We stopped at a gold leaf workshop, which was far more fascinating than I ever expected. Gold leaf has been produced here since the 9th or 10th centuries. It’s mostly used for religious purposes but also in public buildings and personal residences. Putting gold leaf on a Buddha statue brings great merit to the faithful.

It seems strange that the gold leaf is still beaten by hand, much like it was back in the 9th or 10th centuries. That was one of the most fascinating things we learned. There is a huge market for gold leaf in Burma as well as Thailand and other SE Asian countries. So the Japanese developed a mechanized process to produce the same gold leaf. But despite the technology of the Japanese and all the modern-day engineering and expertise, the Japanese cannot get the gold leaf as thin as the hand pounders in Burma. Amazing!

1. The gold beaters get paid US $7-8 dollars a day for eight hours of pounding, or about a dollar an hour. The gold is inside paper and stacked in layers. They pound it for days. Since the gold is bundled up within the paper bundles, the beaters cannot see the gold. We asked “how” the beaters knew when the gold leaf was the right thickness and it was time to stop pounding. We were told that “they just know”. We insisted, “but How?” No further explanation was given.

2. I gave some gold leaf a good pounding. I think that I pounded long enough to earn about two cents. And yes, I had to take my shoes off to do the gold pounding. I spent about half my time in Burma in my bare feet.

3. The workshop makes their own paper. They put gold between sheets of this paper to pound it into gold leaf. You can see their display of the paper making process, from left to right. The paper is made from bamboo. QUICK QUIZ: How long does it take them to make the bamboo paper that is used in the gold leaf pounding process? (Answer at end of the Post)

4. The gold is beat so thin that it is almost transparent. At that point, small squares are mounted on sheets of paper to be sold. One small square of gold leaf sells for about US $3. This woman is sitting in a walled and guarded room, though we were allowed inside.

5. They had a gift shop at the gold leaf workshop. We didn’t purchase anything, but as you can see, they did have some lovely gold leaf items.

This was part of why the gold leaf workshop was so fascinating. They not only pound the gold leaf by hand with sledgehammers but they also make the paper that they use in the pounding process - out of bamboo. And it takes "OVER THREE YEARS" to make the paper.

How someone over 1000 years ago figured out how to make this obviously special paper and how they stuck with the process long enough to get it right, I can’t imagine. But evidently they did.