Empress Kung Sheng, mother to Emperor Lizong, fifth of his line, exploded with the righteous rage familiar to generations of children from Diwali pranks gone wrong: A ‘ground rat’, a simple bamboo-tube firework, had escaped the fireworks display in the Chinese imperial garden, bounced across the room, and blown up under throne of the silk-swaddled dowager queen. The court historian Zhou Mi, military historian Stephen Haw tells us, didn’t record how many children were scolded on that festive evening, in the summer of 1224 CE.
The generals in the court would have known what the empress might not have: The ground rat was powering changes in war-fighting that would shape the fate of her kingdom.
Although Diwali isn’t a good time for a debate on the historicity of the lightning-rod and thunderbolt weapons that suffuse popular accounts of Ramayana-era warfare, accounts from around the world tell us the impact of the firework was profound and savage. The millions of children lighting fireworks—and adults who never left their adolescence behind—will, among other things, be celebrating an ancient revolution in military technology.
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The rise of fire wars
Early in the second millennium, more than a thousand years ago, the city of Kaifeng rose on the south bank of China’s Yellow River. Linked to the Grand Canal, stretching almost 1,800 kilometres to the sea, Kaifeng became a great centre of trade, arts and sciences. The clocktower built by astronomer Su Song in 1087 CE, China expert Joseph Needham has recorded, included an escapement and chain-drive, technologies that would not become known in the West for centuries.
The Taoist monks patronised by this thriving civilisation had long conducted experiments to manipulate nature and control time—among other things by heating sulphur, arsenic sulphide and potassium nitrate in honey. These experiments, Needham has noted, didn’t always end well for the monks. Time wasn’t controlled, either—but the firework that so upset Empress Kung Sheng was born.
Estimates by historians suggest gunpowder weapons were in use by around 1000 CE. The technology had evolved enough to play an important role in the siege of Kaifeng by the Jurchen Jin dynasty in 1127. The weapons might not have been decisive against mounted cavalry—the emperor was led off as a slave by his Jin nomad captors—but it showed enough promise for armies to invest in its further development.
Faced with Mongol armies at the gates of Kaifeng, the armies of the Jurchen Jin used the same core technology to fight back. An imperial chronicle, Haw has written, records the use of the Fire Lance, likely designed to destroy enemy catapults and emplacements.
“To make the lances,” the chronicle states, “sixteen sheets of imperial yellow paper were made into a tube some two feet [chi] long, which was filled with willow charcoal, iron filings, fragments of pottery, sulphur, arsenic and suchlike things, and bound to one end of the lance with cord. Each soldier carried a small iron pot containing fire, to light [the lance] when near the scene of battle. Flames shot out in front of the lance to a distance of more than ten feet.”
For their part, the Mongols deployed their own devices, firing not just stone balls, but a kind of “iron pot filled with gunpowder.” In other contemporary battles, the Mongols deployed what was called huapao from their ships, destroying their enemies.
Like in 1127, the battle didn’t end well for Kaifeng’s new rulers. The Jurchen Jin emperor and princes were slaughtered. The women, including the dowager empress-mother, were led off to the north as slaves.
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Globalising gunpowder
From the middle of the 13th century, as Mongol armies began to sweep into the West, civilisations with no knowledge of gunpowder began to experience its lethal effects—uncomprehending what had befallen them. Medieval friar John of Plano Carpini claimed the Mongols were leveling European fortifications by using “the fat of the people they kill and, melting it, throw it on to the houses, and wherever the fire falls on this fat it is almost inextinguishable.”
The armies of Prince Henry of Breslau, similarly, found themselves confronted by “a cloud with a foul smell that envelopes the Poles and makes them all but faint, so that they are incapable of fighting.” This was, clearly, “witchcraft.”
Ata-Malik Juvaini, the Persian chronicler, recorded the slaughter of the defenders of the fortress of Maimun-Diz, by what he called “meteoric bolts” unleashed from a crossbow-like device. Firing incendiary bombs, Mongol forces similarly crushed resistance at walled Russian cities through the single winter of 1237-1238 CE.
The Mongols, Haw observes, had founded the world’s first gunpowder empire. European warlords—in constant conflict with each other for territory and riches—would be quick to seize on the technology and develop it, with world-changing consequences.
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Firepower in India
Gunpowder arsenals, historian Iqtidar Alam Khan has recorded, began to be developed in medieval Indian armies around the 13th century—likely brought in by Mongol mercenaries. Even though colonial writers like Henry Elliot speculated that the knowledge of gunpowder might have been present in early Hindu civilisation, scholar PK Gode notes that the earliest surviving Sanskrit manuscripts, from1497-1539 CE, apparently drawing on earlier Chinese texts.
Fireworks displays had, however, become common in Kashmir, Delhi, Gujarat and Vijayanagara by the 15th century. The chakra—still used on Diwali—was put to innovative uses, like separating fighting elephants. The Marathi poet and saint Ramdas writes in his 17th century Ramayana about fireworks displays for the god Rama—a sign of how embedded pyrotechnics had become in the culture.
Later medieval battles involved the increasing use of cannon as well as small-arms. In comparison with Europe, though, the metallurgical technology available was backward. The flintlock musket, too, began to be deployed frequently. The lack of a state-organised system of production, as well as the loose contract system that governed Mughal armies, prevented effective development of the technology. The consequences would become clear as European imperial powers overpowered the far-larger armies of Indian states.
Fireworks aren’t, obviously, cutting-edge technology any longer—but their story shows how enmeshed revolutions in military technology and popular culture often are. Adolphe Pénaud’s 20-inch wind-up Planophore aircraft, Nikolai Tesla’s 1893 wireless radio, or the modern drone: The lines between the toy, the scientific breakthrough and the killing machine aren’t always clear.
This Diwali, you might or might not choose to set alight some potassium nitrate, carbon, and sulfur—but it’s a good occasion to remember the incredible forces the monks who first played with them unleashed on the world.
The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Neera Majumdar)