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Chapter 8 - Beyond Ceramics: Metal, Coins, and Glassware
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326 sinGapore & the silk road of the sea 1300–1800 China’s iron industry represented a high level of pyrotechnology. Iron can be made in two ways. In one process, ore that contains iron is heated until impurities such as silica and other minerals melt and are drained off. The ferrous material that remains, which still contains some impurities with a high melting point, is heated until it glows red and becomes malleable; it is then hammered to remove as many of the other elements as possible. In this method, the iron is not melted, merely softened, and can be forged or wrought by hammering into various shapes. Wrought iron is particularly good for making sharp tools and weapons. Southeast Asian wrought iron often approximated the quality of steel, because charcoal (mainly carbon) accidentally became incorporated into the metal during the process of heating and beating. The Chinese succeeded in heating ore in blast furnaces to the point where the iron itself became liquid. It could then be cast in moulds to make various shapes such as flat frying pans and round-bottomed cooking pots (wok and kuali). Chinese industry achieved levels of efficiency and economies of scale which made it possible to export large quantities of cheap iron objects. Cast iron is brittle and not suitable for making items that need sharp cutting edges like axes, knives, or machetes. Thus Chinese iron augmented but did not replace Southeast Asian iron industries. Some densely-populated islands in Indonesia, such as Java, have little or no iron. The geographical imbalance between sources of supply and centres of demand stimulated local trade in iron centuries before China began to export this metal. A second stimulus of demand for Chinese iron stemmed from the difference between the techniques used for making iron in Southeast Asia and India, and those that were invented in China. Southeast Asians produced their own sharp-edged objects, but were ready buyers of Chinese woks. By the third century, Funan in the Mekong delta was importing iron from an island near Borneo, probably in the southern Philippines (Wolters 1967: 52). Ancient iron-working in the Sarawak River delta, northwestern Borneo, has been studied in detail (Harrisson and O’Connor 1969). Remnants of iron-working using local techniques in the Sarawak delta are associated with Chinese coins, stoneware, and porcelain from the Tang to the early Yuan Dynasty. Iron-working and the importation of Chinese pottery in this area peaked in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Although no iron sources in Borneo are commercially viable now, the early- to mid-nineteenth-century Bornean societies were renowned for making iron artifacts with simple techniques from low-grade iron ore. In the twentieth century, villages such as Nagara, south Kalimantan, still produced large quantities of iron tools for export to Java. A similar phenomenon in Luwu, Sulawesi, may have given the island its name (wesi in Old Javanese means “iron”). China imported wrought iron; according to Needham (1958: 48), the Chinese sought “hyper-eutectoid wootz steel of India in relatively small amounts, from about the sixth century AD onwards. . . . This trade seems to have taken several routes; for example, Persia and Kashmir as well as Malaya and Indonesia”. Harrisson and O’Connor (1969: 203–4) postulated that the people living in the [3.236.234.62] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:18 GMT) Chapter 8 Beyond CeramiCs: metal, Coins, and Glassware 327 Sarawak River delta were involved with this trade, and perhaps used Indian production methods. Data from Kedah, northwest Malaysia, suggested that the copper, silver, mercury, diamonds, coal and tourmaline found in reliquary boxes excavated in Kedah came from the Bau mining district, at the headwaters of the Sarawak River (Treloar 1968, 1972), which may date from the eleventh century. This discovery supports the notion that Sarawak exported wrought iron and imported cast iron. Zhao Rugua in the thirteenth century listed iron as an export from Po-ni, the Philippines, Java, islands of the eastern archipelago, and Srivijaya. However, not everyone agrees that the Sarawak Delta was a centre of iron production for export. Christie (1985) agrees that Santubong is the site known in Chinese sources as Po-ni, which may have had ten thousand inhabitants (Hirth and Rockhill 1911: 155). Christie believes that the site only had a moderate-sized iron industry producing for local use, and that the majority of items that Harrisson and O’Connor interpreted as slag are natural concretions. Arab sources record that Indonesians sailed as...