Ethnographic folding knives

[KuKulzA28]

Originally Posted by ausjulius

i wounder if they are a european influnce ,, and if they ar eonly on taiwan,, as after all the portagese and dutch were the original colonists there with the chinese comming while the islands were under european control, maybe this pocket knife was derived from a european folding knife, ive seen quite alot of chinese friction folders from mainland china but none with a back spring on the blade.
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I know the blade design itself is southern Chinese/Taiwanese (hoklo and cantonese folks), however the folding style and mechanism may not be "traditional" though it's probably old enough a style to be considered such. I don't know if the Dutch, Spanish, French, or Portuguese have had that much of an influence on Taiwanese knife-making. Perhaps they did. I DO know that Taiwan hasn't been locked away from influences though, as the northern tribes fold their tangs similarly to Chinese and southern tribes have things in common with northern Filipinos and the Burmese Kachins, Naga, and Assam people. Japanese definitely influenced the metallurgy in some areas. But if any Sino/Taiwanese group was to be influenced by the Europeans it would probably be the Cantonese and the Hoklo, those who had the most contact with the Westerners...

an example of that can be seen with Lorchas... ships that combined the European sea-going hull with the Chinese sails... best of both worlds so to speak... so an age-old Chinese blade design and a European folding mechanism? not impossible... but I plan to get some of those folders within a few months so maybe I can comment on this better later on


EDIT: yes there is one maker left as far as I know... he's in the Shihling part of Taipei, Taiwan