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Review of "The Gunpowder Age" by Tonio Andrade
I recently finished reading "The Gunpowder Age" by Tonio Andrade. It's a book about the history of gunpowder as used in warfare in China (with bits about its use in Europe, provided mainly for context and comparison).
It's also a book about the racist, colonialist myth that guns are A European Thing, that China may have invented gunpowder but never used it in warfare, or that China may have invented guns but they never actually went very far with them and their gun tech was always hopelessly outmatched by superior Western guns. Andrade doesn't call these myths out as the racist/colonialist garbage that they are... but he does demolish them quite thoroughly, by going to both Chinese and European primary sources (and making it clear that secondary sources have long been and continue to be woefully poor when it comes to the history of gun technology. Even some Chinese historians have bought into the myth). In other words, by way of looking at gun tech, Andrade is attacking the orientalist idea of China being "stagnant," "decadent," or otherwise somehow innately inferior to Europe/backwards compared to Europe.
Andrade counters this myth with a counter-narrative that Chinese stagnation happened only during periods of (relative) peace and unity. The land that is populated by Chinese speaking people has sometimes been completely unified and at peace, but at other times (especially during dynastic succession, but also during dynasties that failed to achieve hegemony) it splintered into smaller but still quite powerful states, each more-or-less seriously interested in conquering the others. He argues that the existential threat of conquest drove R&D for new weapons, whereas periods of unity and peace led to military complacency and a significant slowdown of military research. Europe, in contrast, never had *any* periods of peace, so, once gun-having Europeans arrived in East Asia during the era of colonial expansion, from time to time China would lag behind Europe in gun technology, only to catch up once a new period of heightened warfare began.
The colonialist meme that China was decadent and weak solidified in the 19th century, during one of those long periods of peace and stability within China. When the threat from Europe began to prod China to resume military investment in the 19th century, they found themselves behind not just in the realm of weapons, but in a vast array of interlocking realms due to Europe's burgeoning industrial revolution. The Self-Strengthening Movement and the Tongzhi Restoration were able to bring China up to par with Europe and Japan for a time, but they did so only through the action of individual ministers, rather than a systematic, long-term government program - when the ministers died or ceased to be in favour, China began to fall behind again, and at a time when military technology was advancing faster than ever.
This was a good book, and I will now go on at some length into the details that I found most interesting.
Chinese chemists invented gunpowder sometime in the 9th century, as part of a systematic pharmaceutical research effort. They called it "fire medicine," and this continues to be the name for black powder in China even today. It didn't take long for the various rival states of the early Song period (mid-10th century) to adapt fire medicine for use in incendiary weapons (the strong and enduring interest Chinese generals had in setting the enemy on fire, usually with flaming arrows but also in other ways, vastly predates the discovery of fire medicine).
The Song period involved a lot of warfare, but it was all between people who spoke the same language, who traded with each other and who read each other's books, so gunpowder weapons were never a monopoly of one state, and the period saw a huge amount of experimentation and rapid development of new ways to use fire medicine to kill. By 970, fire bombs and fire arrows using gunpowder were the focus of government funded R&D in the Song capital. Early gunpowder recipes included substances like tar and pitch, and were clearly intended to burn rather than explode. The add ons gradually dropped away and gunpowder became less incendiary and more explosive. References to gunpowder bombs (usually delivered by catapult) make it clear that the explosive force of the bombs was steadily increasing, until by 1220 if not earlier, you had genuinely explosive gunpowder being used to turn an iron container into lethal shrapnel.
Meanwhile, around 1132, a new innovation appeared - the fire lance, a hollow bamboo tube packed with gunpowder, used to spit fire at enemy troops (and the original sources make it clear that a: while it had a greater reach than a traditional stabby-type lance, it was a short range infantry weapon, and b: that it was seen as an anti-personnel weapon, used to burn people more than set fire to things). At some point fire lances started being used to spit pebbles or ceramic shards mixed in with the fire. By the early 1200's fire lance tubes began being made of iron, they started shooting iron balls instead of handfuls of pebbles, and finally a plug of some kind was developed and put behind the projectile. Once you have something (a wooden plug, a wad of wool or fabric) keeping the combustion gases from expanding out and escaping around the projectile, you have a missile weapon that can shoot projectiles at lethal speed over fairly long distances. These were the first guns.
As the Mongols conquered the Song and founded the short lived Yuan dynasty, you had the arrival of actual guns in the very late 1200's or early 1300's. These guns were neither hand-held firearms, nor were they cannons, inhabiting an in-between space - an example with a dated inscription, made in 1298, weighs 6 kilograms, with a wide, short barrel of 35 centimeters (short barrels mean less time for the gases to accelerate the bullet, making for a shorter range, as well as a less accurate weapon). These early guns did not displace the vast array of other gunpowder-using weapons that had been developed over the few previous centuries of experimentation, but were instead added to them.
The Ming dynasty which overthrew Yuan was perhaps the first gunpowder empire, but in 1363, accounts of the weapons deployed by the Ming in a naval battle on Poyang Lake include "fire bombs, fire guns, fire arrows, fire seeds [probably grenades], large and small fire lances, large and small 'commander' fire tubes, large and small iron bombs, rockets, and something called 'No Alternative,'" the last being a rolled up reed map stuffed with gunpowder as well as all sorts of smaller explosive and incendiary devices, designed to be lit and heaved onto an adjoining enemy ship - the gunpowder in the mat would go off, shooting out all the contents, which would then explode and burn everything on board. On the first day of battle, catapults (not guns) throwing incendiary and/or explosive bombs were the most effective of all these weapons. And in the end, the battle was won not by any of them, but rather by a ruse - someone under Zhu Yuanzhang came up with the idea of filling seven ships with gunpowder and staffing them with straw dummies holding lances. Skeleton crews of "men unafraid of death" sailed these floating bombs directly into the midst of the enemy fleet before lighting the fuses and leaping overboard. The resulting conflagration destroyed huge numbers of enemy ships, and the survivors began to abandon the cause.
Guns were getting significantly more numerous. by 1380, Ming policy was that 10 percent of troops should be gunners - depending on which numbers you accept for the total size of the Ming army, that would be between 130k and 180k gunners, at a time when England and France together could not field that many soldiers in total. But, Andrade's analysis of accounts of Zhu Yuanzhang's sieges of enemy cities shows that these guns were still being used primarily against soldiers, not fortifications. Destroying fortifications (like a city gate) was the job of catapults hurtling explosive bombs.
Andrade isn't all that interested in gunpowder's history apart from guns, so he doesn't talk much about the spread of gunpowder recipes across the continent. Allow me to fill in for him: In Syria, Hasan al-Rammah wrote about gunpowder and its military uses (incendiary bombs, fire lances, and the like - no mention of explosives or of guns) in 1280, and it seems knowledge of gunpowder had been around for a few decades by the time he wrote. The words in Persian and Arabic for saltpetre (Chinese snow, Chinese salt) and words for a few of gunpowder weapons show that Islamic scholars knew where gunpowder had had originated, and at least some of its military uses had travelled with the gunpowder recipe itself. In contrast, the earliest European writeup (Roger Bacon in 1267) talks about a "children's toy" - a firecracker - that creates "the roar of strong thunder, and a flash brighter than the most brilliant lightning." Somehow the formula for gunpowder had become separated from knowledge of its military uses along the way to him.
But when it comes to the spread of actual guns, things get much more murky. Persian and Arabic accounts that predate the late 1300's are hard to parse because the word "midfa" was used for several quite different weapons over a wide time period, first for flamethrowers (naphtha projectors), then for Chinese-inspired fire lances, and finally for actual guns proper. We can be pretty certain guns existed there from the mid 1360's on, but before that, there are only ambiguous references that could be guns or could be something else. Meanwhile in Europe, the first solid evidence for guns comes from 1326, at least 40 years before the earliest solid Islamic evidence (meanwhile, a comprehensive list of weapons to take on a crusade written in 1321 makes no mention of guns or gunpowder, setting a possible no-earlier-than date on the arrival of the technology).
Which means guns reached Europe just half a century after they became widespread in China, and only a century after their first appearance there, and they might have bypassed the Islamic world to do so. Compared to the long, slow percolation of earlier Chinese inventions from China to Europe, 50 to 100 years is remarkably fast. Andrade thinks the most likely carriers of gun tech to Europe were the Mongols. He doesn't talk about how the Mongol empire, even after it fragmented, had vastly streamlined communication and travel across Eurasia compared to before... but he does talk about how the Mongols were interested in military technology, and at the same time were very indifferent record keepers and historians, creating a blank in the historical record. Finally, given the lack of solid evidence for guns in the Islamic world until some time after their undisputed arrival in Europe, the most likely route of the technology is through the Mongol world.
These first European guns were short and small, very much like the Chinese ones that inspired them. Hardly any examples have survived of 14th century European guns, but one archaeological find weighs nine kilos and measures just 30 cm long. Comparisons of the cost of metal vs the amounts paid for guns up through the mid 1300's show that they averaged only 11 kilograms. Tests with a replica of that archaeological find demonstrated that it could penetrate plate armour much more easily than an arrow, and accounts of the mid-century battle of Crecy suggest that guns were primarily deployed as an anti-knight weapon to protect archers or infantry from cavalry. The fact that guns made a horse-frightening noise as they fired was a bonus. These guns were not always used for shooting balls - metal arrows and shrapnel were also popular projectiles. Sometimes the gunners would leave out the wooden plug behind the projectiles, producing a much shorter-range fire lance effect. it was all rather ad-hoc.
So, in both China and Europe, up until the late 1300's, guns were mainly small, mainly anti-personnel weapons. China actually trended towards quite small guns, mostly weighing under 2 kilograms, clearly designed to be carried and used by a single person. A bigger gun could be used to throw more pieces of shrapnel, potentially killing multiple people with a single shot, but at the cost of transportability and firing speed (the more massive the barrel, the more often you had to wait for it to cool before you could reload it safely). Instead, Chinese generals opted to equip entire regiments with guns, creating another category of missile firing troops. The largest Chinese guns, probably designed for fixed defensive positions, topped out at less than 80kg.
Andrade doesn't address actual European tactics other than in the one example of the battle of Crecy, but if that was more generally applicable, then the European strategy was to put a few larger guns on a cart that could follow your footsoldiers around, providing anti-knight, anti-cavalry protection. Obviously there was a lot of experimentation with different sizes of guns. Eventually, in the mid 1370's, European gunsmiths discovered that if you made guns big enough, they could destroy stone fortifications. The age of cannons and artillery had arrived.
And that was the first divergence point. Chinese fortifications were universally made of rammed earth - ten to twenty meters thick at the base, usually ten meters high, and five to ten meters thick at the top, with steep but not sheer sides protected from erosion by a layer of brick or stone. Having large impressive walls surrounding your town was extremely important, not just from a defensive point of view but also as a sign that your city was prosperous and safe. The only way to breach the walls, really, was by attacking a gate - the walls were essentially indestructible. Neither bombs nor guns could make a dent in them, especially guns were quite useless since projectiles would glance off the angled side of the wall rather than penetrating. Even after they ceased to be practical or necessary from a military point of view, these massive city walls in China only began to be dismantled in the last century, with modern earth moving equipment.
In Europe, in contrast, cities rarely had walls, but castles always had relatively thin (maximum 4 meters, typically 1 or 2), sheer stone-and-mortar walls (earth walls don't have the structural strength to be sheer). Unlike earth, stone and mortar are brittle. And a sheer wall is much more vulnerable to being penetrated and shattered by a cannonball than an angled wall. At the start of the 1300's, Europeans considered your standard stone walled castle invulnerable to capture as long as the defenders had enough food and water. 75 years later, those castle walls began to be destroyed with relatively brief barrages from large cannons. Generals prepared for long sieges, only to realize that they didn't need to raise a siege at all - just a few days of bombardment with their largest guns would make big holes in even the best castle wall, at which point they could storm through the breach, if the enemy didn't surrender first. All of Europe engaged in a massive arms race, and there was an orgy of conquest as everyone who could afford enough big guns proceeded to go around destroying the defences of their neighbours. Meanwhile, China, with no use for large guns, continued to make small ones.
The second divergence point happened in the mid 1400's. Up until then, constant experimentation had caused both China and Europe to gradually increase the length of their gun barrels. Longer barrels meant more accurate shots, and also gave the gases from the exploding gunpowder more time to impart speed to the projectile, giving longer range and more destructive power. But then, in the first half of the fifteenth century, after hundreds of years of more or less steady conflict, China finally achieved relative peace - the Ming had unified China and conquered everyone they wanted to. The need for large military budgets and extensive R&D ended, and with it, the gradual increase in Chinese muzzle-to-bore ratio.
Meanwhile Europe continued to experiment with longer bores, making longer and longer guns until the payoffs in improved range and accuracy ceased around the 1480's. The increased range from a longer bore meant you didn't need as much gunpowder, which meant you could make the entire gun thinner and lighter without risk of it bursting. Instead of monstrous guns weighing tons that needed a long time to cool down, you could make much lighter guns that could be fired more often, without much sacrifice of destructive power. The final stage of barrel lengthening was quite rapid - in the siege of Constantinople in 1453, the largest gun used by Mehmet II had an 8-1 length to bore ratio. By 1480, the typical cannon had a 40-1 ratio, and the shape of guns stabilized for the next 300 years. When Europeans starting sailing to China in the 1500's, the Chinese instantly appreciated that these long thin European guns were superior, and rapidly started copying them.
There's a lot more in this book, but the last bit that I want to talk about is the question of firearms. It's become commonplace for historians to say that late medieval and early modern European monarchs bankrupted themselves for centuries, arming their soldiers with firearms, only to not really have those guns have much of an impact on battles. It's only at the turn of the 17th century that guns finally started to become a pivotal part of warfare in Europe, as European armies began to figure out the advantages of firing volleys - at any one moment, one quarter of the gunners are firing, one quarter, having fired, are falling back, one quarter, having fallen back, are reloading their guns, and one quarter, having reloaded, are advancing to the front line to shoot again. The result is a near-constant barrage of fire.
Doing this required a rediscovering the Roman practice of training soldiers to achieve a choreographed unison of movement and attack, and of drilling them until they are able to keep up that choreography even in the face of a charging enemy. This is something that European armies had not been doing for the previous 1200 years. Andrade devotes a chapter to demolishing the self-congratulatory European histories of warfare that treat this rediscovery as a world-changing development, dryly pointing out that every powerful state outside of Europe (including China) had never stopped doing this sort of thing, and it was more a sign of Europe's millennia long period of governmental, bureaucratic, and military poverty and backwardness than a sign of European supremacy. In China, drilling troops in volley fire goes back to the first millenium BC, when Chinese troops were drilled to choreograph a continuous rain of crossbow bolts (like guns, a highly effective but very slow weapon). They never stopped doing it, and it was obvious the moment guns came on the scene that it was a good idea to adapt crossbow volley drills to the new weapon. The first evidence in China of volley fire being used with guns is from 1388 - a full 200 years before anyone in Europe started trying to do the same thing.
It's also a book about the racist, colonialist myth that guns are A European Thing, that China may have invented gunpowder but never used it in warfare, or that China may have invented guns but they never actually went very far with them and their gun tech was always hopelessly outmatched by superior Western guns. Andrade doesn't call these myths out as the racist/colonialist garbage that they are... but he does demolish them quite thoroughly, by going to both Chinese and European primary sources (and making it clear that secondary sources have long been and continue to be woefully poor when it comes to the history of gun technology. Even some Chinese historians have bought into the myth). In other words, by way of looking at gun tech, Andrade is attacking the orientalist idea of China being "stagnant," "decadent," or otherwise somehow innately inferior to Europe/backwards compared to Europe.
Andrade counters this myth with a counter-narrative that Chinese stagnation happened only during periods of (relative) peace and unity. The land that is populated by Chinese speaking people has sometimes been completely unified and at peace, but at other times (especially during dynastic succession, but also during dynasties that failed to achieve hegemony) it splintered into smaller but still quite powerful states, each more-or-less seriously interested in conquering the others. He argues that the existential threat of conquest drove R&D for new weapons, whereas periods of unity and peace led to military complacency and a significant slowdown of military research. Europe, in contrast, never had *any* periods of peace, so, once gun-having Europeans arrived in East Asia during the era of colonial expansion, from time to time China would lag behind Europe in gun technology, only to catch up once a new period of heightened warfare began.
The colonialist meme that China was decadent and weak solidified in the 19th century, during one of those long periods of peace and stability within China. When the threat from Europe began to prod China to resume military investment in the 19th century, they found themselves behind not just in the realm of weapons, but in a vast array of interlocking realms due to Europe's burgeoning industrial revolution. The Self-Strengthening Movement and the Tongzhi Restoration were able to bring China up to par with Europe and Japan for a time, but they did so only through the action of individual ministers, rather than a systematic, long-term government program - when the ministers died or ceased to be in favour, China began to fall behind again, and at a time when military technology was advancing faster than ever.
This was a good book, and I will now go on at some length into the details that I found most interesting.
Chinese chemists invented gunpowder sometime in the 9th century, as part of a systematic pharmaceutical research effort. They called it "fire medicine," and this continues to be the name for black powder in China even today. It didn't take long for the various rival states of the early Song period (mid-10th century) to adapt fire medicine for use in incendiary weapons (the strong and enduring interest Chinese generals had in setting the enemy on fire, usually with flaming arrows but also in other ways, vastly predates the discovery of fire medicine).
The Song period involved a lot of warfare, but it was all between people who spoke the same language, who traded with each other and who read each other's books, so gunpowder weapons were never a monopoly of one state, and the period saw a huge amount of experimentation and rapid development of new ways to use fire medicine to kill. By 970, fire bombs and fire arrows using gunpowder were the focus of government funded R&D in the Song capital. Early gunpowder recipes included substances like tar and pitch, and were clearly intended to burn rather than explode. The add ons gradually dropped away and gunpowder became less incendiary and more explosive. References to gunpowder bombs (usually delivered by catapult) make it clear that the explosive force of the bombs was steadily increasing, until by 1220 if not earlier, you had genuinely explosive gunpowder being used to turn an iron container into lethal shrapnel.
Meanwhile, around 1132, a new innovation appeared - the fire lance, a hollow bamboo tube packed with gunpowder, used to spit fire at enemy troops (and the original sources make it clear that a: while it had a greater reach than a traditional stabby-type lance, it was a short range infantry weapon, and b: that it was seen as an anti-personnel weapon, used to burn people more than set fire to things). At some point fire lances started being used to spit pebbles or ceramic shards mixed in with the fire. By the early 1200's fire lance tubes began being made of iron, they started shooting iron balls instead of handfuls of pebbles, and finally a plug of some kind was developed and put behind the projectile. Once you have something (a wooden plug, a wad of wool or fabric) keeping the combustion gases from expanding out and escaping around the projectile, you have a missile weapon that can shoot projectiles at lethal speed over fairly long distances. These were the first guns.
As the Mongols conquered the Song and founded the short lived Yuan dynasty, you had the arrival of actual guns in the very late 1200's or early 1300's. These guns were neither hand-held firearms, nor were they cannons, inhabiting an in-between space - an example with a dated inscription, made in 1298, weighs 6 kilograms, with a wide, short barrel of 35 centimeters (short barrels mean less time for the gases to accelerate the bullet, making for a shorter range, as well as a less accurate weapon). These early guns did not displace the vast array of other gunpowder-using weapons that had been developed over the few previous centuries of experimentation, but were instead added to them.
The Ming dynasty which overthrew Yuan was perhaps the first gunpowder empire, but in 1363, accounts of the weapons deployed by the Ming in a naval battle on Poyang Lake include "fire bombs, fire guns, fire arrows, fire seeds [probably grenades], large and small fire lances, large and small 'commander' fire tubes, large and small iron bombs, rockets, and something called 'No Alternative,'" the last being a rolled up reed map stuffed with gunpowder as well as all sorts of smaller explosive and incendiary devices, designed to be lit and heaved onto an adjoining enemy ship - the gunpowder in the mat would go off, shooting out all the contents, which would then explode and burn everything on board. On the first day of battle, catapults (not guns) throwing incendiary and/or explosive bombs were the most effective of all these weapons. And in the end, the battle was won not by any of them, but rather by a ruse - someone under Zhu Yuanzhang came up with the idea of filling seven ships with gunpowder and staffing them with straw dummies holding lances. Skeleton crews of "men unafraid of death" sailed these floating bombs directly into the midst of the enemy fleet before lighting the fuses and leaping overboard. The resulting conflagration destroyed huge numbers of enemy ships, and the survivors began to abandon the cause.
Guns were getting significantly more numerous. by 1380, Ming policy was that 10 percent of troops should be gunners - depending on which numbers you accept for the total size of the Ming army, that would be between 130k and 180k gunners, at a time when England and France together could not field that many soldiers in total. But, Andrade's analysis of accounts of Zhu Yuanzhang's sieges of enemy cities shows that these guns were still being used primarily against soldiers, not fortifications. Destroying fortifications (like a city gate) was the job of catapults hurtling explosive bombs.
Andrade isn't all that interested in gunpowder's history apart from guns, so he doesn't talk much about the spread of gunpowder recipes across the continent. Allow me to fill in for him: In Syria, Hasan al-Rammah wrote about gunpowder and its military uses (incendiary bombs, fire lances, and the like - no mention of explosives or of guns) in 1280, and it seems knowledge of gunpowder had been around for a few decades by the time he wrote. The words in Persian and Arabic for saltpetre (Chinese snow, Chinese salt) and words for a few of gunpowder weapons show that Islamic scholars knew where gunpowder had had originated, and at least some of its military uses had travelled with the gunpowder recipe itself. In contrast, the earliest European writeup (Roger Bacon in 1267) talks about a "children's toy" - a firecracker - that creates "the roar of strong thunder, and a flash brighter than the most brilliant lightning." Somehow the formula for gunpowder had become separated from knowledge of its military uses along the way to him.
But when it comes to the spread of actual guns, things get much more murky. Persian and Arabic accounts that predate the late 1300's are hard to parse because the word "midfa" was used for several quite different weapons over a wide time period, first for flamethrowers (naphtha projectors), then for Chinese-inspired fire lances, and finally for actual guns proper. We can be pretty certain guns existed there from the mid 1360's on, but before that, there are only ambiguous references that could be guns or could be something else. Meanwhile in Europe, the first solid evidence for guns comes from 1326, at least 40 years before the earliest solid Islamic evidence (meanwhile, a comprehensive list of weapons to take on a crusade written in 1321 makes no mention of guns or gunpowder, setting a possible no-earlier-than date on the arrival of the technology).
Which means guns reached Europe just half a century after they became widespread in China, and only a century after their first appearance there, and they might have bypassed the Islamic world to do so. Compared to the long, slow percolation of earlier Chinese inventions from China to Europe, 50 to 100 years is remarkably fast. Andrade thinks the most likely carriers of gun tech to Europe were the Mongols. He doesn't talk about how the Mongol empire, even after it fragmented, had vastly streamlined communication and travel across Eurasia compared to before... but he does talk about how the Mongols were interested in military technology, and at the same time were very indifferent record keepers and historians, creating a blank in the historical record. Finally, given the lack of solid evidence for guns in the Islamic world until some time after their undisputed arrival in Europe, the most likely route of the technology is through the Mongol world.
These first European guns were short and small, very much like the Chinese ones that inspired them. Hardly any examples have survived of 14th century European guns, but one archaeological find weighs nine kilos and measures just 30 cm long. Comparisons of the cost of metal vs the amounts paid for guns up through the mid 1300's show that they averaged only 11 kilograms. Tests with a replica of that archaeological find demonstrated that it could penetrate plate armour much more easily than an arrow, and accounts of the mid-century battle of Crecy suggest that guns were primarily deployed as an anti-knight weapon to protect archers or infantry from cavalry. The fact that guns made a horse-frightening noise as they fired was a bonus. These guns were not always used for shooting balls - metal arrows and shrapnel were also popular projectiles. Sometimes the gunners would leave out the wooden plug behind the projectiles, producing a much shorter-range fire lance effect. it was all rather ad-hoc.
So, in both China and Europe, up until the late 1300's, guns were mainly small, mainly anti-personnel weapons. China actually trended towards quite small guns, mostly weighing under 2 kilograms, clearly designed to be carried and used by a single person. A bigger gun could be used to throw more pieces of shrapnel, potentially killing multiple people with a single shot, but at the cost of transportability and firing speed (the more massive the barrel, the more often you had to wait for it to cool before you could reload it safely). Instead, Chinese generals opted to equip entire regiments with guns, creating another category of missile firing troops. The largest Chinese guns, probably designed for fixed defensive positions, topped out at less than 80kg.
Andrade doesn't address actual European tactics other than in the one example of the battle of Crecy, but if that was more generally applicable, then the European strategy was to put a few larger guns on a cart that could follow your footsoldiers around, providing anti-knight, anti-cavalry protection. Obviously there was a lot of experimentation with different sizes of guns. Eventually, in the mid 1370's, European gunsmiths discovered that if you made guns big enough, they could destroy stone fortifications. The age of cannons and artillery had arrived.
And that was the first divergence point. Chinese fortifications were universally made of rammed earth - ten to twenty meters thick at the base, usually ten meters high, and five to ten meters thick at the top, with steep but not sheer sides protected from erosion by a layer of brick or stone. Having large impressive walls surrounding your town was extremely important, not just from a defensive point of view but also as a sign that your city was prosperous and safe. The only way to breach the walls, really, was by attacking a gate - the walls were essentially indestructible. Neither bombs nor guns could make a dent in them, especially guns were quite useless since projectiles would glance off the angled side of the wall rather than penetrating. Even after they ceased to be practical or necessary from a military point of view, these massive city walls in China only began to be dismantled in the last century, with modern earth moving equipment.
In Europe, in contrast, cities rarely had walls, but castles always had relatively thin (maximum 4 meters, typically 1 or 2), sheer stone-and-mortar walls (earth walls don't have the structural strength to be sheer). Unlike earth, stone and mortar are brittle. And a sheer wall is much more vulnerable to being penetrated and shattered by a cannonball than an angled wall. At the start of the 1300's, Europeans considered your standard stone walled castle invulnerable to capture as long as the defenders had enough food and water. 75 years later, those castle walls began to be destroyed with relatively brief barrages from large cannons. Generals prepared for long sieges, only to realize that they didn't need to raise a siege at all - just a few days of bombardment with their largest guns would make big holes in even the best castle wall, at which point they could storm through the breach, if the enemy didn't surrender first. All of Europe engaged in a massive arms race, and there was an orgy of conquest as everyone who could afford enough big guns proceeded to go around destroying the defences of their neighbours. Meanwhile, China, with no use for large guns, continued to make small ones.
The second divergence point happened in the mid 1400's. Up until then, constant experimentation had caused both China and Europe to gradually increase the length of their gun barrels. Longer barrels meant more accurate shots, and also gave the gases from the exploding gunpowder more time to impart speed to the projectile, giving longer range and more destructive power. But then, in the first half of the fifteenth century, after hundreds of years of more or less steady conflict, China finally achieved relative peace - the Ming had unified China and conquered everyone they wanted to. The need for large military budgets and extensive R&D ended, and with it, the gradual increase in Chinese muzzle-to-bore ratio.
Meanwhile Europe continued to experiment with longer bores, making longer and longer guns until the payoffs in improved range and accuracy ceased around the 1480's. The increased range from a longer bore meant you didn't need as much gunpowder, which meant you could make the entire gun thinner and lighter without risk of it bursting. Instead of monstrous guns weighing tons that needed a long time to cool down, you could make much lighter guns that could be fired more often, without much sacrifice of destructive power. The final stage of barrel lengthening was quite rapid - in the siege of Constantinople in 1453, the largest gun used by Mehmet II had an 8-1 length to bore ratio. By 1480, the typical cannon had a 40-1 ratio, and the shape of guns stabilized for the next 300 years. When Europeans starting sailing to China in the 1500's, the Chinese instantly appreciated that these long thin European guns were superior, and rapidly started copying them.
There's a lot more in this book, but the last bit that I want to talk about is the question of firearms. It's become commonplace for historians to say that late medieval and early modern European monarchs bankrupted themselves for centuries, arming their soldiers with firearms, only to not really have those guns have much of an impact on battles. It's only at the turn of the 17th century that guns finally started to become a pivotal part of warfare in Europe, as European armies began to figure out the advantages of firing volleys - at any one moment, one quarter of the gunners are firing, one quarter, having fired, are falling back, one quarter, having fallen back, are reloading their guns, and one quarter, having reloaded, are advancing to the front line to shoot again. The result is a near-constant barrage of fire.
Doing this required a rediscovering the Roman practice of training soldiers to achieve a choreographed unison of movement and attack, and of drilling them until they are able to keep up that choreography even in the face of a charging enemy. This is something that European armies had not been doing for the previous 1200 years. Andrade devotes a chapter to demolishing the self-congratulatory European histories of warfare that treat this rediscovery as a world-changing development, dryly pointing out that every powerful state outside of Europe (including China) had never stopped doing this sort of thing, and it was more a sign of Europe's millennia long period of governmental, bureaucratic, and military poverty and backwardness than a sign of European supremacy. In China, drilling troops in volley fire goes back to the first millenium BC, when Chinese troops were drilled to choreograph a continuous rain of crossbow bolts (like guns, a highly effective but very slow weapon). They never stopped doing it, and it was obvious the moment guns came on the scene that it was a good idea to adapt crossbow volley drills to the new weapon. The first evidence in China of volley fire being used with guns is from 1388 - a full 200 years before anyone in Europe started trying to do the same thing.
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