HISTORY OF THE CROSSBOW— WILBUR 429 



tury B. C. It is mentioned in historical literature composed at that 

 time.' Probably it was known earlier, for the Shih chi, a work of 

 great authenticity written about 100 B. C, on the basis of no longer 

 extant documents, reports its extensive use during the fourth cen- 

 tury in the battle of Ma-ling in 341 B. C* From historical works 

 produced during the Former Han Dynasty (B. C. 20&-25 A. D.) it 

 becomes amply evident that the crossbow was at that time the prin- 

 cipal offensive arm of the foot-soldiers fighting on China's far-flung 

 frontiers. Also there is one crucial statement in the Shih chi which 

 tells specifically of the crossbow used as a trap. This passage de- 

 scribes the tomb of the great emperor Ch'in Shih, who died in 

 210 B. C. In supervising the preparation of his own sumptuous 

 tomb "he commanded the artisans to make automatic crossbows and 

 arrows so that if anyone dug in and entered they would suddenly 

 shoot and slay them." ° 



Within recent years archeology in China and neighboring coun- 

 tries has been revealing unknown secrets of the brilliant civilization 

 of Han times. Parts of crossbows left by the imperial Chinese troops 

 of 2,000 years ago have been found in northern Korea, southern Man- 

 churia, Inner Mongolia, and even in the desert waste of Chinese 

 Turkestan. Along the old frontier limes in eastern Central Asia, Sir 

 Aurel Stein discovered 2,000-year-old guard stations which had once 

 been used by the defenders of China's silk route to the West. In the 

 rubbish heaps he found army ordnance lists, written in still legible 

 characters on wooden slips. In these documents crossbows are men- 

 tioned, together with their strings and arrows, some 30 times, while 

 the plain bow is mentioned only twice, in each case in the hands of 

 a "barbarian".® This proves almost conclusively that the crossbow 

 was the standard offensive projectile arm of the Chinese frontier 

 troops during the first century B. C. and during the first few cen- 

 turies A. D. It may have been this effective weapon which gave the 



'Han Fei tzu, chtian 18, p. 9 ; and the Chan Into ts'S, Han ts'6. For the sake of caution 

 1 am not yet willing to cite as authentic a section of the Mo tzu, book 14, "On fortifica- 

 tion and defense", which may perhaps date from the fourth century B. C. This section 

 Is studded ^vith references to various types of crossbows. Of an entirely different nature 

 is the critical problem regarding the date and authenticity of the Chou U, which also 

 mentions various kinds of crossbows. At one time this work was thought by many 

 western Sinologists to date from about 1100 B. C, and owing to this error Forke (Ueber 

 die chineslsche Armbrust), and Horwitz (Die Armbrust in Ostaslen) have created the 

 impression that the crossbow was much earlier known in China than we now have any 

 reason to believe. 



« Edition of Takigawa, Kametaro. Bhiki Kaichu K6sh0. Tokyo, 1934. Chlian 65, 

 SUn-tzu Wuch'i Heh-chuan, p. 11. Cf. also Chavannes, Edouard. Les M^moires His- 

 toriques de Se-ma Ts'ien. Paris, vol. 5, p. 155, 1895-1905. 



^ Shih chi, op. cit., chtian 6. Ch'in Shih Huang pSn-chi, p. 69 ; and Chavannes, op. cit., 

 vol. 2, p. 193. The translation is my own. 



• See : Stein, Aurel, Serindia, vol. 2, pp. 758-759, Oxford, Clarendon, 1921 ; and 

 Chavannes, Edouard, Les documents chinois d^couverts i)ar Aurel Stein dans lea sables 

 du Turkestan Oriental, pp. xv-xvl, Oxford, 1913. 



