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

the frequency of interregional communications during the Eastern Zhou period, could it safely be assumed that Houma casters did not know the lost-wax process? It is hard to imagine that they did not, but if they did know it, why has no evidence of the use of lost-wax at Houma been found in the abundant archaeological record? One reason might be that they were already able to cast everything their patrons wanted.⁹⁴ Another reason might have been their pursuit of efficiency. Perhaps needing to supply a broad market, they may have focused on mass production and replication, which the direct lost-wax process, at least, does not lend itself to. Houma founders may have been uninterested in the lost-wax process because it was too inefficient for them.⁹⁵

In addition to the pattern-block technique, Late Bronze Age metalworking also made extensive use of mechanical or metallurgical joining. For instance, an intricate table base from Hebei Pingshan (fig. 14) dated to the late fourth century BCE⁹⁶ is composed of 78 components that were cast from 188 mold pieces and joined together 22 times by interlock casting and 48 times by soldering.⁹⁷ In the same period, more and more bronzes were inlaid with metals of various types, such as gold, silver, tin, or pure copper. The Pingshan table base (fig. 14) and many other bronzes from the same tomb are inlaid with gold and/or silver; the earliest metal inlays in bronze (with cast copper) appeared in China no later than the sixth century BCE.⁹⁸ Although not entirely absent from earlier periods, hammering, as a technology distinct from casting, also started to become more common in China at this time, especially with its variants of repoussé and chasing. During the same period, other “alien” techniques arrived in China, such as granulation, gilding, and punching.⁹⁹ Lost-wax casting, as another seemingly new metallurgical skill, unavoidably arouses the curiosity of scholars. Did lost-wax casting exist in Bronze Age China? If so, what evidence is there for it? How was it adapted to produce particular castings? Did it revolutionize Chinese metalworking as a whole? The chapters that follow attempt to unravel these mysteries.