Bronze Weapons Exhibition Hall

The Bronze Weapons Exhibition Hall is located at the right side after entering the gate of the Qin Terracotta Warriors Museum. There are exhibiting bronze weapons such as sword, dagger-axe, spear, tomahawk, beryllium, crossbows and so on. Among them the wugou beryllium was firstly found in China.
 

There are a large number of bronze weapons unearthed from the terracotta warriors pits. According to preliminary estimates, the number is close to 40,000 and most of them are bronze arrowheads. The excavation of these weapons reflects the scale and standard of the production of weapons.

 

According to the function, the weapons could be divided into 3 categories: short weapon, long handle weapons and long-range weapons.

 

Short Weapons: using for close combat. The bronze sword and gold hook are such a kind of weapons, including: sword, gold hook,

 

Among the 22 unearthed bronze swords, except for 5 broken ones, others are relatively complete. The bodies of the bronze swords are slender in willow leaf shape. They are about 81-94.8 cm long. Some still in scabbard but the scabbard was decayed. Comparing with swords before dynasty, the body of the bronze swords is longer and narrow, and contains more tin as they are in bluish white.

     

Long Handle Weapons: the long handle weapons unearthed in the pits are spear, dagger-axe, halberd, tomahawk, and beryllium bronze and so on. Just one of them was made of iron, others are bronze weapons. They all has long wooden handle.

 

Long-range Weapons: As early as the Warring States Period, Qin had already used strong crossbow as weapon and it played an important role in wars at that time. A great batch of crossbows, bronze crossbow machine and arrowheads were unearthed from the terracotta warriors’ pits. The bronze crossbow machine and arrowheads are most lethal long-range weapons.

 

As the proportion of tin and bronze in the weapons are different, the hardness of the weapons is different. The hardness sword in the pits is about HB106, which is very sharp. The hardness of bronze spear and bronze arrowheads are also more than 100 with good puncture force.