Replica Bronze of Luoyang

Bronze casting is the older of Luoyang's two great crafts, and the one with the longer memory. It begins with the ritual vessels of the Xia, Shang and Zhou, and it is still practised in the city today.

Casting Bronze in Luoyang

Large-scale bronze casting appears in the Central Plains of China at around 2000 BCE, and it is the technology that opens the three dynasties — Xia, Shang and Zhou — that Chinese history begins with. The Luoyang valley sits at the centre of that story. The earliest ritual bronze vessels yet found in China come from a site in this valley.

What that means for the craft today is straightforward. Nothing about it had to be imported. The material, the casting techniques and the object types all have their earliest Chinese expression here, in the same valley, four thousand years ago.

A Reputation Built on Copies

The craft as it is practised in Luoyang now is replica bronze — fanggu, "modelled on the ancient." This is a distinct discipline with its own standard, and the standard is not creativity. It is accuracy.

A replica maker works from an excavated object or a documented type. The goal is to reproduce the form, the decoration and the surface of the original: the profile of the vessel, the register of cast ornament around its body, the handles and the foot, and the patina that long burial produced. A piece that departs from the original in order to look more attractive has failed at its job, however handsome it is.

That standard is why the craft is associated with this city in particular. Luoyang's own soil has produced an unusual density of the objects being reproduced, which means the people casting here have had originals to study at first hand for a very long time.

Bronze in Luoyang Before the Replicas

The objects the modern craft descends from are not abstractions. Two finds in the Luoyang valley make the point.

The first is Erlitou, the site identified in the official record as the capital of the Xia. Its excavation produced China's earliest group of bronze ritual vessels — the beginning of the whole sequence that replica work draws on. It also produced a turquoise-inlaid dragon ornament, one of the most arresting objects of its period and a reminder that bronze work at this date was already reaching for something beyond mere utility.

The second is the Eastern Zhou royal city. A chariot-and-horse pit opened there in 2002 held a chariot drawn by six horses — the tianzi jia liu team that classical texts reserved for the Zhou king.

For a craft whose whole discipline is fidelity to originals, this is not background information. It is the reason the work can be done at all: the earliest objects of the tradition came out of this ground, and a maker here can study them without leaving the city.

The Lost-Wax Method

The technique that gives Luoyang replica bronze much of its character is lost-wax casting, and the principle is easy to state.

A model of the intended object is made in wax. That model is packed in clay to form a mould. The assembly is heated, and the wax melts and runs out, leaving a hollow clay cavity in the exact shape of the model. Molten bronze is then poured in. When the clay is broken away, the object is there, cast in one piece.

The alternative method, piece-mould casting, works differently. A clay mould is built in sections around a model, the sections are removed and reassembled around a core, and the bronze is poured into the gap between them. Where the sections met, a casting seam is left on the finished object.

Lost-wax casting leaves no such seams, because there are no sections. It also handles shapes that piece-mould casting cannot: openwork, deep undercuts, and ornament that would be impossible to withdraw a mould from. A vessel with pierced or interlocking decoration, or a figure with fine detail in the round, is a lost-wax object almost by definition.

A Provincial Heritage Craft

Bronze casting in the Luoyang area is recognised at the provincial level of China's intangible cultural heritage system. Two separate casting traditions here are listed: one entered the third batch of Henan's provincial list in 2011, and a second entered the fifth batch in 2021, as an extension of the existing provincial listing.

What the listing covers is exactly the set of methods described above: the wax model, the clay mould, the pour. Those are the elements a provincial heritage listing recognises, and they are the elements still in use here.

Cast in Luoyang

What is worth holding on to is the span this craft covers. The earliest bronze ritual vessels in China came out of the ground in this valley. The people casting bronze here now are making objects of the same families, by a method that reaches back to the same period, with the accuracy of the original as the measure of success.

Every piece on our replica bronze page is made to that standard: an original, reproduced.