Most relevant for this forum, however, are the military arrows of the Qing. Only those that one missed with his bow, needed one to take on with spear or sword. On the other side, only those that got through without being shot got to use their sword.
The Qing had many different military arrows, many of which extremely long and heavy. Manchu bows were also among the heaviest known composite recurve bows and some experts argue that they are therefore less efficient than say, Turkisch and Korean bows. The increased strength of the Manchu bow does indeed not shoot the arrow faster, and thus not further than a much lighter bow does. However, they can shoot much heavier arrows that pack much more kinetic energy on impact on shorter distances. The relatively large arrowheads found confirm the suspicion that impact power was not a problem for these bows.
Thus I think the Manchu warbow was not designed for long distance shooting, but to cause maximum damage at a reasonable distance on which a direct hit was more likely. Hails of arrows were unpractical for a roaming hunting people because it inevitably meant a lot of loss of expensive material. Only a sedentary people could afford such kind of warfare and once settled, the Manchu's were likely to stick to tactics that had worked for them earlier. Manchu's are often shown with only 10-30 arrows in their quivers, enforcing the idea of precision over quantity in their shooting behaviour.
Here some of the broadest Qing arrowheads used for hunting large game and warfare. The total length of these arrows is equal to or often even exceeding a metre and the tips are up to 130 mm long, with shaft thicknesses in a range of about 10-13 mm in the middle and tapering to the end.
The largest leaf shaped arrowhead in the
Huangchao Liqi Tushi is 83mm long and 5 cm wide. Arrows were usually fletched with long eagle feathers. The black wrappings near most of the tips is a sheet of black peach bark. The most common type of military arrowhead is the second from the left, referred to as
"Plum Needle Arrow". Specialized sleeker versions of this arrowhead were used against mail armor.
Of special interest is the way the chisel headed arrow is fletched. It's fletching running obliquely near the nock to give it a spin during flight. One other type of arrow in the
Huangchao Liqi Tushi is fletched this way: Qianlong's personal target arrows. It's function is to give it increased stability and accuracy on the shorter distances, but a downside is loss of speed on middle to longer distances.
The remains of fletching on the flat headed pi arrow
Standard Qing fletching on a possibly Imperial pi arrow
"Pi" arrows are defined as "flat, wide and leaf shaped" in ancient classics and the name is used throughout the
Huangchao Liqi Tushi to differentiate arrows with heads such as 1, 3, 4 and 5 from the above picture.
Comment: It's amazing how much there is to tell about a bunch of old arrows. Then to think this is the highly restrained version of the story, because I realise it's an edged weapons subforum.
-Peter
