Metalworking in Bronze Age China: The Lost-Wax Process By Peng Pe ...

revealed that Li’s understanding of the casting process was moving in a generally more plausible direction. The first substantive step towards an accurate account of the casting process in China was taken by Orvar Karlbeck, who explicitly demonstrated that Anyang bronzes were cast by the section-mold process. Based on traces of soot and color changes likely caused by scorching on the interior of many mold fragments, as well as the occasional bronze remnant left in them, Karlbeck maintained that section molds, rather than the shaping of wax models, were used for the casting of bronzes.³⁶ This clearly ruled out the possibility of the indirect lost-wax casting proposed by Yetts, Creel, and their followers. Though Karlbeck himself did not completely abandon the theory of direct lost-wax casting,³⁷ he considered it “extremely unlikely.”³⁸ Karlbeck was almost certain that Anyang bronzes were cast within fitted mold sections. It is hard to imagine any reason for the investment mold to carry the mortises and tenons that Karlbeck had clearly observed.³⁹

With the work of Karlbeck as their starting point, later Chinese scholars continued to make progress along this line of inquiry. Many scholars, such as Guo Baojun and Rong Geng, soon used the section-mold theory to explain the casting process of newly unearthed Chinese bronzes.⁴⁰ In 1954, Chen Mengjia, with newly acquired excavated materials from Anyang and elsewhere in China, reaffirmed the section-mold theory and rejected lost-wax, including the indirect process proposed by Yetts.⁴¹ The next year, Shi Zhangru published a more exploratory, though problematic, analysis of the Anyang casting process that relied mainly on the section-mold theory. Specifically, Shi assumed that the model was shaved down to serve as the core⁴² and the thickness of the layer scraped off corresponding to the thickness intended for the bronze vessel wall.⁴³ Though Shi’s proposal of the use of wax and tallow during mold construction makes no sense,⁴⁴ he still contributed some original proposals to the prevailing section-mold theory, including his detailed discussion of how a mold assembly might be constructed in a proper number of fitted sections.⁴⁵