Bronze Vessels of Ancient China

The Bronze Age in China

The three dynasties with which Chinese history begins — Xia, Shang and Zhou — are all Bronze Age. Large-scale casting started in the Central Plains around 2000 BCE, and what it produced is the subject of this page.

The phrase means something slightly different here than it does in Europe. It is not only a stage of technology. What survives from these three dynasties is overwhelmingly vessels — containers, made in sets, for wine and for food — and their shapes were not free invention. Each type had a job in sacrifice and in burial, and each set had a size that corresponded to the rank of the person it was buried with.

That is why the objects are worth reading one by one. A Chinese bronze vessel tells you two things at once: what it was for, and who was entitled to have one.

What changes across the three dynasties is which vessels carry the weight. Wine in the Xia. A fixed wine set in the Shang. Food, and above all the ding, in the Zhou.

Xia: Wine Vessels

The Xia period is centred on wine vessels — the jue, the jia and the he among them. Wine, rather than food, is what the earliest bronze vessel repertoire is built around.

The jue is the one to know. It is the earliest bronze vessel shape in the culture — the first form bronze was used to make — and it appears in the Xia and stays in use for centuries afterwards.

The Xia is also where the bronze ding begins. A ding with a net pattern on its body, excavated at Erlitou, is described as the earliest bronze ding yet found. So both halves of the later system, the wine vessel and the food vessel, are already present at the start, even though the period as a whole is counted as a wine-vessel age.

For what came out of the ground at Erlitou, and why it still matters to a working craft, see Replica Bronze of Luoyang.

Shang: The Gu and the Jue

Under the Shang the centre of gravity moves to a pair: the gu and the jue — a tall drinking cup, and the three-legged vessel described above. They are used together, as a set.

And the set has a size. The number of vessels placed in a tomb is not a matter of wealth. It marks rank, in the way a title does. This is the period in which a bronze assemblage becomes a statement about the person buried with it.

The Shang is also present in Luoyang's own archaeology. The Shang capital Xibo, at Yanshi Shang City six kilometres from Erlitou, was founded around 1600 BCE and stayed in use for over two centuries. The dynasty that produced the gu-and-jue set had one of its capitals in this valley.

Zhou: Food Vessels

The Zhou turns from wine to food. The core pair becomes the ding and the gui: the ding for meat, the gui for grain, used together.

Both began as serving vessels and became something else. The ding starts as a cooking pot — the Chinese description is blunt about it, calling it the ancient equivalent of a modern pot, used to stew and to hold fish and meat. What it becomes, once bronze is in play, is the vessel in which meat is offered at sacrifice and at the feast. The gui has the narrower job: it is made specifically to hold cooked grain — millet, broomcorn millet, rice and the like.

The pairing is the point. A set is not a collection of vessels that happen to match; it is a ding and a gui together, meat and grain, and the number of each is fixed by the rank of the owner.

Nine Ding for the King

How fixed? The classic statement is a table.

It comes from He Xiu's commentary of the Eastern Han on the Gongyang Commentary to the Spring and Autumn Annals, at the second year of Duke Huan. The line reads: the Son of Heaven nine ding, the feudal lords seven, the ministers and grand officers five, the senior officers three. The accompanying sets run the same way — nine ding with eight gui for the king, seven with six for a lord, five with four for a grand officer, three with two for a senior officer, and one ding for the lowest grade of officer.

Two things are worth noticing. The first is the source. This is a commentary, not the text of the classic itself: the number system is set out in He Xiu's annotation, and Chinese museums and heritage authorities are careful to say so. Presenting it as a rule of the Spring and Autumn Annals would be wrong.

The second is what happened to it. In the Spring and Autumn period the lords began to use nine ding anyway. A set of nine ding and eight gui excavated from the Zheng-Han city site is the physical evidence: a tomb furnished at a king's scale for someone who was not a king. Chinese accounts of the period use the phrase 礼崩乐坏 — the ritual order broken, the music spoiled — and this is one of the objects that shows it happening.

The Vessel Types

Seven shapes account for most of what a museum visitor meets.

鼎 Ding. The round ding stands on three legs and carries two upright handles on the rim. The square ding has four legs and two handles, and the legs of the great ones are hollow. Scale varies enormously — the Zilong ding is 103 cm tall, its handles rising 22 cm above the body; the Houmuwu ding is 133 cm tall and weighs 832.84 kg. A ding holds meat.

尊 Zun. An open mouth, a high neck, a ring foot — and very often an animal form. The Four Rams zun carries a curled-horn ram's head at each of the four corners of its shoulder and stands 58.3 cm tall. A zun holds wine.

罍 Lei. A narrow mouth, a long constricted neck, an angled shoulder, a deep body tapering to a ring foot. Round and square types both exist. A lei holds wine, and can also hold water.

卣 You. Lidded, and carried by a handle. The cross-section is usually oval; the lid carries a bud-shaped knob; a pair of half-rings on the neck takes the handle. A you holds ju chang, the scented millet wine used in sacrifice.

甗 Yan. A steamer, and it is worth being literal about that. The upper part has a perforated floor, the lower part holds water, and a grid between them lets the steam through. Chinese museum descriptions call it the equivalent of a modern steamer. The pottery version goes back to the Neolithic; the bronze one appears in the early Shang and stays in use as a ritual vessel into the Han. It cooks grain.

簋 Gui. An open mouth, a bulging body, a ring foot, and two handles — often animal-headed — sometimes standing on a square base. The square-based gui appears at the beginning of the Western Zhou. A gui holds cooked grain.

爵 Jue. Three legs, a spout on one side and a pointed tail on the other, a handle, and two small posts standing on the rim. Its exact use is given several ways — a drinking vessel, a warming vessel, or both — so the honest description is that it was for wine, with the manner of use still under discussion.

Reading a Bronze

The vessels carry writing, and the writing is why many of them are famous.

Inscriptions on bronze — jinwen, "metal script" — exist from the Shang, but the Shang ones are mostly short. The Western Zhou is the period in which they become long, and it is the long ones that matter.

They are usually cast inside the vessel: on the inner wall, or on the floor of the interior. The Da Ke ding carries 28 lines and 290 characters on its inner wall. The Li gui carries its text on the floor of the interior. The Zilong ding has its inscription on the inner wall near the rim. On a jue, the inscription normally sits inside the handle. Some are cast with the vessel, some are cut afterwards.

Length is the measure of ambition. The Li gui has 32 characters, the Da Ke ding 290, and the Mao Gong ding 499 — described in Chinese sources as the longest bronze inscription known.

What they record is administration: sacrifices, military campaigns, appointments, gifts. What makes them valuable is that they can correct the received histories. The Li gui's inscription and the "Battle of Muye" chapter of the Book of Documents corroborate each other on King Wu's campaign against the Shang. The Mao Gong ding is treated as a primary source for late Western Zhou politics.

From Ritual to Replica

Put the pieces together and a system becomes visible: a fixed set of shapes, a fixed set of contents, a scale of numbers tied to rank, and an inscription recording who gave what to whom. Bronze in ancient China was an administrative technology as much as an artistic one.

The shapes outlasted the system. Luoyang makes bronze vessels today on the same set of forms — the ding, the zun, the gui, the jue — working from excavated originals. The casting methods behind that work are set out in our articles on replica bronze, on telling a lost-wax piece from a mould-cast one, and on why bronze turns green.

The pieces themselves are on the main site: replica bronze vessels.