Description
Antique Chinese Bronze Archaistic Mirror. 3.75" wide, solid bronze, from a very<br>nice collection of Chinese Antiques. Appears Excavated, collected in the third<br>quarter of the 20th century. I'm unsure of exact age.<br><br>The Chinese magic mirror (simplified Chinese: 透光镜; traditional Chinese: 透光鏡;<br>pinyin: tòu guāng jìng) traces back to at least the 5th century, although their<br>existence during the Han dynasty (206 BC – 24 AD) has been claimed. The mirrors<br>were made out of solid bronze. The front was polished and could be used as a<br>mirror, while the back has a design cast in the bronze, or other decoration.<br>When sunlight or other bright light shines onto the mirror, the mirror appears<br>to become transparent. If that light is reflected from the mirror onto a wall,<br>the pattern on the back of the mirror is then projected onto the wall.<br><br><br>The back of the same mirror<br>Bronze mirrors were the standard in many Eurasian cultures, for example ancient<br>Rome, but most lacked this characteristic, as did most Chinese bronze mirrors.<br><br>Robert Temple describes their construction: "The basic mirror shape, with the<br>design on the back, was cast flat, and the convexity of the surface produced<br>afterwards by elaborate scraping and scratching. The surface was then polished<br>to become shiny. The stresses set up by these processes caused the thinner parts<br>of the surface to bulge outwards and become more convex than the thicker<br>portions. Finally, a mercury amalgam was laid over the surface; this created<br>further stresses and preferential buckling. The result was that imperfections of<br>the mirror surface matched the patterns on the back, although they were too<br>minute to be seen by the eye. But when the mirror reflected bright sunlight<br>against a wall, with the resultant magnification of the whole image, the effect<br>was to reproduce the patterns as if they were passing through the solid bronze<br>by way of light beams."<br><br>History<br>China<br>In about 800 AD, during the Tang dynasty (618–907), a book entitled Record of<br>Ancient Mirrors described the method of crafting solid bronze mirrors with<br>decorations, written characters, or patterns on the reverse side that could cast<br>these in a reflection on a nearby surface as light struck the front, polished<br>side of the mirror; due to this seemingly transparent effect, they were called<br>"light-penetration mirrors" by the Chinese.<br><br>This Tang era book was lost over the centuries, but magic mirrors were described<br>in the Dream Pool Essays by Shen Kuo (1031–1095), who owned three of them as a<br>family heirloom. Perplexed as to how solid metal could be transparent, Shen<br>guessed that some sort of quenching technique was used to produce tiny wrinkles<br>on the face of the mirror too small to be observed by the eye. Although his<br>explanation of different cooling rates was incorrect, he was right to suggest<br>the surface contained minute variations which the eye could not detect; these<br>mirrors also had no transparent quality at all, as discovered by the British<br>scientist William Bragg in 1932 (after an entire century of their confounding<br>Western scientists). Bragg noted that "Only the magnifying effect of reflection<br>makes them [the designs] plain".<br><br>Japan<br>As the manufacture of mirrors in China increased, it expanded to Korea and<br>Japan. In fact, Emperor Cao Rui and the Wei Kingdom of China gave numerous<br>bronze mirrors (known as Shinju-kyo in Japan) to Queen Himiko of Wa (Japan),<br>where they were received as rare and mysterious objects. They were described as<br>"sources of honesty" as they were said to reflect all good and evil without<br>error. That is why Japan considers a sacred mirror called Yata-no-Kagami to be<br>one of the three great imperial treasures.<br><br>Today, Yamamoto Akihisa is said to be the last manufacturer of magic mirrors in<br>Japan. The Kyoto Journal [6] interviewed the craftsman and he explained a small<br>portion of the technique, that he learned from his father.
