The main road through Amarapura is lined with open-fronted workshops where you can watch cotton and silk weavers at work on traditional looms. This is not a tourist performance — the weavers are producing cloth for sale, working quickly and with evident skill, and the sound of the shuttles creates a rhythmic background noise that carries down the street.
The loom work is intricate: some workshops specialise in patterned silk with geometric designs that require the weaver to track dozens of threads simultaneously. Others produce plainer cotton longyi fabric in stripes and checks. Visitors are welcome to watch and to buy; prices for silk pieces are lower here than in Mandalay or Yangon shops, and you see exactly what you are getting.
Several workshops are happy to demonstrate the threading and setup process if asked through a guide or interpreter. The process of preparing a loom for a complex pattern — stringing thousands of individual threads — takes days before a single centimetre of cloth is produced.