Chinese (or other country) sai/parrying weapon

[estcrh]

Originally Posted by Shakethetrees

I've been struggling with this one for a long time.

It's entirely hand wrought iron and I would have no problem assigning an 18th/19th century date.

I'm sure the grip was wrapped at one time.

Any information y'all have will be appreciated, nationality, an accurate name for it, etc.

I suspect it's a KungFu or other discipline weapon, but I'm open to suggestions.

Real antique sai are quite rare, there are only a few images available online, from what I have read and seen your sai is not Chinese, it looks like an Okinawan sai, the antique Chinese sai like weapons that I have seen looked different then this. I have uploaded a few images of antique sai, from left to right, two Okinawan sai found in Japan with wrapped hilts and the smaller sai with no wrapping came from Indonesia, your sai has some similar traits to the ones I posted.

In Indonesia the sai seem to have been more for martial arts use, in Okinawa they had more of a weapons type use. Okinawa was under Japanese control for several hundred years and the Japanese weapon known as the jutte sometimes took the form of a sai, I have included an image of two Japanese sai jutte.

The bottom image is a quote from"The Secret Royal Martial Arts of Ryukyu"
by Kanenori Sakon Matsuo, which discusses the use of the sai in Okinawa.