Reattributing Royal Regalia: Rethinking the Afterlife of a Celebrity Artifact from Myanmar in the Victoria and Albert Museum

Ein Dray Pyone Han

This poster reconsiders a late fourteenth–early fifteenth-century gold headdress in the Southeast Asian collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, long associated with Queen Shin Sawbu, the sole female sovereign throughout the Burmese history. The headdress has been reidentified through epigraphic and historiographic analysis as most likely belonging to Queen Piyarajadevi, chief consort of King Rajadhiraj of Hongsawaddy. Drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s “social life of things” and Igor Kopytoff’s theory of singularization, the study extends the object biography framework to interrogate not only shifts in function and value but also the making and unmaking of celebrity attribution. Organized through four epochs—creation, consecration, colonial extraction, and exhibition – the poster traces the headdress’s transformation from a regalia of ‘deification’ to enshrined relic and from colonial trophy to museum centerpiece. While Kopytoff illuminates processes of singularization, Appadurai’s notion of diversion clarifies how colonial displacement and museum display recontextualized the object within imperial knowledge systems. The study introduces the concept of the “celebrity artifact” to examine how misattribution to Shin Sawbu by the local scholars generated symbolic capital and public fascination. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s theory of ‘aura’ and museum discourse, its celebrity status has been shaped by the Burmese community, somehow reinforced by the museum. Reattribution to Piyarajadevi not only corrects a historical error but destabilizes a century-long narrative embedded in scholarship and display. By reframing the object as “reattributed regalia,” the poster positions epigraphic and provenance revisions as both epistemic repairs, proposing attribution itself as a dynamic phase in an object’s biography.