Old Stuff - Silver Cufflinks from Vietnam

Don't you just love hunting for gems on the flea markets?

I do! I absolutely adore doing so and honestly, it's been a pain that I haven't been able to do so for months because of the pandemic. I want to go hunt for treasures again, like these beauties above. Not long before the pandemic, we went to visit a flea market for the first time, not knowing if we'd find old junk or gems, we were actually determined to find at least one pair of cufflinks that day. Not looking for anything particular, we went through all these little boxes with (mostly) junk or often only one single cufflink instead of a pair. Which is pretty useless if you want to wear them.

I honestly already gave up on finding a pair

When my boyfriend suddenly stopped at this guy that was standing there with some suitcases that had boxes inside. He was looking at the cufflinks his "neighbor" was selling and they weren't what he was looking for, so that guy said to wait and took out a box of jewelry to show him. He instantly noticed a pair of silver cufflinks that had a cool engravement of dragons.

Look at the details, I personally think they are awesome! He paid less than ten euros for them and when we were traveling home by bus, he already found a similar pair online with the value over a hundred twenty dollars. At home, he began to search more info about the engravements of the cufflinks:

Obviously, as you can see, they are made in Vietnam. Some research showed that they are most likely made between 1937 and 1966. This mark below was hard to get clear on camera but I remember that my boyfriend found this exact mark at the time.

Old but very nice and detailed

I wonder how many times this set has been worn by others until the set ended up in the box at the flea market. Personally, I love to recycle / upcycle stuff and I'm always very happy when we find something old for a bargain rather than buying something new in the store. These cufflinks are much nicer than tens of others of pairs I found in normal stores while hunting for a pair at the time. I think they're timeless as well.

They look super neat if my boyfriend wears his business outfit. I never really realized that cufflinks can really finish the outfit when wearing a suit until I accidentally bought a few blouses for my boyfriend which had these special cuffs meant for cufflinks. I was so happy to find a few high-quality blouses for him in a second-hand shop that I totally missed the fact that these had different cuffs. He said he would only wear them if he had a pair of decent cufflinks, and so we went cufflink hunting.

I hope you enjoyed the pictures as much as I did taking them. This was my entry for the @qurator Monday Missions: Old Stuff!

Thanks for stopping by!

Pictures are all taken by me