Club from China with a brass-mounted wooden grip, surmounted by an iron square pommel and an iron guard. The wooden grip is inlaid with four brass floral designs. The body of the club is an 11-joint, squared, ornamental, steel shaft, ending with a hexagonal knob and a blunt tip.
Clubs of this type made of iron were referred to as iron whips, and first appeared in the Tang dynasty (618-907 AD), and later again in the Daogong period (1821-1850 AD) of the Qing dynasty. There are single or twin jointed iron staffs, both soft and hard. This one is a hard steel type made in the 19th century. See Plate 59, fig. 1 and p. 229, Zhou Wei (1957), 'Zhongguo bing qi shi gao', Beijing.
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