Zhanmadao & Modao: China's Horse-Cutting Great Sabres

A zhanmadao (斩马刀, zhǎnmǎdāo), or “horse-cutting sabre”, is a Chinese two-handed great sabre: a long single-edged blade on a grip long enough for both hands, made to stop cavalry. Its name is older than any surviving example — it reaches back to a Han-dynasty sword in an imperial workshop — and its battlefield cousin, the Tang modao (陌刀, mòdāo), carried one of the most famous charges in Chinese military history.

The Han “horse-cutting sword” and Zhu Yun’s broken railing

The story starts with a name, not a weapon. In the Han shu, the outspoken official Zhu Yun confronts Emperor Cheng (r. 33–7 BCE) in open court and asks for a zhanmajian (斩马剑, zhǎnmǎ jiàn):

The minister he meant was the emperor’s own tutor, Zhang Yu. The furious emperor ordered Zhu Yun dragged away; he clung to the palace railing until it snapped, and was saved only when a general beat his head on the floor until he bled. The emperor later had the broken railing kept unrepaired “to honour an upright minister” — the origin of the idiom 朱云折槛.

The Tang commentator Yan Shigu explains that the imperial workshop “had horse-cutting swords — swords so sharp they could cut a horse”. What they looked like, nobody knows. As a jian, the zhanmajian was presumably double-edged, and some historians read it as a ceremonial or execution blade rather than a battlefield weapon.

Tang modao: Li Siye’s wall of blades

The Tang turned the name into an infantry arm. The Tang Liudian (738) lists the modao as the fourth of its regulation dao and glosses it as “a long dao carried by infantry — probably the ancient horse-severing sword”. It gives no dimensions, and the modao’s exact form is still debated.

Its most famous wielder was Li Siye (d. 759), a towering soldier from near Chang’an. When the Anxi frontier armies first took up the modao, the Old Book of Tang says, everyone agreed he was its master: “he always led the squad, and wherever he went the enemy broke.” In the late 740s, when Gao Xianzhi marched over the Pamirs against Little Bolü, Li Siye and Tian Zhen served as his left and right modao generals.

His great day came in 757, during the An Lushan rebellion, at the Battle of Xiangji Temple outside Chang’an. Rebel cavalry broke into the Tang lines, and Li Siye told Guo Ziyi that only a fight to the death could save the army:

The line re-formed. According to the New Book of Tang, two thousand infantry with modao and long-handled axes then “advanced like a wall, and nothing could stand before them”. The battle ran from noon to dusk, the rebels fled east, and Chang’an was retaken.

Song zhanmadao: a great sabre by imperial order

The zhanmadao proper is a Song weapon. In 1072, the Song shi records, Emperor Shenzong showed a boxed zhanmadao to the official Cai Ting, who praised it as finely made and easy to wield. Shenzong had eunuchs supervise the making of tens of thousands for his border commanders: a grip over 1 chi, a blade over 3 chi — about 31 and 94 cm in Song measure — and a large ring pommel. The court even ran a dedicated zhanmadao workshop, which a censor grumbled about a few years later.

Song strategists knew exactly where the idea came from. A memorial preserved in the Song shi proposes that the strongest infantrymen be armed with zhanmadao under their own commander, “like Li Siye’s modao method”, to charge the heavy “iron hawk” cavalry of the Western Xia.

One correction to a claim repeated online: the zhanmadao is not in the Wujing Zongyao (1044). That encyclopedia draws a hand dao and seven long-hafted dao, but no zhanmadao.

Long blades against horses were not just theory. At Yancheng in 1140, according to the accounts compiled by his grandson Yue Ke, Yue Fei ordered his infantry to go in with long-handled mazha blades (麻札刀), “not look up, and only chop at the horses’ legs” — and the chained heavy cavalry of the Jin went down. Four centuries later, Qi Jiguang cited the same trick in his Lianbing shiji. The weapon also turns up in a darker story: Lu You records that a palace-army soldier, Shi Quan, ambushed the chancellor Qin Hui — the man blamed for Yue Fei’s death — with a zhanmadao at Wangxian Bridge, and managed only to cut through one pole of his sedan chair.

Ming and Qing: from mass orders to Green Standard regulation

The Ming kept making them. The Da Ming huidian records a 1500 order for “zhanma great sabres” from six provinces — about 14,500 blades, including 4,000 from Zhejiang — and in 1509 the Liaodong garrisons used their old crossbows and zhanmadao “to teach the ancient methods of shooting horses and cutting horses”.

The Qing wrote the weapon into its regulations. The 18th-century Huangchao liqi tushi describes the Green Standard zhanmadao as “shaped like a sidearm sabre but long”: 4.8 chi overall (about 154 cm), with a 3.4-chi blade (about 109 cm) and a grip of 1.38 chi (about 44 cm). Its entry cites the 1072 Song zhanmadao as precedent. By then the zhanmadao had merged with the Japanese-inspired long sabre that Ming general Qi Jiguang adopted — the line that leads to the modern miao dao.

The 1930s dadao and the Big Sword units

The last horse-cutters fought no horses at all. The dadao (大刀, dàdāo), or “big sword”, is a short, broad chopping sword of the late Qing with a grip long enough for two hands; 1930s writers specified a 58 cm blade and a weight of about 3.5 lb (1.6 kg), though real examples vary wildly. In 1933, Chinese troops defending the Great Wall passes against Japan were often armed with little more than pistols, grenades and traditional swords, and sword-armed soldiers repelled repeated close assaults.

In 1937 the composer Mai Xin honoured the 29th Army with “The Sword March”, whose first line — 大刀向鬼子们的头上砍去, “let our big swords hack at the devils’ heads” — became a national rallying cry.

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Zhanmadao, modao and dadao compared

Phantom Blade Zero has its share of huge two-handed blades, from the parry-charging Juggernaut to the heavy weapons fans spotted on State of Play menus. None is officially labelled a zhanmadao or modao, so treat any match as a comparison, not a developer statement. But whenever Soul swings something long enough to clear a horse, he is fighting in Li Siye’s tradition — the wall of blades that held when the cavalry came. For the wider family, see types of Chinese swords and the pole-mounted guandao.