[ Chinese FN 1900 Copies in 7.63mm Mauser ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking
another look at another different type of
Chinese domestic Warlord Era pistol.
What we have here today are a pair of
large-scale FN 1900 pistols.
Now, if you're at all interested in Chinese arms, or
mystery pistols like these, you should definitely
check out my ongoing Kickstarter
for the current book project.
That is "Pistols of the Warlords, Chinese Domestic Handguns, 1911-1949",
which covers this and a whole lot more. There's a link in the description. Anyway.
The FN 1900 as a standard pattern of pistol was very popular in China
during the Warlord Era and during the Chinese Civil War.
And the reasons for this are a little bit hazed over by history.
But basically the FN 1900 was an old enough design that it had managed to get into China
and become recognised as a high-quality, reliable pistol before 1911
when the Chinese Revolution toppled the last Imperial dynasty.
The last Imperial dynasty had been working on modernising the Army.
And they actually sent a delegation to FN to look at rifles and pistols,
and they came back rather impressed with the FN 1900.
In fact FN had originally manufactured the 1900
(or the 1899 pattern as it would have been at the very beginning),
in both a small scale for .32 ACP, which is what the Belgian Army eventually adopted.
And they also made a few prototypes that were large scale, kind of like these.
In fact we know one of those pistols ended up in Asia,
although we don't exactly know when or why.
So not sure if that directly influenced the creation of this sort of thing.
But what we do know is the FN 1900 was very popular.
And the .30 Mauser cartridge was also very popular from its use in the C96 Mauser pistols.
And Chinese artisanal gunsmiths being the creative lot that they were,
why not combine the two and give yourself an FN 1900 chambered for .30 Mauser?
Let me show you up close.
The .30 Mauser copies of the FN 1900 were made in a variety of frame sizes, no two are alike.
But just to give you a size reference, I have pulled out our Jinling Arsenal standard FN 1900 copy.
This is also a Chinese production pistol, albeit a factory produced one
instead of basically a craft, or artisanally produced example.
So you can see we have some versions of the .30 calibre guns
that ... have grips that are basically the same length as a standard FN 1900,
albeit with slightly longer barrels. And the grips are certainly longer front to back here.
And then we have some of the .30 calibre copies that are substantially larger in every way
than a regular, simple, .32 calibre 1900.
If you're not familiar with the cartridges, here are examples of both.
So here's .32 ACP, aka 7.65mm Browning,
here's .30 Mauser, aka 7.63x25mm Mauser.
This was developed originally for the Borchardt, but then it ... saw
very widespread use in the C96 Mauser Broomhandle pistols.
And this of course is the original cartridge used by the FN 1900.
Actually designed by John Browning for the FN Model 1900 pistol.
The .30 Mauser is a substantially more powerful cartridge,
and traditionally is seen as requiring a locked breech action,
which these Chinese copies do not have.
In fact, if I take one of these apart by removing these two screws,
I can pull the slide off, and then I can take out the breech block assembly,
... like so. And if you've ever seen the inside of an FN 1900,
this is exactly the same mechanism, just scaled up slightly.
So I don't know that I would trust one of these to actually shoot in .30 Mauser.
I don't think it would explode right off the bat, but I do think it would very quickly
be battered to the point of being potentially dangerous.
Or certainly you would end up breaking some part of the gun in relatively short order.
I don't think these pistols were ever actually fired all that much.
At least, not using full power ammunition.
Anyway, back to our two assembled examples,
there are a variety of different features that you will find on these.
Some of them have rounded grips and rounded magazines,
which gives them the look of a Broomhandle Mauser which was,
again, a very popular pistol in China at the time.
You can see this magazine is plenty long enough
for a 7.63 Mauser cartridge.
You will also find them with square bottomed grips and frames.
Notice that this one has a push back style of magazine release, like so.
And this holds probably 8 rounds, possibly 9.
It's a little hard to tell because the witness holes don't always actually
line up with cartridges or give you an accurate count of the capacity.
But this pistol has a push forward magazine release
similar to what was on the original FN 1900.
The safety is generally a functional copy of the FN 1900 back here,
that's safe, and that's the fire position.
But every once in a while you will find an oddball, like this one, that actually has two safeties.
Now, some people are going to suggest that this is actually a machine pistol,
and one of these is a selector lever, but in fact these are both safeties.
And you ... have to have both of them in the fire position in order for the gun to fire.
If either one is set to safe, the gun won't fire.
Why exactly people wanted two redundant safeties, I honestly don't know.
But this is a feature that we see both on large-scale FN 1900s like this,
and also on smaller, more standard patterns.
You'll also note here that there is a raised extra material boss
added to the back of the frame, and it has been cut for a shoulder stock.
In fact, if we take a look at the side plate of this pistol, it's actually even engraved
with a little picture of this pistol with sort of a Mauser-style holster stock attached to it.
Which is really cool. It also has an alleged serial number,
and then a profusion of gibberish ... Latin character markings
that mean nothing, as far as I can tell.
We have a few more numbers in various places.
The grips here are ... a copy of the FN logo.
That one's actually reasonably well done.
On real FN 1900s there were serial numbers applied to the rear sight base,
the slide, and the frame.
And they've actually copied that, but then they went and added additional ones.
On the opposite side on the side plate, we have all sorts of
more nonsense, and fake proof marks. ...
This is some of the really neat stereotypical Chinese domestic production
sorts of things that we expect to see.
The safety markings there are e-u-r and r-u-s.
Back here the fire selector is marked "Feu", which is correct, that actually means fire in French,
which is what you would find on a regular FN 1900.
But then the safe position is r-u-s, which is the word "safe" in French,
but spelled backwards, it should be s-u-r.
So we have markings that were applied by people who
didn't actually read the language that they were marking.
Some of these artisanal gunsmiths would have been literate in Chinese,
but plenty of them probably weren't.
Most of these pistols don't have ... usable, functional rear sights. This one actually does.
That detail might have been given a little bit more priority
because of the fact that this has a shoulder stock on it,
and thus could actually be used for reasonably accurate fire at long range.
However, like all FN 1900 pattern guns, ... the rear sight is just a cut notch.
It doesn't have a tangent sight like a C96 Mauser would.
Our smaller FN 1900 here in .30 calibre has a much more typical rear sight
where that's basically like a homeopathic rear sight notch. ...
It conveys the impression of a rear sight, but you can't actually use it.
And we have a similar set of nonsense markings on here.
These FN 1900s typically have quite a lot of fake Belgian proof marks, as you see here and there.
This one's marked "Brownes Patent", it would of course originally have been "Browning's Patent".
And we have the serial numbers once again applied in the regular places that FN would apply them.
But the serial number here is 67890, which, call me sceptical,
but I'm guessing that that's not actually a proper sequential serial number.
This is another aspect where Chinese gunsmiths didn't necessarily understand
why specific things were on pistols,
(we've got some cool markings up on the top here as well),
but they understood that markings had significance
in people's perception of the guns, if nothing else.
Certainly some of them were rather superstitious,
and might believe that the markings actually contributed something to the gun's effectiveness.
But either way, whether it was supernatural or it was just convincing a customer
that this was actually a high quality Belgian pistol, it's worth putting those markings on.
While these two pistols show you most of the features
that are to be found on this type of Chinese pistol,
no two examples are actually identical.
And so you will find a wide mixture of different sights,
different grip profiles, different markings, different safeties.
... It's a smorgasbord of just neat interesting features.
So we have a whole section on these pistols, these large-scale .30 calibre FN 1900s
in my upcoming book on Chinese Warlord pistols.
So if you're interested in seeing more of them, and more of the super funky markings,
definitely check out the Kickstarter.
We also have a Kickstarter exclusive cover design that I think
you'll probably really get a kick out of. I hope so, I think it's really cool.
Anyway, hopefully you enjoyed the video, whether you're interested in the book or not.
These are certainly a fascinating and little understood branch of Chinese handgun manufacture.
Thanks for watching.