Front Cover: Cover: Illustration of a Lun-taya Acheik Htamein. Detail from a skirt made of pink andwhite silk, mid 20thcentury, Amarapura, Burma/Myanmar. Silk, metallic wrappedyard, cotton. Burma Art Collection, Center for Burma Studies, Northern IllinoisUniversity. Gift of Hugh C. MacDougall, collected by his wife Eleanor MacDougallbetween 1981 to 1984. BC2019.05.122. Photo credit: Chloe Insley, Northern Illinois University.
This is a detail of a classical handwoven traditional Burmese silk htamein (a woman’swrap-around skirt) exemplifying a particular technique called lun-taya acheik: withregard to the usage of lun-taya (i.e., one hundred shuttles); and acheik (i.e., a complexgeometric design comprised of interspersed alternating floral elements). Once theprivilege of the ladies at the court due to the expensive material and the technicaldifficulty of the requisite weaving techniques, it also became accessible to a wealthyelite during the colonial period (1824-1948).
Unique to Burma, such htamein are worn now at ceremonial events such as weddingsand commencements. The colors pink and white intertwined with silver metallicwrapped yarn (bu ngwe) demonstrate the mastery of its weavers; and the style of thisparticular acheik pattern attests to a likely post-colonial provenance.
It alternates between a repetition of wave-like line, with a simple stylized orchidembedded within each undulation; followed by another stripe repeating the numeral“3” (in Burmese) intertwined with three-strand flower yarn—a more-complex floralmotif—and thence the five-strand gamon vine motif. The alternating usage of whiteand pink silk, along with the silver thread wrapped yarn, was formerly limited bysumptuary laws for use solely within the royal court.
The color pink seemed to have been particularly favored under Thibaw, the lastKing of Burma (r. 1878-1885); although the detail here illustrated is taken from acentral panel of a much more recent htamein. The complete garment incorporates anupper waistband made of black cotton, and itself terminated below by a pink andoff-white-striped sewn train woven with a cream weft over a warp of pink, andinterspersed with narrow pinstripes in black, pink and white.
This relatively subdued htamein was collected in Burma by Eleanor McDougall, wifeof Hugh MacDougall, an American member of the US diplomatic corps who wasposted in Rangoon from 1981 to 1984. We selected it from our Burma Art Collection as the present cover illustration to evoke and to honor the remarkable and seminalvolume Textiles in Burman Culture by Sylvia Fraser-Lu: published by Silkworm booksin 2021 in Thailand, and reviewed in this issue of the Journal.
Catherine Raymond, Curator, Burma Art Collection at Northern Illinois University.
