Pair of Shan-Burmese Silver Bracelets

This sculptural pair of silver cuff bracelets is from the Shan people of Eastern Burma. Of tall, concave, tubular form, they are thickly cast and heavy, and decorated with fine applied silver wire work as well plaited silver wire borders, and applied filigree arrayed in spirals around three central spherical nodes.

Such bracelets were made by the Shan but worn by both Shan and Kachin married women.

The spirals are a motif said (uncritically, in the literature) to date back to the Dongson period of the Bronze Age in Southeast Asia. This might be so, but then a spiral might be simply that and is hardly a motif that needs pinning down to precedent.

One (not a pair) is illustrated in Geoffroy-Schneiter (2011, p. 230), and again in van Cutsem (2002, p. 262).

The bracelets here are in fine condition. Finding matched pairs of such bracelets is difficult now. They are decorative and striking.