Talk:Mexican lacquerware

WHAT IS LACQUER?
The English word lacquer has been applied when referring to—resin and insect lac. The Portuguese introduced the name laca to Europe from Asia. The Hindi term lakh (lac) was applied only to the substance extracted from certain insects. In Persia (Iran), the word lâk or lâki was applied to both insect and resin lac. Lâkh and lâki mean “hundred thousand,” which is the approximate number of insects needed to produce a pound of lacquer. Resin lac extracted from the Rhus trees is used only as a varnish, while insect lac is used both as a dye and as a varnish,   the word lâk also refer to the red dye. ,,    In Persia, a red dye is obtained from the dried bodies of the insect called germez, kermes or kerem. The kermes insect thrives upon certain species of oaks found in Spain, Portugal, and Morocco, and various other trees throughout Southwest Asia. Chemically, the red dye, laccaic acid (C20 H14 O11), is a complex related to the kermisic acid found also in the cochineal insect native to Mexico from which the red dye is obtained. According to some historians, the Spanish word maque, which is the name used for lacquer in Mexico, could have been derived from zumaque, a Spanish word for the resin of any tree or bush of genus Rhus, and it is believed that zumaque was reduced to maque. But maque is not a resin; it is a waxy-lard extracted from the axe scale insects. The Portuguese also brought home from their voyages to Japan in 1553 the word maquié (maki-e), based on the Japanese name of a particular technique of lacquering, possibly believing it was the name for lacquer in general. ,  Lacquer in Japanese is urushi, and maki-e refers to gilt-lacquer decoration. Maqui-e could have been modified and applied to lacquer in Mexico as maque. This is fully addressed in chapter 20, Mexican Lacquer. Resin lac, referred as ‘true’ lacquer, is sap extracted from several species of Rhus trees, members of the Sumac genus family (Anacardiaceae). Insect lac is the secretion of Coccus lacca, Tacardia lacca and various species of insects belonging to the Margarodidae family. As mentioned above, the earliest known use of resin lacquer is traceable to China of about two millennia prior to the present era, while the Turkic people of Turkistan used insect lac earlier. This indicates that lacquering may have had its beginning with insect lac in northern Mongolia and Central Asia, from which it was introduced to Persia, India, and Turkey. It also became a popular technology in Indochina and Southeast Asia, and centuries later it appeared in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.

External links modified (January 2018)
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