Nine Tripod Cauldrons

The Nine Tripod Cauldrons (Chinese: 九鼎; pinyin: Jiǔ Dǐng) were ancient Chinese ritual cauldrons. They were ascribed to the foundation of the Xia (c. 2200 BCE) by Yu the Great, using tribute metal presented by the governors of the Nine Provinces of ancient China.

At the time of the Shang Dynasty during the 2nd millennium BCE, the tripod cauldrons came to symbolize the power and authority of the ruling dynasty with strict regulations imposed as to their use. Members of the scholarly gentry class were permitted to use one or three cauldrons; the ministers of state (大夫, dàifu) five; the vassal lords seven; and only the sovereign Son of Heaven was entitled to use nine. The use of the nine tripod cauldrons to offer ritual sacrifices to the ancestors from heaven and earth was a major ceremonial occasion so that by natural progression the ding came to symbolize national political power and later to be regarded as a National Treasure. Sources state that two years after the fall of the Zhou Dynasty at the hands of what would become the Qin Dynasty the nine tripod cauldrons were taken from the Zhou royal palace and moved westward to the Qin capital at Xianyang. However, by the time Qin Shi Huang had eliminated the other six Warring States to become the first emperor of China in 221 BCE, the whereabouts of the nine tripod cauldrons were unknown. Sima Qian records in his Records of the Grand Historian that they were lost in the Si River to where Qin Shi Huang later dispatched a thousand men to search for the cauldrons but to no avail.

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