This is a dragon that is erected outside one of the malls in Kuala Lumpur. What is unusual about it is that it is constructed out of 75,000 sticks of "lidi" or the stem of the coconut leaf. It is 35 meters long.
The lidi is usually stripped from the leaf and is made into brooms to sweep the house compound or a wet bathroom. It is stiff at one end and soft and pliable at the other which makes it an effective broom. Unfortunately, there are not many lidi brooms available today.
When I was young, we used to strip the lidi from old coconut leaves that had fallen to the ground and we would make our own brooms. My grandmother taught us how to do it. After collecting sufficient lidi we would bind the stiff ends together with a straw string, ( kiam chow )and viola! We had a broom which we put to good use sweeping away the fallen leaves in her house compound. Some people would attach the lidi to a long piece of wood so that they could sweep better without having to bend as they swept.
This unusual dragon entered the Malaysia Book of Records as the longest hand-made dragon using "lidi". At night the inside of the dragon is lit up with LED lights while the eyes are yellow light bulbs that glow, making the dragon a beautiful sight to behold at night.
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