Quote:
Originally Posted by Ian
That is an extremely beautiful sword! It has a substantial amount of silver and clearly belonged to someone of considerable wealth and power. A couple of points to add to Nathan's assessment. The silver motifs on the hilt are not repeated on the silver mounts of the scabbard, which suggests to me that the sword and its scabbard were not made at the same time.
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I saw a few of these composite weapons in an exhibit at the Historical Museum in Saigon back in 2007, it dealt with a Vietnamese military campaign up the Mekong River towards the Thai border in the early 19th cent. A couple of them had Vietnamese disc guards (separate comment above) on swords whose components were fashioned and decorated in un-Vietnamese manner. The display captions didn't comment on the weapons themselves other than they were attributed to this event, but my impression from the historical backstory is that the swords were trophies subsequently modified with the addition of the guards to make them conform to the appearance of similar sabers with extended hilts which were long popular in Vietnam, even prior to the Nguyen Dynasty.
Subsequent to the museum visit, an antiques dealer in Saigon showed me a similar one, which unfortunately I was not able to acquire. And a couple years later I noticed one of similar quality to that featured in this thread, in a private collection in Israel of all places, which was not for sale.