This curtain would have been used to cover doorways or separate a room into sections. Usually, they are surrounded by a piece of plain cloth, but this example lacks that border. The textile is decorated with ancestral figures, diamonds with vegetal motifs, the elephant-bird ('saang hong'), a mythical animal associated with spirits and the heavens, and a fringe-like pattern ('soi saa') related to Thai and Cambodian textile designs. Continuous and discontinuous supplementary yarns of a variety of colours are used for most of the decoration. The base fabric itself has brown and purple warp threads, but every third warp yarn is pink. The wefts are burnt orange.

Asian Art Department, AGNSW, December 2011