Metalworking in Bronze Age China: The Lost-Wax Process by Peng Peng (review)

Peng Peng's book provides an excellent overview of studies focusing on lost-wax casting in Bronze Age China from the twentieth century to fifth century b.c., more specifically in the core regions of the Eastern Zhou states, and is a fresh contribution to a long-standing debate. It offers many constructive points on the identification, origin, and transmission of this exotic casting method. The 190 pages of main text is followed by 223 pages of figures, which are mostly images of the bronze artifacts that are mentioned throughout the text; these provide much-needed illustrations for the complicated technical discussions. This separation between text and figures, however, causes some inconvenience for readers who are forced to jump back and forth in order to check referenced figures.

Though it has been widely accepted that section-mould casting was the hallmark of Bronze Age China and was employed to produce intricately decorated bronze ritual vessels, a few Eastern Zhou (eighth–third centuries b.c.) artifacts with three-dimensional interlaced openwork and serpent decorations have troubled generations of archaeologists and researchers of historical metallurgy around the world. These decorations were technically challenging, if not impossible, to be fabricated with sectionmould casting and so are thought to be evidence of lost-wax casting in pre-Qin China. In contrast to section-mould casting, lost-wax casting creates a model with wax which can later disappear (hence, "lost") without disassembling the mould surrounding it. The workers would be able to create more complex shapes and very deep undercuts with this technique.

The proposal that lost-wax casting was used during the Eastern Zhou period, was however bitterly rejected by a group of researchers who insisted that these complicated shapes could also have been created with section-moulds; they suggested that lost-wax casting had never been employed by ancient bronze workers in China. For those who have not actively participated in this highly technical debate, it is quite confusing to see the same artifact explained by these totally contradictory theories; it is frustrating to find that a consensus could not be reached even after so many years. In a sense, this debate has already damaged the general significance of the technical investigation of bronze artifacts and caused people to question the reliability and relevance of all studies of this kind. Peng's book is a recent and important effort to rectify this situation in that it sets out to answer whether or not lost-wax casting was ever practiced in Bronze Age China and how and why it was adopted and developed by bronze workers.

Readers will find a systematic and insightful review of previous studies on this topic and sophisticated characterizations of many important artifacts that are regarded as the products of lost-wax casting (chapters 2–6). This book is a highly useful introduction and resource for researchers and students who are seeking to obtain a detailed understanding of these discussions. Peng summarizes and proposes a number of principles that can be followed to identify an item produced via lostwax casting using the naked eye. For instance, bronze objects featuring intricate decorations and having an interlaced openwork structure were likely produced with the lost-wax method. In addition, if an object is stylistically similar to another bronze object, confirmed to be produced by lost-wax casting, it can be argued to be made by the same caster with a similar technique. These identification criteria, however, are passive ones, and simply labelling all technically challenging objects as lost-wax casting works is problematic. An immediate question is whether this technology was exclusively associated with a particular shape. If that was the case, the lost-wax casted items found in China and dated to the Bronze Age seem to be too few in number. In addition, one would wonder how this highly specialized technique was transmitted across such a vast distance and passed...