Apart from cooking, another great way to get a feel of the local culture is to see the local arts and crafts, so today we headed off to see what they make here in Chiang Mai. Our first stop was an umbrella “factory” where they hand make decorative wooden and paper umbrellas.

After that we were off to a local silversmith where we saw that they need 3 different molds to make the silver.

The first mold is a rubber mold and they fill it with hot wax, then they use the newly made wax mold to make a plaster mold and melt the wax out of it. After that they pour silver into the plaster mold and when it cools they break the mold to remove the silver. Below you can see how they make the wax mold in the rubber mold:

The thing that all of these places had in common was their need for cheap manual labor. And in Thailand that isn’t a problem. Salaries for office workers start at 8000 Baht (US$250) a month, and people in the countryside can make a lot less than that!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 1:07 am and is filed under Chiang Mai. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.