Cauldron, Copper, Cash: Medieval Bronze in Motion and Flux

Abstract

Medieval Chinese thinkers conceptualized ancient bronzes in anthropocentric terms—as mute, inert objects that required the engagement of a perspicacious human subject for their value to become apparent. They also regarded bronzes as animate things that had the capacity to act independently of direct human manipulation, and they situated bronzes within frameworks of material vitalism that parallel many aspects of the “new materialism” associated with contemporary theorists like Karen Barad and Jane Bennett. This article interprets both of these understandings as containment strategies designed to rein in and constrain bronze's ever-present capacity for liquefaction. As with other metals, bronze was forever oscillating between solidity, in the form of discrete, functional objects, and liquidity, as a mutable substance of tremendous potency. Both states spawned different metaphors. Tracing this tension between solidity and liquidity, from the casting of the Nine Cauldrons and the origin myths of Chinese civilization through the medieval challenge of adapting a metallist currency regime to an expanding economy, this article explores how the cultural logics and natural tendencies of bronze were intertwined.