The men held the clay mold steady.

Their faces beaded with sweat from the infernal heat inside the workshop, holding their

breath against the stress and pressure of the moment.

They waited while their compatriots slowly took the crucible full of molten bronze away

from the blazing fire.

With the utmost care, he turned it over, pouring the liquid metal into the openings at the

top of the cylindrical mold.

Playing on the outside, but inside was an incredibly elaborate model of the vessel that would

be the end result of this bronze casting process.

A four-legged cauldron with beautiful and complex decoration, half the height of a person

and much heavier.

The craftsman had been preparing for this moment for weeks, creating fired clay replicas

of the bronze vessel to serve as a model, testing and rejecting several before finally

settling on when they approved it.

Then came the shaping of the mold itself, then the outer mold, then finally the assembly,

the melting of huge amounts of raw bronze over the fire, and the casting itself.

They breathed the sigh of relief as the last bit of molten bronze, blessedly free of visible

bubbles, disappeared into the mold.

Now they could only wait and hope that this fine, fang-ding cauldron would meet the expectations

of the man who had ordered its casting, the ruler of this city in which they lived, and

everything stretching for huge distances around it.

It would serve for ritual sacrifices to the ruler's ancestors, and so it had to be perfect,

...