How did China invent gunpowder but it was the European nations that went out and “conquered the world using firearms”?
11.06.2025 08:05
Because gunpowder by itself is not that strong.
Second, you don’t need that much training. It takes years, almost a decade, to train a good bowman. It takes a few month to train a good gunman.
An hand canon. The idea is easy on paper, you bring it, load it with powder and then pellet, approach the enemy and fire.
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On practice? It wasn’t great.
They didn’t see gun as an incredibly powerful weapon. In fact, bow was still seen better than gun up to the 17th century. So 900 years after the first hand canons.
So, were these weapons empty of any qualities?
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Ok, let me explain. When the gunpowder was first used, it looked like that
It took 900 years of development to come to that, and bow still had the advantage
Not really useful, is it? Of course today we know their potential. But no chinese emperor will spend centuries of investing in hand canon because “one day it could be useful”. This is why hand canon and proto black powder weapon were more like gadget. At best very specialized weapon to use for naval battle (like the firespear), compensate a lack of men (like the first powder-based balista) or to break formations like the canon above. You don’t need 200.000 of them.
It’s fucking slow. a bowman could shoot 6 arrow per minute. This? It’s gonna take at least 2 minute to reload. You shoot one time, the guy in front of you shoot 12 times, who do you think will win?
So, with a gun, as long you have the industry and the men, you can litteraly raise big armies. And THIS is what interested European.
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You can be part of these casualties. Yeah… cause your weapon can also explode in your end.
This part was pretty nice, because European armies were typically about a few nobles, trained knights and a big bunch of conscripts and mercenaries. Having a range weapon not requiring a lot of training was a pretty big bonus. This is also the reason of why the crossbow became popular.
The range is stupidly low. You have to be at 10–20 meter to have an effect. A mongol bow can shot at 500m range max. Let’s say you can advance at 5km/H (cause you now it’s heavy), you will take 5 min to cover the distance. 5 min is enough to shoot 30 arrows at you. How many casualities do you hope to do with a shot? Not 30. And because it’s extremely visible and slow to reload, you won’t get a second chance.
With time improvement in technology made the guns more and more interesting and ended burying the bow.
So, why didn’t chinese use gun to conquer the world (or at least improve their army) ? Because they didn’t invest in it. Why they didn’t invest in it? Because their lack of tech and industry made gun a bad investment. And not being psychic, they couldn’t see the potential these weapon could reach 1000 years later.
Edit: i don’t mean you can’t produce a lot of them, i mean you can’t industrialize the process. Of course if you bring 10.000 specialized artisan you going to produce a lot of bow.
But with gun, you could turn a bunch of conscript into armies of dozens of thousands of men. Not with bows. And with 20.000 gunmen, you can easily crush 2000 bowmen.
Casualties aren’t garanted. Pellets are great but their power of penetration is pretty low. So if the guys in front of you have a good armor, it won’t do s…
It’s heavy so it’s an hell to transport. Logistic is one of the main key in war, so obviously having individual weapon weighing 20kg and requiring tons of powder and amunition is not great.
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Well not really, they had 2 big qualities. And this is what saved them
First, their production can be industrialized. You can mass produce powder, you can mass produce canon, you can mass produce amnution. You can’t mass produce bows and arrows