It has been several months since the release of “Total War: Warhammer 3”, presumably many players already have a good understanding of this game.
I still vaguely remember that when the Aurora trailer for “Warhammer 3” came out, the mighty and domineering Aurora Gundam – Warrior and Guards in the trailer left a deep impression on countless players.
Our topic today is related to the armor worn by the warriors and guards.
Carefully observe the armor worn by the warriors and guards. This is a kind of stacking of triangular armor pieces.
This kind of armor is called Shan Wenjia in our Chinese history.
“Tang Liu Dian·Arsenal Order” has such a paragraph: “There are three types of armor: Mingguang armor, light armor, fine scale armor, black hammer armor, white cloth armor, soap silk armor, mountain armor , cloth back armor, infantry armor Armor, leather armour, wood armour, chain armour, vest.”
I believe that as long as you are a friend who loves history, you must have seen armor with this pattern in all kinds of ancient costume movies and TV dramas or ancient games.
Throughout our thousand-year history, we can always see such armor on the portraits and sculptures of various generals. It can be said that the mountain armor itself has become a symbol of China, a cultural symbol.
The picture above is a modern bronze statue of Guan Yu. You can see that Guan Yu is wearing Shan Wenjia, and in ancient sculptures, Shan Wenjia is also a very popular dress:
Although it has a large number of appearances in sculpture and painting, Shan Wenjia itself is a big mystery in Chinese archaeology, because there is no real object unearthed for this kind of armor.
As for what material it is made of, and how it is made, countless armor enthusiasts are scrambling to and fro, and they have not been able to reach a definite conclusion.
The author of this article will not give you a definite conclusion. I just want to take out some of the current mainstream speculations about Shan Wenjia for everyone to take a look at. As for which one is correct, readers are asked to judge for themselves. .
Conjecture 1: Shan Wenjia is an iron armor made of a special type of armor.
In later generations, especially in the eyes of history lovers and art workers in the 21st century, most people believe in shanwenjia as a kind of iron armor made of triangular pieces of armor.
For example, in the illustration of “Romance of the Three Kingdoms 14” in the above picture, the artist obviously painted Shan Wenjia as a kind of iron armor with triangular pieces.
The Shanwen armors copied by modern armor enthusiasts follow this idea without exception:
Since there are no real objects unearthed, and no exact records of production are left, modern enthusiasts can only verify the connection method of Shanwenjia’s armor pieces through their own imagination, guesswork and continuous experiments. Different groups of enthusiasts have their own The idea:
Some people think it’s like this:
Some people think it’s like this:
But going around, armor enthusiasts have to face a very real problem, that is, no matter how they change the style and connection method of the armor, the defensive ability of Shanwen armor is not very ideal, and some are even difficult to bend , very little flexibility. Moreover, most of them are expensive to make, and the working hours are still very long, which do not quite meet the cost-effective standard of ancient armaments.
Due to the lack of reliability of the first guess, people from all walks of life debated endlessly, which gave birth to the second guess – Chain Armor said.
Conjecture 2: Shan Wenjia is the artistic expression of chain mail
When it comes to chain mail, I believe everyone is familiar with it. This is a kind of “iron sweater” made of small iron rings.
As a kind of armor widely used in the East and the West in human history, chainmail has played an extremely important role in the history of human warfare.
In ancient China, there was such a special connection and sorting method, which connected multiple iron rings in a triangular shape.
It can be seen that after such an arrangement, the shape of the chain mail and the mountain armor is very similar, and it is completely impossible to see which one is from a distance.
From this, many people have come to the conclusion that Shan Wenjia, which exists in portraits and sculptures, is essentially a form of artistic expression adopted by painters and sculptors in order to be lazy (because the iron ring unit of chain armor is too Thin and difficult to carve, so sculptors and painters use this Shanwen shape instead to save their workload).
The author used to be a faithful believer in this statement, but with the accumulation of my reading in the past few years, I gradually discovered that this guess is not so flawless.
First of all, looking at the portraits and sculptures of our country, Shan Wenjia and chain armor have appeared on the same screen:
The picture above is the painting of “Vimalakirti Performing Sutras” by Li Gonglin of the Song Dynasty. If you carefully observe the armor worn by the characters in the painting, you will find that his breastplate is painted with chain mail:
And his arm armor is painted in the shape of a mountain in the shape of a mountain.
If the two are really the same thing, why would an artist paint both at the same time? Shouldn’t only one be drawn?
Moreover, the chain mail itself is a large category, and there are various ways of weaving. There are more than a dozen weaving methods that can be verified:
The weaving method that resembles mountain armor is just one of them. Why does this shape become the symbol of Chinese chain armor?
And like the first hypothesis, this weaving method is not a cost-effective armor. According to the ancient craftsmanship, its defensive effect and the time cost required to make it are not very cost-effective. The mainstream chain armor in East Asia and Europe The way it is prepared is very different.
Under the circumstance that the first two hypotheses are flawed, someone has put forward a third hypothesis – non-iron armor theory.
Conjecture 3: Shanwen is just a pattern, not an iron armor
Since Shan Wenjia is always accompanied by soldiers such as soldiers and generals, it is easy for people in later generations to think that Shan Wenjia is a kind of iron armor.
But is there such a possibility that it is not iron armor at all, but a special piece of clothing ? Even if it is armor, is it possible that it is not made of iron? Otherwise, why haven’t we been able to find the unearthed objects of the metal?
The earliest records of Shan Wenjia originated in the Tang Dynasty, and there were corresponding records in the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties. However, the strange thing is that these records do not clearly say that Shan Wenjia is actually a piece of iron metal armor.
In the armor book “Building French Style” in the Northern Song Dynasty, this mountain-shaped, or triangular, herringbone-shaped pattern was named ” chain pattern “. Some archaeologists believe that since the book refers to this shape as a “pattern”, it may also imply that this so-called shanwenjia is actually a decorative pattern.
In the later Ming Dynasty, there was a record of a kind of armor with a mountain pattern, called Tang Yi armor:
Tang Yijia’s records clearly stated that it is a leather armor made from a series of non-metallic raw materials such as thorn grass, radish seeds, and pangolins after being boiled into skins, not iron armor:
The above picture is the corresponding record. It can be seen that the author did not mention the use of metal materials at all, and the Shanwen pattern of Tang Yijiao was carved on the leather armor after it was made.
During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the folk also recorded a lot of “suozi brocade”, that is, the decorative pattern of the mountain pattern chain pattern was drawn on the cloth brocade:
On many clothes of the Qing Dynasty, we can see such patterns:
Iron mountain armors have not been unearthed, but many clothes with mountain armor patterns like this can be found in the Qing Dynasty, which makes many people believe that the mountain armors displayed on ancient portrait sculptures may be just a painting Clothes with special patterns, or leather armor with patterns.
However, this hypothesis has also been questioned by many people. Due to space limitations, it will not be expanded to everyone. To this day, people still cannot reach a definite conclusion about what Shan Wenjia is.
The above are the three guesses about Shan Wenjia. I don’t know which one is the most reliable in the minds of readers? What do you think the warriors and guards wore? See you in the next article.
References:
https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/26133843
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1zq4y1N77D?spm_id_from=333.999.0.0
https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/422945302
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