Chinese Firearm

[Philip]

These are different variations of the "hand-gonne", the earliest type of hand-held projectile weapon using gunpowder as an explosive propellant. The examples in this assortment are the types used for signalling, or noisemakers: typically they are of wrought iron, are somewhat crude, and tend to be multi-barrelled (using either a wick-fired touchhole or percussion caps struck by a hand-held hard object such as a hammer, rock, or the like). Examples of these weapons have been found not only in China but Korea and various parts of SE Asia as well.

They are different from the military-issue hand-cannons from China, Korea, Vietnam, and even Japan, whose heyday was prior to the introduction of matchlock muskets by the Portuguese (and, in the case of N. China) by Ottoman emissaries in the early 1500s. I would refer the reader to Howard L. Blackmore's excellent article on these weapons, "The Oldest Dated Gun", in the journal ARMS COLLECTING, Vol. 34, No. 2 (May 1995). The military hand-gonnes (the earliest extant specimen with a date is Chinese, 1332) are almost always of bronze, single-barrelled, in most cases with an expansion or bulge which reinforces the combustion-chamber, and with several raised moldings at intervals along the barrel. They are generally well-cast and finished and unlike the pieces shown in this thread, they are inscribed with the place of manufacture and date. Most indicate manufacture in the 15th and early 16th cent.; those with later dates are scarcer and they seem to have fallen completely out of use by turn of the 17th cent. except, perhaps, as signalling devices or short-range weapons used for throwing a quantity of buckshot-like projectiles from their relatively large bores.

I have examined a large number of the iron cannons which are the subject of this thread. Most recently, over a half dozen of them which a dealer brought to the Louisville gun show. Some appear to have been assembled of industrial-type steam pipe, with wire coil wrapping and signs of welding here and there. Despite the rust, the wire appeared to be drawn by mechanical processes. I have been informed that roughly-made muskets (some of vaguely European style but locally-made), and blacksmith made devices such as these "gonnes" remained in use well into the 20th cent. by Chinese farmers to scare birds away from their crops. (the custom was maintained even in some Chinese emigre communities: years ago a friend in Hawaii showed me a couple of rusty surplus military muskets recovered from under a house in Honolulu, the family used to have rice farms a few generations back. Practically every farming household had these, for scaring birds or for shooting them for the pot. One of the guns my friend found was an unaltered Prussian army musket which could have been from the time of Frederick the Great, converted from flintlock, with the "Potsdam" inscription on the lockplate still legible. Sadly, a century or more of neglect in tropical humidity had turned it into an unrestorable wallhanger.