Chinese ritual bronze (piece-mould casting)
Bronce ritual chino fundido en moldes por secciones
- Date
- c. 1600 BCE · confidence high
- Place
- Erlitou and Anyang (Yinxu), Henan, China
- Credited to
- Erlitou and Shang cultures
- Field
- Matter & energy
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
Ritual vessels (ding, jue, gu) cast in sectional clay moulds assembled around an inner core, a technique opposite to Western lost-wax casting, allowing pieces of up to 800 kg (the Houmuwu ding) with crisp relief decoration. Chinese bronze is fundamentally ritual and political, not utilitarian.
Whether bronze metallurgy reached China by diffusion from the steppe (Seima-Turbino culture, c. 2000 BCE) or arose locally is debated; the piece-mould technique is in any case an independent Chinese invention.
What it led to
- Legitimation of Shang and Zhou power through the monopoly of ritual vessels for ancestor worship
- State workshops of hundreds of workers and organised copper and tin mining (Tonglüshan)
- Bronze inscriptions (jinwen), the principal historical source for the Zhou
- A rank system defined by the number of vessels each noble could own
Built on
Made possible
- Chinese oracle bone scriptc. 1250 BCE
- Two-tone bells of Marquis Yi of Zeng433 BCE
- Zhou bronze inscriptions
- Tuned bronze bells (bianzhong)
- Chinese cast iron