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In China, early tin was extracted along the Yellow River in Erlitou and Shang times between 2500 and 1800 BC. By Han and later times, China imported its tin from what is today Yunnan province. This has remained China's main source of tin throughout history and into modern times. [49]
Tin mining began early in the Bronze Age, as bronze is a copper-tin alloy. Tin is a relatively rare element in the Earth's crust, with approximately 2 ppm (parts per million), compared to iron with 50,000 ppm.
Tin was first smelted in combination with copper around 3500 BC to produce bronze - and thus giving place to the Bronze Age (except in some places which did not experience a significant Bronze Age, passing directly from the Neolithic Stone Age to the Iron Age). [18]
Chinese bells:Bianzhong of Marquis Yi of Zeng, Spring and Autumn period (476–221 BC) Singing bowls from the 16th to 18th centuries. Annealed bronze continues to be made in the Himalayas. Bronze is the preferred metal for bells in the form of a high tin bronze alloy known as bell metal, which is typically about 23% tin.
Bronze tiger inlaid with gold and silver, Han dynasty. Metallurgy in China has a long history, with the earliest metal objects in China dating back to around 3,000 BCE. The majority of early metal items found in China come from the North-Western Region (mainly Gansu and Qinghai, 青海).
The "Early Bronze Age" in China is sometimes taken to be coterminous with the reign of the Shang dynasty (16th–11th centuries BC), [41] and the Later Bronze Age with the subsequent Zhou dynasty (11th–3rd centuries BC), from the 5th century, called Iron Age China although there is an argument to be made that the Bronze Age never properly ...
The Bronze Age was a period in human cultural development when the most advanced metalworking (at least in systematic and widespread use) included techniques for smelting copper and tin from naturally occurring outcroppings of copper ores, and then smelting those ores to cast bronze. These naturally occurring ores typically included arsenic as ...
A study in the journal Antiquity from 2013 reported the discovery of a tin bronze foil from the Pločnik archaeological site dated to c. 4650 BC, as well as 14 other artefacts from Serbia and Bulgaria dated to before 4000 BC, showed that early tin bronze was more common than previously thought and developed independently in Europe 1,500 years before the first tin bronze alloys in the Near East.