Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're taking a look at a
Chinese Type Han, or Type 88, Hanyang rifle.
Now, this is a gun that is not covered in
my upcoming book on Chinese domestic pistols.
Because, of course, it is a rifle.
However, one of the cool things that we are doing
as part of the publication of my pistol book
is also reprinting a small book written in the 1990s
by Dolf Goldsmith entitled "Arming the Dragon".
Which is all about Chinese domestic production of rifles.
... I would typically say Mausers, but they're not all strictly Mausers,
and this in fact is not a Mauser.
However, Dolf's booklet went out of print in the mid-90s.
It is one of the few really good sources of information,
albeit a little bit dated at this point.
And so I am really happy to say that we have permission to reprint it
and make that information available to people once again.
And one of the four major types of rifle that is covered in that book
is this one, the Hanyang.
So, without further ado, let's get into this.
This is called the Hanyang rifle because it was originally developed
and for many decades produced at the Hanyang Arsenal.
This arsenal was one of the biggest in China during the 20th century.
It was originally built in 1890/1891, and it was originally set up to produce
a copy of the German Model 71/84 Mauser, the tube-mag fed Mauser.
Well, like in 1891, as the arsenal is going through the final stages of being built,
one of its administrators basically finds out about the German Gewehr 88 Commission Rifle
from some of the German technical assistants they had setting up the arsenal, and basically says,
"Hey, that's a much better rifle than this black-powder tube-fed thing,
let's produce those instead."
And so the factory begins in 1895
(it took them a couple of years to get all the tooling up and running),
they begin to make a copy of the Gewehr 88.
And originally what they are making is a straight copy of the Gewehr 88.
It has the barrel jacket, the original ladder sight of the Gewehr 88.
It is still chambered in 8mm Mauser (or 7.9 Mauser), and it's chambered
for the early version, the round-nose 8mm with a bullet diameter of .318 inch.
And it would in fact continue to use that early style of bullet and projectile
all the way through its production.
.318 ammunition was in production in China through the 1930s.
So you didn't have sort of the conversion issue
that you would see with the Gewehr [88s] in European service.
At any rate, they make a couple of changes starting relatively quickly.
In 1904 the barrel jacket is deleted, it's really not necessary.
The idea was to prevent heat from getting out, to protect the barrel.
It actually has an issue of sort of like retaining moisture,
and then you get rust on the barrel, and nobody notices it because it's hidden under the shroud.
Anyway, they get rid of the jacket in 1904, they give it a handguard instead.
In 1910 they update the rear sight to be sort of a standard Mauser 98 pattern,
instead of the original flip-up ladder sight.
At the same time they also give it a much more realistic zero.
This sight starts at 200 metres.
And from 1910 on the gun's pretty much in that configuration, and that's what we see here.
So, it's got a barrel that's exposed, like so.
It's got the Gewehr 88 Mannlicher style of magazine that takes a 5 round en-bloc clip.
The exact same clip that the German Gewehr 88s use.
And this would be one of the front line rifles in Chinese military service
all the way through the end of World War Two.
So the arsenal was originally set up by the last remnants of the Qing dynasty
that had ruled China since the mid-1600s.
By the late 1800s they realised that the military world was changing
and they didn't really want to become this fully owned colony of various European powers.
And so they start trying to modernise the army.
And part of that is building new arsenals ...
manufacturing new modern arms, and this is a big part of it.
By 1909 they had made something like 130,000 of these, which is nothing to sneer at.
Now in terms of basic operation this is functionally identical to a Gewehr 88.
It is bolt action of course, it uses a 5 round Mannlicher clip loaded from the top, like so.
Go ahead and not load that all the way in, because that is live ammo.
If you want to eject a partially loaded clip, you have the clip release here.
If you don't, when you chamber the fifth round
the empty clip will simply fall out the bottom of the action.
We have a safety flag on the back that works just like it did on the Gewehr 88.
Interestingly, this is actually a German production bolt in a Chinese rifle.
Now a substantial number of actual German Gewehr 88s did wind up in China,
so I don't know if that's a bolt that was replaced in China, or after it came into the US.
Could be either way, the parts are interchangeable.
These were made by a real factory,
this is not the sort of made in ... the equivalent of a Chinese 1920s garage.
This is a proper full-size western-style arsenal that made hundreds of thousands of these rifles,
and so they were made to pretty darn good standards and they are high quality rifles.
Or they were, before they spent 100 years in military service and thoroughly beaten up.
Of course the front end of the rifle is much more Mauser-like than Gewehr 88-like,
because they got rid of the barrel jackets.
There was originally a cleaning rod here, mine is missing the cleaning rod.
I have a hole cut through the stock. Maybe to hold a sling, which is a little odd,
because it does have sling swivels as well. Who knows what interesting story is behind that.
We have a very Mauser-style handguard and rear sight there.
And you can see this goes down to a 200 metre initial zero,
which is a lot more practical than the much longer zero that Gewehr 88s originally had.
We've got a number of repairs to the wood: one there,
got one here along the magazine well.
Now the markings here I think are one of the most interesting elements.
This is actually a 1940 production gun, so it's dated on the receiver 29-4,
and that is a Chinese Republican Year.
So the Chinese Revolution was in 1911, you add 11 to these dates and you get
April (month number 4) of 1940 for production of this rifle.
Now the way this actually worked is that the Hanyang Arsenal
of course started producing these in 1895,
and they would continue producing them until 1938.
In 1938 the Hanyang Arsenal has to be evacuated
lest it be captured by the advancing Japanese forces in China at the time.
And so it's evacuated north into Hunan Province.
And at that time the rifle section of the Hanyang Arsenal
is actually transitioned over, it's moved to a different arsenal.
And at this same time, 1939, all of the arsenals in China are re-designated
with numerical designations instead of geographical ones.
Because there's kind of a lot of shifting going on.
And so Hanyang becomes Arsenal Number 1, or the First Arsenal.
Its rifle production setup is given to the 21st Arsenal.
And it is the 21st Arsenal that restarts production in 1939, and so that's where this one was made.
At that time this rifle was re-designated from being the Type 88,
named after the German Gewehr 88,
to become the Type - that's "Type" and that is "Han", named after Hanyang.
Incidentally, if you are curious, Hanyang is actually one of the three cities in
... basically the single industrial area that is now known as Wuhan in China.
The centre there is the symbol of the 21st Arsenal,
which is a reversed, or a left-handed, swastika.
You'll see that on a number of Chinese firearms from the '20s, '30s, '40s,
because the same arsenal made ZB-26 copies,
they made Maxim machine guns, and you'll see those with the reversed swastika.
This has nothing to do with Nazi Germany, it is in fact a Buddhist symbol.
All the Chinese arsenal had different symbols,
and they happened to pick a left-handed swastika for the 21st.
So that's what that nomenclature indicates there.
The 21st Arsenal would manufacture these rifles from 1939, when they started up, until 1944.
At which point they transitioned to manufacturing the Chang Kai-Shek rifle,
which is basically a Mauser 98 copy.
So in total ... under this style of marking
they made about 207,000 rifles during this period in World War Two.
Two other quick little notes to make.
They stopped marking the month of production very shortly after this rifle was made,
because at some point in year 29, or 1940,
they just went to ... just the year, instead of year and month.
In addition, the very early 21st Arsenal rifles had their markings
as four characters in a vertical row here, and one of them will be that reverse swastika.
Before that, when they were being made at the Hanyang Arsenal,
they were marked a similar four characters vertically indicating the date of production.
And the Hanyang Arsenal symbol was a five pointed star.
So you'll see that instead of the reverse swastika on those Hanyang production rifles.
The serial numbers that you see on them are
a number, and then a letter, and then a four digit serial number.
So they are made in blocks of 10,000 with a letter prefix,
and once they went through all the letters they then added a numerical prefix.
This first character there is just like an approval stamp.
So this is 4-T-4854.
So they originally would have done just numbers, then A-Z, and then they went to 1A numbers,
and then 2A, and then eventually you get to 4A, and then 4T.
And this gives you several 100,000 rifles worth of production under this serial number system.
This was carried over from Arsenal Number 1's production,
they didn't start serial numbers brand new when they re-started production at Arsenal 21.
Grand total production of the Type Han and the Type 88 Hanyang rifles
was just under 1.1 million over the course of basically five full decades, 1895 until 1944.
It was in 1944 Arsenal 21 finally stopped making these
in order to instead make Chang Kai-Shek rifles.
Which was a name they gave to the Type 24, which was effectively a copy of the Mauser 98.
So a little more advanced, stripper clips instead of Mannlicher clips, that sort of thing.
But I think it's neat to look at these. ...
This was a rifle of the last Chinese Qing Imperial dynasty.
This was rifle that was in substantial use in China during World War One.
It was a rifle that was in heavy use during the Warlord period, through the 1920s and '30s.
It was a rifle that was in front-line use in China during World War Two,
the Second Sino-Japanese War.
Of course China was more involved fighting Japan than mainland Europe.
... And then it of course was a rifle that continued to be used under the CCP after 1949.
So, it's really I think a tremendously significant rifle
for a lot of periods in Chinese history, which is pretty cool.
And it's I think a recognition that these don't generally get here in the United States.
We think of these as, "Oh, it's a Gewehr 88, that means it's this short use
kind of failure of a rifle, because Germany replaced it within just a couple of years."
Well, in China they fixed some of the issues that the Germans had with them,
and then used them for half a century, which is pretty neat.
So if you're interested in finding out more about these,
I would strongly suggest that you check out the ongoing Kickstarter for "Pistols of the Warlords",
which includes also the option to pick up a reprint of
Dolf Goldsmith's book "Arming the Dragon", covering these rifles among others.
Also the Mauser 1907s, the Chang Kai-Sheks and a few other patterns.
So definitely check that out, we have a link to it in the description text below.
Hopefully you enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.