A History of Lac Turning
In July I wrote about the craft of coloring wood with sticks of lac at the lathe. That piece was Color at the Lathe, if you missed it. Since then I have been down in the old books, and I want to show you what I've found. Lac turning has one of the longest paper trails of any finishing technique I know of, and following it is a pleasure.
Older than French polish
One reference surprised me - applying friction lac on a lathe is one of the oldest documented uses of shellac as wood finish. It comes from Juliane Derry’s 2012 study of shellac processing, and she is citing Shayne Rivers and Nick Umney’s Conservation of Furniture: button lac, the round uncut form of shellac I have built this shop around, was originally manufactured for exactly this. Buttons were made to be pressed against turned work spinning on a lathe, the friction heat fusing the lac to the wood, back before spirit solvents were in common use. Dissolving shellac in alcohol and padding it on, which is French polishing, only became widespread in the early 1800s, once alcohol was easy to come by.
The way most of us think about shellac, as flakes, a jar of alcohol and a pad, is the newer idea. If Rivers and Umney are right, lac turnery is the senior tradition. The buttons came first, and they came for the lathe.
A traveler watches the lathe, 1596
Jan Huyghen van Linschoten’s account of his years in the Indies was published in 1596. George Watt’s Dictionary of the Economic Products of India (1890), the great Victorian reference on the subject, calls it perhaps the earliest description of the process anyone wrote down, and quotes it at length. The spelling is worth keeping:
“In turning of the woode, they take a peece of lac of what colour they will, and as they turne it… they spread the lac upon the whole peece of woode which presently, with the heat of the turning… cleaveth unto it about the thickness of a man’s naile: they then burnish it over with a broad straw or dry rushes… and it shineth like glasse, most pleasant to behold.”
Bedsteads, chairs, stools, “and all their turned wood-work, which is wonderful common and much used throughout all India.” Every element a turner would recognize today is already there, four hundred and thirty years ago. The colored stick. The friction heat. The burnish. The glass shine.
Three hundred years later, not much had changed
What makes Watt’s 1890 entry so valuable is that he checked. After quoting Linschoten he observes that the sixteenth-century description “agrees almost exactly with the process now commonly employed.” The only difference he could find was in the burnishing: in his day it was done with a dry palm-leaf stalk cut chisel-wise, and an oiled piece of rough muslin, instead of straw and rushes. A leaf and a touch of oil. That is the same pairing the craft uses today. Three centuries of continuity, documented at both ends.
Watt records lac turnery reaching “a high development” in the Punjab and Sind, and quotes a note by J. L. Kipling on the turners of Pak Pattan, where several families sent toys, boxes, spinning wheels and charpoy legs out across the whole province. Kipling calls the craftsman a kharadi, and his description of the material could run in this newsletter without a word changed:
“The varnish which is produced by pressing what is virtually a stick of coloured sealing-wax against a rapidly revolving wooden object, has been found by the experience of generations to resist damp, dust, and excessive heat and dryness, better than any known paint.”
The experience of generations. That was the state of the evidence in 1890, and it holds up at my lathe in 2026.
Kipling also noticed something the Punjab and Sind turners did that the southern toy makers did not. Their work carried bands of mottled purple and black with fine floral borders that looked painted, but were not. The pattern was cut through the layers of color, which Watt compares to the sgraffito of Italian plasterwork. That engraved style is still alive across the border in Pakistan, where the craft goes by jandi, and a 2021 survey of it describes the same sequence Kipling saw: colors laid light to dark, a burnishing stick, a finish of mustard oil, and then a stylus cut through the layers while the piece turns.
The map fills in
The lathe belt Watt described was never one town’s craft. It stretched across South Asia, and pieces of it are still working.
In Gujarat there is a furniture-turning town, Sankheda, whose craft is documented from around 1855, and whose very name comes from sanghedu, the Gujarati word for lathe. On the Andhra coast, the turners of Etikoppaka formalized their lac application in 1906, and now hold a Geographical Indication for their toys. The country around them is dotted with villages named Lakkavaram, “lac place,” the way old European maps are dotted with names for mills and forges. That is what a craft economy looks like when it is old enough to name the land.
Sri Lanka kept two methods side by side. One is the lathe method you would recognize, burnished with a strip of talipot palm leaf and often engraved through layered color. The other needs no lathe at all: the artisan warms a lac stick, draws it out into a fine thread by hand, lays the thread onto the slowly turned piece and nips it off with a thumbnail. When Ananda Coomaraswamy surveyed the island’s crafts in 1908, both methods were working, and the one thing he singled out was that no Sinhalese lac worker ever used a brush. The families of one hill village tell of the lathe method arriving there within living memory, carried by a single craftsman from the north of the subcontinent. That is their own account, and I pass it on as one.
And in Karnataka there is Channapatna, the town most associated with the craft today. Tradition credits its founding to the patronage of Tipu Sultan in the late 1700s, and a 2018 study of the town’s tools counted about two thousand artisans still earning their living at its lathes. They turn a soft, pale wood the locals call ivory-wood, and the same study lists turmeric, indigo, madder and kumkum among the traditional colorants for the lac. The town’s toys hold their own Geographical Indication.
This history belongs to those artisans and their forebears, in every one of those places. We did not discover any of it. We are students of it.
An old complaint
One more thing from Watt, because it made me laugh and then made me stop laughing. He records “great complaints” in the Calcutta trade of the 1870s about shellac being cut with resin (rosin), and says that in the high-price year of 1874 what was sold as lac often “consisted of resin to the extent of 50 and even 60 per cent.” Derry adds that in the 1800s, as is the case today, the makers of buttons in particular were suspected of bulking them with cheap rosin, which is one reason the careful varnish makers of the day bought seedlac instead and cleaned it themselves.
Some problems are as durable as the craft.
Where this leaves us
The old books say a simple thing over and over. A stick of colored lac. A spinning piece of wood. Friction. A leaf. A finish that outlasts paint. It worked in 1596, it worked in 1890, and it works today in Channapatna, in Etikoppaka, in the hill villages of Sri Lanka, and now at a growing number of benches over here.
If you want to try it, the technique piece is already up: Lac Turning, In Practice covers pressure, the leaf and the oil, with video from our bench. The sticks themselves are in the shop as the Friction-Lac Sticks, First Edition Set, and everything we have gathered on the craft lives at shellac.net/friction.