Guangzhou crucibles provide earliest direct evidence of brass-making in East Asia

For centuries, scholars have read ancient documents describing the production of brass in 10th-century A.D. China. 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,”…