Malay Arts & Crafts 
By IVOR H. N- EVANS. 
T HIS little pamphlet is intended to be a short 
and concise guide to modern Malay arts and 
crafts. Those which are obsolete, or obso- 
lescent, are dealt with very briefly. 
In undertaking the study of Malay arts and crafts 
it must be remembered that the Malay is emphatically 
not a specialist; one man may be clever at carving, 
another at silver-work, and so on, but it is probable 
that each craftsman is also, and possibly first and 
foremost, a rice-planter. This fact, with the Malay 
craftsman’s lack of capital and his dislike of con- 
tinuous and monotonous work, has tended to ruin 
native handicrafts. The Chinese goldsmith works 
Tegularly, lives in an easily accessible place — the local 
township, which everybody visits occasionally — and 
has sufficient capital to keep a stock of silver and 
gold in hand with which to fulfil orders, while he has 
also a display of ready-made jewellery, especially of 
such articles as are in frequent demand, these being 
the products of his labour when orders are slack. 
The Malay jeweller has no stock of gold or silver 
and requires an advance to purchase the material for an 
order, which he may be some time in obtaining, works 
irregularly because he has other matters to attend to 
and does not care much regular work anyhow, has no 
stock of ready-made articles’ and, perhaps, lives in some 
inaccessible village, ever so far from anywhere. 
