Chinese Empire

The Imperial Chinese Army: Organisation, Weapons, and the Great Wall

For more than two thousand years, the imperial Chinese army was the largest standing military institution in the world. At its peak, the Han fielded more than a million soldiers on the northern frontier. The Song maintained a paid professional force of close to a million men, even though the dynasty controlled only a fraction of the territory of the Han. The Ming organised a hereditary military population of several million in the weisuo system. The Qing maintained a hybrid banner and Green Standard force of nearly a million men, plus a much larger reserve of registered banner households. Across these enormous institutions, certain patterns repeat: a centre–periphery tension between palace guards and regional armies, a recurring reliance on hereditary or quasi-hereditary soldier households, and a deep ambivalence about the social status of the soldier himself. This section examines the institution of the army from the inside — its organisation, its weapons, its fortifications, and the people who served in it — and complements the broader narrative in the Chinese military section and the survey of the history of imperial China.

The section has three parts. The first part surveys the great organisational systems: the Tang fubing (府兵) and the Wei, Suo, Hui, Ying structure of garrison administration, the Song professional army, the Ming weisuo (衛所) and Wei, Huo, Bing (衛、戶、兵) system, and the Qing Eight Banners. The second part surveys the weapons of the imperial Chinese soldier, from the crossbow and the halberd through the sword to the gunpowder weapons of late imperial China. The third part treats the Great Wall as a military institution. Two in-depth pieces, on army organisation and on the Great Wall as a military structure, go into these topics in greater depth.

Army Organisation: The Wei, Suo, Hui, Ying of the Tang

The most thoroughly documented army of the imperial period is that of the Tang dynasty (618–907), and for most of the Tang the army was organised in the fubing system established by the founding emperor Gaozu (r. 618–626) and consolidated under Taizong (r. 626–649). The fubing system divided the empire’s military households into roughly 600 fubing regiments of 800 to 1,200 men each, distributed across the empire and tied to specific prefectures. Each fubing regiment contained soldiers from a defined locality; in peacetime the men returned to their farms and trained for a few days a year; in wartime they were called up and marched to the frontier under their local officers. The broader pattern of army organisation is treated in the in-depth piece on army organisation, and the Chinese dynasties survey covers the political context.

The Wei, Suo, Hui, Ying (衛、隊、營、府) was a system of garrison administration that built on the fubing. Wei (衛) were large regional commands, each containing several suo (所) or smaller units, which in turn were organised into hui (隊) of roughly 100 men and ying (營) of 300 to 500 men. The Tang military was famous for its fubing militias, but for the actual conduct of frontier warfare, the dynasty increasingly relied on a parallel structure of professional jiedushi (節度使, regional military commissioners) with standing armies of their own, the so-called yamen troops (牙兵). The jiedushi system, treated in the section on Chinese government, was the source of the dynasty’s military power and the cause of its eventual collapse in the An Lushan Rebellion of 755–763, which our in-depth piece on the An Lushan Rebellion examines in detail.

Song: The Professional Army

The Song dynasty (960–1279) inherited the wreckage of the Tang and the jiedushi wars that followed, and resolved never to allow a general to control an army large enough to threaten the throne. The Song army was therefore divided into three components, all under firm civilian control: the central palace guard (禁軍, jìnjūn), the regional garrison armies (廂軍, xiāngjūn), and the irregular local militia (鄉兵, xiāngbīng). The central guard was by far the most prestigious and, on paper, the most numerous: by the reign of Emperor Shenzong (r. 1067–1085), the central guard had been expanded to a strength of roughly 800,000 men. The Song army is treated in in-depth piece on army organisation, and the broader military history of the Song in the Chinese dynasties survey. In practice, the central guard was a heavily bureaucratised force, organised into 22 armies, paid in cash, and trained in fixed regulations; it suffered from low morale, chronic corruption in the supply system, and a rigid caste division that prevented soldiers’ sons from taking the civil service examinations. By the late Northern Song, the army was a paper institution of nominally a million men, of whom perhaps a third were fit for service.

The Song compensated for the weakness of its army with technological superiority. The Song refined the use of the magnetic compass for navigation and a wide range of early gunpowder weapons, including the fire lance, the gunpowder bomb, and the rocket. The Song navy, built to fight the Jurchen Jin along the Yangzi, was the most powerful in East Asia, with paddle-wheel ships, watertight bulkhead compartments, and sternpost rudders. None of it could stop the dynasty from losing the northern capital Kaifeng to the Jurchen in 1127, and the Southern Song would lose the rest of the north to the Mongols by 1279. The Mongol conquest of the Song see in-depth piece, and the broader military history of the Song in the Chinese dynasties survey.

Ming: The Wei, Huo, Bing of the Weizuo System

The Ming dynasty (1368–1644) was founded by a former soldier and bandit, Zhu Yuanzhang, and the dynasty’s first act was to organise the army in a comprehensive new system. The weisuo (衛所, “guard and battalion”) system, modelled on the Tang fubing but more thoroughgoing, divided the empire into 17 weisuo headquarters in the capital region and a larger number of provincial weisuo, each of which contained several qianhusuo (千戶所, “thousand-household battalions”) and baihusuo (百戶所, “hundred-household battalions”). The whole system was, in theory, a single national registry of military households: each wei contained 5,600 soldiers, each qianhu 1,120, and each baihu 112. The total registered strength at the founding of the dynasty was about 1.2 million, divided among roughly 5,000 weisuo.

The wei, huo, bing (衛、戶、兵, “guard, household, soldier”) arrangement of the weisuo system meant that each wei (guard) was a territorial unit with a fixed complement of soldiers (bing) drawn from a fixed population of military households (huo). Each military household provided one soldier, who served for life and whose eldest son inherited the obligation. The system was a brilliant piece of statecraft: it provided a hereditary military caste, it gave the central government detailed knowledge of the location and status of every soldier in the empire, and it made military service a part of the natural order of things. By the late Ming, however, the system had decayed. Military households had been allowed to drift into civilian life; many had been wiped out by war, famine, and plague; the soldier’s lot had become so miserable that men fled the system by the tens of thousands. The court responded by hiring mercenaries (募兵, mùbīng) to fill the ranks, particularly along the Great Wall and in the provincial armies of the south, but the mercenaries were expensive and unreliable. The pattern of weisuo decay and mercenary replacement is examined in detail in our in-depth piece on army organisation.

Qing: The Eight Banners and the Green Standard Army

The Qing dynasty (1644–1912), the last imperial dynasty of China, maintained a military system inherited from the Manchu conquest. The Eight Banners (八旗) was a system of hereditary military households first organised by the Manchu chieftain Nurhaci in the late sixteenth century. Every Manchu (and every Mongol or Korean who entered the system) was enrolled in a banner, the banners were divided into companies of 300 men, and the banners were stationed in garrisons across the empire. The banners were a caste: bannermen did not engage in trade or agriculture, were supported by stipends of grain and silver, and could not intermarry with the commoner population. The banner system was the military backbone of the early Qing conquest, and banner garrisons in Beijing, Xi’an, Wuhan, Hangzhou, and Guangzhou served as the imperial muscle of the new dynasty.

The banners were supplemented from the start by a much larger force of Han Chinese soldiers, the Green Standard Army (綠營兵, lǜyíngbīng), so called from the colour of their banners. The Green Standard was a conventional force organised into ying (營) of varying size, recruited by conscription among the Han Chinese population and paid in cash. The Green Standard was more numerous than the banners (perhaps 600,000 men in the eighteenth century) but less prestigious, and was used for routine garrison duty, internal security, and the less prestigious campaigns. By the nineteenth century, both the banners and the Green Standard had decayed into hereditary stipendiaries incapable of serious campaigning, and the actual work of fighting was done by regional xibing (鄉兵, “militia”) armies raised by provincial gentry, the most famous of which was the Hunan Army of Zeng Guofan, which suppressed the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864). The xibing armies were the precursors of the warlord armies of the 1910s and 1920s, and the New Armies trained and equipped on European lines after 1895, which would eventually bring down the dynasty. The fall of imperial China tells the longer story.

The Soldier Class

The status of the soldier in Chinese society was always low. Confucian ideology, the foundation of imperial orthodoxy from the Han onward, ranked the scholar-official at the top, the farmer next, the artisan and merchant below, and the soldier not at all. The famous late-Tang couplet “Good iron is not used to make nails; good men are not used to make soldiers” (好鐵不打釘，好人不當兵) captured the social attitude perfectly. In practice, however, every dynasty needed soldiers, and most dynasties found ways to recruit them. The methods fell into a few broad categories: hereditary service in military households (the fubing, the weisuo, the banners), conscription of the male population, the hiring of mercenaries, the recruitment of frontier peoples, and the impressment of convicts and prisoners.

In the early Tang, the fubing militia system produced a genuine citizen-army, in which soldiers were also farmers, owned property, and had a recognised place in the rural social order. The fubing system broke down in the eighth century as the wars on the steppe grew longer and more expensive, and the dynasty turned to the fubing jian’er (府兵健兒), professional long-service soldiers, to fill the gap. The professional soldiers were paid better but had no place in the rural social order, and they became a separate military caste whose interests were often at odds with the central government.

Weapons of the Imperial Chinese Army

The Crossbow

The crossbow (弩, nǔ) was the signature Chinese weapon of the pre-imperial period and remained important for centuries. The mechanical advantage of a crossbow, in which the archer’s arm is replaced by a rigid stock and a set of levers, allowed a relatively untrained soldier to deliver a heavy bolt with great force and accuracy, and the killing range of a Warring States crossbow (300 metres) was twice that of a contemporary longbow. The Chinese developed a remarkable range of crossbow variants: the zhuge nu (諸葛弩, repeating crossbow), a lever-action weapon that could fire ten bolts in fifteen seconds; the bi sheng nu (臂張弩, arm-drawn crossbow); the gong niu nu (弓弩, heavy crossbow with a foot stirrup for cocking); and the lian nu (連弩, multi-bolt crossbow). Crossbows were mass-produced in state arsenals from the Qin onward, and the famous bronze crossbow trigger excavated from a Qin tomb is so refined that modern engineers have had to build replicas to understand its manufacture.

The crossbow’s role declined gradually through the imperial period. The Song retained a large crossbow corps, including the famous Shen Ce Jun (神策軍, Divine Strategy Army). The Ming used the crossbow on the Great Wall and in the southern campaigns against the Miao and other peoples. By the Qing, however, the crossbow had been almost entirely replaced by the matchlock musket. The history of Chinese weapons is part of the broader story of the Chinese economy and Chinese culture.

The Sword, the Spear, and the Halberd

The standard sidearm of the Chinese officer was the jian (劍, straight double-edged sword) in the earlier periods, the dao (刀, single-edged sabre) in the later. The Tang dao in particular was a chopping weapon of considerable power, used by Tang cavalry with devastating effect. The zhanmadao (斬馬刀, “horse-slaughtering sabre”) of the Song and later was a long-handled, heavy-bladed weapon used by infantry against cavalry. The basic infantry weapon was the mao (矛, spear), with the ji (戟, halberd) as a more specialised variant, used in the Warring States period particularly for chariot combat.

Gunpowder Weapons

The invention of gunpowder in the ninth century, attributed to Taoist alchemists, gave the Chinese a series of military advantages that lasted for centuries. By the late Tang, the fire lance (火槍, huǒqiāng) — a bamboo tube filled with gunpowder and shrapnel, attached to a pole — was a standard weapon. By the Song, true gunpowder bombs (火藥砲, huǒyàopào) were being thrown by trebuchet, and fire arrows (火箭, huǒjiàn) with gunpowder propellant were a standard weapon. The Song navy used gunpowder bombs and fire lances against the Jurchen Jin, and the dynasty’s shenjiying (神機營, Divine Engine Battalion) was a precursor of the modern elite firearm corps. The Ming fielded a wide range of gunpowder weapons, including the famous shenjiying of the Yongle Emperor, which operated as an elite firearm corps.

The gunpowder weapon that most affected the balance of military power was the cannon. The Ming acquired European cannon technology from the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, and the Xiyang (西洋, “Western Ocean”) cannon foundry of the early seventeenth century produced some of the largest cast-iron pieces in the world. The Qing inherited and expanded these foundries, and the Eight Banners included specialist huoqi ying (火器營, Firearm Battalions) trained in the use of matchlocks and light artillery. The Opium Wars of 1839–1842 and 1856–1860, however, exposed the gap between Chinese and European arsenal technology. The fall of the imperial system, treated in the section on the fall of imperial China, had military causes that went back half a century.

The Great Wall as a Military Structure

The Great Wall is the most famous military structure in the world, and the most misunderstood. The wall was not built all at once: it was built, rebuilt, and extended by every major dynasty from the Warring States to the Ming, in different materials, to different designs, and for different purposes. The first version was put together in the late Warring States period by the states of Qin, Zhao, and Yan to keep out the nomadic horsemen of the northern steppe. The Qin emperor connected and extended these walls after 221 BCE. The Han rebuilt and extended the wall deep into the Gansu corridor, also in pounded earth. The Ming Great Wall, the one that survives today in its iconic form, was rebuilt in brick and dressed stone from the late fourteenth century onward, with watchtowers, garrison forts, beacon platforms, and elaborate gate complexes.

The wall as a military structure had two main functions. First, it channelled the movements of nomad raiders toward well-defended passes, where a small force could hold a large one at bay. Second, it provided a logistical framework for the deployment of troops: garrisons, supply depots, signal towers, and a road running the length of the frontier. The wall was not impenetrable: the Xiongnu simply rode around it, the Xianbei and Khitan penetrated the line in many places, the Jurchen Jin and the Mongols simply marched through it, and the Manchus were invited in through the Shanhai Pass by the Ming general Wu Sangui in 1644. The story of the wall as a defensive system see our in-depth piece on the Great Wall as a military structure.

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