Leif Bering Mikkelsen: Opium weights (2017)

This book not only deals narrowly with old weights from Southeast Asia. It also describes how trading, valuation and means of payment in the area have developed and how concepts such as quantity, weight, currency, value, coins and money were, and to some extent still are, closely interwoven in the Southeast Asian countries.

The book also describes the symbolic radiance of the “Opium weights” as the weights are called today, and tries to put them into a historical perspective. By setting the weights into a context, it has also to some extent been possible to date them and to show that the use of these weights was an integral part of that culture which in former days existed along “the Southwest Silk Road”. 

Leif Bering Mikkelsen:

Opium weights

- Old animal-shaped bronze weights from Southeast Asia. Commercial, ethnic, symbolic and historical perspectives

280 pages, hardcover

25 x 25 cm