Tiger Cannon & the Ming Crouching Tiger Cannon

The crouching tiger cannon (虎蹲炮, hǔdūnpào) was a short, light iron gun of Ming-dynasty China, staked to the ground and loaded with a fistful of small shot — in effect a battlefield shotgun, carried by General Qi Jiguang’s armies against coastal pirates in the 16th century and later by Ming troops in Korea. It is the closest real-world namesake of the Tiger Cannon, a ranged Phantom Edge in Phantom Blade Zero, although the developers have never named it as a model.

How the crouching tiger cannon worked

Chinese descriptions drawing on Qi Jiguang’s Jixiao xinshu give the gun a barrel about 2 chi long (roughly 60–65 cm by the Ming foot), weighing about 36 jin (roughly 21 kg) and strengthened with five or six iron hoops. That made it light enough to move through mountains and paddy fields, to load on a horse or to mount on a ship.

A light gun has one big problem: fire it and it jumps. The fix gave the weapon its name. A clawed iron support propped up the muzzle, iron nails pinned a rear strap into the earth, and the gun sat low on its haunches like a tiger about to spring. Fired from that crouch, it stayed put.

It fired scatter shot. Loaded with powder and an earth wad, it took up to about a hundred small lead or stone balls — the Ming encyclopedia Wubei zhi (1621) calls it a gun that “swallows a hundred shot” (吞百子) — topped by a larger ball at the muzzle. A Korean manual records a smaller load of 70 lead or 30 iron shot. At close range, against packed infantry or boarding parties, the result was a cone of lead.

Oddly, the tiger crouched before gunpowder did. The Song military encyclopedia Wujing zongyao (1044) already used the name 虎蹲炮 for a traction trebuchet on a triangular frame, worked by about 70 haulers. In the Song, 炮 (pào) meant a stone-thrower; by the Ming it meant a gun, and the old name moved with it.

Qi Jiguang, the wokou and the Imjin War

Qi Jiguang (戚继光, Qī Jìguāng) (1528–1588) was sent to Zhejiang in 1555 to fight the wokou, the Japanese-led pirate bands raiding China’s coast, and cleared them from Fujian in 1562–63 before moving to the northern frontier near Beijing, where he oversaw the building of Great Wall watchtowers. His soldiers fought in small, drilled squads that mixed long and short weapons with firearms. Ming arsenals began mass-producing matchlock arquebuses in 1558, and Qi claimed a trained gunner could hit “a willow leaf from a hundred paces”.

Chinese historians usually credit Qi with refining the crouching tiger cannon to answer the pirates’ arquebuses — adding the front support and stakes that tamed its kick — although his own later manual implies light guns of the type had guarded the frontier since early in the Ming. His manuals treat it as standard kit: the Lianbing shiji places the gun about one zhang (roughly 3 m) in front of the formation, the 14-juan Jixiao xinshu has three squad leaders serve a gun together, and its navy lists put up to six aboard the largest Fujian warships.

The gun outlived its champion. In the Imjin War (1592–1598), when Ming armies came to Korea’s aid against Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s invasion, crouching tiger cannons were part of the artillery that helped retake Pyongyang in 1593, and Chinese and Korean ships fired them at the naval battle of Noryang in 1598.

From fire lance to cannon: a gunpowder timeline

The crouching tiger cannon was the product of six centuries of Chinese experiments with fire.

The key step is the moment the fire lance stopped being a flamethrower on a stick and started shooting things. The History of Song records it at Shouchun in 1259:

From there the tube moved to metal. By the late 13th century, cast barrels had produced the hand cannon, and early Ming arsenals made them in quantity. In the 16th century China absorbed foreign designs as well — Portuguese-style breech-loading folangji guns and Japanese-style matchlocks — and the crouching tiger cannon took its place beside them as the cheap, light gun for the front rank.

Flamethrowers: the Flaming Mane’s real ancestor

Fire projectors are older than guns in China. In 919 the Wuyue navy is said to have burned more than 400 enemy ships at Langshan River with “fierce-fire oil” (猛火油), a naphtha said to come from Arabia. The Wujing zongyao describes the machine, the menghuo yougui (猛火油柜, měnghuǒ yóuguì) or “fierce-fire oil cabinet”: a brass tank on four legs feeding a horizontal cylinder with a double-acting piston, so the operator could pump on both strokes. A gunpowder charge in the ignition chamber at the nozzle, lit with a heated iron, set the oil burning as it sprayed out. The units stood on city walls to break assaults.

Phantom Blade Zero’s Flaming Mane is a Phantom Edge that shoots fire “out of a giant mask”, suited to fast packs of enemies, according to an Epic Games Store deep dive. Chinese coverage calls a fire-spewing Phantom Edge 烈焰狮头, “flaming lion head”, which we take to be the same weapon — so the mask is a Southern lion-dance head (see our lion dance page). Pairing it with the Song flamethrower is our comparison. IGN’s review also mentions a water-cannon Phantom Edge found near a fire boss.

The Tiger Cannon in Phantom Blade Zero

Soul carries two primary weapons and two Phantom Edges, secondary weapons drawn from a pool of “more than 20” (Steam) or “25” (PlayStation Blog). Chinese previews sort them into five categories — martial, destruction, ranged (远程), unorthodox and summon — and their charges refill when Soul rests at a bell. In 2023 Liang described the secondaries as running “from canons [sic] to lances, from axes to big hammers that break shields”, and the PlayStation Store copy promises adaptive triggers that mimic “a cannon charging to fire”.

English coverage of the August 2026 State of Play names the Tiger Cannon: a ranged Phantom Edge that breaks distant formations and detonates explosive enemies. Chinese coverage of the same showcase calls a cannon Phantom Edge 虎炮 (hǔpào), “tiger cannon”. A fan-compiled name list writes 雷当虎炮, and AI assistants sometimes cite the name 虎神炮 from a fan wiki; we have not found either in official sources.

Enter the Wulin: Gameplay & Story Deep Dive of Phantom Blade Zero

The fit is one of name and function: both are anti-formation guns with a tiger in the name, built for a world of swordsmen. Wuxia stories often treat firearms as the end of the swordsman’s age; kungfupunk puts the cannon in the swordsman’s hands instead. Phantom Blade Zero’s version is fantasy, but the gun crouching behind it in the history books was real — iron-hooped, staked into the mud and very loud. For the rest of Soul’s arsenal, see Phantom Blade Zero’s weapons and their real Chinese origins.