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

than its neighbor. Each individual unit comprises multiple pairs of pattern elements. Small vertical rods support the pattern elements and ultimately connect to the horizontal rods that structurally support this surface pattern (fig. 17).³ Traditional assessments have held that the rim appendage was composed of four lost-wax cast blocks that were subsequently soldered together. The reason behind this thinking is that the section-mold process could not cast even a quarter-section of such an openwork structure.⁴ This traditional view similarly deems the handle-shaped appendages of the pan (see fig. 15b) to have been cast by the lost-wax process.⁵

Two objecting perspectives have recently countered this traditional understanding of the manufacturing process of the Zeng zun-pan set. Perspective 1, proposed by Zhou Weirong et al., argues that the rim appendage of the Zeng zun is composed of numerous minute section-mold castings soldered together.⁶ The evidence given to support this view includes pronounced “soldering marks” and a series of “mold marks” and other traces supposedly left by the section-mold process in the manufacturing of precast individual segments (as in fig. 18).⁷ This evidence has met with vigorous critique.⁸ In fact, apart from a few soldering marks left by the joining of the four quarter-sections to the framework, all of the remaining purported soldering points, if they exist at all, seem far more likely to have been caused by the fusing together of pieces of a wax model. Similarly, other so-called “mold marks” that Zhou et al. have cited as evidence of section-mold casting could just as feasibly be the seams created in shaping the components of a wax model. One unanswered key objection to Perspective 1, as the scholar Zhang Changping has pointed out, is its failure to explain how one could solder over three thousand precast individual components within a space whose diameter is a mere twenty-five centimeters and whose height is only three centimeters.⁹ Perspective 1 gives no explanation for the mechanics of such an intricate operation, beyond the acknowledgment that “it must have been difficult.”