Defensive Armor of the Archaic Period 189 



plain word kia (No. 187), or the compound ko kia (Nos. 393, 569), 

 "hide armor;" and we hear also of an official having charge of armor 

 (No. 758). 1 Simultaneously, another word for body armor, k'ai, is 

 twice used in these documents (Nos. 758, 794), and translated by 

 M. Chavannes likewise " cuirasse." This seems to be correct only in so 

 far as leather was applied also to this kind of armor, as expressly attested 

 by document No. 794; but it will be seen in the following chapter that 

 the new word k'ai, which springs up in the Han period, denotes a new 

 type of armor presenting a combination of hide with metal, and that the 

 rendering by "cuirass" is therefore inadequate. The defensive armor of 

 the Han soldiers was completed by a helmet (No. 794) and a buckler 

 (tun), the latter being described as red in the wooden documents (Nos. 

 75, 77), from which it may be inferred that they were made of wood 

 covered with a red varnish 2 protecting the wood from moisture, red 

 being believed to terrify the enemy; it was the main function of the 

 buckler to ward off the shots of arrows (No. 682). In one case a 

 buckler is especially mentioned as having been made in B.C. 63 by the 

 official Armory of Nan-yang in Ho-nan Province (No. 39) ; in another 

 case a buckler is on record as having been worked in B.C. 61 by the ar- 

 tisans of the administration (No. 40). Bucklers were decorated with 

 pigeon tail-feathers attached to them (No. 75). 3 



Despite the fact that metal armor, as will be seen in the next chapter, 

 gradually made its way during the period of the two Han dynasties, 

 and was firmly established in the age of the T'ang, mention is still made 

 in the Statutes of the T'ang Dynasty 4 of hide cuirasses (p'i kia) ; rhino- 



1 In Ch. 49 of Hou Han shu the story is told of how in 75 a.d. General Keng 

 Kung and his troops, being at war with Kucha, were at the point of starvation, and 

 cooked cuirasses and crossbows so as to feed on the leather and sinews contained 

 in them (Chavannes, T'oung Pao, 1907, p. 228), — a case sufficiently convincing 

 as to the material of which they were made. 



2 In the same manner as the cuirasses (p. 182). 



3 M. Chavannes (/. c, p. 30) thinks that the expression "pigeon-tail" must be 

 a technical term which designates perhaps the leather or hemp handle of the buckler. 

 There is in my opinion no necessity for such a conjecture. " Pigeon-tail," I venture to 

 suggest, is to be understood literally, inasmuch as the buckler, as perhaps in the period 

 of the Shi king, was adorned along its edges with feathers; in the document in question 

 the report is made that the soldier so and so has received "a red buckler, the pigeon 

 tail-feathers of which had rotted away." The " rotting-away " sounds plausible 

 with regard to the latter, but much less so if a leather or hemp strap were intended. 

 As to offensive armor, M. Chavannes correctly emphasizes the fact that the Chinese 

 soldiers of the Han time availed themselves of crossbows, not of bows; this is con- 

 firmed by his documents as well as by the Han sculptures, on which men are usually 

 represented as shooting with crossbows, not, as has been said by some observers, 

 with bows. As to swords, it seems preferable to study them from actual specimens 

 of cast bronze and iron, such as are in our collections, instead of from the bas-reliefs, 

 as M. Chavannes recommends us to do (compare Plates XX and XXI). 



4 P'ei wen yiin fu (Ch. 106, p. 73), and Ko chi king yuan (Ch. 41, p. 3). The 

 T'ang leu lien ("Six Statutes of the T'ang Dynasty") gives a description of the 



