Hand cannon
A hand cannon is an early portable firearm with a metal barrel, fired by applying an external flame or hot material to its powder charge.
Touch hole: A small opening through a firearm’s barrel or breech that lets an external ignition source reach the powder charge. The hand cannon’s flame was applied at this opening to ignite its charge.
Fire lance: A Chinese gunpowder weapon that projected flame, incendiaries, or early projectiles from a tube attached to a pole. It shared the hand cannon’s tube-and-gunpowder principle and preceded portable firearms.
Firearm: A weapon that launches a projectile by the rapid expansion of gas produced by burning propellant. A hand cannon is an early, mechanically simple member of this weapon family.
Arquebus: An early long firearm, commonly fired from the shoulder or supported by a rest, with a match-based ignition system. It developed a more manageable stock and ignition arrangement from earlier hand firearms.
Black powder: A fast-burning mixture of charcoal, sulfur, and potassium nitrate used as a propellant and explosive. Its combustion generated the gas that propelled a hand cannon’s projectile.
Heilongjiang hand cannon: A bronze firearm discovered in Heilongjiang, China, commonly dated to the late thirteenth century. It is among the earliest surviving objects identified as a hand cannon.
Gun barrel: The tube through which a firearm’s expanding gas accelerates its projectile. The hand cannon’s metal barrel contained the charge and guided the shot.
Musket: A long, smoothbore shoulder firearm used by infantry from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Later infantry firearms extended the portable-gun lineage to standardized battlefield weapons.
Matchlock: A firearm ignition mechanism that uses a lever to lower a smoldering match onto a priming charge. It mechanized the external flame that hand cannon users applied by hand.
Ming dynasty: A Chinese imperial dynasty that ruled from 1368 to 1644. Ming military forces developed and used early firearms descended from hand-cannon forms.