For most of Chinese military history, the typical soldier carried a polearm rather than a sword. Reach mattered — against cavalry, against shield walls, against other infantry — and the cheapest, most easily-produced, most easily-trained weapons in any pre-firearms army were the ones with long wooden shafts and metal heads.
Chinese Ge
The bronze dagger-axe that defined two millennia of Chinese Bronze Age warfare — a chariot-borne hooking and slashing weapon used in numbers no other ancient weapon ever matched.
Chinese Ji
The combination halberd that bridged the ge dagger-axe and the imperial spear — a transitional weapon that, for a thousand years, was the prestige polearm of the Chinese battlefield.
Chinese Qiang
The spear — known in Chinese martial tradition as the "king of all weapons" — and for over a thousand years the dominant infantry weapon of the Chinese battlefield.