Why did the Qing army abandon the traditional iron armor and start using cotton armor that looked vulnerable? The reason is not simple!
In ancient times, because they are all cold weapons, the army will be equipped with armor, but the cost of metal armor is very expensive, so in ancient times only a small part will be equipped with armor, many soldiers do not have anything, and wearing armor in the winter has a problem of keeping warm can not be solved, and in the Tang and Song Dynasties, in order to save the cost of the army, in addition to armor, there are many paper armor. By the time of the Song Dynasty, paper armor had a large number of replacement armor, there was no way, all because there was no money, and the degree of use of paper armor at that time was already equal to that of armor. However, the defensive power of paper armor is far worse than that of armor, so it has not given up on making armor. However, the author recently found an interesting phenomenon, after the middle of the Ming Dynasty, the temperature of the whole of China plummeted, and even the temperature in Shanghai and Jiangsu in winter dropped to minus 20 or 30 degrees Celsius, but the army in the middle and late Ming Dynasty still used iron armor, and in the Manchu Qing Dynasty, it became a lighter cotton armor.
First of all, the metal armor is heavier than the cotton armor, and the soldiers wear it to fight, which is inconvenient to move and affects the combat effectiveness. In the Ming and Qing wars, artillery and muskets were used to attack each other, and the metal armor seemed to be invincible, but it was easy to be penetrated by artillery, resulting in the death of soldiers. Cotton nails look rudimentary, but they are not. Its production can be described as unique, cotton armor is made of iron armor as bone, supplemented by cotton armor inside and outside, fixed with copper nails. Cotton armor can effectively weaken the power of guns and bows and arrows, so that soldiers can be protected by armor.
Secondly, save materials, thick cotton armor appearance gives people a very bloated image, to use iron armor pieces to wrap the cotton nails all need more nail pieces, and iron armor in, as long as you can wrap the body of the warrior, you can save a lot of materials, and the weather is hot can take off the cotton frame to continue to use, if the iron armor wrapped cotton armor, wait for the day to get rid of the cotton armor the warrior does not fit when wearing, obviously a circle.
With the use of iron armor for a long time, the human body will be very tired. In addition, for the officers and men in the northern region, every winter, wearing iron armor is basically equivalent to entering the ice cellar, and iron armor does not play much of a warm role at all. Ouyang Xiu, a civil official of the Song Dynasty and one of the eight great masters of the Tang and Song Dynasties, described the hardships of the frontier soldiers in a poem: "We must pity the iron armor and cold bones, and more than 400,000 tun border soldiers." "Due to weight, cost and thermal performance, iron armor has not been fully popularized in the military. The development and progress of science and technology, in the middle and late period of the Tang Dynasty's rule, paper armor and cloth silk armor began to appear. Among them, paper armor has been welcomed by armies everywhere because of its low cost, relatively thin and light, and good protection. In the tang dynasty literature, it is recorded: "The paper armor is made of asexual and soft paper, which is soft, three inches thick, and four nails in square inches, and if it is soaked by water and rain, it is difficult for the arrows to penetrate." ”