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    1871: A Manchu soldier with his bow and arrow. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

    Western European armies gave up bows and arrows hundreds of years ago, but they remained in use in China into the 1800s—even though the Chinese had beaten the West to the development of guns. Why?

    A physicist at Australia’s University of Queensland offers a partial answer: Asian craftsmen created a bow whose physical properties were so impressive that they continued to offer advantages over slow-loading guns, despite guns’ greater power.


    The key to the Central Asian bow, writes Timo Nieminen—reader-friendly summary here—was its composite structure. The side facing the archer was crafted of horn (which can endure tremendous compression), while the side facing the target was a glue-and-sinew composite (which can endure the tension caused by flex). A central portion of wood joined the two sides.

    The bows were costly to produce—it might take a year for the glue-sinew composite to dry, by some reports—and they didn’t travel well: They couldn’t endure Western European humidity, for example.

    The brilliant construction allowed the creation of bows that were simultaneously more powerful and less unwieldy than Western bows. Chinese craftsmen (and Mongol weapon-fashioners, too) could vary the length of the bows depending on whether the goal was distance, accuracy, or armor-piercing potency. In the arms race against gunmakers, they held their own for an astonishingly long time.

    –Christopher Shea


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