Gunpowder Artillery in The Middle Ages - Early Use in China and East Asia

Early Use in China and East Asia

Part of a series on
Cannon
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  • Artillery in the Song Dynasty
  • Artillery in the Middle Ages
  • Naval artillery in the Age of Sail
  • Field artillery in the US Civil War
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For more details on this topic, see History of gunpowder. See also: Technology of Song Dynasty

The first documented battlefield use of gunpowder artillery took place on January 28, 1132, when Song General Han Shizhong used huochong to capture a city in Fujian. The world's earliest known cannon, dated 1282, was found in Mongol-held Manchuria. The first known illustration of a cannon is dated to 1326. In his 1341 poem, The Iron Cannon Affair, one of the first accounts of the use of gunpowder artillery in China, Xian Zhang wrote that a cannonball fired from an eruptor could "pierce the heart or belly when it strikes a man or horse, and can even transfix several persons at once."

Read more about this topic:  Gunpowder Artillery In The Middle Ages

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