Quote:
Originally Posted by Lee
My favorite from the start, the longest, at bottom in the group images, appears to be a yànmáodāo (goose quill saber) by curvature or a yútóudāo (fish head saber) by profile with a concave back false edge from the rise on the back.
I’ll appreciate any further insights members may wish to provide.
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This bottom one is my favorite as well. The blade looks like one of my polish jobs, probably done in the last couple decades (after doing so many of these things, memory gets fuzzy as to whose sword it was
) The grip wrap is new, it looks like the work done by a guy here is southern CA who's very good from a technical standpoint but he didn't have the sources in China to get the authentically-woven stuff that Peter Dekker has access to; what you see looks like a close nylon facsimile in terms of width and thickness.
The iron fittings, heavily corroded, appear en suite and most likely original to the saber, which was probably carried by a lower-echelon field officer. A lot of these old rusty iron fittings were once decorated with silver koftgari, but the corrosion pretty much killed it off (iron and silver are an unstable combo anyway, the reason that Indian and "Islamic" weapons are more often seen with better-preserved gold than silver koftgari on hilts). The profile and style of the scabbard is correct.
This is a nice example of a Qing military saber, I would estimate its date to be mid-18th to the turn of the 19th. You see the same pattern depicted in Qianlong-era military portraits and battle scenes, the most accurately-rendered ones based on sketches by Jesuit missionaries who sometimes accompanied the campaigns as documentarians. It is also illustrated in Fr Joseph Amiot's (very rare) book on all things China, his chapter on military affairs even quotes from Qing production manuals regarding the materials and manufacture of army equipment.
The regulation styles changed in the 19th cent., favoring brass for most types, with bulbous pommels, oval-section sheath and grip, and rounded scabbard chapes.