II. DEFENSIVE ARMOR OF THE ARCHAIC PERIOD 



"Your subject has heard that the army of the Son of 

 Heaven is rather maintained for the assurance of peace 

 than for the purpose of aggressive war. The Empire and 

 all its inhabitants being your own, is it worth while wast- 

 ing a day's business on the land of the Barbarians, or driv- 

 ing a single horse to exhaustion on their behalf?" 



Memorial of Huai-nan-tse to the Emperor Wu. 



Defensive armor, as employed in the epoch of antiquity, is char- 

 acterized by the absence of any metal. 1 During the Chou period 

 (b.c. 1122-255) harness was exclusively made of hide {lorica of the 

 Romans) . Ts'ai Ch'en, in his commentary to the Shu king (published 

 in 1 210), makes this correct general observation on the subject: "In 

 ancient canonical literature it is a question only of cuirasses (kia, 

 No. 1 167) and leather helmets (chou, No. 2463). Prior to the time of the 

 Ts'in, metal armor (k'ai, No. 5798) and metal helmets (tou mou, Nos. 

 11,424, 8041) were not in existence. The ancients availed them- 

 selves of hide for the making of armor (kia). From the time of the 



1 It is not the object of the present investigation to give a detailed history of 

 Chinese defensive armor of all periods, or to describe each and every type of armor 

 mentioned in Chinese records. Such a task would require dwelling at great length on 

 the military organization and activities of every dynasty, and would swell into several 

 volumes of questionable practical value. It is merely my intention to outline the 

 principal and conspicuous features of the general development of the matter, and to 

 emphasize those types of armor which are of particular interest to the archaeologist 

 and ethnologist. Only those Chinese records which have a real value for an historical 

 consideration of this subject are here exhibited. The theories of the philosophers 

 and the later legendary inventions are historically worthless, and only interesting 

 for what they are worth, — in their quality as philosophy, poetry, or folk-lore. A 

 pure fable it is, for example, when the philosopher Kuan-tse makes Ch'i Yu (alleged 

 B.C. 2698) the first inventor of metal armor (k'ai), and when as late a work as the 

 T'ai po yin king by Li Tsuan of the middle of the eighth century (Wylie, Notes on 

 Chinese Literature, p. 90) is gracious enough to ascribe to the same also the honor of 

 having first cut hide into armor, and goes on to construct the evolutionary scheme 

 that Shen-nung made weapons of stone, Huang-ti of jade, and Ch'i Yu of bright met- 

 al. The famous Ts'ao Chi (192-232) is credited with the statement that the former 

 emperors bestowed on officials an armor (k'ai) called "brilliant like ink" (mo kuang) 

 and another called "brilliant like light" (ming kuang), one suit of armor with a 

 double seat in the trousers (Hang tang [No. 10,727] k'ai), one suit of ring and chain 

 armor (huan so k'ai), and one suit of horse mail. This text is not well authenticat- 

 ed, and is hardly deserving of historical credence. The ring and chain armor is 

 an anachronism in view of Ts'ao Chi's time; and any armor of the designation k'ai 

 did not exist under the ancient emperors. The expression huan so k'ai occurring 

 in this passage is explained in the dictionary Cheng tse t'ung as identical with so 

 kia ("chain armor"). T'u shu tsi ch'eng, in reproducing this passage, writes mo 

 kuang, as above; P'ei wen yun fu has in its place hei kuang ("of black brilliancy"); 

 and Ko chi king yiian has li (No. 6870) kuang, which seems to be a misprint. The 

 two latter works write the character tang in the phrase Hang tang k'ai without the 

 classifier 145. 



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