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King Galon Gold Leaf Workshop, Mandalay

King Galon Gold Leaf Workshop in 36th Street is one of several gold leaf workshops where the manufacture of the wafer thin roughly 1.5 inch squares of gold leaf is carried out.

English speaking staff will show you the whole manufacturing process. Essentially it is as follows – take a 2oz button of gold and run it through a roll-press until it becomes a ribbon about 3/4 inch wide and 20 feet long. Chop it up into 800 equal pieces. Take 200 pieces, each piece separated by paper, put into a bundle and pound it with a hammed till it is flatter. Then, cut the now bigger 200 pieces into smaller pieces and repeat the procuedure several more times. It takes three men with large hammers around 6 hours to hammer the gold into small thin leaves. At the end of the day the men have turned the single gold button into around 2900 gold leaves.

Entering the King Galon Gold Leaf Workshop.

Goldbeater workstation.

Three goldbeaters beating the gold leaves.
The gold is beaten on a large, heavy block of marble or granite. These stone blocks were sometimes placed on top of a tree trunk set deep into the ground. This created greater resiliency for the hammer.

  • Beating of the cutch by hand takes about one hour using a fifteen-pound hammer.
  • The goldbeater follows a pattern and sets up a rhythm, striking the packet with up to seventy strokes a minute.
  • The packet is rotated and turned over to ensure that the gold inside expands evenly in all directions.
  • The original small squares of gold are beaten until they have expanded to the outer edges of the four inch square cutch.

Workers gilding Buddha statues.
Gilding is a decorative technique for applying a very thin coating of gold over solid surfaces such as metal (most common), wood, porcelain, or stone.

  • Gilding gives an object a gold appearance at a fraction of the cost of creating a solid gold object.

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Location

Location: No. 143 36th Street between 77th & 78th Street, Mandalay, Myanmar (Burma)