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In a sense, the type of firearm in the "Fire Dragon Artifact Formation" doesn't feel very reliable at first. Pen fun and pavilion www.biquge.info

However, as a military weapon book that was collected by the rulers of the Ming Dynasty at that time and did not circulate to the people, the "Fire Dragon Artifact Formation" can be said to have its own inevitability.

And the greater embodiment of this inevitability is mainly the influence on the firearms aspect of books such as "Wubei Zhi" in later generations.

To say something more interesting, that is, this unreliable "Fire Dragon Artifact Formation", in a sense, played a role in the development of Chinese gunpowder weapons at that time.

Of course, this inheritance of the past and the future, it seems that even the situation of brain holes and the like has been passed on.

Because in many ways, many of the unreliable firearms described in the "Wubei Zhi" are either excerpts from the content of the "Fire Dragon Artifact Formation", or they have a considerable relationship with the "Fire Dragon Artifact Formation".

However, such a situation, strictly speaking, is an accidental and inevitable result of the development history of firearms in the Ming Dynasty.

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There was a great development of weapons in the Ming Dynasty. Its main cold weapons include long-handled knives, guns, short-handled long knives, waist knives and various miscellaneous weapons such as palladium, horse forks, wolf knives and so on.

In addition to inheriting the traditional varieties of weapons, firearms in the Ming Dynasty developed to their heyday. There are many varieties of tubular firearms and complex forms. At that time, the manufacture of jet firearms (ancient gunpowder rockets) has been quite sophisticated, and there are many styles, according to the historical records such as "Fire Dragon Artifact Formation" and "Wubei Zhi", the types of rockets used here are single-launch rockets, multi-salvo gunpowder arrows, multi-gunpowder cartridge parallel rockets, winged rockets, multi-stage rockets, etc., and there are dozens of varieties of rockets. Due to the vigorous development of firearms, the Ming Dynasty army was generally equipped with firearms, and the main weapons of war turned to the use of firearms.

When Zhu Di, the king of Yan, competed with Emperor Jianwen for the throne, he used rockets to fight. During the Yongle period, the Ming Dynasty also specially set up the "Shenji Battalion", which was second to none in China and even in the world at that time.

As one of the three major battalions of the Ming Dynasty Beijing Janissary Army, the Shenji Battalion was the first formed unit in charge of firearms in the Ming Dynasty army, opening a precedent for firearms troops in the world.

The Qing Dynasty followed the military system of the Ming Dynasty, and set up firearms battalions to guard the Forbidden City and the Three Seas, and the emperor also obeyed when he was on patrol. After the Opium War, the Shenji Battalion established by the Qing government, commonly known as the foreign gun team, was an army equipped with foreign guns and cannons.

In the eighth year of Yongle (1410), when he conquered Cochin (present-day Vietnam), Zhu Di obtained the magic machine gun technique and specially set up a magic machine camp to practice[1]. In the battle of Mobei, Ming Chengzu put forward the operational principle of "Shenji gun in the front, horse team in the rear", and the Shenji battalion cooperated with the infantry and cavalry to fight, and played an important role, making the application of firearms more professional, and the Shenji battalion also became a branch of the Ming army. The battalion was one of the three major battalions of the Beijing Army (the other two battalions were the 5th Army Battalion and the 3,000 Battalion)[2], and was equipped with muskets, muskets, etc., and arquebuses were added in the later period. This independent artillery unit was in a leading position in China and even other countries in the world at that time, about a century earlier than the Spanish musketeers (founded in 1510), which was the earliest formation in Europe, and was the evidence that the early firearms unit of the Ming Dynasty was ahead of the world.

The Shenji Battalion is responsible for the important task of "guarding the Beijing division internally and preparing for external warfare", and is in charge of training firearms and accompanying escort horse officers and soldiers, and is a strategic mobile unit under the direct command of the emperor. The Shenji Battalion is different from the garrison of the guard station established in the early Ming Dynasty, and its highest establishment level is the battalion, with 2 commanders and ministers, 2 military attachés, and 2 chief officers in charge of the battalion; the battalion is organized into five armies, including the Central Army, the Left Guard, the Right Guard, the Left Sentinel, and the Right Sentinel, and each has 1 camp minister and 1 military minister, except for the four divisions under the Chinese army, the rest each has three divisions; each division has 1 gun supervisor, 1 general officer, and 2 card officers. The battalion specializes in sharpshooters and artillery. Later, he had to supervise Tan Guangma 5,000 horses, called 5,000 battalions, attached to the Shenji battalion, and set up officials such as the armies below the Shenji battalion, and the battalion was organized into four divisions, and each division set up 2 officers.

According to history, in order to ensure long-term continuous shooting, the Jinji Battalion usually used the "rotational" tactic (called "three-stage shot" in Japanese), which was divided into three platoons, with the first platoon being fired by soldiers in positions 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th, and 11th in the queue, and then by soldiers in positions 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th, 10th, and 12th in the queue. The soldiers in the front row immediately handed the guns back to the soldiers in the middle row after each shot, and at the same time took the loaded guns from the soldiers in the middle row. On the one hand, the soldiers in the middle row are responsible for taking the guns from the soldiers in the front row and passing them back to the soldiers in the third row to load the ammunition, and on the other hand, they are responsible for receiving the loaded guns from the soldiers in the third row and passing them forward to the soldiers in the front row. Such repeated rotation is very powerful.

This tactic was first created by Mu Ying, a famous general in the early Ming Dynasty, and is the core tactic of all the former guns, leading the West for more than 200 years and Japan for more than 200 years.

This method was originally used to deal with the elephants of the rebel army in the defensive area of Mu Ying, but it was later improved by Zhu Di and used to deal with the more mobile cavalry, first the soldiers equipped with fire guns shot at the enemy cavalry, and immediately retreated to the flank of the army after shooting, and then the cavalry of the 5th Army Battalion and the 3,000 Battalion continued to carry out a second strike on the enemy cavalry, and then the infantry of the 5th Army Battalion used the (anti) cavalry weapons to carry out a third blow on the enemy cavalry. Its lethality against cavalry is very high.

Compared with the previous dynasties, the war pattern of the Ming Dynasty has undergone very huge changes, in which the application of firearms has played a central role. If the Song Dynasty was the embryonic stage of the application of China's firearms on the battlefield, then the Ming Dynasty was an era of great development, and the emergence of this situation was closely related to Zhu Yuanzhang's development process.

Zhu Yuanzhang started near the Yangtze River, and at the beginning of his development, a person named Jiao Yu presented the firearms he developed, so Zhu Yuanzhang's team became the only rebel army in the Jiangnan rebel army that could be said to be the only firearm that became the standard equipment. The water network in the south of the Yangtze River, coupled with Liu Futong's Northern Expedition, the cavalry team that the Mongols were proud of could not exert its due power, so Zhu Yuanzhang, who had firearms, quickly tasted the sweetness. In a series of battles with Chen Youliang, firearms played an extremely important role. In the defense of Hongdu, Chen Youliang waved an army of 600,000 to besiege Hongdu, but the Zhu army of Hongdu was unable to attack Chen Youliang for a long time with the help of firearms. In the subsequent Battle of Poyang Lake, Zhu Yuanzhang's army gave full play to the power of firearms, using the most advanced firearms in China at that time, such as "artillery, firearms, rockets, thistles, large and small muskets, large and small generals' barrels, large and small iron cannons, and divine machine arrows", creating a precedent for bombarding enemy ships with "naval artillery" in water warfare.

After the founding of the Ming Dynasty, firearms became one of the standard weapons of the Ming army, usually the composition of the Ming army was "ten guns, twenty swords, thirty bows and arrows, and forty guns", and the proportion of firearms accounted for 10%. With the development of firearms, two new types of troops appeared in the Ming Dynasty, one was the Shenji Soldier (firearms soldier), and the other was the chariot soldier - the chariot abandoned during the Warring States period was rejuvenated.

During the Yongle period of the Ming Dynasty, a strategic mobile force was created - the Shenji Battalion, which went out with the emperor together with the five military battalions and three thousand battalions. The Shenji Battalion is mainly equipped with artillery, that is, copper fire guns, and it is the earliest artillery unit in the world, making artillery an independent branch of the army to complete specific military tasks. After the establishment of the Shenji Battalion, he followed the emperor of the Ming Dynasty many times and fought with the powerful weapon in his hand - the bronze fire gun. When the Shenji Battalion's bronze guns are in battle, they are in the forefront of the line, and there is a certain gap between the artillery teams, which is convenient for loading shells, and can take turns to fire salvos and destroy the enemy's positions with artillery fire. In February 1410, the Ming army was blocked by the Mongol army, and the Shenji battalion immediately attacked the enemy with artillery fire, and the enemy's defensive position was destroyed by the artillery fire of the Shenji battalion, and most of the defenders were killed in the artillery fire. The cavalry units of the Ming army launched an attack and won a great victory.

However, the winds take turns. When the time came, after the Ming Dynasty experienced the change of Tumubao, the Mongolian soldiers became more and more courageous, and 120,000 Mongolian soldiers had attacked near the capital. The general guarding the capital ordered the Shenji battalion to be set up in ambush outside the Desheng Gate in Beijing. On October 13, the Mongolian soldiers approached the city, and the Ming army guard sent a cavalry detachment to introduce the Mongolian soldiers into the ambush area of the Shenji Battalion.

The Ming Army's Shenji Battalion was equipped with the earliest artillery, the Bronze Fire Gun. Moreover, the Shenji Battalion has been in battle for a long time and has experience in artillery warfare and mobile warfare. After the Mongol soldiers were introduced into the ambush area of the Shenji Battalion, the general defending the city gave an order, and the large and small copper firebolts of the Shenji Battalion opened fire together, and the stone or iron spherical projectiles fired by the large and small copper firecrackers were fired at the Mongolian soldiers in one salvo to kill and injure the enemy.

The large and small bronze fire guns of the Shenji Battalion disrupted the formation of the Mongol soldiers. At this time, the Ming army inside and outside the city took advantage of the situation to attack and defeated the Mongol soldiers. In this battle to defend the capital, the bronze fire guns of the Shenji Battalion played an important combat role and made great contributions.

......

After the fall of the Ming Dynasty, the Shenji Battalion was gradually submerged in the dust of history.

However, the advance of the wheel of history eventually led to the re-establishment of the Shenji Battalion, and this establishment is the final history of the Shenji Battalion.

After the establishment of the Qing Dynasty, the gunpowder weapons manufactured were mainly artillery weapons, and the heavy firearms were mainly artillery, and the light firearms were mainly muskets. The manufacture of firearms in the Qing Dynasty began in the fifth year of the Later Jin Tiancong (1631), and it was still manufactured in large quantities in the early Qing Dynasty. After the middle of the Qing Dynasty, the development of firearms gradually came to a standstill, until the middle of the 19th century, before and after the Opium War, the Qing government rushed to produce a large number of firearms, but the structure still followed the ancestral system, and the performance has lagged far behind that of the Western powers.

At the same time, after the Opium War, the Western powers saw China's weakness and could be bullied, and they came from far and wide to try to further plot against China.

In this environment of internal and external troubles, the Qing government established the "Shenji Battalion" in the 11th year of Xianfeng (1861), which was a Praetorian Guard army using new weapons created in the late Qing Dynasty under the oppression of internal and external troubles. The soldiers were selected from the original battalions of the Eight Banners, with a total of 14,000 soldiers when they were newly formed, and by the fourth year of Tongzhi, they had increased to about 30,000. It was led by Yi Xin, who was the king of parliament at the time. Select the elite of the Eight Banners Manchuria, Mongolia, Han Army and Forward, Protector Army, Infantry Army, Firearms, and Jianrui Battalions. He often guarded the Forbidden City and the Three Seas, and the emperor also obeyed when he was on patrol. It has 25 battalions of horses and infantry and more than 14,000 officers and soldiers.

The name of the Shenji Battalion existed in the Ming Dynasty, but the Shenji Battalion in the Ming Dynasty was equivalent to the firearms battalion in the Qing Dynasty. The newly built Shenji Battalion at the end of the Qing Dynasty was an army equipped with modern Western weapons, and after its completion, the Shenji Battalion became the main force of the Janissary Guard in the late Qing Dynasty, and the scale of its official offices was also unprecedentedly large. However, due to the corruption of the Qing Dynasty and various problems that were difficult to return, this newly created Praetorian Guard army was far from the requirements of the modern army.

The Shenji Battalion was also an important guard force in the Forbidden City at the end of the Qing Dynasty. Every day, 1 member of the Shenji Battalion and 1 member of the battalion general, each with 10 soldiers, are on duty in the palace room. There were 4 officers, each with 20 soldiers, who were stationed at the four corners of the palace on duty. There are a total of 10 shifts of the above-mentioned officers and soldiers. Outside the walls of the three seas of the Imperial Garden, the Shenji Battalion and the spearmen and brave men in the battalions of the Eight Banners, a total of 810 people take turns to stay on duty, which is divided into 10 shifts, which change once a day. When on duty, you have to pass the plan to go away.

The Yamen of the Shenji Camp is located in the cinder alley. At the end of the Qing Dynasty, Zhenjun wrote the book "Occasional News of the Heavens", which exclusively described the Yamen of the Shenji Camp, which wrote: "The Shenji Camp Department is in the cinder alley. At the beginning of Tongzhi, the elite of the Eight Banners was set up and this battalion was set up. There is always a prince and a minister, and there is no fixed number. There are two wing commanders of the whole battalion under him. It is divided into six divisions: copywriting, business affairs, printing, food and salary, checking, and manuscripts, each with a wing commander and a committee member. In addition, the Arms Bureau, the Gun Factory, the Armory, and the Machinery Bureau each have their own special departments, with a total of more than 15,000 soldiers.

Since its establishment, the Eight Banners Beijing officials have competed to serve. There are more than 160 members of the copywriting office, and more than 180 members of the camp office. "The training ground of the Shenji Camp on Wangfujing Street is now Dong'an Market.

According to historical records, in the tenth year of Xianfeng, the British and French allied forces invaded Tianjin, and the monk Greenqin secretly invited Xingrehe. Wen Xiang shook people's hearts, related to the overall situation, and there was no danger outside the plug, and he couldn't hold it, and he said with the courtiers, and asked for the only one,...... Wen Xiang secretly asked the soldiers of the Eight Banners to be selected and trained, and added guns, so he set up the Shenji Battalion and sought his life to manage the affairs of the battalion. The first year of Tongzhi,...... In the autumn of that year, the horse thief entered the Xifeng Pass and ordered Wenxiang to lead the Shenji battalion to protect Dongling and supervise the army to suppress it. ...... Ordered to lead the Shenji battalion to suppress, increase the Zhili foreign gun team out of the customs, about the Mongolian princes of the three eastern alliances from the north road to attack, breaking the thief in Jinzhou Dongjingzi. ...... Attacked in three ways, won more than a dozen battles, and captured more than 3,000.

In the early years of Tongzhi, the Qing Dynasty extinguished the peasant uprising of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and the conquest of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and the Twist Army relied on the Hunan army and the Huai army recruited by Zeng Guofan, Zuo Zongtang and other Han ministers. Later, Guangxu took over his cousin Tongzhi to the throne, and Prince Alcohol was no longer directly in charge of the Shenji Camp because of his special status, and was led by Boyan Namo, the son of his son and daughter's in-law "Monk King" Seng Greenqin. "Monk King" comes from the Mongolian Borzigit clan, that is, the family of the Empress Dowager of Xiaozhuang, and is the first relative of the Qing Dynasty known as the Manchurian and Mongolian family. Rong Lu, who played a unique role in the history of the late Qing Dynasty, started from helping Prince Alcohol manage the deputy of the Shenji Battalion. Here we can see the dignity of the identity and the importance of the status of the Shenji Battalion.

In the fourth year of Tongzhi, he issued an edict: "Wang Yiyi and others of the alcohol county trained more than 30,000 soldiers of the Shenji battalion, and the drill gradually became effective, and the green battalion was also purged." The order is still under the control of the king of the county, and the minister of the military parade is supervised and read together. At this time, although the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom had been destroyed, another peasant rebel army, the First Twist Army, joined the remnants of the Taiping Army and was divided into two divisions, East Twist and West Twist, and was active in Shaanxi, Henan, and Shandong. The famous general of the Qing army, Seng Greenqin, surrendered his whole army, and the Hunan and Huai armies were also defeated. Later, after Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang, Zuo Zongtang and other commanders of the Hunan and Huai armies set up the method of "drawing rivers and enclosing land", the East Twist Army headed by Lai Wenguang and Ren Huabang suffered defeat in northern Jiangsu and Shandong. However, in the seventh year of Tongzhi, the West Twist Army led by Zhang Zongyu crossed the river from northern Shaanxi to the east, and went north from the southern Jin and northern Henan regions to Baoding and Tianlu, directly threatening Beijing.

The Qing court panicked, and in the first month of the first month, the Jingshi was under martial law, and ordered Prince Gong to handle patrol matters together with the minister who managed the Shenji Battalion. In April, the edict of Du Xing'a was appointed as the minister of the Qincha, and he hurriedly came to Beijing to manage the affairs of the Shenji Battalion, and commanded Shouchun, Zhang Guan, Song Qing, and Chen Guorui The four armies led the Shenji Battalion out of the town of Zhuozhou. At one time, Li Hongzhang and Zuo Zongtang led the Hunan and Huai armies to gather in Zhili. In June, Zhang Zongyu of the West Twist Army was surrounded between the Yellow River and the canal, Zhang Zongyu and other leaders of the West Twist Army died, the Twist Army failed in the struggle against the Qing Dynasty, and the Beijing Division announced the lifting of strictness. Although the Shenji battalion had been out of the army, they did not take the battle.

Since then, the Shenji Battalion, like the Eight Banners Army, has become increasingly lax in training and loose in discipline. By the 26th year of Guangxu, the Eight-Nation Coalition Army was disbanded, and the establishment was abolished.

However, since the establishment of the Shenji Battalion, the officials of the Eight Banners have competed to join the army, and the organization has become increasingly bloated, with more than 540 officials of various ranks, more than 300 more than the military department. Officers and soldiers gradually became infected with the corrupt habits of the Eight Banners. In the seventh year of Tongzhi (1868), the Western Twist Army once approached the Gyeonggi region, and the Empress Dowager Cixi wanted to send the Shenji Battalion to defend against the enemy. One day, the Shenji camp will drill and send the attendants to observe. It was also reported that after the boycott, the soldiers had a birdcage in their hands and had wandered around the teahouse shop. There is a folk proverb that "when you see a thief, you have to run away, you have to hire a replacement early, and you have to enter the camp less", which satirizes them to run away from the battle, and hire a stand-in in advance when they go out for exercise, and rarely go to the camp for exercise on weekdays. When the Queen Mother heard about the anger, she ordered Yiyun to go to review the drill. Yi Xun was ordered to read, but he saw that the soldiers were weak and tired, and his steps were disordered. One of the soldiers fell from his horse and broke his leg bone. After inquiry, he replied: "I am a stinky tofu seller in a grinding factory, how can I ride a horse?"

During the Guangxu period, the discipline of the Shenji Battalion was even more lax, and opium was rampant. The Shenji battalion trained at the entrance of the school outside the Shunzhi Gate, and before the exercise, the soldiers had covered the nearby alleys with curtains. After each round of training, the soldiers stepped into the tent. Some people with good deeds took a detour to peep, only to see "opium smoking utensils lined up all over the ground, and all the soldiers breathed desperately, waiting for the order to come out again". After the minister left, he roared away. These "elites" of the Eight Banners, armed with foreign guns and cannons, are actually a group of smokers who are powerless to fight. In the twenty-seventh episode of Wu Woyao's "The Strange Status Quo Witnessed in Twenty Years", "The Withdrawal of the King of the Guanshen Machine Battalion", there is also a vivid description of this matter.

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As the banner of the Ming Dynasty's firearms combat troops, the Shenji Battalion also witnessed the rise and fall of the Ming Dynasty and the corresponding historical development of firearms in a sense:

At the beginning of the founding of the Ming Dynasty, the invention and production of firearms were in the leading position in the world. During the Jiajing period, there were Japanese in the south and Tatars in the north, and the internal and external troubles were serious, and the military struggle was very fierce, which prompted the continued development of firearms in the Ming Dynasty. At that time, people of insight proposed that "if there are elite soldiers but no elite weapons to help them, it is said to be strong"; If someone has no weapons, then they are not me" ("Xu Guangqi Collection"), this group of people vigorously promoted the development of firearms technology. During the period from Jiajing to Wanli, the Ming people mainly learned and improved all kinds of firearms introduced from the West, among which the Franc machine and bird milling were transformed and perfected by the Ming army and equipped the army in large quantities. While studying and imitating foreign firearms, traditional firearms have also developed to a great extent, and they can be roughly divided into three categories: incendiary firearms, explosive firearms, and firing firearms, with about 2,300 types.

At the same time, with the development of firearm styles, the formula and production technology of gunpowder also tended to mature in the Ming Dynasty, which can be roughly divided into two categories: pure gunpowder formula composed of nitrate, sulfur and charcoal and gunpowder formula such as poison fire and divine fire (chemical weapons in ancient China) with other components.

The development of firearms also reached its peak in the Ming Dynasty, and the military books of the late Ming Dynasty, such as "Records of Soldiers", "Artifact Spectrum", "Wubei Zhi", "Western Law Divine Machine", "Fire Attack", "Preparation of Sea Charts", "Arsenal Diagrams", "Fire Dragon Artifact Formation", etc., recorded in detail the preparation and mapping of firearms equipped by the Ming army, as well as the establishment and tactics of firearms troops. It also gave birth to several well-known firearms (including theory) experts such as Zhao Shizhen, Bi Maokang, Hu Zongxian, Mao Yuanyi, and Sun Yuanhua, and military generals who attached great importance to the use of firearms, such as Qi Jiguang and Sun Chengzong. (To be continued.) )

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