How it began
Lotus weaving began at Inle Lake in Shan State, Myanmar, in the early 1900s. Sources credit Daw Sa Oo, a skilled weaver of about 50 from the village of Kyaing Khan. She picked a lotus flower to offer at a pagoda, noticed the filaments that came out of the cut stem, and had the idea of reeling them together. She wove a monastic robe by hand and donated it to the abbot of a local monastery, and later offered lotus robes to the Buddha images of the Phaung Daw Oo Pagoda. A study of the trade states that fibers have been extracted from lotus stems since 1910.
Before it existed
Robe weaving already had a long history in Myanmar, and robes for monks and Buddha images were woven from other fibers. The lotus that Sa Oo used, a variety called padonma kya with large, fragrant pink flowers, grew wild in the shallows of the lake and was valued as a sacred plant, an offering, a food wrapper and a food, but its stems were not a textile material.
How it works
Stems are cut and must be processed within about ten days. A worker scores a stem lightly with a knife about three inches from one end, twists off the tip to draw out the filaments, and rolls them on a wooden slab into a strand about two feet long. More strands are added, joined and spun into yarn, which is kept moist throughout, rinsed and dried in the open air. The yarn is woven on a handloom. The fiber is cellulose, like other plant fibers, and its natural color is a pale grayish yellow.
How it spread
The practice nearly died out after Sa Oo's death. Her relatives U Tun Yee and Daw Ohn Kyi revived it and set up a cooperative to continue robe weaving in a more systematic way. Weaving reached the nearby village of Inn Paw Khon about 20 years before a 2018 survey, and fiber extraction spread to other lakes in Myanmar. Weavers later took up the technique in Cambodia, in Vietnam from 2017 and in Manipur, India, from 2019.
Where it stands today
Workshops at Inle Lake now make scarves, shawls and hats as well as robes, in pure lotus or blended with silk or cotton, largely for visitors. The work remains slow and manual, and lotus cloth is described as one of the most expensive fabrics in the world. The Italian company Loro Piana has imported Burmese lotus fabric for jackets since 2010.
