380 pages, 280 x 215 mm
Paperback, 280 colour photographs
ISBN 978 616 7339 23 8

Price $ 0.00

This book focuses on unpublished tribal and regional lacquerware from previously inaccessible and remote areas of Burma. The author and photography team spent five years between 2005-2010 researching and traveling to visit peoples such as the Gadu-Ganan in Sagaing division in order to find the most beautiful and meticulous lacquerware.

Betel boxes and miniature wooden soon-okes (meal carriers) in plain black or red colour are found within an area as large as five thousand square miles east to west between Banmauk and Homalin. Other shapes are almost impossible to find except for a few pieces transported from other regions in the last century or in recent decades.

In addition, new research from Lower Burma focuses on and provides detailed information on the lacquerware masters of this region and their workshops. Despite the popular and scholarly belief that lacquerware came exclusively from Upper Burma, recent research shows otherwise. Descendants of laquerware masters are still living in a small village in this region and production spanned a period from the 1890s until World War Two.

The lacquerware of Rakhine state on the west coast of Burma, its masters, their names and localities of the production sites is also published for the first time.

This beautifully illustrated book goes beyond the established centres of Burmese lacquerware such as Bagan and Shan State to document the wide diversity of these handicrafts throughout the lesser traveled and usually inaccessible areas of Burma.