Types of Chinese Swords: Jian, Dao, Miao Dao & More

Chinese swords come in two families: the jian (剑, jiàn)剑 jiànThe straight, double-edged Chinese sword — “gentleman of the hundred weapons”.Glossary →, a straight, double-edged sword, and the dao (刀, dāo)刀 dāoThe single-edged Chinese sabre, the standard military blade from the Han dynasty to the Qing.Glossary →, a single-edged sabre. Over three thousand years those families branched into dozens of types — from 30 cm Bronze Age blades to two-metre Ming long sabres — and the clearest way to sort them is by era, because almost every type answered a specific military problem: chariots, cavalry, armour, pirates, or plain cost.

This guide walks through the types of Chinese swords dynasty by dynasty, quotes the period sources that name them, and ends with one reference table. Where a type shows up in Phantom Blade Zero, we say so — but only when the developers or the press have confirmed it.

Jian and dao: the two families

Every Chinese sword is a jian or a dao. The jian has two edges, a central ridge and a point; it cuts with its front third and thrusts. The dao has one edge and a thick, unsharpened spine that carries weight into a chop and survives hard parries. The word 刀 still means “knife” in everyday Chinese — the family runs from kitchen cleavers to cavalry sabres.

Martial culture gives each a personality. The jian is 百兵之君, “the gentleman of the hundred weapons”; the dao is 百兵之胆, “the courage of weapons”. Most one-handed examples of either measure about 70–110 cm overall. The outliers — two-handed long sabres and pole-mounted blades — are where the most interesting history happens.

From bronze jian to the ring-pommel dao

The first Chinese swords appeared in the Western Zhou (1046–771 BCE): leaf-shaped bronze blades just 28–46 cm long, a last resort when chariot and dagger-axe could no longer reach. By the late Spring and Autumn period blades reached about 56 cm, and the casters of Wu and Yue produced masterpieces such as the Sword of Goujian. Bronze “long swords” of around a metre followed in the third century BCE.

The Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) changed everything. Puddled and repeatedly folded steel — the origin of hundred-refined steel — made long, springy jian of 70–100 cm possible, and it also made a new weapon: the single-edged ring-pommel dao (环首刀, huánshǒu dāo)环首刀 huánshǒudāoThe straight, single-edged Han-dynasty steel sabre with a ring at the end of its grip.Glossary →. Excavated examples run from about 86 to 114 cm. Its thick back made it harder to break than a jian, it chopped well from the saddle, and with a shield it did the jian’s job more cheaply. By the end of the Three Kingdoms (280 CE) the dao had largely replaced the jian on the battlefield, and the jian became the sword of officials, scholars and Daoist priests (see the jian dossier).

The Han also left a name that echoed for two thousand years. In the Han shu, the official Zhu Yun asks Emperor Cheng for a horse-cutting sword (斩马剑, zhǎnmǎ jiàn) from the imperial workshop so he can behead a corrupt minister — the ancestor, at least in name, of the zhanmadao.

Tang and Song: four regulation dao and an illustrated arsenal

The Tang wrote its sword types into law. The Tang Liudian (738), the dynasty’s administrative code, opens its entry on blades with a four-way division:

The code’s own notes explain each one. The yidao (仪刀, yídāo) was a ceremonial blade mounted in gold and silver with dragon-and-phoenix rings, carried by honour guards. The zhangdao (障刀, zhàngdāo) (also written 鄣刀) served “to shield the body and resist the enemy”. The hengdao (横刀, héngdāo) was “the sidearm soldiers wear”, a name first used under the Sui. And the modao (陌刀, mòdāo) was “a long dao carried by infantry — probably the ancient horse-severing sword”. General Li Siye led modao troops to victory at Xiangji Temple in 757; his story is in the zhanmadao dossier.

The Song produced the first great illustrated arsenal. The Wujing Zongyao (1044) draws eight dao: one shoudao (手刀, shǒudāo), or “hand dao” — “one edge, with a short hilt like a sword’s” — and seven long-hafted blades, among them the crescent-bladed 掩月刀 that later legend handed to Guan Yu as the guandao. It also notes that tough fighters had their blades made to their own designs and gave them names such as “Taiping”, “Kaishan” (mountain-opener) and “Kaizhen” (formation-breaker).

One correction to a common claim: the two-handed zhanmadao is not in the Wujing Zongyao. The key Song record is the Song shi’s account of 1072, when Emperor Shenzong had tens of thousands of great sabres made with a large ring pommel.

Ming to Republic: long sabres, waist sabres and the big sword

The Ming fought on two fronts — Mongol cavalry in the north, Japanese-led wokou raiders on the coast — and its swords show both. Curved, steppe-influenced sabres had spread under the Yuan, and by the mid-Ming one-handed sabres had replaced the jian as the issue weapon. The classic Ming profile is the yanling dao (雁翎刀, yànlíng dāo), the “goose-quill sabre”: straight-backed, with a curve only near the tip.

On the coast, General Qi Jiguang met Japanese two-handed swords and adopted his own changdao (长刀, chángdāo). Mao Yuanyi’s Wubei zhi (1621) is blunt about the origin: the long dao “is a Japanese design, very advantageous for infantry, which the ancients did not have.” The same passage pairs the waist sabre, or yaodao (腰刀, yāodāo), with the rattan shield. This long-sabre line — Ming changdao, then Qing zhanmadao — is what the 20th century renamed the miao dao.

Under the Qing the waist sabre became the standard sidearm, in four shapes collectors still use: the goose-quill yanmaodao; the liuyedao (柳叶刀, liǔyè dāo), or willow-leaf sabre, the most common of all; the deeply curved piandao (片刀, piàndāo) for slashing; and the heavy, flared niuweidao (牛尾刀, niúwěi dāo), or oxtail sabre. The oxtail is the “Chinese broadsword” of kung fu films, yet it is first recorded only in the early 19th century, as a civilian weapon that never appears in official arms lists. Qing regulations also kept two-handed long sabres for the Green Standard Army. The dao dossier covers them all.

The last chapter belongs to the dadao (大刀, dàdāo), a short, broad, long-hilted chopper of the late Qing that Chinese troops carried against Japan in the 1930s — and to the name miao dao itself, which, as historian Benjamin Judkins notes, never appears before the Republican period.

Soft swords, hooks, twins and butterflies

Some of the most famous “Chinese swords” were never battlefield weapons.

• Soft sword (ruanjian (软剑, ruǎnjiàn)): a jian thin enough to bend. The Song scholar Shen Kuo recorded swords that bent “like a hook” and sprang back straight, but the belt sword worn round the waist belongs mostly to folklore and wuxia. See soft sword.
• Hook swords (shuanggou (双钩, shuānggōu)): paired swords with a crook at the tip and crescent guards. Despite claims of great age, surviving examples and pictures are late Qing or later, and they appear in no official arms list. See hook swords.
• Twin swords (shuangjian (双剑, shuāngjiàn)): two jian wielded at once, a staple of wushu routines.
• Butterfly swords (hudie shuangdao (蝴蝶双刀, húdié shuāngdāo)): short, broad paired dao from southern China, probably early 19th century. English accounts from the 1840s describe Guangdong militia drilling with “double swords”; today they are best known from Wing Chun, with blades of about 29 cm.

Types of Chinese swords at a glance

“Not recorded” means the period texts name the weapon without giving dimensions. Lengths in chi (尺) are converted at roughly 31–32 cm per Song or Ming chi.

The Chinese Sword That Ruled for 2,500 Years | Forged in Fire

Seen in Phantom Blade Zero

S-GAME says the prototypes for its weapons are drawn “from the vast arsenal of traditional Chinese weaponry”, and that it sometimes has master swordsmiths forge real replicas. Here is what has been confirmed for the sword types above:

No source yet confirms butterfly swords or an oxtail sabre in the game. For the full weapon list, including the guandao and the Phantom Edges, see Phantom Blade Zero weapons and their real origins.

That is the pattern across three millennia: a real blade answers a real problem, and then legend, wuxia fiction and now kungfupunk sharpen it into something larger than life.