Chinese siege warfare was its own discipline, refined over more than two thousand years against the rammed-earth walls that defined Chinese fortification. The siege engines that resulted included the original trebuchet form (predating the European counterweight version by fifteen hundred years), the largest siege crossbows ever built, and the first weapons in human history to use rocket propulsion.
Chinese Traction Trebuchet
The manpower-pulled siege engine that invented the trebuchet form — the standard Chinese siege artillery for fifteen hundred years, and the ancestor of every trebuchet ever built.
Chinese Chuangzi Nu
The giant bed-mounted siege crossbow of imperial China — credited with killing the Great Khan Möngke at the Siege of Diaoyu in 1259, an event that may have changed the course of world history.
Chinese Huo Jian
The Chinese "fire arrow" — beginning as a Song-dynasty incendiary, evolving into the world's first rocket-propelled missile, and ending up as the direct ancestor of the modern rocket.