By Rainer Thomm

　　The man with golden hands

　　Lim Soo Foo is a man who can do nearly anything with his hands.

　　Among his most artistic achievements is his collection of hand-crafted pipes that I was able to admire at a recent Cigar Club dinner. But, that is jumping the gun, so let's go back in time.

　　Over a lunch of Hainan chicken the next day, Mr Lim told me about his life. His father was born on Hainan Island, so I had inadvertently made the right choice. The best of the Hainan chicken, Mr Lim asserts, comes from Wenchang, his ancestral home. The father went to Malaya with his family while he was still young, and that is where Mr Lim Junior was born, during World War II. When the Japanese forces arrived, the family hid in the jungle, where they stayed for several years, until the war was over.

　　A pleasant childhood on the east coast of the Malayan peninsula followed. Day after day was spent on the beach, miles and miles of white sand, waiting for the fishermen to return with their catches. At the time of the full moon, Little Lim would go out with his mates to collect turtles' eggs for dinner.

　　After growing up, he studied mechanical engineering in Kuala Lumpur, after which he worked for the Public Works Department, but: "I soon got bored of having to do so little work and found a job with Metal Box, a manufacturer of beer cans. The machines were punching 360 cans per minute!" he recalls. "The constant noise soon became quite unbearable and, after a year or so, I quit."

　　His next stop was Singapore, where he took a job with camera maker Rollei, at that time the biggest investor in that country. As making lenses was a new line of work for him, Mr Lim was sent to the company's headquarters in Germany for training.

　　Three years later, or so, the time came to move on and, in 1968, he had the idea of going to Italy. "It was a difficult time," he remembers. "There were political demonstrations by the labour movement almost every day. But, I liked Italian people, and I made many, many friends. Even if I went back today, I could stay for a whole year without having to pay a single penny."

　　Again, Mr Lim found work with a mechanical engineering company. Communication was difficult at first: "Before I went to Turin, I did not know a single word of Italian, and I picked up the language by mixing with lots of people. As you may know, there are not many people in Italy who are able to speak any English."

　　"What about the pipes?" I asked.

　　"I used to go to a tobacconist's shop - a tabaccaria - and, over time, I became friendly with the owner, Mr Giovanni Bollito. A very nice man, a few years younger than I, who had a huge collection of pipes. One day, after about two or three years, he invited me to visit Castello, a famous pipe manufacturer. All their pipes are hand-crafted. I was introduced to Mr Carlo Scotti, the owner, who suggested that I should try my hand at making my own pipe.

　　Easier said than done! Making a pipe is not as easy as one may think. Pipes are crafted from a single block of briar - bruyere - the root of a plant that grows near the coast of the Mediterranean. It is a very hard wood, and working it demands a lot of skill and patience.

　　Anyway, I went with Mr Scotti to a place where they sell those blocks. He suggested that, to begin with, I should buy one that had been pre-bored, because I did not have the right equipment at home to ensure that the hole would go in straight. I did as he said, and when I got home, I took some tools - a metal file and a wood file, plus some sandpaper, a saw and a carving knife - and went to work. Those were all the tools I had. I did not even have a vice, so I had to hold the block in my left hand while I was working on it with my right. I slaved away wherever I found a convenient place, even on the dinner table. (Fortunately, I was not married at the time, because I don't know what my wife would have said about this.)

　　That first pipe took me several weeks to finish. When I showed it to Mr Bollito, he said: "Non ci male!" (Not bad!) Of course, I knew it wasn't really all that good, but it was my first pipe, and it worked all right.

　　That's how pipe making became a new hobby of mine. I had to get quite a few new tools, to be able to work properly. I also had to find some gold and silver plate, to be able to make the rings for the pipe stem.

　　Over time, I became quite famous in Turin, and most of the older pipe smokers there still remember me. Quite a few of them have collected several of my pipes. After a while, I was invited by an avant-garde art gallery - Ideogramma - to do an exhibition. "We need 40 - 50 pipes," the owner said. "I'll give you one year to prepare."

　　I agreed and began hunting for some bruyere blocks I could use. I travelled to a lot of places to find them: Southern France, Corsica, parts of Italy, down to Calabria, and Sardinia. Eventually, I came back with about six or seven hundred pieces. I also bought a second-hand mini-lathe from a friend and got down to work.

　　I had caught the pipe-making bug, and I toiled almost day and night for a whole year to prepare for that first exhibition. Cutting and working with several hundred pieces of this wood, I came to understand that to find a perfect one, especially one with what is called a fiammatura (a rising flame pattern) on both sides, is extremely rare.

　　During all the time I spent making pipes, I managed to get only three like that. The last of them was auctioned at the dinner last night for 12,000 yuan. It had been with me for over twenty years.

　　Most of the bruyere pieces one just has to throw away at the end, whatever one does. One can spend days and days of work, trying to get close to the shape one wants, only to discover that there is a hole in the stem. And all one's work will have been for nothing. That's the nature of this wood. There is no way of knowing this before one starts cutting - but, of course, one has already paid for the piece, about 50,000 lire at that time. If the faults in the material are not so great, the pipe can be sandblasted and varnished in some dark colour.

　　For the mouthpieces I used Plexiglas. Other people sometimes use ebonite, but that has the disadvantage of losing its sheen after a while."

　　"Did you ever receive any instruction in pipe making?" I asked, naively.

　　"No, no-one ever taught me. I developed all these skills by myself."

　　"Or perhaps he was born with that gift," I mused.

　　"Once I develop an interest in something, I will make sure that I do well. Otherwise, I won't start," added Mr Lim.

　　Nowadays, Mr Lim spends his time developing business, mostly in engineering products and scientific instruments for plastics and rubber testing between Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai. But his fascination with pipes has not left him, and he is planning to open a pipe shop at the World Trade Centre later this year. His next dream is to create a place for people to sit down and have a quiet chat with their friends, while enjoying a leisurely pipe or a cigar.

　　Given the chequered history of establishments for serious smokers in Beijing, one hopes that this project won't turn out to be a pipe dream.