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As mentioned above, in the First Opium War, later generations believed that the difference in firearms between the Qing Empire and the British Empire was not large, and that it had advantages in some aspects. Pen, fun, pavilion www. biquge。 info（.）

But in fact, later generations also have another point of view, that is, the level of firearms in the Qing Empire at that time was actually fundamentally different from the level of firearms in the British Empire.

The disparity in this point is reflected in the level of craftsmanship in the production of firearms, as well as in some aspects of performance.

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And this view has five main arguments:

1. There are great differences in the design ideas and types of artillery between China and Britain.

Before and after the Opium War, most of the Qing artillery was based on weight as the basis for measuring its performance, which was far from being scientific and reasonable based on the proportion of the gun body and caliber as the main performance parameter.

Of course, the design idea of "modulus" is also regarded as a standard by some firearms manufacturers. That is, the individual parts of the gun are designed in multiples of a certain proportion, based on the dimensions of the caliber. At this time, in addition to the central unified manufacture of front-loading smoothbore and arquebus-ignited artillery dominated by the Hongyi cannon type, a large number of artillery pieces were manufactured in the coastal provinces.

For example, since the rise of the military in Guangdong Province, there have been more than 1,000 cast cannons, among which the pig iron cannons made in Foshan are the most representative. The total number of the country is no less than 5,500. The weight of the cannon ranges from hundreds of catties to more than 30,000 catties, and the barrel is as long as 4.44 meters. Although these artillery pieces have many names, most of them are based on the Hongyi concoction system, and the design and manufacturing technology has not been improved, not only can not be compared with the advanced British artillery of the same period, but also some of the technology has shrunk compared with the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. However, the Qing army purchased and copied a large number of Yi artillery. Shi Zai: "Lin Zexu went to Guangdong from last year...... More than 200 guns from Western countries were purchased. ”

In 1841, the military and political officials in Zhejiang, Jiangsu and other places also organized manpower to imitate a batch of copper cannons, and when the British army captured Wusong in June 1842, a record of the British army was: in a military factory, "we saw 10 cannons used by the guerrilla army, which were mounted on trolleys." The cart resembled a large cart used in a garden, with a box for storing shells in front and a drawer between the handles containing gunpowder and a small shovel for shoveling gunpowder. In addition to the iron cannons of various calibers, some new 12-pounder bronze cannons were also discovered, which were imitated from the G?R?1826 cannon with a crown embedded next to it, and the style was identical, the only difference being that the Chinese character replaced the crown. ”

According to the "Opium War Archives and Historical Materials" of later generations, at the time of the war, the Qing army's artillery was roughly classified into three categories: red artillery, sub-mother cannons, and carrying cannons; according to the country and time order of manufacture, it was divided into four categories: old artillery, newly cast artillery, purchased Portuguese or British cannons, and imitation British artillery; according to length and weight, it can be divided into: long-barreled smoothbore heavy artillery and light smoothbore artillery with a short barrel. The former is the prototype of the Hongyi cannon in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. The latter includes General Shenwei, General Shengong, Mountain Splitting Cannon, Sub-mother Cannon, Odd Cannon, Bamboo Cannon, Nine-section Cannon, etc., this kind of cannon has the most varieties, of which except for the sub-mother cannon and the odd cannon are breech-loading ammunition Franc machine gun type, the rest belong to the development type of Hongyi artillery.

In 1857, Engels wrote "Artillery": "In the peacetime after the fall of Napoleon, the artillery of the European powers was gradually reformed. 3-pounder and 4-pounder light guns were eliminated everywhere, and modified gun mounts and ammunition boxes for British artillery were adopted in most countries. Almost everywhere the weight of the charge was 1/3 of the weight of the shell, the weight of the gun was 150 times or close to 150 times the weight of the shell, and the length of the gun was 16-18 times the caliber. ”

At the time of the war, the caliber of British artillery ranged from a few inches to more than ten inches, with a smoothbore in front and fired with a fuse and flint hammer, and a small number of artillery used a **** primer and fired with a firing pin. The weight of the gun body ranges from hundreds of catties, thousands of catties to more than 10,000 catties.

The types of artillery have undergone several adjustments and reforms, and in terms of types, they can be divided into:

1. Long-barreled cannon. It is characterized by the length of the tube, high muzzle velocity, and the firing angle is generally 5~45 degrees, which requires 4~6 people to operate the launch. There are different models of 3 pounds, 6 pounds, 12 pounds, 24 pounds, and 32 pounds. At that time, due to the limitations of the materials used to make artillery, long-barreled guns had thin barrel walls and were rarely used to fire hollow explosive shells.

2. Howitzer: Appeared in Europe at the end of the 17th century, fixed on the gun carriage, and fired with explosive shells at an angle of 12 to 30 degrees. It is a field gun with a short barrel (shorter and lighter than a long gun, longer than a mortar), a large caliber (rarely more than 8 inches), a chamber with a diameter smaller than the barrel, and a two-wheeled gun carriage, and its main purpose is to be placed on armed boats and artillery boats for ground attack.

Until the 19th century in Britain, this type of artillery became the standard equipment of the royal artillery, and there were several different calibers such as 24 pounds, 12 pounds, 9 pounds, and 6 pounds. 3. Mortar artillery. It was first manufactured at the end of the 16th century by the Chiron Iron Works in Scotland, and it is a shorter than the howitzer (about 2~3 times the length of the barrel), a large caliber of 13 inches, 15 inches or larger, with a smaller diameter gunpowder combustion chamber, and sometimes a removable smoothbore front gun.

Such artillery could be fixed on a carriage and fired with explosive shells, usually at an angle of fire of more than 20 degrees, and sometimes even at an angle of 60 degrees. Explosive bombs can be used as explosives or as incendiary bombs. 4. Shipborne artillery. It can be divided into three types: main guns, broadside guns, and shipborne guns; in terms of the types of artillery, it can also be divided into four types: long-barreled cannons, howitzers, mortars, and naval guns. The first three guns are largely the same as the army guns of the same name introduced earlier, while the naval guns are a type of artillery made specifically for battleships and will not be used by the army, and it has a distinctive feature that it has a round hole in the tail so that the rope passes through this round hole to secure the gun to the deck.

2. Comparison of the materials of Chinese and British artillery:

The quality of steel or copper used in artillery is mainly reflected in the selection of smelting materials and the study of smelting methods. From the Tang Dynasty to the Ming Dynasty, China was a period of comprehensive development and finalization of ancient iron and steel technology, and the iron and steel industry system with "pig iron smelting, pig iron frying and smelting of wrought iron, raw and wrought iron combined into steel" as the backbone tended to be finalized. Since the Ming Dynasty, Chinese artillery casting materials have mostly used copper for the small ones and cast iron for the big ones.

From the middle of the Ming Dynasty to the time of the First Opium War, China's traditional steel technology continued to develop slowly. However, because there was no industrial revolution, the capacity of manual production was not comparable to that of machine production, so its steel production was extremely low.

By around 1840, the annual output of iron was about 20,000 tons, only 1/40 of that of the United Kingdom. Second, most of the artillery is cast from liquid pig iron, which inevitably leads to the brittle and hard texture of the artillery, which is easy to explode during the performance and injure the gunner.

The Qing army mainly adopted the following four strategies to deal with it: First, thickening the wall of the artillery barrel increased the weight of the artillery. As a result, thousands of pounds of bulky artillery were not as powerful as the small artillery of the West. First, for the artillery that had been cast into pores with many bubbles and was easy to shatter, the Qing army reduced the amount of gunpowder filled, which in turn reduced the power of the artillery. One is the use of copper as the material for casting cannons. One is to cast some double- or three-layer complex structure guns, so that they are not easy to burst.

Before and after the war, the Qing army began to forge artillery with wrought iron or brass in a small area, and Huang Mian, the alternate prefect of Jiangsu, commented on the material of the Qing army's artillery: "The water and land war cannons are heavy and bulky, and there are not many people who can carry the artillery." It is advisable to restructure the light artillery with small and large ones before it can be used...... Today, if we want to reverse its disadvantages, we must pay attention to concoction, so that we can win big with small, light and heavy, short and far, simple and flexible, and use one cannon to resist several cannons...... Because it also pays attention to small cannons, it can accommodate large bombs. It is not cast but built, and wrought iron is used instead of pig iron, so that the gun body can be thin and the gun chamber wide. The edge of the pig iron is cast, and every honeycomb astringent body can not be smooth, and it is difficult to shovel and grind, so the marble can not be used quickly. Wrought iron cannot be cast, but it can be made. The method of its creation is to use iron bars to smelt and smelt, gradually rotate into a circle, and every five catties of wrought iron can be smelted into one catty, and the steel is extremely smooth...... The lighter the cannon, the more refined the workmanship, and the greater the force. Iron has been tempered for hundreds of years, and there will never be an explosion of casting. Flexible in use, especially the bulkiness of a cannon. ”

In Europe, due to the shortage of timber resources in the late 18th century, the cost of wrought iron rose and formed a serious problem. In order to meet the needs, the so-called mixing process was adopted, which is to use a long steel rod to stir the metal solution in the reverberatory furnace. The furnace is burned with coke, so that not only the solution on the furnace surface, but also the solution of the whole furnace can be exposed to air, so that the decarburization is more complete and becomes malleable cast iron. Wrought iron produced by the churning method is not as good as iron carbon, but it is much cheaper. In 1829, a step was taken further by using the residual gas of the blast furnace itself to preheat the blast, an invention that tripled the production of wrought iron for the same amount of fuel. Another improvement is the "wet" churning method, that is, the furnace is spread with small pieces of slag containing iron oxide, which is combined with the carbon in the metal to produce CO under the surface, forming a bubble boiling stirring that accelerates the decarbonization process. In 1806 Britain produced 250,000 tons of iron, and by 1850 Britain could produce 2.5 million tons per year, with both cast and wrought iron production increasing.

Since ancient times, the method of steelmaking has hardly changed radically, and it is still the product of small-scale individual workshops. The basic material used in England was high-quality Swedish bar iron of equal price, with the result that the cost of steel was equal to 5 times the cost of wrought iron. In 1750, the watchmaker Benjamin Huntsmann created a new method of steelmaking. He placed a special small clay crucible in a coke-burning furnace and added high temperatures to produce cast steel with a special solvent.

This cast steel is free of silica and other slag and costs slightly less than steel produced by other methods. Unfortunately, this product cannot be soldered, it is too hard and not suitable for some purposes. Eventually, however, this technology became the basis of the Shefeld steel company, which was widely disseminated and copied in Europe. This method was so inefficient that by the end of the 18th century it had been replaced by the firing furnace method or churning method. In 1783, Peter Öhlins, the foreman of an ironworks, built on the basis of his predecessors, added a stirring window to the firing furnace to create the method of stirring ironmaking by oxidation and refining with a reverberatory furnace. In 1784, Engineer Henry Cotter, a contractor of the British Admiralty's munitions, made a similar invention and vigorously promoted its application. This method saves effort and improves the work efficiency by 15 times, which makes the ironmaking technology to a new level.

Since the 18th century, countries have expanded their navies on a large scale, because the cost of iron is only 1/5 of copper, so iron cannons have gradually replaced bronze cannons and become the standard equipment of warships of various countries. However, the use of steelmaking in Europe, including in the United Kingdom, continued to be limited until the mid-19th century, when there were no significant improvements in steelmaking and the defects of the steel itself. Thus, "until the middle of the 19th century, bronze and brass cannons always prevailed over cast-iron cannons, with the exception of naval heavy guns." ”

Three: Comparison of the casting process of Chinese and British artillery:

During the war, the Qing army's artillery manufacturing technology was not very backward, and there was an iron mold casting method and a composite layer structure artillery making process that the British army did not have. In some coastal and inland provinces of the Qing Dynasty, the old artillery, new artillery and imitation Yi cannons, except for a small part of the iron mold casting method that the British army did not have, were still mostly made of pig iron and bronze smelting. It's just that artillery cast in liquid pig iron or bronze is of poor quality, difficult to process, and easy to burst. Forged wrought iron cannons or brass cannons are few pounds and small proportions. The British artillery was mainly composed of bronze cannons, brass cannons and cast iron cannons, and most of the artillery could be forged with wrought iron or brass, and then processed with lathe tools, which improved the accuracy a lot.

During the Opium War, Ding Gongchen, a mechanical engineering expert from Quanzhou, Fujian, referred to the structure of Western cannons and cast an iron cannon with good performance in Guangzhou.

In 1841, he compiled the "Speech", and in 1842, the "Speech" was valued by Qi Gong, the governor of Liangguang, and Yishan, the general of Jingyi. In the same year, the Qing government ordered the promotion of the methods described in the "Speech". At this time, Ding's method of casting cannons on the basis of reading Western artillery science is actually similar to the overall mold casting method of the original Hongyi cannon in China since the end of the Ming Dynasty: that is, based on the caliber of the cannon mold, the outer mold and the inner mold are made with mud, and the outer mold is hoisted outside the inner mold with a lifting device, and the gap between the two molds is the thickness of the gun barrel.

It was then poured into a solution of bronze or steel, cooled, the inner and outer molds were removed, and finally processed into a complete artillery with various fittings. The defects of the artillery cast by this method are: when the clay mold is baked with charcoal fire, it is often dry on the outside and wet on the inside, and the moisture is steamed into moisture during casting, resulting in the honeycomb hole often has honeycomb holes in the cast artillery, and it is easy to explode when fired; the efficacy is very low; the gun chamber cannot be processed in depth, resulting in the ballistic disorder after the shell is ejected, and the shooting accuracy is reduced; most people do not understand the actual significance of the ratio of the body tube to the caliber and the position of the fire door in the combustion of gunpowder, and the vast majority of the fire doors are opened too far forward and too large. In terms of the clearance of the breech, during the war, the artillery could only use 1/10 to 1/5 of the inner diameter as the clearance because "the bullet is not round and the mouth is not straight", and this level could not even reach the level of the late Ming Dynasty.

In view of this, Gong Zhenlin of Jiaxing County, Zhejiang Province felt the impracticality and cumbersomeness of the overall casting method of Chinese clay molds, and was determined to reform. In 1841, the invention of the iron mold casting method more than 30 years earlier than Europe, the iron mold can be used many times, without cleaning the gun chamber, eliminating the defects of the mud mold casting cannon multi-honeycomb easy to explode, shortening the casting cycle, reducing the cost of casting the gun, and written as the "Cast Gun Iron Model Diagram", in 1842 was printed and distributed to the coastal provinces for reference. By September 1841, on the eve of the battle of eastern Zhejiang, more than 120 new artillery pieces had been cast, and the people of the time called it: "Since last winter, Zhejiang has cast cannons, which are good for work and skill, smooth and smart, and do not go to the West." ”

Since the 16th century, European artillery casting has been using the clay mold casting method, and the practice of drilling holes in solid guns is said to have begun in 1713, and the clay mold casting method continued until 1770 at the Royal Gun Foundry in Wooledge, England. Around this time, Wilkinson, a British ironsmith, developed an improved machine for borechambering artillery.

Subsequently, in 1794, the British mechanic Maudsley invented the mobile tool holder on the lathe, and in 1797, the lathe with the moving tool holder was made on an iron base. From the 20s to the 30s of the 19th century, Britain invented a series of working machines such as all-metal lathes, self-adjusting lathes, and cattle head planers, and by the 40s of the 19th century, it reached the leading level of manufacturing machinery with working machine tools. For example, in the manufacture of artillery, the cannon is first cast into a solid cylindrical metal casting by using a lathe, and then a hole is drilled by a large drilling machine equipped with an extra-long drill bit, and then the hole is gradually hammered into shape on the hammer bed and processed into an artillery. This method can make the gun body more uniform, symmetrical and smooth than the die casting method, the design of various size proportions and fire doors is more reasonable, and the shooting accuracy is high. It not only improves the accuracy of the casting gun, but also saves man-hours, and is solid and durable.

Before and after the war, in addition to the traditional clay mold overall casting method and lost wax method, the British artillery casting method has begun to adopt lathe cutting casting method on a large scale. "Atlas of the Sea Kingdom" praised the British army's artillery craftsmanship: "Westerners cast cannons, and their iron has been refined and smelted. First, use wax to make a cannon, no different, and then use mud to seal and dry in the shade. When casting, the mold is opened with fire, the wax oil is discharged, and then the iron is poured in, and after four or five days, the mold is taken out and placed in the wilderness. Fill the cannon with gunpowder, draw the fire rope a little with a long heart, and everyone will avoid hiding traces as far as possible, once the cannon is sounded and soars into the air, it will not be damaged if it falls to the extent that it does not explode, and there will be no trouble. The degree of its casting method is mostly based on the rectangle on the door, or the head or tail, or the head and tail are safe, and the degree is also fit. "In terms of breech clearance, in the middle of the 19th century, due to the improvement of the precision of mechanical manufacturing in Europe, the clearance value used in artillery was reduced to 1/42 of the inner diameter, so that as long as less gunpowder was charged, it could achieve a higher speed, and at the same time improve the accuracy of firing. (To be continued.) )

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