Who you got?

Actually crossbow is a miniaturized "crossbow"

>Crossbow is a meme answer, if it proved effective enough, Rome would just adopt it like they did every other weapon or tool they came across from other cultures.
Except no one where able to copy their weapons, if an enemy tried to disassemble the Han Crossbow it would break and be useless. China has always been good at keeping their technology from themselves.

How?

whoops they already did it

>Crossbow is a meme answer, if it proved effective enough, Rome would just adopt it like they did every other weapon or tool they came across from other cultures.
Copying goes both ways. There goes any possible tech advantage for either side.

Didn't the Chinese and Romans like eachother though? And the Chinese basically saw the Romans as another version of themeselves across the world?

...

Requires a fully industrialized nation with state control over mass production. Specific regulations, specific size, specific requirements must be met for the proper crossbows to be produced.

Chinese didnt see Roman empire, they've only heard it from the Persians.

Why didn't Rome invade china? Did they fear the yellow warrior?

They never actually met. They just thought "Damn, if stories of a grand empire on the other side of the world could travel all the way here, that empire must be pretty great"

this should be a ban reason

Oof

why is Finland the meme central of the world?

user those numbers are bullshit, nobody takes them with a grain of salt. Its like taking Herodotus numbers at face value, these are the same people who claim to have had a 500k army in 500BC when China was about 1/10th of its full size.

Herodotus numbers are bullshit because they're actually bullshit. He's been wrong on so many occasions and not only that, the entire Greek literature is filled with exaggerations.

The Chinese numbers maybe false but there been entire ancient weapons caches that correlates with those numbers. Not only that, they also have a universal conscription system, tax records, warfare manuals that highlight the structures of army size, official records that highlight number of food needed to feed x amount of troop size for x amount of days as an oversight review, etc.

Greek numbers are lies simply because they didn't have universal conscripts. They didn't have the population to field those. They didn't have the system needed to conscript those numbers. They don't have any tax records. They don't have any records that point to these things.

The max army size of the time was ~ 50K for the Greeks simply because their population couldn't afford any more.

Han dynasty had more concrete population pool than the entire Roman empire of the time. Its population consisting of mainly homogeneous group of people and following the same cultural tradition. They inherited the unified China from Qin dynasty who had an even stricter rule of law.

And Han dynasty did not exist in 500 BCE. Qin dynasty didn't exist in 500 BCE. Qin as a warring state existed around 500 BCE. Qin as a warring state reformed to a heavy militaristic state with universal conscript around 300 BCE. This is where we see the huge jump in numbers. Before those, they would at most be fighting with ~30-70K. Once the warring states started their conscription reforms, they could pool in tremendous amounts of people into military service.

Chinese records tend to be more accurate because of autistic dedication to writing everything down.

Remember, if there are 100,000 troops on paper, then the government is paying to feed and arm 100,000 people. Naturally they want to make sure they're actually getting what they're paying for.

That said, there does exist a problem of exaggeration based on whether or not non-combatant support staff is included in the total count. Generals liked to include those figures when boasting of their army size (and requesting more stuff from the government), which meant 100,000 combatants could be recorded as an 300,000 strong army.

50 cent army should hang like dogs

>Greek numbers are lies simply because they didn't have universal conscripts
They literally did though, at least among the citizen body.

>Han better than Romans
Except the Romans beat everyone they faught (yes, they did beat the Huns and Parthians) and the Chinese were conquered by the Mongolos

>aiming with your eyes shut
The Chinese truly were masters of marksmanship.

Han Dynasty literally BTFO everyone they fought

Question. Almost every China vs Rome thread I see on here ends up deciding that China wins, but when I was discussing it with some of my more non-autistic friends they actually got upset that I would even consider that China could beat rome.

Is.. Is this the power of Euro-centrism? They were legitimately upset, and they didn't really have an info to back it up. It just turned into a whole "BUT DUDE THE ROMANS WERE AMAZING" deal

Normalfags don't have exposure to both sides of the isle. Infact I'd even say normalfags don't even exposure to even one side of the isle. The best they have is MUH ANCESTORS. Thats about it.

What is the point of these threads? Wars are always about political, economic, and geographic context. This is like having the top 10 anime bishounen fight each other...WHO WOULD WIN?

because /pol/ gets triggered when white people lose to non-whites

*753 BC

B.b.bbut what about this one time the Parthians beat an inept Roman commander with little actual military experience.

Romes advantage was their population to rebuild armies, that doesn't really work against China.

...

Bringing up the Yuan conquest of Song (a long and bloody war that the Yuan only won by incorporating Song defectors and Jin Chinese troops into their armies) is like bringing up the Ottoman conquest of the East Romans. "Mongols" didn't even exist during Han times.

only the most avid sinaboos would give the Chinese, specially the period Chinese a complete advantage over Rome.

in reality each could probably win if they were in their home turf, and in an indeterminate, empty plain that they'd agree to fight in for no reason, they'd meet eachother with roughly equal forces and reach an inconclusive, tactically pointless stalemate because each has only slight strengths and weaknesses compared to eachother.

both faced enemies that used similar tactics and had their own tactics, and could field armies of similar power.

Yes, because obviously such complicated technology was beyond the means of replicating for a nation that already had pseudo-crossbows, I mean, just look at it. You can clearly see the self-destruct mechanisms that will blow the hands off any foolish Roman that tries to study it.

I think they saw them as nega-china.

china is largely land-based

rome is largely sea-based

etc.

This is wrong though, the Romans sent several emissaries to China over the years, the first being in 166 AD, followed by missions in 226 and 284. The Chinese sent an envoy named Gan Ying to make contact with the Romans in 97 AD, but he only reached as far as Mesopotamia, before being discouraged from going any further, as the Parthians told him it would take two years to cross the highly dangerous Mediterranean Sea.

>laughing parthians.jpeg.

(((Romans)))

At best. More likely just some random traders. The Chinese saw their "gifts" as laughable. Then again, the Chinese saw gifts from the Europeans even late 18th century as laughable.

Why do you lie online?

>
>
>

The Romans probably lost their original gifts on the journey towards China, hardly an inconceivable notion.

>muh slips
>muh horn composite

Muh gastraphetes firing bolts the size of southern chinese people

>Typical 6 stone strength Han crossbow's power = 387 lbs draw weight * ~19 inch powerstroke * ~.70 efficiency/2 = 2573.6 inch lbs = 291 Joules
Han crossbows were vastly superior to their contemporaries.
historum.com/asian-history/69030-han-dynasty-crossbow.html
historum.com/asian-history/124269-evolution-chinese-bows-myth-manchu-bow.html
myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?p=297785

Depends why they think Rome wins I guess. Most analysis comes down to China just fielding way, way more troops than Rome could ever match.

>1806

I heavily doubt the efficiency of all but elite Han soldiers. Source: having read Romance of the Three Kingdoms and its accounts of troop performance.

beyond that I doubt the numbers
oh yeah multiple field battles with over 1,000,000 men on each side is feasible for sure

Not a lot of information out there for Hans anyway. Want to read about it? Tough shit! Records of the Grand Historian is aboit as substantive as sparknotes on Polybius, and there isn't much else out there

Name the battle that had 1 million on each side.

there were over 60,000,000 deployed at the battle between Endymion and Phaethon in Book 1 of Loukianos' text, True Story.

From a war's perspective Han's military history is seriously unimpressive and lacking. Their victory over the Vietnamese and the Korean kingdom was unspectacular and hard fought, their war against the Xiongnu by all accounts was extremely tough on the Chinese for the most part before taking turns for the better. In the end it devastated the Han completely and made Emperor Wu to apologize to his people for the pain he put them through. Not to mention that the war was mainly won because the various tribes who compromised the Xiongnu conferedation split.

All in all, apart from beating uncivilized nomads and 2 small kingdoms that were in no way comparable to what Rome fought against, the Chinese were seriously lacking in the military aspect of things, not just during the Han period but during their entire history.

>Greeks are Chinese
We already know the Greeks exaggerate

>Xiongnu empire with > 300K horse cavalry
>uncivilized nomads

>Romans couldn't beat Parthians and their 10K cavalry

>300k cavalry
>in a barren region

Yeah... ok. Chinese numbers, sure.

So the 100K Romans got beat by just a single naked Partian civilian?

Jesus Christ, how incompetent are the Romans?

>a private campaign made by a Roman civilian constitutes as war now.

Ok, nice. And comparing a civilized state, a great one in fact (based on Persian territory) to a confederation of nomad tribes is really stupid, you know?

We can always play the fake news game. And make up our own alternative facts.

But that won't solve the issue at hand. A war is a war. No matter your ancestors feelings.

lel there's like two chinaboos here who keep responding with the same answers. he highlights the crossbow as a decisive weapon and his only citation is a post on historium which uses a single document and takes the numbers at face value. this is the power of autism.

as far as your euroaboo friends, not necessarily euro-centrism but lack of knowledge and repeated notions of superiority. rome has been hyped up since it first fell.

chinese welcomed missionaries who brought navigation shit (i forget exactly what) back in the 17th century; they just didn't like the brits who brought the same shit centuries later. although if I do recall correctly the brits brought flintlock muskets to trade but the chinese rejected them. then got btfo'd by them.

What war? There was no war between Parthia and Rome when Crassus attacked. He brought a private army and invaded Parthia, got defeated and that was it. Rome as a state had no part in what Crassus was doing. Furthermore, Parthia was destroyed by Trajan so your point is pretty moot either way

HOLY

ROMAN

>rome has been hyped
Ancient empires mostly lasted 2-3 generations before collapsing
Roman empire lasted 1000 years, and unlike the chinese began in a swamp, the chinese(like the egyptians) had a fertile river an constant food surplus and still sucked at war

>the chinese(like the egyptians) had a fertile river an constant food surplus and still sucked at war
Wrong.

"China" as we know it began in a fertile river valley. Sure.

It was also a river valley that got visited with annual all-destroying floods that wiped out whole villages and fields and made life there pretty hard.

In fact foundational myths of the early Chinese civilizations talk of how it used to be apocalyptically worse until a certain Prince Yu united the river valley villages to build a massive gorge dam- supposedly what the natural formation known as The Three Gorges- upriver to halt the worst of the floods.

>building your villages in a place with annual 'all-destroying' floods

So this is the power of chinese """intellect"""

woah

Those soldiers were generally peasant conscripts, ofc they were bloody terrible at their jobs.That said, I do believe Rome had higher quality soldiers for most of it's existence, because the endless wars produced a very good and lasting army tradition in the Empire that the Han had to mostly outsource to 'barbarians' in order to fight it's wars. Rome outsourced for manpower, Han outsourced to actually get competent soldiers.

I'm not sure there were every any ancient chinese battle fielding 1,000,000 men on *both* sides, but it's pretty well accepted that the various dynasties (maybe not as early as the Han) could easily field a million men from conscription if they so desired.

The Romans lost to shit slinging Goths

The Goths were trained in the Roman style of warfare, hell half the time they were Roman soldiers.

Also, the Roman Empire lost to a thousand stinging cuts, such as not being able to afford the soldiers they needed to fight the Goths.

We're comparing Han Chinese to Punic War era Roman military. Jesus christ "thousand stinging cuts" what the actual fuck are you doing on this board

One is still greatly loved by its people

the other is being puppeteered for modern political purposes

metro.co.uk/2017/07/27/alt-rigth-commentator-gets-shut-down-by-historian-over-diversity-in-roman-britain-6810143/

Han had two empires and both times collapsed in civil wars. Rome had a fuckton of civil wars but it still took centuries to collapse and that was due to a multitude of issues, some that had been ongoing for centuries.

In a straight up battle I give the edge to Romans but I want to get at least one descriptive account from the other side. Livy goes into ass bleeding detail so we have a good idea of Roman capabilities.

I responded to his statement that "Romans lost to dumb shit Goths", when what happened was a lot more complicated then that. Contain your autism, my son.

The "collapse" as a word to compare the two is bit misleading. Roman republic "collapsed" into an empire. The Roman empire "collapsed" into eastern and western wings. The western Roman empire collapsed. The eastern Roman empire "collapsed" into "Holy" "Roman" "Empire". Which was for all intents and purposes, not holy nor Roman nor an empire.

The Han dynasty was a "collapsed" Qin dynasty. Han dynasty lasted from 200 BCE to 200 CE. Then for ~100 years, it "collapsed" into three separate states. Then those states "collapsed" into Jin dynasty, then Tang and so on.

Each time both sides "collapsed", they had actually retained much of the system of governance, the cultural identity, the core beliefs, occupying roughly the same area, etc. For all intents and purposes, the culture/civilization had not been destroyed. Once the western Roman empire collapsed, it could never recover. Once the eastern Roman empire declined over time, they could not recover. Foreign Muslim Ottomans would then rule the land up until the last century or so. It was a completely different culture, language, people, etc.

Those were some nice memes, but the sophistry was a little much.

I'd say China's problem is more corruption than political puppeteering.

The Julio Claudian Dynasty barely lasted a century

>building your villages in a place with annual 'all-destroying' floods
Because floods carried silt and all sorts of rich soil that fertilized your fields. That's the nice part.

The shit part is determining when and where it hits. Could be before planting season. Could be during harvest.

Sure is shittier than the "swamp" Romans built their shit on, and they made do regardless.

I like both too much to decide

If the Romans can reverse engineer a Carthaginian ship to create their own navy, they can figure out how the Chinese crossbow trigger works and how to mass produce it.

>which uses a single document and takes the numbers at face value
It's not like the numbers were state propaganda or some shit, they were taken directly from maintenance records for crossbows. For those kinds of things accuracy is pretty important.

>having read Romance of the Three Kingdoms
You read a 15th century historical fiction full of anachronisms and pro-Shu bullshits and took it as a reliable indication of Han soldier performance?