Schadenfreude Burmese Hintha Weights

Bird shaped weights for ORIENTILIKA!  There are 10 weights in the set, each as an individual object, and 2 groups of all of them as one piece- one set lined up showing off the graduating sizes, one set clustered.  Each object is 1LI at realistic weight size (they are small).

These are known to the tourists (at least the English speaking ones) as "opium weights", though they were just...weights.  I fell for it (sort of): they were marketing souvenir repro sets of the tiny ones as such when I was in Thailand.  I wasn't looking at "real" antiques and they were obviously new tourist sets, but they were cute so I got some elephants, and I love them.

In reality though, animal shaped weights, mostly cast in bronze, were traditionally used in the region known as Burma (currently Myanmar) and some of the surrounds, to weigh everything you needed to weigh.  Why use a boring plain weight when you can use something beautiful?  They were designed to be highly accurate, so even though they look intricate they were still effective to weigh whatever you were measuring.  After the British conquered Burma in 1885 (ahem the East India Trading Company wanted something), they were phased out for boring plain round iron weights, and that's a shame.

This is a traditional set of 10 weights, from 1 viss (~1600 grams) at the largest size, to 1/8 tical at the smallest.  1 viss = 100 tical, so the 1 viss weight is the largest, the second size is 50 tical.  Aside from the largest weight, the rest are listed in tical (~16 grams)- the smallest size is 1/8 tical, which is also 1 mu (~2 grams).  The units were also known as peithha for viss and kyattha for tical (the currency of Myanmar is the kyat)- as well as assorted other regional names (the kyat was the bhat in Thailand, the originator of the name for their currency as well).  The largest three (1 viss, 50 tical, 20 tical) have decorative handles that would have made them easier to use.  Each king introduced his own standard set of weights, so the weight did fluctuate at times- for older weights to be continued to be used, they had to be adjusted to the current standard for the time.  Myanmar continued using their units of measurement into the 21st century, but they have been gradually switching to the metric system.

The hintha bird system was a popular shape for the weights: you may be more familiar with it under its name as the hamsa bird, of the Buddhist religion.

At ORIENTILIKA until the end of November 7 Japan time (November 7 at 8am SLT).