[ Manchurian Mauser - Liao Type 13 ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the Rock Island
Auction Company taking a look at a Chinese Mauser.
Now there's a lot of Chinese Mausers out there,
and normally they are not something that we would really
give a second glance to, but this
is something a little bit different and special.
This is a Type 13,
what's often called a "Manchurian Mauser".
And it actually has this really cool developmental history,
this is in fact an outbirth of World War One.
So the Austrian Steyr Company originally developed this rifle in about 1917.
They were looking for a way to improve on the standard Gewehr 98 rifle design.
And so they looked at like, "What are some of the problems we are having with it?"
Well, they were fighting in trenches and in a lot of mud,
so they added a dust cover to the rifle, they added a shroud
to the end of the cocking piece to prevent mud or dirt from getting in there at all.
They gave it a flat tangent sight instead of ... what we call the "roller coaster" sight,
the Lange Visier on the back of the Gewehr 98.
They made a bunch of these small improvements, in fact they
even went so far as to give it detachable box magazines.
But it was too expensive to re-tool and start up production of an entirely new design of rifle.
And so it never actually went into production.
And then World War One ends, and of course Austria is on the losing side, so
the Treaty of Versailles prohibits them from manufacturing new firearms.
And Steyr is sitting here with basically the tooling
and the design to make this modern, new, bolt action rifle - but no client for it.
The Austrian military isn't allowed to buy it, Steyr is not allowed to build it in Austria.
And so they actually find an interesting client in one Zheng Zuolin who was
(I apologise for my pronunciation),
he was basically the ruler of Manchuria, a section of ... north-eastern China
from about 1916 until 1928.
Now my Chinese history is not my strong suit, so I'm going to gloss over this a little bit,
I leave it to you guys to dig deeper into that
particular bit of Chinese history if you are interested.
But basically he consolidated power,
and in 1922 he declared an independent republic in Manchuria.
And set about trying to create really a great nation state in Manchuria.
And part of that was economic development, part of that was also military development.
And so he went looking for new arms to purchase to equip his army.
And what he found was a very interested partner in Steyr in Austria,
because he had money and needed guns,
and ... they needed money and they had the tooling to make guns.
And so Steyr came over and helped him set up a factory to start manufacturing
a variation of that improved ... Mauser 98 that Steyr had developed.
Now they didn't go through with the box magazines,
but the rest of these improvements they did manufacture in the form of the Type 13 Mauser.
So let's take a closer look at exactly what that ended up being.
You won't find a model designation marked anywhere on this rifle.
It's typically called the Type 13 based on the Nationalist Calendar starting in 1911,
and production of these guns starting in 1924, hence the 13th year.
You will find this arsenal marking on the top of the receivers.
These were set up for production at what would later become known under
Japanese occupation as the Mukden Arsenal up in Manchuria.
As with typical Mausers you will find a serial number here on the side.
They made, we believe, 140,000 of these.
This one certainly would fit into that range, 105,000.
One interesting detail here that I haven't seen on any other patterns of Mauser.
We have a serial number of 105318,
and typically on the bolt handle of a Mauser,
it's not big enough to write the entire serial number
so they typically just put in the last couple of digits.
So 318 is exactly what you would expect as a matching bolt, matching other pieces as well.
But what's kind of neat here is that if you open the bolt,
and flip it around to the other side, you'll actually find
the first three digits of the serial number.
So they did actually put the entire serial number on the bolt handle,
they just had to split it in half.
You'll also find serial numbers on the floor plate,
on the trigger guard, along with another arsenal proof mark right there,
and also on the bolt release lever.
Now the features that were added above and beyond the Mauser 98.
For one thing we have a pair of gas vent holes.
This is one of a couple of features that's actually very similar to the Type 38 Arisaka.
That rifle came out in 1906, and it is entirely possible that
Steyr and the Austrians were able to find some of those,
and had some to use as references in finding ways to improve the Mauser design.
This flat tangent sight is something that we kind of take for granted today, but
the standard issue Mausers of World War One didn't have this.
They had a much larger and frankly much less useful
Lange Visier roller coaster sight on them.
Unfortunately, like virtually all of the Manchurian Mausers, this one is missing its dust cover.
You can see a little slot cut for it right here.
This is another feature very similar to the Type 38 Arisaka.
That certainly would have been an advantage in, say, World War One trench conditions,
being able to seal off the whole breech action of the weapon against mud.
Now the Austrians went a bit further and they modified the bolt in a couple of ways as well.
So this is our Type 13 bolt, and this is a standard Gewehr 98 bolt.
I've taken the firing pin assemblies out of them, and as you can see
Steyr added this perforated sleeve to encompass the firing pin spring.
Which is normally left exposed on a Gewehr 98.
How important this really was is kind of hard to say,
I can't imagine it was that big of a deal.
But I can see a more substantive reason for putting this shroud over the ... striker piece.
So on the 98 this is exposed,
and you can actually see it move in and out when the rifle is cocked and fired.
And they added this piece just to cover that over
which does prevent any chance of something getting in the back of the bolt assembly.
This shroud seems a bit less necessary.
Now at the same time they were looking to economise, as well as improve.
On the Mauser 98 there is this pin right here,
which prevents the cocking piece from rotating when it's not supposed to.
And what this means is once you open the bolt to cycle it,
the cocking piece can't rotate, it's locked in position.
Which means when ... you go to push the bolt back into battery
you know that these parts are going to be properly lined up
and able to just slide right into the rifle and work.
The Austrians got rid of that feature on their improved bolt,
because they actually designed the dust cover to perform the same task.
And if you've already got the dust cover doing it, well you don't need an extra piece
... doing it with more machining operations required.
So, that's great, except for those cases where the dust cover gets lost,
in which case there is nothing performing that job, and it becomes possible for
the back end of the bolt to actually rotate out of alignment.
Well, you can't see it because it's rotating against this.
It's possible for this to rotate out of alignment when the bolt's open,
because it's only being held in place by spring tension.
So the original idea was a good one.
In application today, as long as you've got the dust cover that's great,
but a lot of people don't have the dust cover, like on this rifle.
I think it's also worth noting briefly here, that to disassemble the Mauser bolt
you have to push in that pin, and then you actually have to unscrew this piece to get it out.
On the Type 13, once you've got the rifle in the safe position,
you don't have to unscrew it, you just have to rotate it around to this position
and then it slides right out.
So going back to the rifle, I've put this back in the fire position here.
Once you open the bolt, what you have to be careful of is bumping this,
because it's now possible, ay, did it again. Alright, so that's twice in a row now.
What I was trying to do was demonstrate that you can bump it just out of position,
and then hold onto it and put it back.
Because once you've done this to it,
now it is really stiff and difficult to get it back into position.
So I'm going to pull this out and use a plastic punch to push the striker here back.
But I do want to point out that this has clearly happened to someone before
because there is that little ... divot,
right there in the stock, which perfectly matches up
to that side of the rear of the cocking piece coming right in and hitting the stock.
And that's exactly what you don't want to do.
... This wasn't a problem as long as the dust cover was on the rifle,
but once the dust cover's gone, this becomes an issue.
And by the way, this is one of those little issues that drives bolt action rifle design.
When you look at bolt actions,
you think it's an extremely simple system ... how much is actually going on there?
Well, this is one of those little features: look at bolt ... designs
and see if you can spot on different ones what the mechanism is to prevent this from happening.
Alright, I went ahead and got that back.
There's just a little teeny cut-out in the bolt body right there
that that tab on the striker is able to lock into.
So if you slide this even just a little bit you can pop it 90 degrees out, just like you saw before.
So I don't know if it was the Austrians or the Manchurians at fault for this,
but someone didn't get all the memos from World War One,
because this rear sight only goes down to 300.
That probably would have been a lot better off at, say, 100.
But people would get that memo later on, I suppose.
One other distinctive feature of this guy,
is its kind of distinctively shaped bolt handle.
It's a smaller knob than you would get on a Mauser, with almost a little bit of a point to it.
Like kind of a distinctively Asian shape there.
And we have some pretty basic stuff up here at the front.
We have the standard Gewehr 98 type hook for a parade sling.
Bayonet lug, cleaning rod, barleycorn front sight.
And even what appears to be an original,
very narrow, Chinese sling on this rifle, that's pretty cool.
Well, it's unfortunate, but certainly not uncommon, for this rifle to be missing that dust cover.
It is really cool that this thing is in such great condition, completely matching.
That's something that's fairly uncommon to find in Chinese surplus rifles.
Typically these are guns that have gone through literally decades of hard use
before being finally surplused and sold into the United States.
And usually they are just, well, "rode hard and put away wet," one might say.
This is exactly the opposite, this is a beautiful example.
So if you're interested in ... either Chinese history,
or looking at the developments that grew out of the small arms of World War One,
this is a really cool example that I think is something that's pretty well under-appreciated.
So if you take a look at the description text below, you'll find a link to ForgottenWeapons.com.
And from there you can follow a link over Rock Island's catalogue page on this particular rifle.
Where you'll find their pictures, their description, their price estimate, all that sort of stuff.
And you can go ahead and place a bid on it if you are interested in having it yourself.
Thanks for watching.