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

In Western academia, Karlbeck’s 1935 publication, though detailed and meticulous, garnered little attention in subsequent years. Leroy Davidson, one of a few immediate followers of Karlbeck, argued in 1937 that a bronze he from the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin⁴⁶ must be one of the earliest decorated Chinese bronzes cast by the section-mold process: with access to the interior of the mold, the section-mold casters could easily create the thread-relief lines and circles.⁴⁷ Davidson’s conjecture, though eventually verified by later archaeological finds from Henan Erlitou, was representative of a rather weak response by Western academics to the section-mold theory. When Western researchers began to take the section-mold theory seriously, their attention stemmed less from Karlbeck’s paper than from the work of Chinese scholars, most notably the aforementioned Shi Zhangru.⁴⁸ Shi’s discussion of the division of mold sections⁴⁹ significantly influenced the Australian scholar Noel Barnard, who in his renowned but controversial 1961 book wholly embraced and wildly elaborated the section-mold theory.⁵⁰

Universal acceptance of the section-mold theory in Western academia was finally realized in the 1960s, thanks to two crucial pieces of research. The first was Wilma Fairbank’s discovery of “piece-mold segmentation” in the design of early Chinese bronzes—the compartments of bronze motifs and ornaments that evidently correspond to mold sections.⁵¹ The second was Rutherford J. Gettens’s technical study of Chinese bronzes in the Freer Gallery, Washington, D.C., which verified that certain visually complex Chinese bronzes could be cast within section molds, but not necessarily in one piece, because individual castings could be mechanically joined together in an interlocking manner (fig. 6).⁵² In addition, Gettens associated the mold join marks on the surface of many early Chinese bronzes with the section-mold process.⁵³ Meanwhile, significant studies were also being advanced in Taiwan and Mainland of China. Through painstaking efforts to evaluate 168 excavated bronze vessels and over three thousand mold fragments from Anyang, Li Ji and Wan Jiabao concluded that all of the bronzes under examination had been cast by the section-mold process, and the number of mold sections depended on the