This is not so! Once they have been exposed to how fast it can fire, the fun begins.
Other people who first fire one will do it slowly, thinking that it needs time to load the next bolt. You can load 6 to 7 bolts, and the firing mechanism is just "push forward and pull back". What I like about firing the miniature Chinese Repeating Crossbow is the sound and feel of the bolt leaving the chamber. Because of the rapid fire mechanism of the Chu-ke nu, it was used as the "first strike" defense in close combat situations. The warriors would line up and fire multiple bolts at riders on horseback as a fist strike. In China, the crossbow revolutionized the war. So even if an enemy were to be hit by a bolt, and not suffer a mortal wound from the bolt itself, the poison would work it's way into the bloodstream and inevitably end their life with a "slight delay". This rapid firing design is why it was so impressive.Įven though it has a short range, the owner of the weapon would dip the bolts into poison. Everyone seems to be impressed by it's mechanism and ease of firing. It was introduce to the Koreans in 1418, and was given the name "sunogung". The weapons were very common among the Manchurian troops, and can be seen in photographs from that era. You can see it spelled a couple of different ways or "Chu-ke nu" or "Chu-ko-nu", the first being correct. It was named after Zhuge because of his improvements. This new design was able to fire multiple arrows (bolts) in succession, was last used in mass formations which helped shape the China-Japan war of 1894. Online research shows that it originates to the 4th century.Ī very famous Chinese strategist, Zhuge Liang (226-481 AD) is believed to have "upgraded" an earlier design from a tomb dating 4th Century BC. This article appears in the Winter 2020 issue (Vol. Special Operations Command (Osprey Publishing, 2019). To compensate for the latter, crossbowmen generally tipped the bolt heads with poison.Ĭhris McNab is a military historian based in the United Kingdom. Its effective range (about 80 yards) was poor, and penetration was limited.
A chukonu could unleash 10 bolts in just 20 seconds (a standard crossbow’s top rate of fire was three or four bolts a minute), but there were substantial trade-offs. This ingeniously simple weapon figured in Asian warfare until the 19th century. The crossbowman then drove the handle forward, pushing the whole mechanism to the front to reengage the string for firing, as the next bolt took its place in the flight groove, ready to go.
CHINESE REPEATING CROSSBOW FOR SALE FULL
When drawn to the rear, the handle both cocked and, at the full extent of the draw, released the bowstring, firing the bolt that had dropped automatically into the flight groove. It featured a top-mounted magazine, in which multiple bolts were stacked, and a large operating handle. Yet they were slow and cumbersome to load, leaving those who wielded them vulnerable to attack.ĭeveloped in the second century BCE, the chukonu was intended to overcome this deficit.
Conventional crossbows, invented in China in the seventh century BCE, required far less training to master than standard bows and delivered immense armor-piercing power. The Chinese chukonu-a repeating crossbow-was a magazine-fed semiautomatic weapon, but one predating its firearm equivalents by millennia. The Ingeniously Simple but Deadly Chukonu Crossbow Close
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