Fire Lance: The Roaring Dragon That Birthed the Gun

The Fire Lance (huǒ qiāng) was a revolutionary gunpowder weapon that appeared in 10th-century China, marking a pivotal moment in the history of warfare. At its core, it was a simple concept: a tube, initially made of bamboo or paper and later of metal, filled with Gunpowder and attached to the end of a Spear. When ignited, it spewed a torrent of flames, smoke, and sparks forward for several meters. In its earliest form, it was a psychological weapon, designed to shock and disorient both men and horses on the battlefield. Over time, however, it evolved. Its gunpowder mixture was refined for greater explosive power, and critically, small projectiles known as “co-viatives”—such as pottery shards, iron pellets, or even toxic materials—were added to the barrel. This addition transformed the Fire Lance from a short-range flamethrower into the world's first proto-gun, a device that used the explosive force of gunpowder to propel a payload. It was the direct ancestor of all firearms, from the Hand Cannon to the modern assault rifle, representing the crucial conceptual leap from handheld melee weapons to chemically propelled projectile weapons, a leap that would ultimately reshape empires and redefine the human capacity for conflict.

The story of the Fire Lance does not begin on a battlefield, but in the quiet, incense-filled laboratories of Tang Dynasty China. Here, Daoist Alchemists, driven by a profound spiritual and philosophical quest, sought the fabled elixir of life. They were masters of observation and experimentation, mixing, heating, and purifying substances drawn from the natural world. Their goal was not destruction but transcendence—to conquer mortality itself. In their ancient texts, they recorded countless formulas, pursuing a “divine cinnabar” that promised to grant immortality to emperors and sages alike. It was in this crucible of spiritual seeking that a momentous, and deeply ironic, discovery was made. Sometime around the 9th century, in pursuit of an elixir, an unknown alchemist blended three common substances: sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter (potassium nitrate). The result was not a potion for eternal life but a volatile black powder that, when touched by a flame, did not merely burn, but deflagrated with a sudden, violent release of heat and gas. They had stumbled upon Gunpowder. Early texts from the era describe the accident with a tone of cautionary wonder. A mid-9th-century Daoist text, Zhenyuan Miaodao Yaolüe, warned fellow alchemists against mixing these ingredients, noting that “some have heated together sulfur, realgar, and saltpeter with honey; smoke and flames result, so that their hands and faces have been burnt, and even the whole house where they were working burned down.” They had found a formula not for immortality, but for instantaneous, fiery destruction. For over a century, this “fire drug” (hu藥 yào) remained a curiosity, a dangerous novelty primarily confined to the realm of court magicians and entertainers. Its explosive potential was harnessed for celebratory spectacle. During lavish imperial festivals, engineers known as “fireworkers” would craft magnificent displays. They packed the black powder into bamboo tubes to create the first firecrackers, whose loud bangs were believed to scare away evil spirits. They attached it to arrows, which shrieked through the air trailing sparks, and designed elaborate pyrotechnic set pieces that erupted in cascades of light and sound. In this early stage, gunpowder was a tool of performance and ritual, a way to manipulate the elements of fire and thunder to delight an emperor or sanctify a ceremony. It was a dragon tamed for entertainment, its fiery breath a source of awe rather than terror. Yet, the military strategists of the ascendant Song Dynasty (960–1279 CE) were watching. In an age of relentless existential threats, they saw something more in the fireworker's craft than mere spectacle. They saw a spark of military genius.

The Song Dynasty was a period of extraordinary cultural and technological brilliance, witnessing the invention of Movable Type Printing, the first use of Paper money, and the construction of monumental Bridge structures. Yet this prosperity was perpetually shadowed by military peril. The Song emperors faced a constant, existential threat from powerful nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples to the north: first the Khitans of the Liao dynasty, then the Jurchens of the Jin dynasty, and finally the unstoppable tide of the Mongol Empire. The Song military, composed largely of infantry, was often at a severe disadvantage against the superb cavalry of their northern foes. A Jurchen or Mongol horseman was a formidable fighting unit, fast, resilient, and deadly with a bow. Song strategists were locked in a desperate search for a technological “equalizer”—a weapon that could break a cavalry charge, sow chaos in enemy ranks, and give their infantry a fighting chance. It was in this crucible of necessity that the first military applications of gunpowder emerged. The Song military bureaucracy, with its sophisticated grasp of science and engineering, began to systematically weaponize the alchemist's “fire drug.” The transition began simply. Around the year 969, a general named Feng Jisheng is credited with inventing a new type of “fire arrow” that used a slow-burning gunpowder propellant. But the true breakthrough came from adapting the firecracker. Military engineers took the basic concept—a sealed tube of gunpowder—and attached it to the most common weapon in their arsenal: the Spear. This was the birth of the Fire Lance. The earliest versions, appearing in the 10th and 11th centuries, were primitive yet terrifying. A warrior would carry a long spear, but near its tip was lashed a tube, typically crafted from layers of hardened Paper or a sturdy stalk of bamboo. This tube was filled with a low-nitrate gunpowder, a mixture that burned furiously rather than exploding outright. Just before a charge, a soldier would light a fuse. As the enemy closed in, he would aim his spear and the device would erupt, spewing a jet of flame and thick, acrid smoke forward for several feet.

The initial function of the Fire Lance was not to kill the enemy directly with fire, though severe burns were certainly possible at close range. Its primary purpose was psychological. Imagine a line of Jurchen cavalry, thundering across the plains, confident in their power to shatter the Song infantry line. Suddenly, the front rank of spearmen does not simply brace for impact. It breathes fire. A wall of roaring flame, blinding smoke, and deafening noise erupts from the Song formation. Horses, naturally terrified of fire and loud noises, would panic, rearing up and throwing their riders or turning back in disarray. The enemy charge, the cornerstone of their military doctrine, would falter, broken not by steel, but by sensory overload and primal fear. The Wujing Zongyao (Collection of the Most Important Military Techniques), a massive military encyclopedia compiled by imperial scholars in 1044, provides detailed diagrams and descriptions of these early thermal weapons. It describes gunpowder bombs, grenades, and the fire arrows, but the true Fire Lance appears in historical accounts slightly later, with its use documented in incidents like the siege of De'an in 1132. Here, Song defenders used fire lances against the Jurchen invaders, marking one of the first confirmed battlefield uses of the weapon. These early models were single-shot, disposable devices. Once its charge was spent, the tube was useless, and the soldier was left with a conventional spear. But for those crucial few seconds, it transformed a simple infantryman into a fire-breathing dragon, a creature of terrifying and seemingly supernatural power. The age of gunpowder warfare had not yet truly dawned, but its first, fiery breath had been exhaled upon the battlefields of China.

For nearly a century, the Fire Lance remained primarily a shock-and-awe weapon, a glorified flamethrower. Its evolution, however, was relentless, driven by the ceaseless pressures of the Song-Jin and, later, the Song-Mongol wars. The simple bamboo tube gave way to more durable materials, and more importantly, the contents of that tube began to change in a way that would alter the course of history. Song military engineers, through painstaking trial and error, began to perfect their weapon. This period of development marked the Fire Lance's adolescence, a time when it grew from a frightening novelty into a truly lethal instrument.

The first major innovation was the move from disposable bamboo or paper tubes to reusable metal barrels. By the mid-13th century, accounts describe fire lances with barrels made of iron or bronze. This was a critical step. A metal barrel could withstand much higher pressures than bamboo, which allowed for a more powerful gunpowder mixture. Alchemists and artisans refined the “fire drug,” gradually increasing the percentage of saltpeter in the formula. A higher concentration of saltpeter, the oxidizer in the mix, meant a faster, more violent deflagration—closer to a true explosion than a rapid burn. The roar of the Fire Lance grew louder, its gout of flame longer and more intense. The weapon was becoming more robust, more reliable, and more powerful.

The most transformative innovation, however, was the idea of adding projectiles inside the barrel along with the gunpowder. Military theorists realized that the blast of gas and flame could be used to hurl more than just fire. They began to pack the barrel with what they called “co-viatives” or “fiery sand”—a nasty mix of shrapnel designed to turn the weapon into a primitive shotgun. These projectiles included:

• Pottery Shards: Cheap, readily available, and capable of inflicting wicked, jagged wounds.
• Iron Pellets or Scrap: Denser and more lethal, these could punch through leather armor.
• Small Stones or Gravel: A simple but effective way to increase the weapon's killing power.
• Toxic Materials: Some formulas even called for mixing the gunpowder with poisons, such as arsenic compounds, so that even a minor wound could become fatal.

This was the conceptual leap. With the addition of co-viatives, the Fire Lance was no longer just a flamethrower. For the first time, a handheld weapon was using a chemical explosion to propel a solid projectile towards a target. The primary killing mechanism was no longer the fire itself, but the shrapnel riding the wave of fire and gas. A 13th-century manual describes a “flying-cloud thunder-clap eruptor,” a large-caliber fire lance designed to be fired from a wheeled cart. Its barrel was packed not only with gunpowder but also with a dozen lead pellets, each the size of a small coin. When fired, it unleashed a devastating blast that could shred enemy formations. This evolved Fire Lance, armed with “teeth,” was a fearsome weapon. It combined the psychological terror of the original with the genuine killing power of a projectile weapon. A soldier wielding one could now burn, deafen, poison, and shred his enemy from a distance, all in a single, thunderous blast. This was the true proto-gun. It had a barrel, a propellant (gunpowder), and a projectile. All the fundamental components of a firearm were now present, bound together in a single, revolutionary device. It was a dragon that had not only learned to breathe fire, but to spit venomous, lethal shrapnel with every roar.

The climax of the Fire Lance's story is inextricably linked to the rise of the most formidable military force of the 13th century: the Mongol Empire. The Mongols, under leaders like Genghis Khan and his successors, were masters of conquest and assimilation. They were not great inventors themselves, but they were unparalleled in their ability to recognize, adopt, and perfect the technologies of the peoples they conquered. When they turned their attention to the final conquest of the Song Dynasty, they encountered the Fire Lance in its most advanced form. They were both its victims and its greatest beneficiaries. In the brutal sieges that characterized the Mongol-Song wars, fire lances were a key part of the Song defense. Accounts of the siege of Xiangyang (1267-1273), a pivotal and protracted conflict, describe Song soldiers wielding “eruptors” that shot forth flames and iron pellets, desperately trying to repel the Mongol assault. But the Mongols were quick learners. They captured Song artisans and engineers, forcing them to produce gunpowder weapons for the Mongol war machine. Having conquered the Jin in northern China decades earlier, they already had access to early gunpowder technology, but the Song's advanced fire lances represented a significant upgrade. The Mongol Empire became the ultimate vector for the Fire Lance's global journey. As their conquests stretched from the Pacific Ocean to the plains of Hungary, they carried this technology with them. The dragon, once a guardian of the Song, was now unleashed upon the world.

The evidence of this technological transfer is found in the battle records of Mongol campaigns across Eurasia:

• Japan: During their invasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281, the Mongols employed gunpowder weapons. Japanese scrolls depicting the invasion show Mongol warriors firing explosive bombs, and archaeological discoveries from the sites of these battles have unearthed pottery shells consistent with early hand grenades. While direct evidence of fire lances is debated, the presence of other gunpowder weapons demonstrates that the technology had traveled east with the Mongol fleets.
• The Middle East: When the Mongol hordes under Hulagu Khan sacked Baghdad in 1258, effectively ending the Islamic Golden Age, they brought Chinese siege engineers with them. Arab writers of the period, such as Ibn Khaldun, later described Mongol armies using “naphtha” and fire-projecting engines. By the late 13th and early 14th centuries, Mamluk Egypt, the power that finally halted the Mongol advance in the Middle East, had not only adopted but improved upon gunpowder weaponry. Mamluk military treatises from this period provide recipes for gunpowder with a high saltpeter content and describe primitive cannons used against both the Mongols and the Crusaders. The term for these weapons, midfa, and the term for gunpowder, barud, entered the Arabic lexicon, derived from the new reality of the battlefield.
• Europe: The most world-altering transmission was westward. The Mongol invasion of Europe in the 1240s provided the continent with its first terrifying glimpse of gunpowder warfare. At the Battle of Mohi in 1241, the Mongols used what European observers described as “a long lance” that emitted “a foul-smelling smoke and fire.” This description, recorded by a European friar, is remarkably consistent with the Chinese Fire Lance. The sound, the smoke, and the fire were unlike anything European knights had ever faced.

While the Mongols did not conquer Europe, the knowledge they introduced spread like wildfire. Within a few decades, European thinkers like the English friar Roger Bacon were writing about the composition of gunpowder, and by the early 14th century, the first primitive European firearms began to appear in Italy and Spain. The Fire Lance had planted a seed in the West, a seed that would grow into the Cannon and the Arquebus, weapons that would eventually empower European nations to project their own power across the globe. The Fire Lance, a weapon born of Chinese desperation, had been carried by Mongol conquerors to the doorsteps of the world, forever changing the calculus of power.

Like all revolutionary technologies, the Fire Lance was destined for obsolescence. Its demise, however, was not a death but a profound transformation. It did not vanish; it evolved, shedding its primitive form to give birth to a lineage of weapons that would dominate the battlefield for the next five hundred years. The Fire Lance was the “missing link” in the history of weaponry, and its ghost still haunts the design of every firearm in existence. Its legacy is one of divergence, as its core concept was refined and perfected in different ways across the world.

In its homeland of China, the Fire Lance's evolution led directly to the Hand Cannon. As metal-barreled fire lances became more common and gunpowder more powerful, the weapon's design began to prioritize the projectile over the flame effect. The long spear shaft, once essential for melee combat, became a cumbersome appendage. It was shortened into a simple handle or removed entirely. The spearhead, once the weapon's primary feature, was discarded. What remained was a short, sturdy metal tube with a touch-hole for ignition, designed exclusively to fire a projectile. This was the shouchong, or Hand Cannon, which appeared in the late 13th century. Archaeological finds, such as the famous Xanadu gun dated to 1288, show a fully realized firearm, a direct descendant of the Fire Lance, but stripped of its spear-like characteristics. In the Middle East and Europe, a similar process occurred, but with different emphases. Having received the technology via the Mongols, Islamic and European gunsmiths began their own process of innovation. They focused on improving three key areas:

• The Barrel: They developed better casting techniques for bronze and iron, creating stronger, more reliable barrels that could handle ever-more-powerful explosive charges.
• The Ignition System: The simple touch-hole, lit by a slow-burning cord, was inefficient and dangerous. This led to the development of the matchlock mechanism in the 15th century, a revolutionary system that used a trigger to bring the lit cord to the powder pan. This allowed a soldier to aim and fire far more effectively.
• The Projectile: The loose shrapnel of the Fire Lance was replaced by a single, tightly fitting lead ball. This dramatically improved accuracy, range, and lethality.

This path of development led from the primitive pot-de-fer and early hand cannons of the 14th century to the Arquebus and the musket of the 15th and 16th centuries. These weapons would, in turn, render the armored knight obsolete, elevate the common infantryman to the primary force on the battlefield, and fuel the age of European colonial expansion.

The Fire Lance itself faded from battlefields by the 14th century, replaced by its more efficient offspring. Yet, its conceptual legacy is immense. It represents the moment when humanity fundamentally changed the nature of combat. For millennia, warfare had been an intimate, physical affair dominated by muscle power—the strength to swing a sword, draw a bow, or thrust a spear. The Fire Lance introduced an entirely new principle: harnessing the power of a chemical reaction to deliver lethal force at a distance. It was the first weapon to truly democratize violence. A peasant, with minimal training, could wield a device capable of felling a nobleman in full plate armor, a feat previously requiring immense strength and skill at arms. This shift had profound sociological consequences, contributing to the erosion of feudal hierarchies and the rise of centralized states with professional, gunpowder-equipped armies. The Fire Lance, born in an alchemist's crucible, nurtured in the desperation of the Song Dynasty, and spread by the conquests of the Mongol Empire, was more than a weapon. It was an idea cast in bamboo and iron. It was the roaring dragon that taught humanity how to kill with fire and chemistry, a lesson that would echo through the centuries, from the cannons of Trafalgar to the rifles of the Somme. The ghost of that first, fiery breath still resides in the heart of every gun, a testament to the simple, terrifying device that first weaponized the alchemist's explosive dream.