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[IanB]

Piers,

Your three-barreled Chinese gun may in fact be Korean. I bought one for the Royal Armouries collection that had belonged to a previous curator. It had appeared in several gun books as an example of a very early Chinese firearm. Since I could not attend the sale it was a telephone bid that won it, together with a fabulous Turkish bullet mould and other oddments. When it arrived, the shock! It was only about 8" long including the socket.

 

I then found an illustration of such a gun, on a short stick, being carried by a Korean horseman. Apparently the small guns were used for signalling.

 

Ian

[Bugyotsuji]

Piers,

Your three-barreled Chinese gun may in fact be Korean. I bought one for the Royal Armouries collection that had belonged to a previous curator. It had appeared in several gun books as an example of a very early Chinese firearm. Since I could not attend the sale it was a telephone bid that won it, together with a fabulous Turkish bullet mould and other oddments. When it arrived, the shock! It was only about 8" long including the socket.

 

I then found an illustration of such a gun, on a short stick, being carried by a Korean horseman. Apparently the small guns were used for signalling.

 

Ian

 

Ian, what you say is fascinating and I have to admit that I hadn't considered the possibility. Mine is about 38 cm in overall length, (1'3", 15 inches). The barrels are 14 cm or 4.5 inches long, and about 1.5 or 1.6 cm in calibre. Each has its own touch-hole at the base of the tube. I'm afraid it's very rusty and crumbling in my hands as I measure it now.

 

Such a short barrel could not have been very accurate, and signalling makes as much sense as anything else. In fact the very earliest Chinese single tubes were called something that means wolfsmoke, Noroshi 狼煙 (beacons to scare off wild animals?) so they were as much firework receptacles as tubes for propelling an object.

 

This gun was sold to me by a Chinese stall-holder in Japan some years ago.

 

I phoned one of the top experts on guns in Japan and told him about it. He wrote me a warning letter saying that I shouldn't publish anything. He said it was either a fake (enclosing some photos of modern ones that are made to look old, and then flogged to tourists in Beijing. Pretty obviously fake they were.) or it was genuine.

 

If the latter, then it may well be a Chinese cultural relic and as such the trader could be shot for smuggling it out of China. (If indeed that is what he had done.) The Mongols used to clear the battlefield of anything metal, to preserve weapons secrets? for reuse? or for melting and recasting I heard, so this kind of practice may explain why there are very few extant. One of the barrels was blocked with a rock-hard blackish substance and after some experimentation I managed to scrape quite a bit of weak fizzly gunpowder out of it which I kept in a film case.

 

I also have some Chinese manuscript illustrations showing a chappie on horseback carrying one of these as though to shoot it forwards, with a taper? in one hand for the touch-holes; the explanantion says that once the three barrels are discharged it can be used as a club, or reversed and used as a spear. I don't know how reliable the picture is, or the explanation, and although the gun looks similar it's not exactly the same. Can you show your picture, Ian? I'll see if I can post what I have.

[Justin]

Hi Piers,

 

Thanks for your feedback.

 

I agree that my teppo is probably from around 1820-1850. The caliber is 2.5 monme (12 mm). The total size of the gun is 136.0cm and the barrel is 102.2cm. It has an outside spring geki lock with five adjustment holes. The barrel is octagonal with a slightly flared muzzle. The barrel thickness at the breech end is 2.7cm and 2.3cm at the muzzle end. The front sight is a triangle shape and the rear sight is a channeled with holes for an attachment.

 

I would post some more photos, but a friend has it at the moment (doing research into kunitomo teppo).

 

It certainly has the feelng of a personal or family gun that may have been used for hunting or something similiar. A bit too small caliber and slender for use by the ashigaru in warfare.

 

Regards

Justin

[Bugyotsuji]

Thanks for the supporting info, Justin. You may be right about a family or hunting gun, or even one for target practice. Many of the Awa guns, 阿波筒

Awazutsu are castle or ships' 狭間筒 Hazamazutsu loophole/eyehole guns, long in barrel, but only about 10-12 mm in bore, and designed for the Daimyo's target pratice days and sniping. Awazutsu usually have the attachment rear sight (often with the folding/sliding extension missing) which supports the idea that your gun was designed for accuracy.

 

I have a Kunitomo 馬上筒 bajouzutsu matchlock pistol, by the way, which I suspect is relatively old, possibly even Pre-Edo, from the first 50 years of gun manufacture in Japan. It too has a hallmark in the lock brassware. I fire it regularly at displays.

[Bugyotsuji]

Piers,

Your three-barreled Chinese gun may in fact be Korean. I bought one for the Royal Armouries collection that had belonged to a previous curator. It had appeared in several gun books as an example of a very early Chinese firearm. Since I could not attend the sale it was a telephone bid that won it, together with a fabulous Turkish bullet mould and other oddments. When it arrived, the shock! It was only about 8" long including the socket.

 

I then found an illustration of such a gun, on a short stick, being carried by a Korean horseman. Apparently the small guns were used for signalling.

 

Ian

 

Visiting Tanegashima the other day, Ian, we popped into the local museum in Nishi-No-Omote Town, the centre of island life. They have a selection of the earliest known guns in there, including a three-barrelled gun like the ones illustrated earlier in this thread. Interestingly, the descriptions in English and Japanese differed on one vital point. The English card simply said 'Korean'. The Japanese card alongside said, 'Introduced into Japan, through Korea, but originally Chinese'. Just goes to show we should stay on our toes!

[IanB]

Piers et al,

I have recently been putting down my researches on the origins of Japanese guns (something I have been looking into for about 20 years) in a little introductory book that the Royal Armouries may or may not publish in due course. As is usual, the story is rather more complex than is generally assumed. What triggered my interest was the usual tale that the Portuguese introduced the gun to Tanegashima in 1543 ... but Japanese guns are totally unlike anything used in Europe. The snapping matchlock mechanism was known in Germany but it wasn't exactly popular elsewhere. There was supposed to be a diagram of such a mechanism in a manuscript written during the 1480's by a gunner called Metz who worked for the Palatinate of the Rhine, but I am certain it isn't a gun lock. I think it is a crossbow lock of some kind but there do not seem to be any surviving parallels. So, we have a gun appearing in Japan with a German mechanism carried by the Portuguese who didn't use that kind of gun in Europe. The answer lay in Needham (see previous comment) who states that the Portuguese conquered Goa and put the craftsmen in the arsenal there to work making guns under German overseers. In other words what the Portuguese carried to Japan and elsewhere in Asia had an Indian/German pedigree.

The next clue is a pair of guns preserved in the Tokugawa Art Museum, Nagoya (see 'Military Accessories of a Daimyo House' pages 66 and 67). These are clearly not Japanese despite the fact that one has an aoi kamon on the pan cover. One has a rather odd 'Virgin and Child' in silver koftgari on the barrel, the other scrolling koftgari folliage. The locks are retained in the stock by screws passing through from the left side, a feature retained by Japanese made guns produced in Tanegashima. There are other minor differences from later Japanese guns, such as the shape of the lockplates, triggers and sights, but they are really only cosmetic differences. I am sure these are Goan guns of the type introduced by the Portuguese. Interestingly they have the two different lock mechanisms, both used by the Japanese later - one with an external spring and one with a coiled internal spring. One also has a stock that is a precursor to the usual Japanese stock shape. What the Japanese seem to have done is take guns like these as a model and modified them for Japanese mass production methods - by eliminating the screws and other minor simplifications.

So where do the Chinese come into the frame? Needham suggests that the later Chinese guns derive from the same source, either from the Portuguese, or the Japanese (Wako) with perhaps some ideas copied from the Turks. Undoubtedly there were earlier Chinese guns, including things like fire-lances and one with a crude form of serpentine (again see Needham). There are Japanese records that a Chinese gun was imported into Osaka in 1510, but we have no record in either Chinese or Japanese writings as to what it was like (although Hojo Ujitsuna is supposed to have had a few made and they may have been tested in the Battle of Udehara in 1548). Whatever it was like, it obviously had drawbacks since the Japanese didn't really take it up with any enthusiasm and it was superceeded both in China and Japan by the Goan model with its long iron barrel, sights and efficient lock mechanism.

Ian Bottomley

[Carlo Giuseppe Tacchini]

Ian, an old friend of mine, formerly curator of the Castello Sforzesco's Nihonto collection

spent years in trying to find the info you've most likely put in that book.

 

He was convinced of the Goa origins of first Tanegashima Teppo as he felt portugueses built

an armoury in Goa because of the need of re-melting cannons after a certain number of shots.

To return such valuable items to Portugal and back to Goa would have been a dangerous and

expensive trip, so the logical solution was to make it "in situ". then the production of Teppo

(and other metal items to be exported in China) would have been a logical addition, considering

also the availability of raw material in India.

He passed away before to get any evidence of this.

 

I would be extremely interested in purchasing your book and in any feedback you can give

about the matter.

 

Thanks for your work.