The great military strategist Sun Zi believed that sieges were to be avoided, a perspective that recurs frequently in his Art of War. “The best strategy,” he noted, “is to attack plans; the next best is to attack alliances; the next best is to attack armed forces; and the worst is to attack walls.” Scholars have suggested that, indeed, Chinese warfare relied considerably less on sieges than did western warfare. In fact, the situation is considerably more complicated. It does seem to be the case that in the late medieval period, when guns first appeared in Europe, European warmakers were far more fond of sieges than were Chinese. Europeans developed huge siege guns by 1380 or so, and those guns began blasting down walls quite regularly by the end of the 1300s; the Chinese, on the other hand, although perfectly capable of building large guns, generally did not do so: their guns remained relatively small, and they were aimed primarily at living beings (people, horses, elephants) rather than at the huge walls that defended Chinese towns and cities. But this difference has less to do with culture or military tradition than with wall-building practices. Before 1500, walls in western Europe tended to be thin and brittle relative to the massive and absorbent walls of China. Moreover, the early modern period saw significant changes on both sides of Eurasia. By the end of the 1400s, Europeans had begun building walls in many ways quite similar to those of China: thick, earthen-cored, slightly sloped. Yet the new European fortresses – the famous artillery fortresses – were also different. Thanks to their powerful bastions, Europe’s new fortresses were not just harder to breach, but also far more difficult to storm. Historians have suggested that the artillery fortress conferred on Europeans a significant advantage in siegecraft vis-à-vis the other peoples of the world, allowing them to defend far-flung bases with relatively few soldiers. Oddly, however, there has been very little detailed study of comparative siegecraft in the early modern period. It turns out that in the 1600s, Chinese armies began to use powerful cannons as never before to batter down their huge walls. These cannons were copied from European designs, and, intriguingly, many Chinese also adopted artillery fortress designs. Those designs, however, did not spread widely, and by examining two sieges in which the forces of China attacked western artillery fortresses, we can suggest that the argument for European fortification exceptionalism has some validity.

The Terracotta Army that protected the tomb of the Chinese emperor Qin Shihuang offers an evocative image of the power and organisation of the Qin armies who unified China through conquest in the third century BC. It also provides evidence for the craft production and administrative control that underpinned the Qin state. Bronze trigger mechanisms are all that remain of crossbows that once equipped certain kinds of warrior in the Terracotta Army. A metrical and spatial analysis of these triggers reveals that they were produced in batches and that these separate batches were thereafter possibly stored in an arsenal, but eventually were transported to the mausoleum to equip groups of terracotta crossbowmen in individual sectors of Pit 1. The trigger evidence for large-scale and highly organised production parallels that also documented for the manufacture of the bronze-tipped arrows and proposed for the terracotta figures themselves.

The Terracotta Army that protected the tomb of the Chinese emperor Qin Shihuang offers an evocative image of the power and organisation of the Qin armies who unified China through conquest in the third century BC. It also provides evidence for the craft production and administrative control that underpinned the Qin state. Bronze trigger mechanisms are all that remain of crossbows that once equipped certain kinds of warrior in the Terracotta Army. A metrical and spatial analysis of these triggers reveals that they were produced in batches and that these separate batches were thereafter possibly stored in an arsenal, but eventually were transported to the mausoleum to equip groups of terracotta crossbowmen in individual sectors of Pit 1. The trigger evidence for large-scale and highly organised production parallels that also documented for the manufacture of the bronze-tipped arrows and proposed for the terracotta figures themselves.

The Terracotta Army that protected the tomb of the Chinese emperor Qin Shihuang offers an evocative image of the power and organisation of the Qin armies who unified China through conquest in the third century BC. It also provides evidence for the craft production and administrative control that underpinned the Qin state. Bronze trigger mechanisms are all that remain of crossbows that once equipped certain kinds of warrior in the Terracotta Army. A metrical and spatial analysis of these triggers reveals that they were produced in batches and that these separate batches were thereafter possibly stored in an arsenal, but eventually were transported to the mausoleum to equip groups of terracotta crossbowmen in individual sectors of Pit 1. The trigger evidence for large-scale and highly organised production parallels that also documented for the manufacture of the bronze-tipped arrows and proposed for the terracotta figures themselves.

Both "Military Revolution" and Fiscal History framework believe the "West" has accomplished great progress in their military and fiscal ability during the early modern period, which are largely unique to the west. They then believe such lead to the rise of western power against the rest of the world, and the delineation between pre-modern vs modern period in human history. Many scholars then began to look at cases from the "rest" of the world, either to confirm or to deny that such progress was unique to the West. Early Modern China (from Song onwards) was one of these cases. In this research, I shall examine either/both Northern Song and Late Ming period, not only on their military and fiscal ability but more precisely whether they had the ability to wage war at an operation level. If such is true, then it predated such alleged invention by the west in the French revolution and might shine some light in explaining the military and economical divergence of Chinese and Western history by the time of Industrial Revolution.

Two 11-inch (28cm) muzzleloaders purchased for the defense of Xiamen (Amoy) in 1874 during China’s military standoff with Japan were the largest coastal guns in China at that time and one was dubbed ‘monster gun’ when it arrived in Shanghai. However, the real identity of these guns is shrouded in mystery and it is even not sure whether they were Blakely or Vavasseur guns. The story and technical details of these two guns can provide some insights into both the development of artillery technology in late nineteenth century Britain and the struggle for modernizing coastal defense in China.