if not a bit faster, and had much greater range and accuracy than early
guns. Guns had much greater penetration and lethality, but in the early
forms were both inaccurate and short-ranged.
It was the Song Dynasty’s Chinese identification and cultural orienta-
tion that brought the crossbow back to the battlefield in significant num-
bers. At times, at least among the Song elite, the Chinese expressed deeply
racist and negative views of steppe people. This was not a new intellectual
position, but what was curious in the Song was that the literati elite were so
divorced from the martial arts that they did not learn to use the most
identifiably Chinese weapon they had available. The Divine Elbow cross-
bow became a symbol of Song interest in recapturing north China, but by
then the literati had come to distinguish themselves as a group as men who
did not practice martial arts. Were they to practice martial arts, only bow
archery had an impeccably Confucian pedigree.
Very few Song literati practiced martial arts of any kind. Occasional
mentions of a literatus foreseeing coming bad times and having his sons
trained in fencing emphasize how extraordinary this came to be. At the
same time, any highly educated man was acutely aware that men like
Confucius practiced archery and strongly argued for the importance of
properly performed archery ceremonies. While no Song literati contra-
vened Confucius directly on the importance of archery, they simply did not
practice it. Archery had come to be a strictly martial skill, the practice of
which implied that one was a martial person. It was not acceptable for a
literary man to practice martial skills. The closest most literati came to an
archery-like contest was the game oftuohuwhich involved throwing
weighted arrows into a narrow-necked pot.
A good example of the place and problems of practicing archery for a
literatus is an early Song official by the name of Chen Yaozi ( 970 – ?). Chen
came from a family of distinguished civil officials, with both his father and
two brothers holding positions. Chen himself had also passed the civil
service exams–coming infirst, in fact–and held a position in the civil
administration. He was also, quite strangely, an excellent archer and
indeed is best known for a number of anecdotes related to that skill.
Here we must also keep in mind that Chen lived in the early Song, when
the split between civil and military careers had not yet become as absolute
as it would later.
The third Song emperor, posthumously known as Song Zhenzong
(r. 997 – 1022 ) wanted to appoint Chen as an envoy to the Kitan Liao
court because he was handsome and a skilled archer.^9 It was important
for an envoy to acquit himself well in a steppe court where archery was still
124 The Five Dynasties, Ten Kingdoms, and Song Dynasty