Last time, I mentioned that the "Qi Army" used the "Mandarin Duck Array" to deal with the "Mongolian cavalry" against the "Japanese Invaders", and by expanding the "mixed brigade", it made it much more powerful!

The "Qi Family Knife" is actually not the first combat knife equipped by the "Qi Family Army", but it is only the most suitable for the "Mandarin Duck Array". The "eighteen kinds of weapons" mentioned in ancient China are knives, guns, swords, halberds, axes, axes, hooks, forks, hammers, sticks, lances, sticks, whips, maces, hammers, grasps, crutches, and meteor hammers. Although bows, shields, and lock holsters are occasionally counted, they are usually taken out differently, and the word "sword" is ranked first, indicating that the "sword" has an important place in battle.

Among the "knives" that have survived in history, the most common is the military war knives of the Ming and Qing dynasties. Among them, the more typical is the "Qi Family's Army" knife that has been passed down through the Ming and Qing dynasties, that is, a kind of straight scimitar with a short handle and a slender and narrow body with a slight arc at the tail of the blade with one hand.

The Ming Dynasty general Qi Jiguang once mentioned in his "New Book of Ji Xiao" that "the long knife was introduced from the Japanese Kou", but there is no record that the design of the "waist knife" was influenced by the "Japanese knife" in the "Practical Record of Military Training" and the later "Wubei Zhi", because the original shape of the "Japanese knife" is the "Tang straight knife" with a two-handed blade with a slight arc.

The "waist knife" book shows a narrow body and curved blade, not a "lancet" but a "goose feather knife". Qi Jiguang's other works and the historical books of the Ming Dynasty have not found the word "Qi family knife", or it is said to be "imitation of the Japanese waist knife", after all, although the "Japanese saber" is very powerful, it is not invulnerable.

According to Qi Jiguang's own statement, "the waist knife is sharp without a shoulder, and it is especially sharp." This shows that it is very different from the "Japanese knife" with the spine pickaxe to make the blade and the knife tip with the cutting first; Secondly, the "waist knife" is used with one hand and does not belong to the list of "two-handed knives"; Thirdly, the "waist knife" developed into the main melee weapon of the cavalry of the Ming Dynasty in the later period.

However, the "Japanese sword" during the Ming Dynasty was not suitable for cavalry warfare, but mainly for infantry combat. Therefore, it can be seen that the so-called "Qi's imitation of the 'Japanese waist knife' to fight the 'Japanese long knife' for the 'waist knife'" and other sayings should be speculated by future generations, although the "Japanese knife" can easily cut off the Ming Dynasty "saber", but that is a matter of craftsmanship, not whether the knife is used smoothly, after all, the Ming Dynasty during the "firearms" was widely popularized, so that the court and local officials attached importance to the "knife" declined.

Because the Ming army relied too much on "firearms" and gradually despised "cold weapons" in combat, the Ming army suffered a great loss when it came into close contact with the enemy. Fortunately, the emergence of the "Mandarin Duck Array" changed the situation that the Ming army was "difficult to catch with short weapons and not quick with long weapons" when dealing with the Japanese long knives, so that the Ming army knew itself and knew the enemy, and was invincible in a hundred battles.

But the reason is that the "combination fist" of long and short weapons in coordination restricts the skills and abilities of the long sword, and it is not that the "waist knife" of the Qi family army is sharper and tougher than the "Japanese knife", on the contrary, in the two slashes, the knife of the Qi family army will also be cut off on the spot by the Japanese sword, but the team is not afraid.

As a result, some people think that the "Qi family knife" adopts the so-called "result of learning from the 'steel-clad steel method' of the self-Japanese knife" that is widely spread by later generations, but it is simply nonsense.

Of course, there is another popular saying that perhaps Qi Jiguang changed the "imitation waist knife" to "the handle is bent down" to facilitate one-handed holding. But in fact, the "Yuan-style waist knife" before the anti-Japanese war, whether it is the "Yanling knife" or the "lancet", its handle has already been bent downward, and the waist knife illustrated in Qi Jiguang's two works and Mao Yuanyi's book has most of its handles curved, but it is a bit like the handle style of the "Japanese Japanese sword".

However, it is difficult to deny that many "waist knives" in the late Ming Dynasty can be seen to be influenced by "Japanese knives", after all, this is one of the main trends in the development and evolution of "Ming knives". But objectively speaking, this influence or evolution is a long-term process, beginning in the early Ming Dynasty or even earlier, and reaching its peak in the late Ming Dynasty. This is completely unnecessary, and it should not be attributed to Qi Jiguang's merits or achievements based on personal preferences or hopes.

As for the term "Qi family knife", if it really existed at that time, it was only regarded as the name of the "Qi family military knife", and its shape was not much different from the "waist knife" of other Ming army troops at that time, and it did not specifically refer to the "imitation of the waist knife", after all, cold weapons were gradually replaced by "firearms".

At the same time, the word "Qi family knife" is also closer to describing the "knife technique" used by the "Qi family army" in conjunction with the "rattan brand". Therefore, it can be seen from Qi Jiguang's use and equipment of the "waist knife" at different stages that the knife and other weapons must evolve accordingly with the needs of the war.

When a war develops to a certain stage and scale, its victory or defeat does not depend only on the level of a certain weapon, and likewise no weapon can be universal or invulnerable, unless history develops to later generations, and there is a super-large-scale and destructive power such as "thermonuclear weapons".

The same is true of knives, different knives have special uses, one-handed waist knives directly against two-handed Japanese knives are naturally more losses and fewer wins, and under the protection of the wolf whisk made of moso bamboo and rattan can also kill the Japanese and make meritorious deeds.

All of this comes from the "Mandarin Duck Array" of the "Qi Family Army", and as the designer of this array, General Qi Jiguang is also indispensable. Therefore, under his efforts and influence, the use of Chinese waist knives and their status in warfare reached another peak in the era of cold weapons after the Tang Dynasty.

Although the "Japanese waist knife" is deeply related to the "Japanese knife", it is also quite different. From the point of view of forging structure, the "Japanese waist knife" is mostly a steel embedded structure with a soft blade and a hard body, which is different from the steel structure of the "Japanese knife" that is the outside and soft on the inside;

From the perspective of heat treatment and quenching, the principle that iron cannot be quenched is used, and the overall heating does not need to be like the soil quenching blade of the sword, and the process is frugal, but the effect is the same; From the perspective of the combination of stalks and stems, the traditional tail riveting fixation method is used instead of the eye nail fixing method.

From the point of view of wearing method, the "double hoop loop suspension method" is used instead of the belt co-insertion method. Therefore, from the exterior, it is a traditional Chinese sword decoration rather than a Japanese sword decoration. There are two main materials for the knife of the "Qi Family Knife", one is iron and the other is copper. There are three common types of handle shapes: square, four-petal melon, and eggplant with a bent handle.

"Square" is the most common type of equipment, because the parts on the handle of the knife mainly have a small folded edge oval blade, the front of the blade is oval, and there is a narrow and upright edge to the blade, some of which are vertical, and some of which are slightly outward. Of the two parts on the shank, the "tiger's mouth" part is called the "rim", which is rectangular in cross-section and has a trapezoidal shape on the side. The blade tail part is a rectangle similar to a fan, so it is called the "knife head".

There is a round hole near the tail of the stem, and this hole is worn with a bracelet. One of the functions of the bracelet is to decorate the beauty, and the other effect is to wrap the rope around the hand, so that the knife is not easy to get rid of in actual use, and the knife stem is mostly a square "flat stem".

The wood of the handle is generally cork, made into a rectangular shape, hollowed out in the middle to let the "knife stem" pass through the wooden handle, and the tail of the knife stem is riveted to the tail of the knife hand. There is a kind of block in the "four-petal melon type", which is commonly known as "papaya block". The front of the block is a four-petal melon shape, and such a block is also divided into two types: along and flat. The height of the vertical edge is very low, only 5-8 mm, which is small and delicate, and the age of this equipment is generally in the late Ming Dynasty.

Some of the "flat hands" are flat, with a larger thickness in the middle and thinner edges, and are generally iron. Some flat blocks have a circle of piping on the outer edge, and the piping with complex processes will be carved method. This type of block is older and often appears in the early Ming Dynasty, similar to the sword style of the Song and Yuan dynasties.

The edge under this kind of stop is generally elliptical in shape, and the cross-section of the knife head is also elliptical. Such handles also have empty hand ropes, and the knife stems are mostly square flat stems. The structure of the "undercurved eggplant" is special because the head of the knife is a curved iron sheet as a riveted gasket. The arc-shaped iron sheet wraps the second half of the handle, the overall handle is like a cloud head rolled down, there is a hand rope hole in the middle of the cloud head, and the knife handle is narrowed at the edge, and the edge is mostly oval.

The "knife block" is mostly a four-petal melon-shaped block, mostly iron, so that the knife stem is mostly a narrowed rat tail stem, and the hand rope is empty on the wooden handle, not through the iron stem. The parts of the iron suit are generally wrong silver, and there are many kinds of ornaments, such as the wrong silver dragon, rice grid, 10,000 character grid, sea water cliff and so on. In contrast, the copper costumes are mostly gilded, and some copper costumes are also made of high-relief styles.

"Blade forging" was in an important historical stage during the Ming Dynasty. During this period, the "Chinese sword" not only maintained the traditional Chinese forging techniques, but also began to learn the more complex forging methods of West Asia and Japan. Therefore, the forging technology of this period was in the era of great convergence.

The forging of "Qijia knife" is generally divided into two types, one is the type with obvious pattern effect, and the other is the type with fine forging without pattern. In both types of forging, the cutting edge is handled by clamping the blade with steel, and the length of the forged blade varies from 680 to 780 mm.

The forging "Qijia knife" with obvious patterns is mostly in Shanxi and Hebei, and the pattern form has many lines such as "flowing water" and "rotary welding", indicating that its forging technology is mostly from West Asia, imitating the "Damascus scimitar". The other pattern is not obvious, but the fine grain is irregular, so the knife body is green and white.

These two types of forging methods are in line with Qi Jiguang's requirements of "iron should be smelted more, and pure steel should be used for the blade", using "100 steel" as the blade and pure steel as the blade, so as to achieve the overall rigidity and softness. Judging from the "Qi family sword" preserved in later generations, there are almost no knives made using the Japanese forging method.

The most important feature of the Japanese sword forging method is that "soft iron is used as the core of the sword, and the outer blade steel is used". Its forging method is complex and has good performance, but the cost is too high. Because the Yuan Dynasty monopolized the Song Dynasty's "steel knife" technology, the Ming Dynasty could only use the "cutting edge and steel" forging method to simply deal with the problem of both rigidity and softness.

"Qijia knife" borrows from the posture of the Japanese sword, and the overall style is changed from the past, and the knife posture starts from a foot on the handle to form an arc, which is called "anti" by people.

Of course, some "Qijia knives" are relatively straight, so their "anti" is relatively small, and the "anti" of some knives is relatively large, which should be related to the different scales grasped by craftsmen in different regions in the production process. The blade is wider near the stopper, usually 28-35 mm, and begins to narrow overall at the beginning of the "reverse", and when it reaches the tip of the knife, some blades are only 20-25 mm, which is significantly narrower. However, the arc of Daoshen You shows that the knife body posture is smooth.

The "anti" of the "Qi family knife" is different from the "anti" of the "Japanese knife", because the arc of the "Qi family knife" can be regarded as a section intercepted on a large arc. Such a knife posture will exert the greatest lethal effect in the process of slashing and cutting.

The "Japanese sword" is relatively straight by the tip of the knife, because of the need for "stabbing" in Japanese sword techniques. Among the "Qi family knives", there are "flat made" and "pickaxe made". The type of "flat" in "Qijia Knife" is not that there is no "pickaxe line" at all, but that the "pickaxe line" is relatively flat, but it is also slightly curved and curved.

This should be the craftsmen in the Ming army camp to borrow the style of Japanese swords to cast sabers, and at the same time, combined with their own characteristics to make adjustments, because the Ming army did not pay attention to the grinding of the knife body like the Japanese Kou, but paid more attention to the overall efficacy and manufacturing cost. The overall strength of this type of knife is not bad, even if it is still possible to be bullied and cut off when slashing with the "Japanese knife", but it is also easy to use, and it is very suitable for borrowing the "Mandarin Duck Array" to beat the opponent.

For this reason, Qi Jiguang, Yu Dayou and other famous anti-Japanese generals have specially compiled the "knife method" of this kind of war knife. Even, in the later stage of the development of the "Qi Family Knife", there was also a "blood groove" on the knife body, which was conducive to bleeding after stabbing into the enemy's body and increasing the lethality. Therefore, the knife type was still used in the early Qing Dynasty.

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