The first diet of human beings may have been to set up firewood in the wild and smoke food to eat. Later, there were kettles and other cooking pottery, people picked three stones or made special pottery supports to set up the cooking utensils to cook food, and then later, people connected the supports and cooking utensils when making utensils, and developed "three-legged" cooking utensils such as dings and pipes.

Ding first appeared in the Neolithic period, the texture is ceramics, all three-legged, is a kind of cooking vessel, because it is often accompanied by animal bone discovery in excavations, so it was originally used to cook meat.

Legend has it that Xia Yu once collected the gold of Jiu Mu and cast Jiuding under Jingshan Mountain to symbolize Kyushu, and engraved the figure of the Nine Mu Jiuding on it to make people vigilant and prevent being harmed by it. Since the legend of Yuzhu Jiuding, Ding has developed from an ordinary cooking vessel to a heavy weapon. From the Shang to the Zhou Dynasty, the capital or dynasty was called "Dingding". The state was destroyed, the Xia dynasty was extinguished, the Shang dynasty was prosperous, and the Jiuding was moved to the Shang capital Bojing; The Shang dynasty collapsed, the Zhou dynasty prospered, and Jiuding moved to the Zhou capital Haojing.

There is an allusion to "winning the crown" in history, which comes from "Zuo Chuan Xuan Gong Three Years", which basically means: King Chuzhuang came to Luoyang to fight against foreign invaders and inspected the army in the territory of Zhou Tianzi. King Ding of Zhou sent the doctor Wang Sun Man to comfort him, and King Zhuang of Chu took the opportunity to ask Zhou Ding about his size. Wang Sun Man said: Political virtue is clear, the small is also heavy, the monarch has no way, and the big is also light. The Zhou Dynasty ruled the Central Plains, and power was gifted. Ding's weight is not properly asked. King Chuzhuang came to the throne, with the intention of taking the Zhou dynasty and replacing it, but was severely reprimanded by Wang Sun Man, the messenger of the king of Ding. Later, the attempt to usurp the throne was called "winning the throne". Around the time of the Erlitou culture, the so-called Xia Dynasty site, a three-legged and two-eared bronze ding was first found, but the volume was smaller. The quadruped tripod appeared in the middle of the Shang Dynasty, and the shape was large.

In the late Shang Dynasty, Ding had retired from the ranks of cookware and became a symbol of power status. From the perspective of cultural relics, the number of four-legged dings found is far less than that of three-legged dings, and it is more delicate, so the owner status of the quadruped pod is higher than that of the person who uses the tripod. The most famous quadruped ding, the late Shang Dynasty Simu Pending, is in the collection of the National Museum of China, but there are also casting defects, indicating that the nobles of the time had to cast large square dings (quadrupeds) to show off even when the casting technology was not fully mature. After entering the era of iron civilization, the ding has been used as a sacrificial ritual vessel, the round ding has evolved into an incense burner, and the square ding has evolved into a sacrificial special ding.