I think the silver bands are purely decorative, and added to give more "value" to the object. I have seen quite a few of these objects, it was always badly decorated porcelain and the bands often cover part of the decoration. I think the makers did not care much about it, it just had to look "exotic" to sell better... The pictures do not enlarge when I click at them, in fact the enlarged version is smaller than the pics in the post itself. But there are some areas where I believe to see that it was printed, as for example in the first picture at some of the leaves, where the transfer print seems not applied very well...