Great River Taoist Center Forums

Hi, Although I don't own the book, this seems like a good starting point: The Xingyi Quan of the Chinese Army: Huang Bo Nien's Xingyi Fist and Weapon Instruction - by Dennis Rovere Available for a bargain at: http://www.amazon.com/Xingyi-Quan-Chinese-Army-Instruction/dp/1583942572/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8...

Also, the same weapons may go by different names in different times. The 1759 regulations of the Huangchao Liqi Tushi lists a huyadao or "Tiger Tooth Dao" as having a 1:1 blade ratio. This may well have been similar to the earlier "Yue Fei Dao" but Yue Fei was a sworn enemy of the Jin dynasty Jurche...

Hi,

Thanks for posting! I like the touch of the iron pommel. Luckily the blade didn't snap. How hard is the blade, were you able to test it?
Could you present an overall picture? I'd be interested to see what it looks like now.

-Peter

During a recent trip to Korea I visited a gem of a museum in a Seoul suburb, the Silk Road Museum. It is a small, hard to find place that I had been tipped to by a fellow archery researcher, Jack Farrell, who was attending the same festival in Korea. Upon entering, it is like one goes back in time w...

Turquoise was actually frequently used on high-status arms and ornaments. Even some of the emperor's swords had it, as well as those of princes. As you say, it is not a particular expensive material so that leads me to thinking that perhaps there was some symbolic meaning to it that made it attracti...

Well said, Tim! I can give some advice. Most of us don't get everything from a single source. We stroll around and look in all places we can think of, on the net, arms shows, antique markets. Stuff will turn up eventually but yes, some stuff is really hard to find nowadays like a good 18th cent. pei...

It is probably not on display, it wasn't when I visited in may 2008. The museum has a vast depot and only so much display space, so just a fraction of their Chinese arsenal is on display at a time. Perhaps you can contact the arms and armor department, when you find out the accession number you can ...

Nice to see a grouping of them side-by-side.
The second one from the bottom is especially graceful, it reminds of earlier sabers.

-Peter

As far as I know we don't really know why it evolved, just that it did. Like changes in modern fashion, reasons why styles went a certain way may be hard to grasp. It may have also had to do with changes in style of swordsmanship, but this is just guessing. In the michuan style that Scott Rodell tea...

Hi, That is certainly an odd one. The pommel is of a type first seen on sabers in the high-Qing of the eighteenth-century, which then disappeared in favor of round ball-pommels, and then re-appeared again in the late nineteenth-century on flaring blades like niuweidao . The saber presented here is a...

Hi guys, It is always hard to judge from pics, especially in this low resolution but it appears to me that this piece could be old. Judging from the work on the ray-skin and the fittings, it does not strike me as very old, perhaps even dating from the 20th century. Even tough the Yangs sell this swo...

Hi Linda, Be careful what sources you use, some are highly inaccurate. From the Dutch writings of their battles on Taiwan in the sixteenth-century up to the Opium wars of the nineteenth-century foreign observers frequently noted the good quality of the Chinese steel. The quality only went down in th...

Just to stay ahead of things, neither is my company Mandarin Mansion, nor my Manchu archery website Fe Doro for sale!

But honestly these rumors are quite disturbing. People can do weird things when ego and finances are affected.

-Peter

Hi, Interesting question indeed. I began to wonder about how if in the late Qing, especially for civilian jian, that thinning of the blade and softer steel was an actual design characteristic or just the beginning of the death of the sword as a main defensive weapon. I tend to think that it is the l...

Ah how could I have forgotten that one! It is one of my favorite helmets when it comes to geometry, I love its overall shape and the little stylized cloud details that hold the rivets.

-Peter