About four minutes into what seemed like a straightforward woodworking video, the creator took a water buffalo horn and started sawing off large strips that would become the flexible support for the bow she was building. Something about the tone of the video (there was no narration, only the sounds of the workshop, birds, and sometimes gentle music) combined with the beautiful compositions of shots had hooked me in. The novelty of the raw materials and the traditional techniques intrigued me further.
The video is called Making a Chinese Qing Horn Composite Bow and it's a whopping 39-minute display of craftsmanship and artistry, without a shred of attention-hacking, commentary, calls-to-action, or other distractions. We simply get lost in the project of transforming raw materials into a stunning bow.
From her description, she notes:
"I followed traditional methods recorded in ancient Chinese texts as closely as possible. My main reference was 天工开物 (Tiangong Kaiwu), a Ming dynasty encyclopedia documenting traditional Chinese craftsmanship and technology. Throughout the process, I relied on historical records rather than modern simplified techniques."
With each new phase of the project, I was baffled at how tangible all of this felt. I spend almost all of my time on an immaterial craft: websites. Everything I do exists on a screen. My raw material is data and logic. Only a keyboard and a mouse have any tactile connection to my work. But this bow...this had wood and sinew and leather and antler and horn. As I looked longingly at the collage of texture and weight, I also realized something about technology that I hadn't been able to fully connect before.
Technology is an abstraction, ultimately, and while that is a good thing from a productivity perspective, there is also loss that accompanies that abstraction.
For example, with my craft currently being programming, I have abstracted design concepts in my toolbelt that I use to accomplish great work, provide great experiences online, and achieve business outcomes. These abstracted concepts actually do have a basis in reality but you have to work to trace back the principles and apply them outside of a programming context. Not only that, but these principles carry with them a host of knowledge and experience that gets boiled down into something that can be more easily passed along from person to person.
I see that same thing in the traditional techniques that were displayed in the video. While she certainly used modern tools at times like a band saw and a heatgun, the amount of knowledge packaged up as "traditional technique" was astounding. She didn't explain anything, but offered some labels of the materials when she first uses them. "Fish glue," it said simply in the corner of the screen as she melted down something that looked like pieces of golden wax and later brushed the liquid on the bow, applying the horn and tying it in place.
What is fish glue?! How is that made or harvested? It's apparently sticky enough to handle the intense load of a bow at peak draw. How did they figure this out? All of these questions surfaced, but the technique doesn't need to answer them, because it has abstracted those details. All you really need to know is how to prepare the fish glue, how / when to apply it and how to let it cure or bond.
After fish-gluing and then tying cord all along the bow to clamp it down, we see her using these bamboo shafts slipped under the black cord to increase the tension. My guess is that this probably evens out and spreads the tension along the bow to help bond the buffalo horn with the wood. Again, this is a technique—a package of expertise—that has been distilled down into something anyone can learn to apply.
Just for my sake, I'll highlight this other technique of using twine to help bind the soft shagreen to the curved surface near the handle. I love rope and string, and therefore I love the idea of using it as a way to help clamp something to a non-squared surface.
Tekhnē
The word "technology" is built from the Greek tekhnē, suggesting art or skill, some kind of method or system, and "technique" pulls in that same Greek root, becoming the "performance method of an art" (1). For me, understanding this etymology seems to confirm the observation of knowledge being abstracted and packaged up. Where science makes the discovery of discrete information, techniques / technology puts it into action.
As artist Matt Hall remarked after unveiling his Beauchene skull for the Bone Museum:
The secret isn't in the actual techniques because the techniques can be learned by anyone...You can learn to machine. You can learn to mill wood. But you have to [learn] to think about things and...consider how things go together...Putting all those together is really where the secret is. It has nothing to do with the individual techniques. Has everything to do with the amalgamation of those techniques.
Mimicry is how we learn any technique, whether traditional or modern, and those techniques on their own aren’t sufficient for craft, at least from what I can tell. We can’t get rid of the abstraction, because the abstraction is what makes things learnable. If I had to understand the properties of fish glue, I would never get around to actually using it, because when do you ever stop learning about it sufficiently? At its atomic level? At its historical significance? No, I don’t have to fully understand it before I can use it, but no understanding at all may hold me back a little—for instance, where do I get it? How easily can I replenish my stock? How do I store it? What is it best used on?
Craft is achieved as we start putting together the connections between our knowledge, our experience, and our will—the motivation behind our projects or our work.
That's why this is a celebration for the ancient, the traditional, and even the modern techniques. Everyone has their own set of curated techniques either obtained or forged, and those techniques are further distilled and taught to others. I hope we don't lose that in our never-ending search for faster and easier in the digital space. Although AI has absorbed many of our techniques for digital communication and interaction, if we never learn the basics ourselves and use AI to skip over that, what might we be losing? What gets forgotten when we abstract too far too soon?
Works Cited
- technology and technique, Etymonline, accessed 03/02/2026. See also Techne, Merriam-Webster Dictionary.