Thin and precious

For the women making thin gold sheets at Kieu Ky village, winter is something.
“We won’t sweat as much then,” said Nguyen Thi Hoi, one of the female employees at the village’s famous workshop of gold sheet artisan Le Van Vong.
Working without a fan in all weather is just one of the requirements demanded by the delicate art of gold flattening. Even a puff of breath can blow the materials away, let alone the powerful force of a fan.
But here at the village in Gia Lam district, Hanoi, the only one in Vietnam known to make incredibly thin sheets of gold, silver and tin for gilding, the workers are used to and proud of their hard job.
The females crack jokes while their faces sweat profusely and their hands swiftly spread a special liquid adhesive made from buffalo-skin glue and pine-resin soot on small sheets of poonah paper used to hold tiny gold squares for flattening.
And the men, whose job is to hammer the gold outdoors for hours until it gets as thin as thin can be, chat with each other without even looking at the hammers that a bystander would hold his breath for fear of accidentally hitting his hands.
There would be no accident though, because only the strongest and most dexterous males are assigned this task.
The gold squares would be flattened alright – into ‘leaves’ so thin that they can gild any type of material, as long as the surface is smooth.
“High-tech Japanese gold sheet makers can’t beat us,” said 54-year-old Le Van Vong, who, together with his brother-in-law, are the only two nationally-recognized gold sheet artisans in the village.
When he says thin, Vong means a tael of pure gold can be flattened into leaves of 4 to 5 square centimeters to cover an area of 7 square meters, around the size of two queen-size mattresses.
Kieu Ky’s gold sheet making dates back 300 years and has given birth to generations of talented workers who have spread the craft to other parts of the country.
The old artisans here say wherever one sees a gold sheet maker with a hammer, he is sure to come from Kieu Ky.
This is a much revered profession whose bearers long ago made a vow on the lives of their fathers and sons that they wouldn’t pass it on to outsiders – meaning anyone who isn’t a biological son of the village.
The vow is still obeyed today, and it is with some regret that Phinh, a successful producer of leather goods (Kieu Ky’s second famous traditional product), said he wasn’t taught how to flatten gold because he was a mere son-in-law.
Not that gold flattening is profitable. It can’t bring as much money as leather goods which have launched many households here into millionaires.
The price of flattening one tenth of a tael of gold (the weight of a ring) ranges from VND100,000 when demand is high at the beginning of the year to VND60,000 in quieter seasons.
And the overall demand for thin gold leaves isn’t high either.
“This is all about religion,” Vong said. “Demand is up when people are religious and vice versa.”
Indeed, for hundreds of years, the trade prospered as Vietnamese took great care in gilding pagodas, temples, Buddha statues and the like.
Yet, the gold sheet artisans don’t have other markets outside the traditional ones of gilded religious products, Chinese lacquered boards and wood panels of parallel sentences (a literature genre).
In recent times, Kieu Ky has found new customers like painters and vase producers who once in a while want to adorn their products with pure gold, but demand from these quarters is small.
Vong said a French handicraft and fine art company once approached him and suggested he invest in better technology to make bigger gold leaves. But he dismissed it as the small demand wouldn’t make such an investment worthwhile.
So production is still very much an affair of individual households. Vong’s workshop is among the bigger ones with around a dozen workers.
Yet, big or small, his female workers, ranging from 19 to 80 years of age, enjoy themselves. The job gives them a few thousand dong a day, plenty of laughter and a frequent sight of journalists and tourists.
With a great deal of sweating and hand-blackening caused by the glue-ink, the indoor phase of production isn’t picturesque. Nor is the outdoor one that is even more sweaty.
But because it is so rare and so fine, the craft attracts visitors, and the village is among the country’s most respected, if not famous, traditional craft villages.
During the 2001 lunar New Year, it received both the President and the Communist Party’s General Secretary, a rare honor.
For artisans like Vong, honors are welcomed. But more than anything, he wants to find more customers.