Hand cannon

Unlike matchlock firearms it requires direct manual external ignition through a touch hole without any form of firing mechanism.

According to Liu, the weight of the cannon would have been too much for one person to hold, especially with just one arm, and points out that fire lances were being used a decade later at the Siege of De'an.

Cheng Dong believes that the figure depicted is actually a wind spirit letting air out of a bag rather than a cannon emitting a blast.

Stephen Haw also considered the possibility that the item in question was a bag of air but concludes that it is a cannon because it was grouped with other weapon-wielding sculptures.

According to the History of Song: "It is made from a large bamboo tube, and inside is stuffed a pellet wad (zǐkē 子窠).

Once the fire goes off it completely spews the rear pellet wad forth, and the sound is like a bomb that can be heard for five hundred or more paces.

From there it branched off into several different gunpowder weapons known as "eruptors" in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, with different functions such as the "filling-the-sky erupting tube" which spewed out poisonous gas and porcelain shards, the "hole-boring flying sand magic mist tube" (zuànxuéfēishāshénwùtǒng 鑽穴飛砂神霧筒) which spewed forth sand and poisonous chemicals into orifices, and the more conventional "phalanx-charging fire gourd" which shot out lead pellets.

In 1287 Yuan Jurchen troops deployed hand cannons in putting down a rebellion by the Mongol prince Nayan.

[13] The Nihon Kokujokushi, written around 1300, mentions huǒtǒng (fire tubes) at the Battle of Tsushima in 1274 and the second coastal assault led by Holdon in 1281.

[17] Other specimens also likely predate the Xanadu and Heilongjiang guns and have been traced as far back as the late Western Xia period (1214–1227), but these too lack inscriptions and era dates (see Wuwei bronze cannon).

[12] Li Ting chose gun-soldiers (chòngzú), concealing those who bore the huǒpào on their backs; then by night he crossed the river, moved upstream, and fired off (the weapons).

[33] Shihab al-Din Abu al-Abbas al-Qalqashandi described a metal cannon firing an iron ball between 1365 and 1376.

[36] In Southeast Asia Đại Việt soldiers were using hand cannons at the very latest by 1390 when they employed them in killing Champa king Che Bong Nga.

[42][43] The earliest surviving documentary evidence for the use of the hand cannon in the Islamic world are from several Arabic manuscripts dated to the 14th century.

[44] The historian Ahmad Y. al-Hassan argues that several 14th-century Arabic manuscripts, one of which was written by Shams al-Din Muhammad al-Ansari al-Dimashqi (1256–1327), report the use of hand cannons by Mamluk-Egyptian forces against the Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260.

[47][48] Iqtidar Alam Khan argues that it was the Mongols who introduced gunpowder to the Islamic world,[49] and believes cannons only reached Mamluk Egypt in the 1370s.

[26] However the term midfa, dated to textual sources from 1342 to 1352, cannot be proven to be true hand-guns or bombards, and contemporary accounts of a metal-barrel cannon in the Islamic world do not occur until 1365.

[55] Improvements in hand cannon and gunpowder technology—corned powder, shot ammunition, and development of the flash pan—led to the invention of the arquebus in late 15th-century Europe.