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

Because both Seima-Turbino and the BMAC, as Fitzgerald-Huber maintained, display remarkable evidence of cultural transmission to the metallurgical centers of Qijia and Erlitou,¹⁵ it is tempting to suggest that the first metalworkers of Bronze Age China had already encountered the lost-wax process. Against the rapid and long-distance metallurgical expansion model proposed by Fitzgerald-Huber,¹⁶ however, Mei Jianjun has argued that metallurgy was brought to China not directly by the Seima-Turbino groups but through “indirect, occasional, and small scale” interregional communications.¹⁷ According to Mei, numerous interactions occurred between northwest China and Eurasia,¹⁸ and many “intermediaries” acted as both means of passage and “filters” of metalworking.¹⁹ If Mei’s theory is applied, then lost-wax casting could have been one technology that had been “filtered out” by the time metallurgy was introduced to China.²⁰ This is, of course, only a speculation without firm evidence from our current archaeological record.²¹ Whatever the case, no clues about the use of lost-wax have ever been associated with Qijia or Erlitou, or any other contemporary sites that fall within modern China. The casting used in early Bronze Age China was almost invariably an alternative to the lost-wax process, as discussed in the following section.

Early Chinese Bronzes: The Lost-wax Problem Reviewed

I first briefly review the research history of early Chinese bronzes centered on the lost-wax problem. Based on accounts in antiquity far later than the Chinese Bronze Age,²² most modern scholars uncritically believed until the 1960s that early Chinese bronzes were cast by the lost-wax process.²³ For instance, according to Chinese Art by Stephen Bushell, published in 1904, “Chinese bronzes have always, as far back as we have any record, been executed by the cire perdue process, and finished, when necessary, with the hammer, burin, and chisel.”²⁴ Agreeing with Bushell that the lost-wax process cast all early Chinese bronzes, William