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

it seems that this mainstream view cannot be easily shaken based on current evidence.

Late Bronze Age: Innovations in Metalworking

As discussed earlier, in early Bronze Age China, mold making started predominantly with a decorated model of the vessel to be cast, but serial or repetitive production from a single model appears not to have been practiced until quite late.⁸² Only around the mid-first millennium BCE was a new decorative technique invented. It is best revealed by the bronzes and workshop remains from Houma of Shanxi Province, the capital of the Eastern Zhou state of Jin. This innovative process has been thoroughly investigated by Barbara Keyser⁸³ and lucidly described by Robert Bagley. Bagley’s description proceeds as follows: to cast a Houma-style hu in the Freer Gallery (fig. 11; the two handles were separately cast and will not be discussed here), clay was applied around an undecorated model and removed in two large blank shells. The decoration was carved neither on the model nor in the mold but was manufactured separately from a reusable baked pattern block, similar to the one illustrated in fig. 10. Wet clay was pressed to the block and then peeled off, carrying with it a negative imprint of the decoration. This soft peeled ornament was pared, bent, and plastered piece by piece around the mold in a manner akin to wallpapering. The soft pattern units so planted in the mold were then baked hard, and the bronze cast in the resulting mold bore horizontal registers of ornament, each register comprised of identical, duplicated units.⁸⁴

A remarkable number of Houma products have been discovered at numerous sites in Shanxi, Shaanxi, Henan, Hebei, Shandong, and even more remote areas.⁸⁵ With the verified use of reusable decorated models at Houma,⁸⁶ it is puzzling that pattern units there were not applied directly to the model, in which case the decorating process would only have had to be carried out once.⁸⁷ Even more curiously, Houma casters rarely carved on the model or made mechanical duplications of it, a process