One day in 1978, the Danjiangkou Reservoir in Henan Province opened its gates to discharge floodwater. A mighty stream of water rushed down from above, rushing out a tomb buried under the riverbed. The onlookers immediately informed the Henan Provincial Cultural Relics Bureau, and after receiving the news, the Cultural Relics Bureau immediately sent a professional archaeological team to carry out rescue excavations of the tomb.
After identification, the tomb is a tomb of the State of Chu in the Spring and Autumn Period, and the owner of the tomb is "Prince Yin of the State of Chu". Prince Wu, also known as Zi Geng, was the son of King Zhuang of Chu who dared to "conquer the Central Plains", and was then the Ling Yin of the Chu State (Ling Yin was equivalent to the Prime Minister). The tomb was excavated in the Han Dynasty, but with the continuous excavation of archaeologists, more than 6,000 valuable cultural relics have been unearthed.
Among them, there is a rare cultural relic called cloud pattern copper forbidden, solemn and magnificent, wonderful shape, casting art ingenious, domineering and natural, now hidden in the Henan Museum. The word "forbidden" in the cloud pattern copper prohibition has the meaning of forbidden drinking. In 2002, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage designated it as one of the first 64 cultural relics banned from being exhibited abroad.
Because the Zhou Dynasty witnessed the demise of the Shang Dynasty, they believed that one of the reasons for the demise of the Xia and Shang Dynasties was excessive alcoholism, so they called the desk where the wine glasses were placed "forbidden". The Zhou Dynasty also issued China's earliest prohibition on alcohol, the "Liquor Curse", which stipulated that princes and princes were not allowed to drink alcohol incivility, and only during sacrifices. The surrounding area of the "Cloud Pattern Copper Forbidden" is surrounded by dragons and tigers, probably taking the meaning of the warning of the divine beast.
The whole body of the cloud-patterned copper ban is made of bronze and has a rectangular shape. The surrounding area is decorated with a multi-layered cloud pattern of transparent carving, with good permeability, like a white cloud floating in the sky, and the upper part of the cultural relics is attached to 12 dragon-shaped beasts, which are concave waist and tail, probing the head and spitting out their tongues, facing the center of the forbidden, forming a scene of dragon arch guards, and there are twelve other beasts crouching under this cultural relic.
Who would have thought that such a delicate and complex copper ban was only a "light plate" copper case and a root copper stem when it was first discovered? One of them also collapsed into most of the pulls, and the whole case split into seven or eight pieces, like the earth that fissioned after the earthquake. What revived him was Wang Changqing, one of the three holy hands in the field of bronze ancient artifact restoration in China, a senior technician at the Henan Museum.
At that time, the "cloud pattern copper ban" was transported to the restoration room in two sacks, and Wang Changqing opened the sack and inhaled a cool breath. The forbidden body was fragmented into more than ten large pieces, and the panel was seriously deformed, and countless cloud patterns were peeled off and missing. The 12 dragon-shaped beasts and 12 seat beasts were not only all out of the forbidden body, but most of them were incomplete. The general restoration of cultural relics is to repair and repair, and the large frame of cultural relics is still there, but the "cloud pattern copper prohibition" in front of you can only be described as fragments.
In the face of a pile of fragments, Wang Changqing and Wang Chen, who was also a restorer, began to carefully compare the forbidden section, docked the copper stalk ballast mouth and the ballast mouth, and carefully observed and analyzed the position of the attached beast and the seat beast. After figuring out all the structure and casting methods, it was repaired by various methods such as shaping, reinforcement, carving plaster samples, filling in the gaps, flowers, welding, casting, bonding, coloring, rusting, etc., and it took nearly 3 years before the "cloud copper ban" was repaired.
After the restoration, the moiré copper ban is 103 cm long, 28.8 cm high, 46 cm wide, and weighs more than 90 kg, which is the largest, earliest and most exquisitely made piece of copper forbidden in the current excavation, which can be called the "king of copper forbidden"!
The moiré copper ban process is exquisite and complex, and its body is supported by copper stems of different thicknesses, which are divided into 5 layers, and the inner thickest layer is the beam frame. Each beam frame is flanked by multiple branches, like bucket arches on ancient buildings. Multiple layers overlap and crisscross each other, and the branches are curled and coiled with each other, but they are not connected to each other, and they are all supported by the inner layer.
This exquisite composition is inseparable from a casting process that amazes the world - the lost wax method.
The lost wax method, also known as the "investment method", is a precise method for casting metal objects such as bronze. The specific steps are: make a model of the casting with beeswax, and then fill the mud core with other refractory materials and apply the outer model. After heating and baking, the wax mold is all melted and lost, so that the entire casting model becomes an empty shell. The molten liquid is poured in and cast into a vessel. The artifacts cast by the lost-wax method are exquisite and transparent, and have the effect of hollowing out.
The earliest use of the lost wax method in China as seen in the literature was in the early years of the Tang Dynasty, and according to the "Tang Huijiao", Gao Zu Wude cast the Kaiyuan Tongbao during the years, using the lost wax method. Due to the late reading of the lost wax method literature, the academic community generally believes that the Chinese lost wax method process originated in India. The cloud-patterned bronze ban was one of the rich burial items of Ling Yin Zigeng during the reign of King Chu Kang, and was cast no later than 552 BC. Therefore, its excavation has pushed forward the history of China's lost wax casting process by more than a thousand years.
Through the Han and Tang Dynasties to the Ming and Qing dynasties, the lost wax method has been inherited and carried forward by generations of craftsmen, and has endured for a long time, and until now, it is still a commonly used bronze casting technique. Because the mold with the lost wax method will disappear once it is used, the instruments cast by the lost wax method are all orphan products. It is precisely because of this that the cloud-patterned copper forbidden cast by the lost-wax method is so precious!