Pounding Gold

After leaving Burma I've come to realize that other than the obvious glut of Chinese products, everything in Burma is made in Burma. This means that because of the way the country has been closed anything that was made by a machine anywhere else in the world, was made by hand in Burma, sometimes with age old processes.

All over Asia wherever there is Buddhism there is a tradition of buying gold leaf foil to apply to the outside of Buddhas's as an offering and act of respect. Nowhere is this taken as seriously as in Burma, a country where there are more Monastaries and Pakodas than anywhere else on earth, I'm sure. There are around one and a half million monks and nuns in the country. The monks dress in shades of amber and the nuns wear orange underdresses and hot pink overdresses. They look like exotic flowers scuttling along the streets with their matching umbrellas to protect them from the hot sun.

The act of applying the foil to a Buddha is only allowed of male worshippers. We saw some statues that had so much foil on them that you couldn't tell what was originally underneath it all. We saw one tourist remove a piece of foil from a Buddha and apply it to a plastic dinosaur from her purse. She then proceeded to place it in front of the Buddah and take it's picture. It would be like walking into a church and taking a precious artifact and playing with it.

In Mandalay you can visit a workshop where gold is pounded into goldleaf much the same way as it has been done for centuries. The small rectangle of solid gold, about 3/4 of an inch wide, half inch thick and a couple of inches long is flattened into a 'ribbon'. A tiny 3/4 by 3/4 piece is placed between two sheets of paper and a stack of these about an inch thick is fastened together. The stack is placed on a stone that has a 45 degree angle. It is then hammered with a sledge hammer for 7 hours until each piece has spread into a 3 inch square of gold foil. There was a line of five stones with men pounding all in a rythm together.

Meanwhile bamboo was soaked for three years and then boiled for three hours and whipped into a fine pulp. The paper made from this is so fine, probably the finest tissue I've ever seen. The stacks of gold are then taken to a room where two rows of women sitting at a low table remove it from the stacks and apply it to the fine paper. I'll never be able to see goldleaf on a Buddha again without seeing those men hammering away with headbands and longis and muscles gleaming.