| Chapter 3: | Was Lost-wax Casting Used in Bronze Age China? |
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Chapter 3
Was Lost-wax Casting Used in Bronze Age China?
Recent intense scholarly debate over the use of the lost-wax process in Bronze Age China has focused on the bronze zun-pan set (fig. 15) from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng (d. 433 BCE), discovered at Suizhou in Hubei Province in 1978. Of the more than four thousand bronze artifacts discovered in the Marquis’s tomb, the zun-pan set is by far the most delicate and complex. The vessel set was likely created for an earlier marquis whose name was erased and replaced by that of Marquis Yi,1 a fact that underscores the tremendous value of the zun-pan in the time of Marquis Yi.
In the zun (fig. 15a) of the zun-pan set, the rim appendage (fig. 16) has been widely believed to be the only portion made using the lost-wax technique.2 It is composed of two physical layers connected to each other by irregularly shaped and spaced rods. The inner layer, which was not meant to be seen, is composed of a highly regular network-like structure, whereas the outer layer, the visible part, is composed of two rings, one central and the other distal. Each ring is further composed of thirty-two units, with each unit sitting alternatingly higher or lower