The Lacquering Technique Of Han Dynasty

The histories of Chinese manufacture originated from the Neolithic early stage whose development was continual, which wasn't a way to copy mechanically and apply indiscriminately from the traditional technology, but the way with creativities and improvements.Unquestionably, modern test techniques had come to play an important pole in the archaeological field, especially to research the ancient lacquer wares. They could show many potential messages about lacquer producing technologies, which benefited us to deeply realize the ancient lacquer wares, such as its designs, shapes, starting material, managerial system, spread, manufacture and conservation, etc.In The Han Dynasty, lacquer manufacture developed rapidly with a high-level technology to produce different kinds of fine lacquers, which had a high place in the history of Chinese Lacquer Culture. The lacquer film wasn't only a component part of lacquers, but also a key to producing them, above all, on which we usually adopted modern test method to study.The purpose of this researching work was to attempt adopt modern test techniques, example for microanalysis, RAMAN, XRF, FTIR and SEM, to study the lacquer film. That experimental results had shown many important messages about lacquers of the Han Dynasty, example for the process about how to produce lacquers, some undiscovered technologies, supplied us precious materials to know lacquer manufacture.Firstly, this paper based of the research on ancient lacquer samples to summarize its producing process and technological essentials.First, the lacquer plaster layer was usually step one that adopted the mixture of urushi and backfill materials to cover the surface of wooden body. This step would conceal the superficial flaws and flatten the surface to facilitate next step.Second, the ground lacquer layer above the plaster layer was an important process with which craftsman often applied grinding and polishing technique to deal. So the surface of lacquers only took on a shining look.Last, that decorated designs on the lacquer surface named apsilate layer often used HgS as red pigment to produce red lacquer, and also used another pigments, such as CuS, etc.Secondly, we also studied lacquers with ramee body to turn out that there exist four main steps of its producing process. The first step was to make internal mold, next to stick multilayer ramee fabric above it with lacquer plaster liquid, then to brush a thick lacquer plaster on both side of the dried ramee body peeled off the internal mold, next to lacquer the ground layer, last to paint on the surface.The red lacquer films of different sites were analyzed by XRD, RAMAN. The results showed that all of pigment in red film was cinnabar (HgS). By RAMAN and XRF, we discovered an unreported pigment of that time, named as covelline (CuS) whose application to make the faint black color.Additional, the spectrum of lacquer films from Fangwanggang Tomb analyzed by XRD showed messages about quartz. These grains had good psephicity with homogeneous granularity through microscope, as if they were grinded by human. From the above mentioned, it could conclude craftsman unusually add quartz into the lacquer liquid at that time.This paper firstly used modern test techniques to systemically investigate ancient lacquers of the Han Dynasty. Meanwhile, considering the historical documents, we announced the main producing process and analyzed raw material to make lacquers, which offered important reference to present-day lacquer manufacture, also supplied reference data to copy, identify and protect them.