Cane Town
August 18, 2020
The cane furniture of Weweldeniya has stocked Sri Lankan houses and hotels for generations. We spoke to one of its most established manufacturers for an insight into the craft and its future
Drive from Kandy to Colombo along the so-called Great Road – more prosaically now the A1 – and with an eye on roadside retail you’ll first spot the fruit stalls, then the leather goods stores; next up the inflatable plastic toy stands - each retail zone as uniformly populated as the next.
Continue on your way to the capital and you’ll hit the rambutan district, tables stacked with the bright red fruit, then the pineapple zone, row on row of roadside shelves. There’s a stretch of the highway even, it seems, exclusively for second hand commercial fridges.
At Weweldeniya – a little under halfway from Kandy – you’re in cane territory. Chairs, light-shades, book-shelves, boxes, laundry baskets and place mats. You could furnish an entire apartment.
The shopfronts of the small town provide the most eye-catching of the road’s market districts. An Instagram-fueled trend for the boho-chic style of cane furniture has seen the designs used worldwide, and in Sri Lanka especially, where much homegrown furniture has stuck to a dark 1970s palette, the appeal is even greater.
As with many traditional Sri Lankan industries though, cane furniture manufacturing is under pressure. We were grateful for the below from Mr Amarasiri.
“Weweldeniya has always been the centre for cane manufacture in Sri Lanka. At first it was for farming. We made sieves for rice production and containers for moving produce.
“In the 1950s there was a boom in graphite mining and we were able to produce the buckets and containers needed to bring out and transport the materials dug from the mines.
“In the 1980s we started to see tourists coming and were able to make small souvenir items. We still have lots of tourists that stop on the way to Kandy – though not so much this year.
“Now our biggest clients are hotels. Chairs and lampshades are the most popular. Most people have a very clear idea of what they want and our workers can produce any style.
“Good skilled craftsmen can take up to three years to learn the craft. I learned from my father and have taught my son also.
“It is not a simple but the process has always stayed the same. We dry the cane for nearly two weeks and then fire it to shape it as we need for furniture. Binding the pieces and then sealing with a varnish takes a lot of time.”
“It is skilful work but nowadays people prefer to work in the city, people don’t like to work producing furniture.
“30 years ago the whole town worked in the cane industry – several thousand people. Now maybe only two or three hundred. Our business alone had over a hundred people making furniture; now I employ 10.
“It is also harder to find the cane now. We use different types for different products but none is grown commercially in Sri Lanka so it is harvested wild. We used to have a good supply close to the town but it is used up and we have to transport cane here from all over the island. The bigger cane comes from the mountains, the smaller branches from Trinco and other places near the sea.
“Although it is getting harder to produce we still have good demand. The hotels make big orders and there are many more hotels in Sri Lanka now. In the past we would just make the design that a client would bring. My son now looks on the internet and magazines and creates our own designs. The light-shades are very beautiful. We started selling these about five years ago; now they are very popular.
“We only sell our products in Sri Lanka. I know some people that export but haven’t done that. Perhaps will should try.
“My father started this business when the British left, about seventy years ago. Now that it is hard to find workers and there is less cane I don’t know if we can still be here in five years. Let’s see.”
Mr Amarasiri’s shop…Amarasiri Cane Furniture - 70/C Kandy Road, Radawadunna - +94 72 433 2951 / +94 (0) 77 777 0751
Photography courtesy of Aravinda Rathnayake (@lankainmotion)