Bronze Forgery and the Methodological Shift in Epigraphic Scholarship

With the growing interest in epigraphic scholarship, mid-nineteenth-century China witnessed the flourishing market for ancient ritual bronzes, which in turn stimulated the forgery industry. This paper examines scholarly responses to the prevalence of falsified bronze inscriptions and argues that the widespread circulation of forgeries catalyzed the development of new hermeneutic approaches and heuristics in epigraphic scholarship, reshaped collecting preferences, influenced preservation techniques, and contributed to the reconfiguration of identities within the scholar-collector community. Specifically, the prevalence of textual forgery prompted scholars to shift the focus of authentication from seeking “certificates of authenticity” or narratives of provenance to the examination of the material details of bronze inscriptions and the techniques of ancient casting technologies. New connoisseurial preferences also emerged, favoring certain types of bronze artifacts with inscriptions of specific lengths, innovative surface-cleaning techniques, and more restrained approaches to the treatment of excavated objects. Furthermore, bronze forgeries contributed to the regrouping of the scholar-collector community based on their susceptibility to fakes, resulting in a widened divide between amateur collectors and experts, while simultaneously dissolving the boundaries between forgers and scholars.