Chinese Gekken (half moon) pole arm

[Philip]

Originally Posted by fernando

An interesting blog; and apparently one with significant knowledge.

https://greatmingmilitary.blogspot.c...t=161069358338.

(scroll down to spades).


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Nando, the photos you added are worthy of comment. There is a demilune below a trident, they were separate classes of weapons. In China (as well as Korea and Vietnam) the trident was much more widely used than the demilune, obviously the central spike made it more useful for direct thrusts and ease in trapping an opponent's weapon. Tridents (I don't recall the Chinese name, in Vietnmese it's dinh-ba) can roughly correspond to the use of the spetum in the European martial arts repertoire of roughly the same time period; as you are no doubt familar with, the military writer Pietro Monte had much to say about its utility. And we see many more speta in museums and collections than demilunes probably for that functional reason.