thumb| The changdao () was a two-handed, single-edged Chinese sword. The term has been translated as "long saber," "saber-staff," or "long-handled saber." During the Ming dynasty, was often used as a general term for two-handed swords and was used in the frequent raids along the coast. After Republican Era, the term is sometimes used to describe due to similarity. Tang dynasty sources describe the as being identical to the (), but the may have been a double-edged weapon like earlier zhanmajian.
thumb| The changdao () was a two-handed, single-edged Chinese sword. The term has been translated as "long saber," "saber-staff," or "long-handled saber." During the Ming dynasty, was often used as a general term for two-handed swords and was used in the frequent raids along the coast. After Republican Era, the term is sometimes used to describe due to similarity. Tang dynasty sources describe the as being identical to the (), but the may have been a double-edged weapon like earlier zhanmajian.
The seems to have first appeared during the Tang dynasty as the preferred weapon choice for elite vanguard infantry units in the Tang army. It was described as having an overall length of seven feet, composed of a three-foot-long single-edged blade and a four-foot-long pole grip. Due to its considerable length and size, it became one of the hallmarks of elite Tang infantry and was often placed at the front of the army as spearheads against enemy formations. The Taibai Yinjing states: In one army, there are 12,500 officers and men. Ten thousand men in eight sections bearing ; two thousand five hundred men in two sections with .
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).