Hello everyone:

I've read several books for ancient Chinese arsenal, they said that there're both front sight(準星) and rear sight(照門) on Hon-Yi Pao(or demi-culverin), but I can't find any in all pictures that I've ever seen before. Did I misunderstand all those writings, or Hon-Yi Pao did not have any front or rear sight on it at all?

Thanks for replying~

Hong Yi Pao - 红夷炮 seems to be a kinda of cannon imported into late Ming/Qing dynasty from dutch?

Not really. In fact, Chinese scholars are trying to identify that the first Hon-Yi Pau was imported by Dutch, Portuguese, or English,
and the dispute is not settled now.
As I known before, Chinese named the demi-culverin Hon-Yi Pau in 1596, but all documents did not mention its details until 1621.
Ming troops first imported 4 Hon-Yi Pau from Macao Portuguese, since those guns was made by cast iron, and the Portuguese did not master technique for casting iron then, so scholars estimated they were salvaged from sunken ship.
Those who owned cast iron guns, and appeared in Chinese southeast coast in 17th century was either English or Dutch, but
unfortunately, no one knows their origin because they were lost.
So Hon-Yi Pau may not be first imported by Hon-Yi(Dutch)

An ignorant question here. Is it certain (e.g., based on surviving examples) that the earliest Hon-Yi Paus were cast in iron? There were bronze culverins earlier and I have previously assumed that these were the ones being referred to.

Also what the the etiology of Hon-Yi? The Dutch were referred to as "Red-Haired" in early woodcuts. Were the Portugese also referred to as such?

"Memorial to the throne for fetching european guns"（《為致勝務須西銃，起敕速取疏》）by Lee Tsu-Zao（李之藻）in 1620（泰昌元年）said "Macao Portuguese merchants donated lots of money...bought 4 iron guns..."（...夷商...捐助多金，買得大鐵銃四門...）, and since this is the first offical record, so historians thought the earliest Hon-Yi Paus in China were cast by iron.

In late Ming Dynasty, Hon-Yi meant Dutch, and (Macao) Portuguese were called by Au-Yi（澳夷）,but most Chinese at that period(even now) could not tell Dutch from Portuguese, that's the reason why the origin of Hon-Yi Paus confuses modern scholars and us.

Hello, guys:

Finally, I found one with rear sight by myself. That's "Jie-Xen Fei-Kong Mie-Lu An-Ben Fire Gun"(捷勝飛空滅虜安邊發貢神炮) which cast in 1628.

Enjoy it!

P.S. But I still believe guns without front/rear sight were much more than the ones with front/rear sight in 17th China.

The oxidation colour as seen from the photo suggests a bronze (rather than iron) canon!

Its outer surface was cast by bronze, but chamber was cast by iron.
It's so-called "iron-heart and bronze-body"(鐵心銅體) , that used to be the particular technique of Chinese, so this gun was cast by Ming itself.

This is a very interesting topic. OldCat, you seemed to know this subject very well. Where did the record of Lee come from?

Yi-Long Hwang(黃一農), a famous Chinese historian, wrote a lot about that topic, you can find them in

http://ylh.theweb.org.tw/chinese.htm

Thanks.