On the east bank of the Irrawaddy River in upper Burma lies the village of Pagan. It is a poor village, populated by farmers, craftspeople, and the tenders of a modest tourist trade existing in the shadows of vast, historic structures.
Formerly the site of an ancient capital city, Pagan today is a center for pilgrimage. Some 2,000 temples and pagodas, built by a long line of rulers seeking merit in the eyes of Buddha, cover the twenty square miles of the broad plains of Pagan. A few of the centuries-old shrines have been restored and kept in use. And amid the ruins, one simple craft, linked with a noble past, survives.
The lacquerware industry found here today is possibly as old as the temples themselves. A circular teak box, painted in a mixture of lacquer and yellow ochre and dating from the thirteenth century, was discovered in the Mingala Pagoda, and a lacquer statue of a twelfth century king is found in the Ananda Pagoda. However, widespread use of lacquer did not occur until the seventeenth century. Today it is a cottage industry that has gained a reputation for fine craftsmanship.
The lacquerware usually known to us as Pagan-ware is called yun work in Burmese. Yun is the Shan word for Laos, indicating the origins of the craft. A theory popular among historians is that the craft was first brought from the Yun state to Thaton, and later to Pagan after Thaton was sacked by the forces of Pagan's King Anawrahta in 1056. It is, however, possible that the craft made its way directly from the Yun state to Pagan since there was, certainly from the time of Anawrahta and possibly before, a great deal of interchange between the two.
The lacquerware industry is localized, and involves about 7,000 people directly in production. The material used by the Burmese people to achieve the shiny surface is called thitsi. To obtain the substance, incisions are made in the thitsi tree, which then oozes a sticky gray liquid which will eventually harden into a jet black material. To set properly, it must be placed in a cool, dark location rather than in hot, direct sunlight.
The forms lacquerware usually takes are cups, betel-boxes (cylindrical cases with two or three fitted trays used for storing the betel leaf, nuts, lime paste, and other ingredients for betel-nut chewing), food trays, bowls, and platters of all sizes.
To make these, fine bamboo is woven into the required shape. The interstices are then filled with a mixture of thitsi and clay, or for the finer work, thitsi and bone-ash. Once filled and coated, the piece is put in a cool, dry place to set. When it is quite hard, it is put on a rude lathe which is turned by one hand while the other smooths the object with a strip of siliceous bamboo. A fresh coat of thitsi and bone-ash is then applied and allowed to set before being polished to a glossy black.
To complete the process, a series of incisions is made in the surface and filled with colors. These form rich patterns of waving lines, floral patterns, images of Burmese characters, and signs of the zodiac. No box is complete without three colors, which by tradition are almost always red, yellow, and green, on a black background. Since each color is applied in an alternating sequence of scratching and filling, the whole process
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