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Identifying materials on an old whistling arrow

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Peter Dekker
Hi,

I just obtained a nice Chinese / Manchu whistle arrow. It is of the type used for a certain form of Manchu target shooting, where one shoots on a target made of concentric felt rings of different colors. A very similar arrow appears in the 1759 regulations compiled under the Qianlong emperor, also stated to be used for this purpose. This arrow is made later than the Qianlong era but is nevertheless of very fine workmanship.

I am now trying to determine what materials were used to make it, partly out of curiosity and partly so I can attempt to reproduce such arrows.

Whistling head
It is made of a material that strongly resembles the material used for a number of old thumb rings I have. These were said to be made of tiger-bone. It is hard to verify whether the thumb rings or the whistle are in fact tiger-bone, but it is surely a very dense type of bone that was large enough to cut a whistler out of. Bones of other large animals like cattle tend to be quite porous, and this one certainly isn't. Indeed, the whistler is of a one-piece construction that was skillfully hollowed out. The walls are about half a mm thick at the whistle holes.

Behind the head are two sets of two green dyed ray-skin rims. The shaft's end is wrapped in bark. Which type of bark is this? I'm thinking it is cherry bark. It has a nice reddish glow in sunlight, comparable to Chinese huanghuali wood.

Shaft
The shaft is of wood, I suspect poplar or birch because that is what most arrows of the time were made of. I don't have the skill to tell them apart myself. Does anyone have any ideas on the type of wood?

Feathers
Light and dark brown, the color and structure is different from the eagle and vulture feathers commonly encountered on Chinese arrows. Period texts mention stork feathers on these arrows as well. I suspect they are in fact stork but have colored more brown over time. Can anyone confirm whether my guess is true?

Nock wrapping
This is the most mysterious material of them all. It looks like ray-skin at first glance but differs from the stingray-skin commonly used in Asia in two major aspects:
1. The grains on regular ray-skin are spaced much closer together.
2. The grains have dark green centers as if they sucked up more gree dye than the rest, where the grains in standard ray-skin tend to stay lighter than the surrounding material when dyed.

Black stripes
I thought they were paint at first, but close examination with a magnifying glass shows they are hair thin cord, I assume it is black silk as they hardly had anything else that delicate at the time.

Nock
This is the first Chinese / Manchu arrow I've seen with a separately inset nock. It appears to be made of some type of bone, again very dense.

I hope someone can help me ID these materials, especially the bark and the nock wrapping.

Numbers
Overall length 93.5 cm
Whistle 38 mm long / 27 mm wide
Feathers 23.5 cm long, 12 mm high
Thickness shaft: A very uniform 7mm, varying only tenths of mms.

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Thanks!

-Peter
Bede
Peter,
I have been told that water buffalo horn from the femur is very dense and suitable for carving. There are also several large deer species such as moose and elk that might have been the source. I do not know of the properties of tiger bone.

Dr Grayson has identified the Amur Cherry as the source from which some bark bindings are made. He had been growing a tree for several years but local birds pecked hundreds of holes in the bark so his plan was frustrated.

The Turks used black silk in a similar manner to form lines near the nock for decorative effect.

I have seen horn nocks on modern Mongolian arrows, but this bone nock is unusual and recalls some Indo-Persian ones. Is the slot of the nock of a size to take a large Manchu string?
Peter Dekker
Hi Bede,

Thanks for the informative reply!

On the material of the whistle, I am really open for everything. As you say, it is hard to determine the properties of tiger bone with any accuracy. It would be interesting to obtain a buffalo of deer femur and see what it brings. Considering the shape of the whistle and the spongy inside of bone, the round head of a femur is indeed probably the only bone that could be used to carve this shape out of.

I am not familiar with the Amur cherry but given its location it is highly likely. It appears from what I've been able to find so far that the Manchus held on to materials native to their region up until quite late in the dynasty. I take it that Amur refers to the river there? Too bad the tree was ruined by birds. Perhaps that's where the Manchu shamans came to play! :P

The slot of the nock is indeed large enough for a Manchu bow string 6mm thick.

I hadn't made the observation myself yet but I am not surprised about the similarity with Indo-Persian arrows. There are a lot of Indo-Persian influences on many other types of Chinese arms especially those from the 18th century: Tiger spears with katar-shaped heads with sunken panels, U-turn fullers on sabers, raised backedges on sabers, etc. If they took stylistic features from a culture in their edged weapons, it makes sense to me that some of their archery equipment took similar influence, albeit in a more limited degree.

It is also interesting that the Turks used similar silk thread for decorative purposes, another thing I was previously unaware of.

Great stuff, Bede!

-Peter
Jos?Dom
Do you have an idea how the point is inserted in the shafts?
I wonder what's the purpose of this type of arrow. Probably it's a signal arrows; I don't think Chinese used this arrows for ceremonial purposes as the Japanese with their exorcism hikime-ya.

Ok, now shoot the arrow to the sky and let's us know how it sounds! :wink:
Bede
Peter,
The Amur Cherry is named after the river.

I assume the head is mounted in the usual way with a tenon carved into the end of the arrow shaft fitting into a small hole on the inside of the front of the whistling head. The ones I have seen also fit tightly at the lower end of the head. Usually the arrows taper towards the head anyway which makes for an airtight fit.
Peter Dekker

Jos?Dom wrote:

Do you have an idea how the point is inserted in the shafts?

Quite like how Bede says it is, but the tenon fitting into the mortise appears to be some separate piece of bamboo that is inserted into the shaft. I've seen this construction once before, one on a gigantic whistling arrow in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. (With gigantic I mean a shaft of 125 cm long, 20mm thick and a whistle head of about 15cm long and 13cm wide.)

Jos?Dom wrote:

I wonder what's the purpose of this type of arrow. Probably it's a signal arrows; I don't think Chinese used this arrows for ceremonial purposes as the Japanese with their exorcism hikime-ya.

Numerous. Although often believed to be used by commanders to guide battle, little reference points to this use in the Qing. This particular arrow is a whistle target arrow, made to shoot concentric rims out of a target in a typical Manchu archery game.

Other whistles served purposes for signaling, but apparently not on the battlefield but during hunts. Yet others were used to shoot animals like hare, who reportedly startle from the sound making them easier to hit. One of the more peculiar whistles is what appears in regulations as a "Tiger shooting whistle arrow" which was used to arouse snoozing tigers! Apparently it wasn't honorable to kill a sleeping tiger so the animal needed to be gotten on its feet before attacked with arrow, musket or the special tiger spears they had.

Although there is no reference to the Manchus having ceremonial use for such arrows, it could very well be that they had. Being a people with shamanic origins, they still kept some of their rituals after their conquest of China but as these rituals were considered barbaric by those they had conquered, they kept them for themselves. Many Manchu families still had spirit poles and such, so who knows there may have very well been rituals involving whistling arrows as well that were not well documented because they wanted to keep them hidden.

Jos?Dom wrote:

Ok, now shoot the arrow to the sky and let's us know how it sounds! :wink:

It is tempting, but I think I'll just leave this one on its stand! I have blown it as hard as I could, and the sound is quite loud. More than my ears can stand, at least. And I assume that I can't quite blow as hard as the wind passes when it is shot.

-Peter
Peter Dekker
Oh and Bede, I looked up some pictures of Amur Cherry bark and it looks like this is the one indeed. It definitely has the same color and sheen to it. Thanks, another material identified.

Looks like I got to try to grow myself one of these as well.

-Peter
Jos?Dom
Talking about this subject, I ordered a whistling head a while ago. It should be here in a few weeks. David Gray from Krackow offer them for sale, I'll let you know how it looks and sounds.
Bede
Peter,
I have had a suggestion that the arrowhead might not be animal in origin. Apparently in Mongolian arrows, plane tree wood was used with exactly the visual effect we see in the photographs.

I am looking into some of the other information I was sent. It certainly is a beautiful arrow.
Peter Dekker
Hi Bede,

Thanks for diving into the matter regarding this arrow. I'm curious what more you can come up with.


Examining the whistle up close, I am quite convinced it is made of some type of bone. I've looked up examples of the "Plane wood" you mention, and although it appears to have a very dense grain indeed, it is not as dense as this stuff and has a slightly different pattern with spots in it. The whistle also lets through light quite well as bone does, and under strong magnification one can see the pores where the blood vessels went through. The cracks in it are also like you would expect them to look in bone. It also needs mention that my pics are rather magnified, so the grain de tails are much finer than they look like in the pics. The whistle is only 27mm wide at its widest point.

Despite the odd sound of it today, I think tigerbone is a rather plausible material. Tigers were far more common and frequently hunted by Qing archers in those days. Many "user-grade" thumb rings were also known to be made of tiger bone, and looking through my collection I do have a few good quality ones made of very similarly dense bone, while others show the more porous bone found in most of the bones coming from cattle.

The large number of tigers present at the day becomes clear from the fact that the military even brought their own tiger traps (in the form of crossbows) to set up around their encampments and took special tiger spears when on campaign. Villages often had tiger tridents in their arsenals to deal with lurking tigers as well.

I've found a source for the Amur cherry, or prunus maackii! Hopefully the Dutch birds aren't equally eager in destroying the bark.

-Peter
Stephen Selby
My guess is that the whistle is ivory becasue it seems to have clear annual growth rings. Such rings are seen clearly on tusks but are notmally hard to see on bone. I am also interested to see the 'feeler' on the shaft to show the correct draw-length. That is common today in Mongolia, but I had never seen it on an old arrow.
Peter Dekker
Hi Stephen,

Comparing the whistler to ivory, it appears that the grain in ivory is slightly different. It tends to "cross". I add a pic of some ivory "Mahjong" tiles below:

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A friend of mine has two Chinese whistling arrows that appear to be of the same type as this one, also with this "feeler". But apart from that, I also haven't seen it on any other Chinese arrows.

I guess that accuracy, and thus very consistent draw lengths, were more important for these "sporting whistles" than for normal whistling arrows. I can't remember seeing this feature on other Chinese arrows either.

I now wonder who was first, the Chinese or the Mongolians, with this. I have never really seen an antique Mongolian arrow.

-Peter
Bede
I showed these pictures to Dr Grayson and he thought the arrow was Mongolian too. Walrus ivory was used in Mongolia for points for arrows to shoot at the sur targets. There is a pair in the Grayson Collection from the 1920s.

Both elephant ivory and walrus ivory are very heavy in proportion to wood. They are also much harder. Walrus ivory carvings often include parts of the dentine which has a distinct pattern.
Peter Dekker
Hi,

Thanks for the ongoing search for the materials and origins of this arrow!

I've looked up walrus ivory and tend to dismiss it due to differences in grain. The outer layer of this stuff has little to no grain, while the inside has a spotted appearance. Both differ significantly from the material of this whistle.

The arrow indeed shares some important characteristics with one of Dr. Grayson's Mongolian arrows, most notably the "feeler" and the separate nock:

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However, the rest of the construction is much closer to what I am used to of the various Chinese / Manchu whistlers I've studied. We do know that cultures influenced eachother a lot in this era, as is most exemplified by 18th cent. Chinese sabers with design features from a wealth of cultures. The Manchus used a certain type of Mongolian arrow (Manchu: monggo yoro) to hunt rabbits on rocky terrain as well.

Vice versa, it seems that the Mongolian bow of the 20th cent. is a modified version of the Manchu. Lacking of early reference of these suggests that the Mongols have used the Manchu type until they fairly recently start to make them with shorter ears. (Easier to make / maintain? Yang Fuxi "shortened" his ears as well.)

I now wonder where this type of arrow originates. My earliest Chinese reference to a dimensionally identical "Manchu target arrow whistle" dates from 1759. Is there any earlier Mongolian reference? If not, it would be tempting to think the Mongolians also adopted these arrows from their Manchu neighbors. Where the Manchu language does attribute the rabbit arrow to the Mongols, there are no such references that attribute their distinctive whistling arrows to any culture but their own.

-Peter
jack farrell
Peter, Greetings. These are really nice whistling arrows and fine workmanship.

I can say for sure that the origional whistle is not made of walrus ivory. I own some Eskimo carvings and the grain is certainly not similar.

On your question of the origin of this type of archery, I hope you do not mind, but I always wondered where the Mongols starrted their contest of shooting very heavy arrows at ground objects. Then I saw a special about how Mongols hunt Marmots, a rodent larger than a big house cat also called a woodchuck here in the USA. These are cooked with the skin intact and have hot stones put inside and are put on a fire to steam the insides. For this reason the skin is wanted undamaged.

Well it occurred to me that Mongolian archery with its heavy arrows with large blunts would be perfectly suited to hunting marmots. I have no proof, just an idea.

What would others think.
Peter Dekker
Hi Jack, good to hear from you again!

jack farrell wrote:

Well it occurred to me that Mongolian archery with its heavy arrows with large blunts would be perfectly suited to hunting marmots. I have no proof, just



This sounds very plausible. I've been translating regulations for 64 Manchu arrows in a mid. 18th cent. text where there are in fact such arrows listed. According to the text dating from 1759 they were used to "shoot rabbits on rocky terrain" and mentioned elsewhere to have been adapted from the Mongols. The Manchus originally used "rabbit fork" arrows for hunting them in the woods but anything sharp doesn't last long on the rocky steppes. When I was in Inner Mongolia I wrecked numerous sharp arrows on the ground myself there as well.

The whistle currently under discussion is far too fragile for such practices, with walls of only half a mm thick. But it would do well in hitting the felt targets the Manchus describe, with an arrow catching net behind them. It is also very close to the Qianlong emperor's own arrow made for this purpose, dimensionally accurate up to a few millimeters.

-Peter
Bede
Peter,
There might be some connection to Jurchen arrows. I know that whistlers with big thing broadheads were used to hunt hares from horseback because of the depiction of Qianlong doing it accompanied by his guards.

The Grayson arrows are from the 1920's so constructional details would have changed.

Jack's idea about sur target arrows being developed as blunts for shooting small animals is interesting. The Manchus had a taboo about marmots, I remember reading. However, they are not the only small animals with valuable fur. The Manchus hunted in the forest too.
Stephen Selby
One point, Peter. Whatever the whistle is made of, you must decide that it is NOT elephant ivory, otherwise you'll find your collection raided. Europe bureaucracy has gone mad over even the slightest trace of ancient ivory.

Your whistle is made from boring bone. :wink:
Peter Dekker

Bede wrote:

Peter,
There might be some connection to Jurchen arrows. I know that whistlers with big thing broadheads were used to hunt hares from horseback because of the depiction of Qianlong doing it accompanied by his guards.

You are probably referring to the painting by Castiglione in the Palace Museum collection. Those arrows are also listed in the Imperial Regulations and were called shao pi jian or "Whistling Broadhead Arrow". There are numerous sets of these arrows in the Palace Museum depot and I've also been able to examine one up close in a private collection in Beijing. According to the regulations, they were universal arrows used to shoot a number of types of game, among which hare, deer, fox and stag.

For hunting one type of game exclusively, there was usually a special arrow for a certain animal. But apparently when not knowing what one would encounter, these more universal arrows would be carried. The use of Mongoloid arrows on rocky terrain and native Jurchen designs by the Manchus on grassy terrain further exemplifies their diversity of arrows and their purposes. Not surprising, for a people that did not develop any agriculture until the 16th century and primarily lived off hunting before that time.

Bede wrote:

The Manchus had a taboo about marmots, I remember reading. However, they are not the only small animals with valuable fur. The Manchus hunted in the forest too.

I didn't know about the Marmot taboo, do you recall any source or reason? I do know that some groups didn't like to shoot dogs because there was a connnection with Nurhaci. They did hunt a lot of fur animals, the Jurchen economy largely relied on fur trade with Russians, Mongols, Chinese and Koreans in the early days of Nurhaci.

Stephen,
I'll remember that! Even better, lets assume that the arrow was made of plastic. I know that my government is rather fussy about these things but I thought that antique ivory was no problem. I may be mistaken though, it wouldn't surprise me at all that they have further limited our freedom recently.
Bede
I think I saw the marmot prohibition in a collection of the letters of Kangxi. It might have been in a footnote. There was some reference once to the possibility that the Manchus connected the marmots with the Black Plague.
Orda Khan

Bede wrote:

There was some reference once to the possibility that the Manchus connected the marmots with the Black Plague.

I've read the same about marmots (not about Manchu) yet this did not stop Mongols from hunting them.
Bede
Apparently at the time, there was some dispute about who was being sensible about what to hunt.

The early Manchu emperors often had Mongol relatives so I suppose you would have to be careful what you said while hunting.
Stephen Selby
In North Asia marmots are shot and cooked baked in clay. Because they eat a lot of wormwood, they have strongly-flavoured flesh which is thought to be medicinal. I've eaten them. They're ok - but if you can get a McDonald's, go for that instead.

In that last 100 years they they have been identified as a vector of bubonic plague, so eating them is no longer favoured.

S
Orda Khan

Stephen Selby wrote:

I've eaten them. They're ok - but if you can get a McDonald's, go for that instead.

That bad eh?!
jack farrell
I want to ask about arrow points. As this has little to do with the original topic, I will start a new thread about Asian arrow points under hardware. -j-
Stephen Selby
Yeah, the discussion on McMarmots was pushing irrelevance to the limit. :twisted:
Peter Dekker

Stephen Selby wrote:

Yeah, the discussion on McMarmots was pushing irrelevance to the limit. :twisted:

With such a lengthy discussion on an object from that region we were just bound to end up with the local cuisine sooner or later..

I can imagine a burger being more tasty. I tried nearly anything in China, but hardly anything of the stranger food became a favorite!

-Peter
JJ
I?m just stumbling over this old thread looking for dimensions of Manchu arrows...

Peters question regarding the material of the arrow head seems not to have been solved yet. A bangle comes to my mind that I once (about 18 years ago) bought for a girl friend in Morocco. This was a massive piece of bone and the grain resembled closely this whistling arrowhead, if I remember correctly. It was made from camel bone.

Best regards, JJ
Bede
Camel bone was used extensively in Central Asia because of its strength and good carving features. It could also be dyed or painted.
Peter Dekker
That's interesting, I had not thought of camel bone before it is plausible indeed. I've looked up some pics on the net and on some the grain resembles something as seen on the whistle head.


JJ, Manchu arrows were often 90 - 110 cm in length depending on the type of arrow, with most antique examples I've personally seen ranging somewhere between 90-100 cm. Some shafts are rather straight while others (most) have a complex shaft geometry usually consisting of a tapered end in front and a "waist" right before a nock that usually flares out to a wide end of slightly oval cross-section. Complex enough to drive most shaft-suppliers nuts!

Let me know what type of arrow you want specifics of, military, hunting, target, whistling, etc. I'll see whether I've got the numbers here. Apart from measurements of actual arrows I also have official period regulations on some 100 different arrows but unfortunately they only mention length and materials and not the small details of tapering.

You can PM me, or perhaps a separate thread on Manchu arrows is in order.

-Peter
Hermitking
I really doubt it is a tiger bone whistle. The bone peice looks as though it was made of a solid chunk of bone that was later hollowed out to make the whistle cavity.

Having handled a lot of bone, the only bones that I have ever seen that are solid bone all the way through are peices of antler at the base and the ends of antler tines. Other solid bones could include walrus tusks, as mentioned elsewhere here, elephant ivory, and other tusks.

All other bones, even large thick ones have the sponge like matrix of bone inside of them. Only the outer surface of bones are actually solid. The inner matrix is a mix of sponge like bone fibers and marrow.

For these reasons I would suggest that it is some sort of antler or tusk. I'm leaning towards a peice of antler near the base of the skull. Walrus tusk seems unlikely when an abundance of deer, cariboo, elk and moose antler could be easily had.

Tigers don't have any bones that are solid bone through and through.
Bede
Walrus ivory was used by the Mongols to make arrow heads for sur shooting in the 1920s. There are two in the Grayson Collection. It is heavy and strong. I have thumb ring made from it. In larger pieces, like a thumb ring or an arrowhead you can see the distinctive dentine pattern of the inner part of the tooth.

The femoral bones of some large ruminants like water buffalo have a great thickness of dense bone as opposed to the spongy inner bone structure.
Peter Dekker
Thanks for the extra input.

Walrus ivory was also suggested to me by Jack Farrell, but he added that it was always hard to judge a material without handling it.

I've looked up some walrus ivory pics and found it close, but not a good match. Like elephant ivory, it has clear lines but where elephants have two sets of lines crossing each other, (known as Schreger lines) walrus seems to have only one set of similar lines going a single direction. Where one sees the cross-section of the lines, they appear as dots. While some aspects of the material do resemble those of ivory, none of these lines can be found on the whistle head.

Here an example of walrus ivory, from an external website, note the lines going along its length. (Click to view, it is a rather large image.)
http://www.stanscarvings.com/animals/walrus.jpg

Here some classy poker chips, from another website, clearly showing the Schreger lines so characteristic of elephant ivory:
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(Usually they're not as prominent as this but they're always there.)


Now another look at the whistle head, I made some pictures that clearly show the holes of blood vessels that go through it:
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Because of these, I'm still inclined to think we are looking at some type of bone. Only what type, and from what part of an animal remains in question.

As for antler, would it also exhibit such small channels running through the material?

-Peter
jack farrell
Peter; This material is DEFINITELY NOT walrus ivory.

I would think that horn-like material would be much more suited to the purpose. Whatever it is it was shot only at a very soft, safe target.

The surface looks rough like the grain is raised.

It has been assembled on a center seam?

The grain has been arranged so that impact further compresses the layers of material.
Peter Dekker

Jack Farrell wrote:

Peter; This material is DEFINITELY NOT walrus ivory.

I figured that these additional pics would clear it up. My previous pics concentrated on the finer sides of the arrow, that didn't show the holes.

Jack Farrell wrote:

I would think that horn-like material would be much more suited to the purpose. Whatever it is it was shot only at a very soft, safe target.

Yes it is described in an 18th century text on the emperor's toys to be shot at a felt target made of concentric rings, exactly like the one Stephen Selby encountered when visiting the Xibe tribe. The trick was not only to hit it dead center, but also to hit it with an arrow going perfectly straight for the tail not to hit the other rings. It is conceivable that the whistling sound also contributed to the appreciation of the correct flight of the arrow. Behind the target would be a net or a soft "screen" of cloth to catch the arrow. I too expect the head to shatter when hitting something harder. A friend in the U.S. has two quite similar arrows, also both made of a similar material. Both have broken heads and were glued together again.

Jack Farrell wrote:

It has been assembled on a center seam?

It is a one-piece construction, no seams to be seen. I have no idea how they did that.

Jack Farrell wrote:

The grain has been arranged so that impact further compresses the layers of material.

Thanks, that's a detail I missed! Aligning it the other way and the shaft might have indeed split it on impact.

-Peter