This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: For centuries, scholars have read ancient documents describing the production of brass in 10th-century A.D. The problem was that the earliest physical evidence of brass production would be found nearly 600 years later, in the 16th century A.D.
A new study, published in Antiquity, describes the discovery of the earliest brass-making crucibles in a southern Chinese workshop in Guangzhou, dated to the 9th–10th century A.D. What led to the discovery? "We find an anomalous increase in zinc contents since the 9th–10th century, a time close to the time when written accounts claimed the commencement of brass production in China," said Hongyan Xiao, an archaeologist at Peking University.
"That's the first time we started to think it might be related to brass-making." Guangzhou was a major metropolis in southern China, famous for having once housed the Royal Palace of the Nanyue Kingdom (204–111 B.C.). The city continued to serve as a bustling international hub of trade and commerce and as a regional administrative center for nearly two millennia after the fall of the Nanyue Kingdom. Between 1975 and 2007, a series of structures were unearthed, including the remains of a metalworking workshop, furnaces and crucibles, all likely maintained and operated by the local government.
According to the study, this workshop operated for more than a millennium, creating metallic objects ranging from bronze to silver from the third through 18th centuries A.D. Xiao and his team had been visiting different sites and analyzing metal objects for years when they came to Guangzhou to take a closer look at its nearly 80 crucibles and crucible sherds. Using a portable X-ray technique, the team scanned the crucibles to determine their chemical makeup.
Then, a sudden spike in zinc caught their eye, a tantalizing hint that brass may have been made in some of the ancient containers. The team felt "thrilled and hopeful at once," Xiao said, describing how they packed up the samples and quickly returned to the lab for further investigation. There, they found tiny droplets of brass trapped on the surfaces of three crucibles dated to the ninth and 10th centuries, making them the earliest physical evidence of brass-making in all of East Asia.
Large-scale brass production first appeared in Europe and the ancient Near East more than 2,000 years ago. It had long been assumed that it traveled slowly overland along the mountainous and desert routes of the Silk Road. But in China, the Tang dynasty had lost control of the Silk Road in the eighth century A.D.
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