Bamboo is a natural sustainable material with a high potential to substitute high contaminating construction materials in various applications. It is a heterogeneous material axially reinforced with cellulose fibers that confers high axial mechanical properties. However, it is prone to longitudinal fissures, mainly due to tensile and shear stress components. Previous studies have been focused on determining the circumferential strength of bamboo using the edge bearing tests. To complement these efforts, two tests with parts of rings are proposed to determine the inner and outer circumferential tensile strength of bamboo. In the first set-up, a semi-ring is radially loaded at the middle section and supported on rollers at both ends such that the inner surface of the specimen is under tensile stress. In the second protocol, similar to the edge bearing test for a complete ring, a specimen bigger than a semi-ring is submitted to compression loading to generate tensile circumferential stresses on the outer surface. Both tests are compression based. The ongoing experimental program includes the bamboo species Guadua angustifolia, Phyllostachys edulis, Bambusoides, Vivax, Iridescens and Violascens. The inner failure strain was significantly higher than the outer for all the species. A brittle failure was observed with longitudinal fissures initiated at the tensile surface. Stress determination through the wall thickness is highly dependent on the constitutive equation. Taking into account the variation of the circumferential modulus with a radial position, the outer strength for the bamboo species Guadua angustifolia was 10.0 MPa (COV= 0.09, n= 15), which is about 50% higher than the inner strength of 6.4 MPa (COV= 0.26, n= 15). Higher failure stresses were obtained for the European species calculated with a homogeneous model. More experiments have to be conducted to analyze the variation with radius of the circumferential modulus of the European species for a more accurate determination of strength.