Chinese swords versus Japanese swords...

[Thomas Chen]

Hi guys
I have been away for a couple of months......Been busy with travelling and work.

I have just read the recent post on the Chinese swordsman versus the Japanese swordsman, which got into a good discussion concerning Chinese swords versus Japanese swords.

I have written an article on this topic:
http://chineseswords.freewebspace.com/contact.html



I have also posted some new pics of an antique Chinese jian at:
http://chineseswords.freewebspace.com/photo6.html


And other new pics of the laminated construction and heat-treatment effects of a Chinese jian at:
http://chineseswords.freewebspace.com/custom.html


My main website on Chinese swords at http://thomaschen.freewebspace.com is unavailable for access til 1st September. I would seriously recommend to everyone seeking info on the history and technical development of Chinese swords to visit this website next month.




Cheers
Thomas Chen

[Thomas Chen]

To the Top...

[neito]

this one is actually as reasonable topic, unlike the swordsman vs. swordsman one which was impossable.

[Cipher]

Originally posted by Thomas Chen
Hi guys
I have been away for a couple of months......Been busy with travelling and work.

I have just read the recent post on the Chinese swordsman versus the Japanese swordsman, which got into a good discussion concerning Chinese swords versus Japanese swords.

I have written an article on this topic:
http://chineseswords.freewebspace.com/contact.html



I have also posted some new pics of an antique Chinese jian at:
http://chineseswords.freewebspace.com/photo6.html


And other new pics of the laminated construction and heat-treatment effects of a Chinese jian at:
http://chineseswords.freewebspace.com/custom.html


My main website on Chinese swords at http://thomaschen.freewebspace.com is unavailable for access til 1st September. I would seriously recommend to everyone seeking info on the history and technical development of Chinese swords to visit this website next month.




Cheers
Thomas Chen

Thomas,

That was a good artical. It had some good info in it. The pics of the Jian are awsome. Is the Jian primarily a Tai Chi sword? Or are there other styles/warriors that used it as a primary weapon?

Something else I have alway been interested in is the Han Dynasty period. You would probably know about that. Like the Romance of the Three Kindoms book is based on. I have not read that book yet but I am planning on reading some time in the future. Is it hard to get ahold of? Are there any web sites selling it? I have had a hard time finding it.

Do you know, were the five tigers Zhoa Yun, Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, Ma Choa, and Huang ??? (Spelling) really to gether like the book says? I have read many excerpts and stories but not the whole book. I have also wondered what martial arts were predominante in that time, and what they tigers mainly the three main ones would study. Do you have any links with info on this time frame? If I remember it started around 120 A.D.

[Ford Prefect]

I'm not sure if you can compare the two unless there are still Chinese swordsmiths around. Then you can take a chinese and japanese weapon and put them through a series of strength/stress tests. You can't compare which sword was "better" by examining the outcomes of engagements. The Americans beat the British in the Revolutionary War. Were the farmer's muskets better? USSR got whooped by mujahdeen who had very inferior weaponry. Etc etc.

[Thomas Chen]

Ford Perfect
What I was saying in my article was that the one historical way which the Chinese blades and the Japanese blades had been tested against each other was through war, with massed armored exponents fighting in real world conditions, using their specific forms of swordsmanship, with realistic blade-to-blade contact. I am not advocating that the ones with the better-constructed sword would win, merely the fact that it was one of the most reliable ways of evaluating swords thru blade-to-blade contact. The sword that chips the most severely or breaks would, in my opinion, be considered the inferior one.

There are surviving traditional Chinese swordsmiths in Thailand and Taiwan. One of them by the name of Chen Tianyang alleged that he once cut his own personally-forged sword against an antique Japanese sword and found that it was equal if not superior. But then again, even if he could prove in this specific example that his Chinese sword was superior, there are a total of 300 Japanese swordsmiths in Japan who would probably be willing to challenge him to another test.....LOL. What I am saying is that on a historical basis, during the Chinese Qing Dynasty or Japanese Edo Period, there was no actual blade-to-blade contest and contact, so who can claim to be the ultimate authority and say that the Chinese swords of that time were inferior or superior to the Japanese swords...??




Hi Cipher

Generic-style Jians such the the ones showned above on my websites were used by Qing Dynasty Chinese martial artists of many different styles, including Taiji practitioners. There seems to be no specific Taiji jian historically used that was distinctive and different compared to the jian used by other schools/styles.


I would recommend this book at the Amazon.com link on Romance of the Three Kingdoms, translated by C.H. Brewitt-Taylor, costing US$20....

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0893469246/qid=1030027627/sr=2-2/ref=sr_2_2/002-3403882-4494410

The book's translation is pretty good.

From all the textual and archaelogical evidence that survive, the martial arts during the earlier Han Dynasty (206BC-220AD) and the Three Kingdoms Period (220AD-280AD)would include:

1) wrestling
2) empty-hand techniques (including bare hands against bladed weapons)
3) mounted horse archery and infantry archery
4) swordsmanship (using the jian and dao; archaeological and textual evidence have suggested and pinpointed that the Chinese had two-handed swordsmanship as early as the middle Warring States Period ie. 300BC, all the way down to the Three Kingdoms period)
5) spearmanship

As for the various protagonists warriors like Zhao Yun, Zhang Fei, Guan Yu, Cao Cao, Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang etc., the Ming Dynasty author Luo Guanzhong of this book had combined the oral story-telling traditions handed down from the Song Dynasty and the non-fictional history book "Records of the Three Kingdoms" to form the romanticised version "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", meant for the masses.

As such, many of the accounts in the book are fiction, though some are real historical fact. Cao Cao, for example, in my opinion was not as villainous as he was depicted to be in the Romance. Cao Cao's commentaries on Sun Tzu's Art of War still survive in more or less complete form, of which some are published in the Oxford University Press edition of Sun Tzu, translated by the late Samuel B. Griffith. Cao Cao's commentaries had been regarded by Chinese military scholars of the past 1000 over years to be the best ever on the Art of War.

[Ford Prefect]

Okay. Well in 1200's and early 1300's Japanese swordsmithing (as Samurai are concerned) was in its infancy. The outcome of blade-to-clade contact in those battles is negligible because of this. You'd need to do scientific testing rather than taking a couple smiths' word.

[Cipher]

Thanks for the link. I would like to buy that book. How much of the Romance book would you say is true compared to how much is fiction? Is it easy to tell what is real history and what is not?

The Art of War is another must read for me. What would you suggest is the best book translation for Art of War?

What about Mastering the Art of War by Zhuge Liang? I didn't know Zhuge Liang had a book that was around nowdays.

[Thomas Chen]

Ford Perfect

To be honest and unbiased, I am not taking the Chinese swordsmith's word for it. As for Japanese swords during the Mongol invasions, there are a number of Japanese swords of that period that have survived. But the trouble is that no Chinese sword of that period had surivived. So scientific testing for swords of this period is out. However, there was an article in which scientific testing was carried out on Chinese and Japanese swords in a Taiwanese magazine "Free China Review" in the mid 90s. One Chinese gentleman had promised to email it to me. Stay tuned.

I also wish to highlight that that the Japanese swordsmiths during the Mongol invasions had by then, accumulated a history of over 600 years of indigenous sword manufacture. They were not amateurs....

[Thomas Chen]

Cipher

The best readable layman edition of Sun Tzu, in my personal opinion, is the Oxford University Press version. This translation is not perfect, but you could read it in conjunction with the edition translated by Roger Ames, and published by Ballantine Books..

As for the Romance, one would have to study and compare all the historical events listed in the Romance and the "Records of the Three Kingdoms" to have a quantitative perception of how much was real and how much was fiction in the Romance, an academically laborious and intellectually-exhaustive task...


If I recall correctly, there are 2 books surviving today that claim their authorship from Zhuge Liang. One by the name of "The Book of the Mind" and the other "The General's Skills", or "xinshu" and "jiangyuan" respectively. I understand that these 2 books were considered apocryphal or of fabricated authorship by some contemporary academics and scholars. I am not sure whether the edition of Zhuge Liang's work (authored by Thomas Cleary and published by Shambala) belongs to the category of the above 2 books:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0877735131/qid=1030034136/sr=1-8/ref=sr_1_8/002-3403882-4494410#product-details

[Ford Prefect]

Too bad none of the Chinese swords survived. I'd like to see that article when you get it, so please post it. :) It's true the Japanese were well practiced in making swords by the above dates, but the samurai sword as we know it wasn't created until well after the Mongol invasions. I'm not saying that you're biased. I just figured you'd be talking about best vs best as the Japanese best was not represented in those battles. It really doesn't matter though as either one was a good weapon and could be used to deal death quite effeciently.