[ Horn Grip Type Chinese Pistol ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are looking at
a unique pattern of Chinese domestic pistol.
This is one of the many types that I have categorised,
and described and covered in my upcoming book:
"Pistols of the Warlords, Chinese Domestic Handguns, 1911-1949".
I've kind of colloquially referred to these as the "Horn Grip" type of pistol
because the most distinctive feature about them is the fact that they use
a typically light-coloured horn material for their grip panels.
However, that of course is not a definitive technical characteristic of a handgun.
What we have here though is we know these pistols would have been made
in a particular place and time, for a particular ... single Warlord or group of Warlords.
Unfortunately, there are basically no surviving records from this period in China.
And so we don't know exactly who these were made for, or when, or by whom.
But we know that they form a single sort of continuous family of pistols.
So what I'd like to do is show you these three examples,
which are pretty definitive of the type, and give you an idea of what they look like.
Other than the horn material used for the grips,
and, by the way, while we're looking at it here, I want to point out that these are
sort of translucent grips, especially the lighter ones.
You can see the trigger bar through the grip panel there, which is kind of cool.
Anyway, aside from those grips, there are a few distinctive features of this pattern of pistol.
So, one is that these have a separate pinned in place front barrel band
that holds the front of the barrel in place.
We have rear sights that are vaguely sort of inspired by the C96 Mauser.
And they will have markings in them but they, as an almost complete rule,
have sight ... sliders that are fixed in place.
This is a separate piece,
but it doesn't actually move, it's permanently assembled into the gun.
And there's actually no rear sight notch on this sight.
If we compare these two rear sights, you can see that they share the same
basic sort of distinctive elements.
They're not identical by any stretch, but neither one has an actual rear sight notch.
They both have ... "range markings" engraved on them,
but neither has a slide tangent leaf that actually moves.
In the case of this one, you can clearly see how the ... sight slider
is actually being used to retain the extractor there.
These will also show hammers that are styled after the C96 Mauser,
and also grasping lugs back here on the slide that are styled after the C96 Mauser.
So this has a solid slide, where the C96 of course had a separate bolt inside a fixed frame.
But the styling characteristics here clearly came from the Mauser.
These all have open slides, so the barrel is exposed out here,
and the slide just runs down on the bottom.
Now, some of them will have a bit more detailed features out on the slide.
So ... this set of lightening grooves is also directly inspired by the C96 Mauser.
But some of these, perhaps later production, or perhaps just production by different people,
some of them are a bit simpler.
Sometimes these Horn Grip type pistols are a real wealth of interesting fake markings,
and this one's a pretty good example.
We have an Eibar-style safety here on the front, which is typical for these guns.
But then we have a whole bunch of "Belgiques", we have a fake Mauser banner.
Like, I'm not even sure what this all is.
This example is even better for fake markings,
we've got ... fake Belgian proof marks that are used as decorative elements.
We've got this thing back here,
a bunch of writing on the side of the slide.
These guns will typically have square-bottomed grips with square-bottomed magazines.
Patterned after the FN 1900 basically, but not always,
they can occasionally be found with round-bottom grips.
The witness holes in the various magazines for these pistols,
they can take a wide variety of forms.
And they may or may not have any connection to how many rounds fit in the magazine.
So sometimes the bottom witness hole is below the last ... round,
and doesn't actually tell you when it's full.
Sometimes it's located above the last round, so ... once this bottom witness hole is full
you can still load more ammunition in.
And sometimes they actually line up with a fully-loaded magazine.
Sometimes you have magazine witness holes that are purely decorative, like this one.
This is a particularly neat example, that's just crude art in the form of a pistol magazine.
These can be found with a variety of barrel lengths.
And the long-barrelled examples typically, often, will actually be slotted for shoulder stocks.
This is really cool in that this is the only example of one of these pistols
I've yet run into that actually has its matching shoulder stock.
These guns were all handmade, so you can't just ... take a shoulder stock from one,
and fit it to another gun, that's unlikely to work.
This is set up
very much like a Mauser C96 stock, where we have sort of a T lug on the front of the stock.
You can see ... the workmanship on this is pretty questionable,
a lot of things not really square there.
But then there's a spring catch below the lug that locks it in place.
Now you can tell this one has been used with the stock a fair amount because
the stock slot is actually sort of starting to break apart.
Unlike some other patterns of Chinese pistols, there's no added material
on the back of the grip to reinforce the shoulder stock connection.
So if you put a 14 inch long stock onto this pistol
held in place only by this relatively thin set of grooves,
(here's the example from our other long barrelled one),
and if you start pushing that stock side to side, it's got a lot of leverage.
And it's going to start bending the rather ... thin thickness
that is right there around the milled-in stock slot.
In fact you can even see this one has broken through
into the magazine well of the pistol as well.
That's not really a good thing.
This example also has a rather unique finish to it.
Someone has refinished the barrel on it.
The rest of the gun was originally blued, and it appears either in China or
... sometime after the fact, someone has polished off the blue
on a specific set of flat surfaces.
So the blue survives on the inside of the trigger guard here, but not on the side of the frame.
It does survive on the slide.
This appears to be someone's attempt to make a fancy two-tone pistol, and it's kind of cool.
I don't know, it wouldn't be perhaps my first choice, but it's neat to see.
We have only a few markings on this one.
We got a Mauser, we got a "Nationale", two more "Nationales",
that's a fake German proof mark.
We then have a "Brownings" back here with a picture of a small pistol,
although it's not a picture of this pistol specifically.
And once again the typical rear sight composition for one of these pistols.
Where there is a rear sight slider, it is a separate piece,
but it's used to hold the extractor in place and has no relation to the actual sight.
In fact you can see our sight here ... has the same markings
all up and down on the two sides of the sight, nothing changes.
There is actually a rear sight notch on this one, but it's a pretty darn small one.
Like the C96 Mauser stocks that these were obviously patterned after,
they do open up and you can actually put the pistol into the stock.
This fits just like a C96 does, it's a nice fit there.
And then you've got a band here so you can attach this to a belt or to a leather carrier.
And this is ... sort of a functional handling equivalent to a C96 Mauser,
or at least that's how it would have been seen in Chinese military service during the Warlord era.
This is a fancy high-status sort of weapon.
A gun that has the attachable shoulder stock is seen as one that's more powerful,
even if it is just in .32 ACP.
These are all chambered for the .32 ACP cartridge.
The two common cartridges in Chinese pistols were of course .32 ACP,
and .30 Mauser or 7.63 Mauser.
Some models of Chinese pistols you will see in both calibres.
These are exclusively made in .32.
One thing that is particularly cool about this pattern is
this is the only surviving Chinese domestic-made shoulder stock
that's not for an FN 1900 pistol, that I have been able to come across.
There are a fair number of these Chinese domestic pistols that are cut for shoulder-stock slots.
FN 1900 copies, as well as uniquely domestic Chinese designs like this one.
But finding the original stock that actually fits the gun
because these are all individually handmade and hand fitted, that's really cool.
So, these are pistols that are actually available from time to time on the US collectors market.
There's very little known about them, and so they don't tend to get described very well.
Hopefully, this gives you a bit of a better idea of what you're looking for on a Horn Grip type pistol.
If you're interested in the subject and you would like to know more about these,
(we have, I think, three times as many as this actually in the book),
as well as knowing more about some of the other patterns of domestic Chinese pistol designs
as well as their interesting and unique copies of various American and European pistols,
definitely check out the Kickstarter.
We have some cool Kickstarter-only options
for those of you who helped support us in the pre-sale of the book.
Either way though, thanks for watching, and hopefully you enjoyed the video.