Xun lei chong

The xun lei chong—"thundering fast firearm"—was a five-barreled revolving musket that tried to do everything at once: shoot five times without reloading, block incoming attacks with an integrated shield, serve as a polearm in close combat, and launch flares to signal allies. This Swiss Army knife of Ming dynasty warfare solved every problem except the ones that mattered: it was too heavy for one soldier to carry, too complex to manufacture at scale, and too expensive for armies facing existential threats on multiple fronts.

Zhao Shizhen invented the weapon in 1598, presenting it to the imperial court at the conclusion of the Imjin War against Japan. His treatise Shen Qi Pu ("Catalogue of Divine Weapons") documented the design with detailed illustrations showing how five thin gun barrels connected behind a reinforced shield. The gunner could rotate the mechanism 72 degrees between shots, lighting each barrel in sequence with a matchlock. At full effectiveness, the weapon was deadly at 120 paces—roughly the same range as a European arquebus.

The genius was in the integration. The shield could be detached and slung on the arm for protection. The gun's rest doubled as a double-headed hand axe. The central firing mechanism incorporated a detachable spear that could launch flares or serve as a pike when ammunition ran out. Pull it apart and you had multiple weapons; assemble it and you had a portable fortification.

The adjacent possible for the xun lei chong had been building throughout the Ming dynasty. China had invented gunpowder and pioneered early firearms—the huochong hand cannon appears in records from the 1200s. By the 1500s, European matchlock designs had reached China via Portuguese traders and Ottoman intermediaries. Multi-barrel firearms like the san yan chong (three-eyed gun) were already common along the northern frontier. Zhao synthesized these traditions with foreign innovations, attempting to create a weapon system rather than just a gun.

But the xun lei chong's very sophistication doomed it. The weapon required a two-person team: one soldier to aim and fire, another to assist with reloading and transportation. The intricate construction made mass production impractical during an era when the Ming faced Japanese pirates in the south, Mongolian raids from the north, and the rising Manchu threat that would eventually topple the dynasty. Simpler, cheaper weapons proliferated instead. Historical records show no evidence of widespread deployment.

The weapon illustrates a recurring pattern in military technology: the multi-purpose design that excels at nothing. Soldiers preferred dedicated weapons—a musket that was just a musket, a spear that was just a spear—over integrated systems requiring specialized training and maintenance. The xun lei chong represented exceptional engineering answering a question the battlefield never quite asked.

Yet Zhao's design anticipated revolving firearms by two and a half centuries. When Samuel Colt patented his revolver in 1836, he solved the same problem—multiple shots without reloading—through different engineering. The xun lei chong's rotating barrel mechanism, while crude by later standards, demonstrated that the concept was available in the adjacent possible long before Western manufacturers commercialized it.