Chinese magic mirror
metallic mirrors of ancient China
The Chinese magic mirror (traditional Chinese: 透光鏡; simplified Chinese: 透光镜; pinyin: tòu guāng jìng) traces back to at least the 5th century, although their existence during the Han dynasty (206 BC – 24 AD) has been claimed. The mirrors were made out of solid bronze. The front was polished and could be used as a mirror, while the back has a design cast in the bronze, or other decoration. When sunlight or other bright light shines onto the mirror, the mirror appears to become transparent. If that light is reflected from the mirror onto a wall, the pattern on the back of the mirror is then projected onto the wall.
Bronze mirrors were the standard in many Eurasian cultures, but most lacked this characteristic, as did most Chinese bronze mirrors.
Construction
Robert Temple describes their construction:
The basic mirror shape, with the design on the back, was cast flat, and the convexity of the surface produced afterwards by elaborate scraping and scratching. The surface was then polished to become shiny. The stresses set up by these processes caused the thinner parts of the surface to bulge outwards and become more convex than the thicker portions. Finally, a mercury amalgam was laid over the surface; this created further stresses and preferential buckling.
“Chinese magic mirror” enters the record as metallic mirrors of ancient China. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Chinese, magic and mirror can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2919513. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chinese magic mirror” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.