Page 302 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

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Bronze triple ji halberd

Length (including spearhead and shaft) 325 (127 %)
Warring States Period (c. 433 BCE)
From Leigudun, Suixian, Hubei Province

Hubei Provincial Museum, Wuhan

This halberd consists of three bronze blades and
a spearhead attached to a long haft. 1 The blades
vary slightly in length (the longest, excluding its
tang, is 18.3 centimeters) and exhibit the slender,
curving profiles characteristic of the period. Each
blade extends down the haft approximately 15 cen-
timeters. This lower part (hu) provided a firm at-
tachment to the haft by means of thongs threaded
through perforations in the hu and bound to the
haft. The upper blade extends into a tang, which
anchors the unit through a slot cut into the haft.
The haft itself, ovular in cross section, is made of
wood veneered in strips of bamboo bound with silk
and coated in red and black lacquer. A horn ferrule
is attached to the base of the haft.
This is one of thirty halberds found in the
northern chamber, named in their inscriptions as
ji. The term ji has been traditionally applied to hal-
berds that include a spearhead, but as only three of
these weapons have spearheads the evidence of this
group suggests that ji may be more correctly defined
as two or more blades attached to long hafts. The ji
hafts average 3.3 meters in length — much longer
than the single-bladed ge halberds (which average
1.3 meters) in the tomb. The greater reach of the ji
suggests that it was a charioteer's weapon; the
shorter ge was the mainstay of footsoldiers.
Most of the ji from the tomb are inscribed with
names other than those of the tomb's occupant
(Yue is the most common, followed by Yu); these
are generally believed to be names of Marquis Yi's
predecessors. 2 CM

1 Excavated in 1978 (N 139); reported: Hubei 1989,1:264, fig-
154 and 2: pi. 90:1-2.
2 Hubei 1989, i: 460.