Daily History Challenge · No. 110 · Friday 16 October 2026 · When?
Puzzle No. 110: When?
The event was Casting of the Houmuwu Ding, Peak of Shang Bronze Art, in c. 1200 BCE.
The answer
The Houmuwu ding (formerly read Simuwu), a rectangular four-legged ritual cauldron unearthed near Anyang in 1939, is the heaviest piece of ancient bronze to survive anywhere in the world, standing 1.33 m tall and weighing about 833 kg. Cast in the late Shang for a royal ancestral cult, its interior inscription dedicates it to 'Queen Mother Wu', it epitomises the Shang mastery of the labour-intensive piece-mould casting technique, in which multiple fired clay section-moulds were assembled around a core and filled with molten alloy; the body and legs were cast as one and the handles added separately. Such ritual bronzes (ding, gui, jue and others), decorated with taotie monster masks and dragon motifs, were the supreme markers of political and religious authority in Bronze Age China: the number of ding a noble could use signalled his rank, and possession of the great cauldrons came to symbolise the legitimacy of rule itself. The vessel demonstrates an organised metallurgical industry mobilising enormous resources of ore, fuel and skilled labour under royal control.