readx;?? During the period of the Great Qin Empire, the Great Qin Empire implemented the national policy of collecting civilian weapons, mainly because the weapons that were scattered among the people would have a great impact on public security and the rule of the Great Qin Empire. Pen "Fun" Pavilion www.biquge.info

In particular, the six countries that were destroyed had a very large number of weapons scattered among the people. There are many reasons why these weapons are scattered among the people, such as the battlefield leftovers, the soldiers take them away when they flee, or the weapons and equipment that are discarded, and because the generals or officials in some areas open the arsenal and scatter the weapons among the people.

Such a situation became one of the biggest factors in the Great Qin Empire's implementation of the confiscation of civilian weapons.

Of course, the Great Qin Empire itself also had strict regulation and control over weapons during the Qin period, which was also the basis for action in this regard.

And the history has developed to the point of the Great Qin Empire, and there has been a great development in weapons.

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The knife can be said to be one of the earliest weapons used by humans, and the knife is a short weapon with a long blade on one side. At the same time, it generally refers to tools that can be used for cutting, cutting, cutting, chopping, and stabbing, and is also called a meal utensil together with a dagger. The original form of the knife is very close to that of the sword. Its shape is short, the head is upturned, the spine is unadorned, and the blade is long.

In primitive societies, ancient humans used stones, mussel shells, and animal bones to make knives of various shapes. The stones they chose were mostly quartz and sandstone, but also flint and crystal. The stone knives made from these stones are firm and sharp, and they are good chopping tools. The second is the mussel knife and bone knife made of mussel shells and animal bones, which are light and sharp, suitable for cutting utensils. Similarly, the ancients not only used knives as a tool of labor, but also carried them with them as a weapon for self-defense.

By the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, the shape of the knife changed dramatically, and during the Han Dynasty, the knife gradually developed into one of the main combat weapons of the infantry, and many different forms of long-handled knives appeared at the same time. There are only a few surviving bronze knives, and their bodies are all light and thin, with the thickest part being only 0.35 centimeters. Its shape is roughly divided into several categories, such as short-handled warped head knife, long leaf headpiece knife, flat-edged knife, curved blade knife and so on.

In terms of material development, the earliest copper knife in Chinese history was born from a stone knife and was very small in shape. The earliest bronze weapon found in China is the bronze knife. The bronze knives of the Shang Dynasty have a wide shape and an upturned edge, and their production is like a stone knife. At that time, knives were mainly used to cut utensils and slaughter cattle and sheep. or self-defense, which has not yet been officially used in war. Zhou Dynasty heavy sword. I don't like sabers. During the Western Zhou Dynasty, there was a bronze broadsword, with a short handle and a long knife, a thick spine and a sharp blade, and the head end of the handle was flat and circular, so it was also called "ring-handled knife". Two bronze knives were unearthed in the wooden coffin tomb of Baifuxi Zhou in Changping County, Beijing, one with a body of 41 centimeters and a slight bow on the back, and the other was 24 centimeters long, resembling an ice blade. At that time, bronze knives were more brittle. Lacks toughness and is easy to break when chopping. Compared with the copper swords of the same era, the workmanship of the sword is rough, the shape is clumsy, and it is far less delicate and sharp than the copper sword. Therefore, the knife did not enter the battlefield for a long time.

During the Qin and Han dynasties, after the advent of steel, the process of making knives was improved. The shape of the blade has been lengthened, and there are special war knives and sabers. The saber is unique in style and beautiful in ornamentation, while the sword is tough in texture and well-made. In the wars of the nations at that time, the military vehicles had gradually withdrawn from the battlefield, and the cavalry team became the main force of the battle. Therefore, a simple stabbing weapon is not enough to be effective. Steel knives that are good at slashing and slashing are becoming more and more demanding in terms of production quality. According to historical records, during the Three Kingdoms, Liu Bei ordered craftsmen to make 5,000 knives, Sun Quan ordered 1,000 knives to be made, and Sima Yan also sent 8,000 knives at one time. These knives were used to equip the army, and by that time knives had become one of the main weapons. The most common knife is the "ring head knife", which has a straight back and a straight blade, a thick back, a flat and circular handle, and a length of about one meter. It is convenient to smash and chop in the cavalry battle, it is a short weapon with strong combat effectiveness, and in the fighting on the battlefield, many generals often use spears and short knives at the same time, stabbing far and chopping closely, and the power is incomparable. Li Dang, the son of the general Li Guang in the Western Han Dynasty, "held a long lance on the left and a short sword on the right and a prancing horse in the right". Mrs. Zhurong, the wife of Meng Xu, the leader of the Southern Barbarians during the Three Kingdoms, was good at flying knives and hit every shot. She once carried an eight-foot long standard and stuck five flying knives in her back, seriously injured Zhang Wei, and captured Ma Zhong alive. ’‘

Steel knives are not only used on the battlefield, but also in officialdom. During the Han Dynasty, from the Son of Heaven to all officials, they all wore swords. The saber indicates the status rank of the nobles. In the Eastern Han Dynasty, there were very strict regulations on the shape and decoration of the saber of the Son of Heaven and the hundred officials, and no one was allowed to exceed them. This kind of wearing knife requires exquisite and beautiful appearance from the appearance, the knife body is carved with wrong patterns, and the knife ring is cast into various forms of bird and beast patterns. For example, the saber of Liu Chang, the king of Zhongshan in the Eastern Han Dynasty, was 105 cm long, and the blade was decorated with smooth lines of gold vortex patterns and flowing cloud patterns. During the two Han Dynasty and the Three Kingdoms, the monarchs and ministers of all countries did not attach importance to the sword, and some of them were almost hobby, and they did not hesitate to spend a lot of money, invited famous teachers, and spent several years or even more than ten years of hard work to refine the treasure sword. At that time, there was a famous knife maker such as Ruanshi, who was said to have made knives "under the law of Baoqing...... With the Qi of water and fire, the pottery of the five essences, and the combination of yin and yang, take the sum of rigidity and softness". The Ruanjia knife made "when the hair is cut slightly, there is no change in the firmness". There is also Pu Yuan of Shu, who used the advanced quenching technology at that time to make knives, which is unique. He was ordered by Zhuge Liang to make 3,000 steel knives in the valley.

During the Sui and Tang dynasties, the more advanced "steel filling method" was used instead of the hundred refining method, and the knife was more tough and sharp. There are three kinds of knives in the Tang Dynasty: ritual knives, knives, and horizontal knives. The ceremonial sword was a weapon used by the Imperial Guards, the sword was a knife worn by ordinary officials, and the horizontal sword was a combat knife specially equipped with the army. The Tang Dynasty not only paid attention to maintaining the traditional production skills of the Han nation, but also absorbed a lot of foreign knife-making skills with the extensive economic and cultural exchanges between countries and ethnic groups, which made the production of war knives more practical. The most used by the Ming Dynasty army was the "waist knife". The body of the waist knife is long and narrow, the blade is curved, and the blade is extended, which absorbs the advantages of the sword and increases the power of slashing and killing.

Qi Jiguang, a famous general of the Ming Dynasty, attached great importance to the production of waist knives, and had detailed research and records on the production methods of waist knives in his military work "Actual Record of Military Training". In the Qing Dynasty, the types of knives were more complex, including waist knives, rolling back double knives, spleen knives, two-handed belt knives, back knives, nest knives, mandarin duck knives, stern knives, cutting knives, wind knives and so on. Among them, the most widely used in combat are waist knives and two-handed belt knives. The upper part of the waist knife is straighter, the lower part is slightly curved, and the blade part is slightly narrower. The blade is three feet two inches long, the handle is three inches long, and it weighs one catty and ten taels (in ancient times, 1 catty = 16 taels), and was generally used for cavalry combat. Both hands carry knives, and the handle is 1 foot 5 inches long, which can be grasped by both hands. The blade is long and particularly wide and heavy, with a flat line on the top. When infantry fights in close combat, they can cut off the enemy's head or limbs with a single sword. The short knife was still one of the main weapons of the army in the Ming and Qing dynasties.

It can be said that in Chinese history, weapons such as knives have been active as standard weapons for a long time.

And during the Qin period, except for the sword. There were also many officers and soldiers who used weapons such as scimitars, but after the establishment of the Great Qin Empire. In order to meet the scale of the unification of weapons and equipment, the swords of this period were gradually sealed and replaced by a large number of Qin swords.

The period of the resurgence of the sword was before the middle of the Han Dynasty, and the most famous period of this rise was the head knife.

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The head knife, also known as the ring head knife, was born in the Western Han Dynasty in China, is a straight-edged long knife made of steel after repeated folding and quenching, it is the most advanced and most lethal close-quarters cold weapon in the world at that time, and it is also a weapon of extraordinary significance in human history.

To some extent, it can be said that the ring head knife defeated the Huns. and indirectly contributed to the great migration of Eurasian peoples at that time.

The meaning of the ring head knife is a knife with a ring on the hilt, which is a very representative type of armament in the long Chinese civilization. For a long time, it was used as the main hand-to-hand combat weapon to defend the reproduction and glory of Chinese civilization. The appearance of the ring head should be for both practical and aesthetic reasons, which can not only play a balancing weight, but also hang the rope sleeve to hold it stably, and can also hang ornaments and knife spikes.

The ringhead sword was originally used as a chopping weapon for cavalry to replace the original Han sword. The Han sword was not conducive to immediate combat, chopping, and easy to break due to its double-sided blades, which was very disadvantageous in close combat against the Hun cavalry. The one-sided blade and thick ridge of the ring head knife were the most conducive weapons for slashing and killing at that time, and the long-term and short-range cooperation of the strong crossbow and iron halberd greatly strengthened the attack power of the Han cavalry.

July 1974. In the Cangshan area of Linyi, Shandong Province, a ring head knife of the Eastern Han Dynasty was unearthed, and the knife body was also engraved with the eighteen characters of the inscription in Lishu: "In the sixth year of Yongchu (112 years), the fifth month of Bingwu made a big knife Ji Yangyi descendants." "Thirty Tempering" means thirty refinements, that is, this knife has used the "Hundred Steel" technology to fold and forge the steel as many as 30 times, and the blade of this knife has also been found to have been "quenched". "Quenching" is the process of heating the cutting edge to a certain high temperature, then cooling it rapidly with water, oil or air and hardening the surface of the workpiece.

In the development of Chinese knife weapons. During the Shang, Zhou, Qin, and early Han dynasties, China was in an era dominated by bronze weapons, and although iron weapons appeared one after another from the Spring and Autumn period, they did not fully popularize the army. The ring head knife was unearthed in the Shang Dynasty, and the Qi State in the rich armor of the world during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period even used the scimitar as the appearance to make coins, which shows that the use of the scimitar was still relatively widespread during this time. During this period, iron ring knives were occasionally unearthed.

But in general. In that era when the sword was the first personal combat weapon, the scimitar was still not the protagonist, it was more of a tool of life. And due to the limitations of the performance of bronze itself, it is destined that close-quarters weapons can only be based on stabbing, and chopping can easily lead to the destruction of weapons. Until the Western Han Dynasty, the shape of the bronze ring knife began to change significantly, the blade became more and more slender (the shape of the steel ring knife has basically been determined), and at the same time, the popularization of steel technology, the imperative of the war against the Huns, everything is brewing a gorgeous change in Chinese hand-to-hand combat weapons.

The Western Han Dynasty was the age of steel, and the booming steelmaking industry turned the Han army into a rare steel hero of that era. In addition to steel armor, steel also provided more resilient bones for weapons, giving rise to the ring-headed sword with a length of more than 1 meter and the Han sword with a length of more than 1.4 meters. In the eyes of the cavalrymen who did not yet have horses, the rough and narrow blade of the ring-headed sword contained an unprecedented murderous aura, and the thick back of the sword would easily withstand the stress of the fierce slash, making them turn into a rushing falcon. At the same time, as a kind of glory, from the Western Han Dynasty onwards, wearing a delicately decorated ring head knife has gradually become another kind of martial respect for civil and military officials after the sword.

Due to the martial arts of the Han Dynasty, there were many weapons in the tombs, which made the Han Dynasty ring head knife unearthed a lot, allowing us to get a glimpse of its appearance. The steel ring knife of the Han Dynasty was processed from the hundred steelmaking process. The 100 steelmaking process, simply understood, is to smelt the iron or high-carbon fried steel, after continuous heating, folding and forging, to remove oxide impurities, carburizing, and finally obtain the knife strip. In addition, the knives of the Han Dynasty already had a steel composite process, which forged steel with different carbon contents into one at different levels, so that the knife was rigid and soft, and would not be deformed and broken in the fierce fighting; through heat treatment and quenching process to make the blade more tough, and even the technology of covering the soil and burning the blade had appeared; there was also a fine grinding process, so that the knife had a unique beauty while maintaining sharpness.

In terms of knife type, the Han Dynasty ring knife is slender and straight, some of them have an inner arc, and there is no mature knife stem structure characteristics. The length of the big ring knife is basically left and right, and many ring knives have reached or even exceeded, and these are mostly one-handed grip structures, except for a small number of two-handed long handles.

In the structure of the ring head, the Hanhuan knife is mainly divided into five types: the ring head is made separately, heated hammer forging and welded on the knife stem; the second type is similar to the first one, but the ring head has a gap as wide as the stem end, and then welded at both ends; the third type is still the ring head is made separately, but it is sandwiched at the end of the stem that is turned back. This kind of knife is relatively rare, and the quality of the knife body is very good, the side reflects the maturity of the heat treatment technology of the Han Dynasty; the fourth is the knife stem ring head forging, and then with the knife body with the way of embedded welding, and then reinforced with a nail; the fifth is the whole knife forging, the ring head often has a delicate dragon finch pattern, the so-called "dragon bird big ring".

The ring head sword began to be popularized in the Western Han Dynasty and completely replaced the long sword in the late Eastern Han Dynasty. During the Three Kingdoms period, almost every soldier had a ring-headed knife, and the ring-head knife became an important indicator of military strength.

"Taiping Yulan Pu Yuan Biography" mentioned that Zhuge Liang in the Three Kingdoms had ordered "Pu Yuan" this artificial knife, Pu Yuan started work in the sloping valley, in order to make a good knife, but also specially designated to use the Shu River water to quench the blade, the three thousand knives made are very sophisticated, known as the "magic knife". Liang Tao Hongjing of the Southern Dynasty described in the "Sword Record" that Sun Quan made ten swords and ten thousand swords in the fifth year of Huangwu (226 years), from which it can be seen that the sword has become a weapon for playing at this time, and the sword is a weapon for soldiers to fight.

After the Three Kingdoms, the Huanshou knife became a classic and legend that spanned nearly 300 years until the middle of the Tang Dynasty. Ring-headed, narrow-body, long-bladed, and straight-backed, this series of characteristic ring-headed knives played a leading role in the most brilliant millennium of Chinese martial arts.

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Zhang Jiashi did not think of directly making the head knife as a standard weapon, but in terms of the current situation, the head knife is a high-quality weapon like the Mo knife, and now is not the time to popularize this weapon, Zhang Shixin knows this better. [To be continued.] ]