The Chinese annals give no support to the hypothesis that gunpowder was known in China in very early times. Currency was given to the popular legends about it by such writers as Father Gaubil, who declares that gunpowder had been in use for 1600 years when he wrote, and Father Amiot, who fully accepts a much earlier date. With reference to Koung-ming, who is said to have employed earth-thunder (ty-lei) about 200 A.D., Amiot says: (a) “Les auteurs qui parlent de Koung-ming ne le font pas l’inventeur de cette manière de nuire à l’ennemi. Ils disent, au contraire, qu’il l’avait puisée dans les ouvrages des anciens guerriers; ce qui est une preuve sans réplique que les Chinois connaissaient la poudre à tirer ... bien longtemps avant que cette connaissance fût parvenue en Europe.... (b) Les anciens Chinois employaient la poudre (chen-ho-yen), soit dans les combats, soit pour mettre le feu au camp des ennemis.... (c) Cette poudre (ny-foung-yo) a une vertue qui, ce me semble, pourrait être d’une très grande utileté dans nos armées; c’est que la fumée va également contre le vent.”[289] In (a) and (c) of these extracts the true note of legend is audibly sounded, and the tacit assumption that ty-lei was an explosive is to be noted. As to (b), Amiot was unwittingly describing some early incendiary similar to that of Marcus Græcus, No. 2: “Ignis quæ comburit domos inimicorum.” Such is Father Amiot’s “preuve sans réplique” that the Chinese possessed gunpowder in the times of the pre-adamite Sultans. It must be put aside; and with it must be laid the evidence of Fathers Maillac and Gaubil. First, their critical faculty became paralysed when dealing with Chinese history. Secondly, they evidently did not understand the difference between an explosive and an incendiary. Thirdly, without questioning their good faith, they are open to the charges brought against them by MM. Reinaud and Favé, when speaking of M. Quatremère’s dating Artillery in China at the thirteenth century: “(Il) ne s’est pas aperçu que PP. Mailla et Gaubil avaient traduits différement certains passages des Annales chinoises, et qu’ils y avaient même ajouté tantôt des expressions de leur cru, et tantôt des interpolations de la version tartare-mandchou, version qui date seulement d’un peu plus d’un siècle, et qui, par consequent, n’a aucune autorité.”[290]
Had the Chinese an explosive shell in 1232?
The following is a translation by M. Stanislas Julien of a passage in the Encyclopædia entitled Tung-Chien-Kang-Mu, relating to the siege of Pien-king (now Kai-fung-fu) in 1232, given by Reinaud and Favé in the Journal Asiatique, Oct. 1849: “A cette époque on faisait usage de ho-pao ou pao à feu, appelée Tchin-tien-louï, ou ‘tonnerre qui ébranle le ciel,’ On se servait pour cela d’un pot en fer que l’on remplissait de yo. A peine y avait-on mis le feu que le pao s’élevait, et que le feu éclatait de toute part. Son bruit ressemblait à celui du tonnerre, et s’étendait à plus de cent lis (i.e. thirty-three English miles); il pouvait répandre l’incendie sur une surface de plus d’un demi-arpent (i.e. about one-third of an acre).... Les Mongols construisirent avec les peaux de bœuf un couloir qui leur permit d’arriver jusqu’an pied des remparts. Ils se mirent à saper les murs, et y pratiquèrent des cavités, où l’on pouvait se loger sans avoir rien à craindre des hommes placés en haut. Un des assiégés proposa de suspendre à des chaînes de fer des pao à feu, et de les descendre le long du mur. Arrivés aux endroits qui étaient minés, les pao éclataient et mettaient en pièces les ennemis et les peaux de bœuf, au point même de ne pas en laisser de vestige.” There is another account of the shell in the Wu-pei-chi, published in 1621, but (as one gathers from Mr. Mayers[291]) it is so similar in the details that the two accounts cannot be taken as independent. They merely quote some common document or repeat some common tradition.
Like the Liber Ignium of Marcus Græcus, the Tung-Chien-Kang-Mu is not the work of one man or of one period. The original portions (the “Old Recipes” of Marcus) were written by Ssu-ma-kuang, 1019-86, and were named T’ung-Chien, or the “Mirror of History,” by the reigning Emperor. The book was brought up to date by Chu-hsi, 1130-1200, and was afterwards continued, with commentaries, by various writers, up to the seventeenth century. The above-quoted passage belongs to the commentators,[292] and was written by some one whose date, name, and authority for his statement are alike unknown to us; but it was presumably written long after the event it records.
We have seen in Julien’s translation what the encyclopædist actually says, but what meaning did he intend to convey by his words? Did he mean to say the shell exploded? The passage may be divided into two clauses: in the first he explains generally the action of the ho-pao, and in the second he gives a particular example of its use. In the first clause he says that “no sooner was a light applied to it than the fire burst forth on all sides” (le feu éclatait de toute part): in the second clause he says, “the pao burst forth” (les pao éclataient). But the effect produced by the shell shows that this latter phrase is simply an elliptical way of saying, “the fire of the mixture contained in the pao burst forth.” On this point Reinaud and Favé are clear: “Les pao à feu éclataient s’applique aux éclats de la flamme qui sortait par les ouvertures,”[293]—holes in the shell which were probably numerous. Mayers agrees: the pao were lowered into the excavations, “when the fire burst out from them, utterly destroying every fragment of the hides,” &c.[294] The Chinese writer was describing an incendiary, not an explosive. Gunpowder would have left in the hiding-place of the Mongols a tangled mass of charred human remains and scorched cowhide: only an incendiary could have destroyed its contents so that “not a vestige remained.” Father Gaubil and M. Berthelot acquiesce in this conclusion:[295] Herr von Eomocki dissents from it.[296]
There is nothing in the military history of China in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to lead us to suppose that the Chinese possessed an explosive during that period. In 1255 Prince Hulágu had 1000 Chinese arbalisters in his pay to work his incendiaries,[297] and it may be presumed that he would have learnt the secret of gunpowder from them if they had known it; but he possessed no explosive. Father Carpini, cir. 1250, states that when hard-pressed the Tartars had recourse to incendiaries, and Rashid ed-Din, in his history of Hulagu’s campaign of 1260, makes no allusion to explosives.[298] The Chinese had only reached the same stage as Marcus Græcus in 1257: in this year they had Roman candles.[299] During the siege of Siang-yang-fu, 1268-73, “Khubelai sent to his nephew Abaka, in Persia, for engineers skilled in making catapults, called mangonals[300] by Marco Polo. Two such engineers were sent.”[301] We have three different notices of this siege, Chinese, Persian, and Venetian, and “they all concur as to the employment of foreign engineers from the West,”[302] but none of them mentions the use of explosives by either side. “The Chinese at that period,” says Sir John Davis, “were as little acquainted with firearms as Europeans.”[303] When Chang-chi-ki’s fleet on the Kiang River was destroyed a few years afterwards by Atchu, it was by means of fire-arrows.[304] In a word, during the thirteenth century, the Chinese made a free use of various incendiaries already noticed in the chapters on the Greeks and Arabs; and they seem to have made no progress in the manufacture of their missiles during the course of the fourteenth.[305] Not until we reach the fifteenth century do we meet with gunpowder and cannon.
The Prince of Yen (afterwards the Emperor Yung Loh) is said to have been “defeated by firearms” at the battle of Tung Chang, 1401;[306] but whether these arms were furnished with incendiaries or explosives is doubtful. The first trustworthy account of the use of artillery in China is given in the Kai-yii-tsung-kao, published in 1790, by Chao I, a man of considerable ability, and an accomplished antiquarian. He states that in the beginning of Yung Loh’s reign, 1407, cannon were acquired by the Emperor and employed during his campaigns in Cochin China.[307] Whence came these cannon and their ammunition?
It is antecedently improbable that the Chinese either invented or manufactured them; for although the Chinese exhibited considerable intellectual power in some fields of investigation, they possessed little genius for mechanical or chemical inventions, and what mechanical ability they had was absorbed in other pursuits. When actually possessed of powder, they seem to have been incapable of making any improvement in its manufacture. “Si la poudre de Chine vaut mieux que la nôtre,” says Father Incarville, the ablest of the Jesuits I have consulted, “cela vien plutôt de la bonté des matières que du soin que les Chinois prennent de la faire bonne; ils la grainent très mal et ne savent pas la lisser.”[308] “Whatever their claims as inventors,” says another writer, “it is certain that the Chinese have made no progress in the art” (of making gunpowder).[309] Even their fireworks were no better than European fireworks. They did not employ stars, and their largest rockets had a length of only five inches, with an internal diameter of eight lines.[310]
There is no trustworthy evidence, so far as I am aware, to prove that the Chinese invented gunpowder. The statements of the Jesuits on this particular matter are worthless for reasons already given,[311] and the popular Chinese tradition is deprived of any little weight it might otherwise have had by the disavowal of the invention by sober Chinese historians. On the other hand, we possess a number of facts which point to the conclusion that the Chinese obtained their first gunpowder and firearms from the West.
(a) It has been already pointed out that the mangonals used at the siege of Siang-yang-fu, 1268-73, were of western origin, and were worked by western engineers.