Chinese Archery

Stephen Selby

Jan 2000 · Hong Kong University Press

About this ebook

Chinese Archery is a broad view of traditional archery in China as seen through the eyes of historians, philosophers, poets, artists, novelists and strategists from 1500 BC until the present century. The book is written around parallel text translations of classical chinese sources some famous and some little known in which Chinese writers give vivid and detailed explanations of the techniques of bow-building, archery and crossbow technique over the centuries. The author is both a sinologist and practising archer; his translations make the original Chinese texts accessible to the non-specialist. Written for readers who may never have picked up a book about China, but still containing a wealth of detail for Chinese scholars, the book brings the fascinating history of Chinese archery back to life through the voices of its most renowned practitioners.

Ratings and reviews

Stephen Selby is unquestionably one of the foremost experts on traditional archery anywhere in the world, and Chinese traditional archery is his specialty. This book does not disappoint in that regard; you'll find all you could ask for and more, from detailed images and descriptions of bows throughout Chinese history, as well as mythology, games, and many other things of interest. Why call it flawed, then? Because it doesn't render properly on certain devices. It's a PDF file, so you'd think it would be fairly straightforward, and indeed, the text is displayed perfectly. Unfortunately, some rogue algorithm has tagged most of the images in the book - including some Chinese characters and lists - as "copyrighted images" and prevents them from being displayed. This error doesn't appear to affect the experience on-line, or using the downloaded Adobe file, only the Google Books app, on at least a Nexus 7. More than that I can't say, but it's enough for me to be more than a little irritated. I expected a good read during a flight, yet the text was broken and at times incoherent due to a missing list (e.g. - The emperors names were: <blank>). Selby still gets 5 stars. Google?...

Great work

About the author

Stephen Selby holds an MA (Hons) Degree in Chinese from Edinburgh University. He has worked in Hong Kong for twenty years, during which period he has pursued his interest in Chinese language and culture, and has published a number of articles on Chinese culture, history and traditional law. With a keen interest in Asiatic archery, he has done research in China, Japan, Korea and Mongolia. He is the founder of the Asian Traditional Archery Research Network (ATARN) which has an Internet web page at www.atarn.org.