Art of East Asia: Neolithic & Bronze Age China
Bronze Jue (Chueh) from Erlitou is one of the earliest Bronze artifacts
yet discovered in China. it is ritual pouring or possibly (but I doubt
it) drinking vessel. Rather the position of the handle on the side suggst
a kind of pitcher for pouring heated liquids, possibly either wine or condiments.
All such vessels were part of the equipage of the morturary feast in honor
of the ancestors (usually said to have been made of specific types of wood
rather than bronze). The elegent forms relate directly to the late Long
Shan pottery types (see above 09.20), the technique of casting in Bronze
is apparently new to China. Bronze casting is a sophisticated metal working
technique in which the alloying of copper with tin (and usually a little
lead for workability) demonstrated an advanced metalworking culture. However,
to date no developmental stages of metal working have come to light in the
Chinese archaeological universe. Thus it has been suggested that bronze
working was imported from either the contemporaneous near eastern cultures
in Euphrates valley or, in my opinion more likely from the Chengmai cultures
of northern Thailand. An extremely important feature of Chinese ritual
bronze casting techniques is that they were made through the process of
piece-mold casting rather than by using what would have appeared at first
glance as obvious, lost wax casting. This piece mold technique required
an extremely high level of ceramic technology as often the pieces of the
molds were joined and accurately aligned to nearly 0 tolerances and errors
of less that .25 mm are common.
