The lantern maker of Ma Street

At six in the morning the workshop smells of glue and split bamboo. Mr Tam, sixty-three, sits cross-legged on a low wooden platform with a ruler between his teeth, bending a strip of cane into the point of a star. Behind him, rows of frames hang from the ceiling like the ribs of small paper animals. The workshop is a single room off a lane near Hang Ma Street in Hanoi, and for the next two months it will be the busiest room in the family. Mid-Autumn is coming.

Mr Tam learned the trade from his father at the age of eleven, and the first thing he was taught was how to wait. 'Glue needs patience,' he says, without looking up. 'If you hurry, the paper blisters and the customer sees your hurry.' His star lanterns, red and gold, with a candle-sized bulb inside, take a full day each. A plastic lantern that sings a cartoon theme tune in three languages, mass-produced and sold for the price of a bowl of noodles, takes a machine seconds.

It would be easy to tell this story as a lament, and he does not want it told that way. Business has never been better than in the weeks before the festival, he says, because a handful of customers now come looking for exactly what the machines cannot do. A cafe owner in the Old Quarter orders forty lanterns every September. A young couple recently asked him to make one in the shape of the house they had just bought. 'They don't need it,' he shrugs. 'They want something with a person in it.'

The difficulty lies elsewhere. Neither of his children wants the workshop. His daughter works in a bank, his son in logistics, and both help out in the festival season, out of loyalty rather than ambition. Mr Tam does not hold it against them. 'I had no choice at eleven,' he says. 'They have a choice. That is better.' He has begun teaching two teenagers from the neighbourhood, who come after school, and he is clearly surprised to find that he enjoys it.

The economics are not romantic. A star lantern sells for roughly what a pair of decent shoes costs, and after glue, bamboo, paper and electricity he keeps very little. What keeps the workshop open is the family's other trade: for the rest of the year they make paper votive offerings for funerals and anniversaries, a steadier business, and one that nobody could outsource to a machine because the customer wants it made to order. Mr Tam is open about this. 'The lanterns are my pride,' he says. 'The other work pays the rent.'

There is also the matter of what a lantern is for. Children no longer parade through the lanes at night with candles, as he did, partly because of traffic, partly because of fire regulations and partly, he suspects, because there is always something on a screen. The lanterns now hang in cafes and shop windows, admired more than carried. He finds this a little sad, though not sad enough to complain. 'A lantern that is looked at has done half its job,' he says with a grin. 'The other half needs a child.'

By midday the stars are drying in rows and a motorbike is already waiting at the door. Mr Tam wipes the glue from his fingers and says something that I keep returning to. People imagine, he says, that they are buying a lantern. In fact they are buying the day he spent on it. It is a modest claim, made with the matter-of-fact air of a man quoting a price, and it may be the most persuasive defence of handmade things I have heard.