Amazing stuff! Apparently, ancient Chinese metallurgy was more advanced than previously recognized.
"The 2,300-year-old Kaogong Ji is the oldest technical encyclopedia in the world. The book contains designs and instructions on how to make several highly advanced tools for the time, such as metal drums, chariots and weapons. It also has ambiguous recipes for casting bronze, whose ingredients have puzzled researchers for years. Now, they were able to finally decipher those recipes and their ingredients. ..."
From the abstract:
"Knowledge of alloying practices is key to understanding the mass production of ancient Chinese bronzes. The Eastern Zhou text, the Rites of Zhou, contains six formulae, or recipes, for casting different forms of bronze based on the combination of two components: Jin and Xi. For more than 100 years, the precise interpretation of these two components has eluded explanation. Drawing on analyses of pre-Qin coinage, the authors offer a new interpretation, arguing that, rather than pure metals, Jin and Xi were pre-prepared copper-rich alloys, in turn indicating an additional step in the manufacturing process of copper-alloy objects. This result will be of interest to linguists, as well as archaeologists of ancient Chinese technology."
Knife coins, which were in use in China around 400 BC, were some of the objects studied as researchers deciphered ancient recipes for bronze
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