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In 1686, Chinese cannons bombarded the Russian fortress of Albazin for several weeks. The Qing Kangxi Emperor had sent an army to the frigid and inhospitable east of Siberia to capture the fortress and stop the expansion of the Tsardom of Russia in the region. But despite relentless bombardment, superior numbers, and ferocious assaults, his troops still struggled to capture the fortress. This was not due to any fundamental inferiority of the Chinese forces to the Tsardom’s troops. Instead, the trouble arose from the clash of Eastern siege methods with a Western-style star fortress with bastions. Chinese siege tactics differed significantly from those practiced in the West, which typically featured massive fortifications with bastions, systematic trench digging, and the use of heavy artillery. In this video, we’ll investigate the reasons for these differences and examine how early modern Chinese siege warfare differed from that in Europe.
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Bibliography
Andrade, Tonio, Siegecraft in Ming and Qing China, in: Fischer-Kattner, Anke / Ostwald, Jamel (Eds.), The World of the Siege. Representations of Early Modern Positional Warfare, Leiden/Boston 2019, pp. 243-264.
Andrade, Tonio, The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History, Princeton 2016.
Andrade, Tonio, Lost Colony. The Untold Story of China's First Great Victory over the West, Princeton 2011.
Chung, Michael Yan Hon, The Introduction of European-Style Artillery and the Reform of Siege Tactics in 17th Century China-a Case Study of the Tragedy of Jiangyin (1645), in: Journal of Chinese Military History 9 (2020), pp. 1-37.
De Lucca, Denis, Jesuits and Fortifications: The Contribution of the Jesuits to Military Architecture in the Baroque Age, Leiden 2012.
