Lacquerware
Description: Myanmar’s traditional handicraft
Myanmar’s Traditional Handicraft
Lacquerware
Text and photos by Tan Chung Lee
Of Myanmar's various handicrafts, lacquerware is perhaps the most distinctive. It is also the most traditional of the country's arts and crafts.
Its use cuts across all social boundaries. For example, it was for many years in the past the preferred container used by royalty for storing court documents and precious jewellery, while the more humble households still employ it for such everyday use as keeping betel nuts and leaves or as soup bowls. Monks, also, use a black lacquer bowl known as thabeik when asking for alms. So highly treasured are lacquerware items that they were often presented as gifts to foreign emissaries by Myanmar's kings.
Little is known of how the making of lacquerware started in Myanmar, although some believe that it might have come from China's Yunnan province, which lies north of Myanmar.
But what is certain is that lacquerware is a traditional Myanmar craft that is centuries old, dating at least as far back as the 13th century, and possibly much earlier.
Valued for its artistic beauty and practical qualities - it's light and watertight, for instance - lacquerware comes in a wide variety of articles. You find them as trays, bowls, waterjars, vases, salvers for temple offerings, cups, jewellery boxes that double up as pillows (from a very practical ancient design), traditional betel boxes, plates, storage chests, tables and chairs.
Looking at them, it's hard to imagine the extraordinary length of time it takes – about five to seven months - to make even the Bamboo and wicker frame (right) and frames after the first coating of lacquer smallest lacquerware item. Considering the amount of time and work involved, lacquerware is surprisingly inexpensive and make wonderful mementoes and gifts.
QUALITY BOWLS ARE PLIABLE
The centre of the country's lacquerware manufacture is in and around Bagan in upper Myanmar. It is still a cottage industry, but there are many artisans. In the village of Myinkaba alone, some 600 households are involved in making lacquerware. Visitors are welcome to watch the many stages of lacquerware production, a skill that has been passed down from generation to generation. If you would like to learn about lacquerware production, you might wish to check out two traditional lacquer shops whose English-speaking proprietors are willing to demonstrate the processes step by step — Golden Cuckoo Lacquerware in Myinkaba and Ma Moe Moe Family Lacquerware in Ywar Thit Quarter, New Bagan.
To make, say, a lacquerware bowl, a bamboo frame has to be made first. If the item is of the highest quality, fine horse-hair, taken from the tail, is then woven around the bamboo bowl frame. You can tell if horsehair is used by pressing the sides of the bowl together. They should touch. A lower-quality bowl would be made completely out of bamboo wicker which is woven around the frame. The bowl, as a result, is stiff and barely pliable.
Bamboo wicker and horse-hair are traditional materials employed for most lacquerware products. Nowadays, however, cheaper and more durable wood – mainly teak or mango plywood - is sometimes used a7 bases for objects that are not round in shape, such as trays, boxes, treasure chests, screens, tables and chairs.
After the frame is made and bamboo wicker or horsehair has been woven around it, the first coating of lacquer mixed with clay powder is applied. The lacquer paint used is black, and it comes from the resin of a tree species that grows around Inie Lake in eastern Myanmar. The lacquer paint is applied by hand to give it an even coating. The object is then left to dry for a week in an underground cellar. Drying in the sun in the early stages would cause pockmarks to develop. The object is then taken out for a second coating of lacquer to be applied. It is left to dry for yet another week in the cellar.
The next stage involves covering the object with a paste made from a mixture of pulverised buffalo bone, teak saw dust and lacquer to fill up the nooks and crevices. It is left to dry for a week. The object is then thoroughly smoothened with a pujmce stone to eliminate any surface roughness. Lacquer paint is again applied and the object put aside to dry. After another week, the object is smoothened again, both on the inside and outside, using a mixture of clay and stone. The polishing is done three times before the object is stored underground for one month.
IT TAKES FIVE TO SEVEN MONTHS
Then a long-drawn out process of painting and drying begins. First, the inside of the object is painted with lacquer, left to dry a week; then the outside is painted and put aside for drying.
The next step involves smoothening the entire product with water and stone, drying in the sun for two hours and applying a coat of lacquer before setting it aside to dry underground for a week. For the next seven weeks, a layer of lacquer is coated over the object at one-week intervals. The result is a shining lacquer product that is made even more glossy by careful polishing with a buffalo chamois cloth soaked in sesame oil.
At this stage, the desired colour or colours and designs are worked onto the object. Usually traditional designs are etched by very fine instruments onto the surface. The desired colour, say red, is applied, left to dry for a week, after which it is polished with rice husks and washed with water and painted with acacia glue to fix the colour. If a second colour is required, then more details are etched and coated with the desired colour, say blue, left to dry for a week, washed and then fixed with acacia glue again. More etchings are made and the third colour is added and the process repeated. Then the last colour, say yellow, is added and this time, the object is left to dry for a month.
Later, it is polished first with teakwood ash and water, and then by a piece of cotton cloth. It is washed and dried again for 10 minutes in the sun and finally polished with a powder made from pulverised petrified wood. That's not all. The object is painted once more on the inside with red lacquer, left to dry for one week and finally is put on the shelves, ready for sale.
It takes five months to produce lacquer cups, seven months to make betel boxes and at least a year to produce tables and chairs. But the final result is,without a doubt, a thing of beauty and a fine testimony to Myanmar craftsmanship.
Book Title - PYINSA-RUPA Published By - Myanmar Airways International Inflight Magazine