A traditional paper lantern can be pressed into a flat stack a few centimetres tall, put in a cupboard for a year, and opened again into a full round body with a pull at each end. It weighs less than a book, needs no frame of rigid joints, and in a gust of wind it deforms and comes back rather than breaking. Those three properties come from the same decision: make the skeleton out of something that wants to spring, and the skin out of something that only resists being pulled.
Bamboo and paper are not cheap substitutes for wood and glass. They are the correct materials for the structure, and replacing either one makes the lantern worse.
The hoop is a spring
Bamboo is split along its grain into thin strips, with the hard outer skin kept on the outside of the bend and the softer inner pith on the inside. Bent into a circle and held there, the strip stores elastic energy and pushes outward continuously. A single hoop is enough to hold a round cross-section; a series of hoops joined by a continuous spiral of split bamboo becomes a skeleton that wants to be a barrel shape and resists being shortened.
The spiral is the clever part. Because the strip winds from one end to the other rather than forming closed rigid rings, the whole skeleton can collapse along its axis: the hoops stack into one another and the lantern flattens. Release it and the stored bend in every hoop opens the structure again. The same geometry appears in a collapsible bamboo basket, and the limit on how tightly the strip can turn is set by how thin the strip is relative to its bending radius: halve the thickness and the tightest possible corner roughly halves too.
Paper is a tension skin
Paper is strong when you pull on it and almost useless when you push on it. Glued over the outward-pushing skeleton, it is held in tension, and a tensioned membrane is remarkably stiff: it stops the hoops from racking sideways, gives the lantern a smooth surface, and distributes a local knock across the whole panel instead of letting one rib take the load. The skeleton and the skin hold each other up.
The light is a bonus of the same material. Paper is a mat of fibres with air between them, so light scatters many times on the way through and emerges evenly in all directions. A translucent sheet turns a small flame into a glowing surface rather than a visible bright point. Woven cloth would survive handling better, but it is heavier, its weave shows as a grid, and a loose weave lets the flame flicker; a thin sheet of paper gives a quiet, uniform light for very little mass.
Heat needs a way out
A lantern is a small chimney. The openings at the top and bottom are not there for hanging convenience: hot air leaves through the top, cooler air enters through the bottom, and the continuous flow keeps the paper far below the temperature of the flame while supplying oxygen. The light source sits near the centre on a wire or a small cup, so the shortest distance to the paper is as large as the shape allows.
Moisture is the other enemy, since a wet sheet sags and loses its tension. Traditional paper is often treated with a drying oil or a thin alum sizing, which slows water uptake without closing the pores that scatter light. The treatment is a compromise: seal the sheet completely and you gain waterproofing but lose the soft diffusion that made paper worth using in the first place.
Why a gust does not wreck it
A round section has no flat face for the wind to press against; the flow divides and slides around it. What force remains is taken up as elastic deflection in the hoops, which bend slightly and spring back when the gust passes. A rigid shell of the same weight would have to be thick enough not to buckle, and would crack at its joints instead. Even a torn panel is not catastrophic, because the load is shared: a hole changes the tension locally but the surrounding skeleton keeps its shape.
This is the same engineering problem that a kite solves with a thin flexible surface over a light frame, and it is why kites converged on similar solutions on several continents without sharing a drawing. Wind, a thin skin and a springy skeleton give you a short list of workable answers. The lantern is one of them, arranged vertically and lit from inside.