I have been following Liang Jieming's work on Siege equipment with great interest.

I am curious as to whether there are references to field artillery used on the battlefield against armies from the Warring States till the Han dynasty? If so, what were they called and how and against what were they employed? Was it simply a case of using Siege equipment to target troops instead? If no references to field artillery appeared during this period，were field artillery ever employed in Ancient China's History?

Any information is welcome.

The first reference to field artillery is the "pili che" (thunder carriages) developed by Cao Cao at Liu Ye's suggestion during the Battle of Guandu in 200 AD. They were essentially siege traction trebuchets with wheels added to allow them to be deployed in more than one spot. Cao Cao used them in his encampment to destroy the towers that Yuan Shao had built around the encampment to lay suppressing fire down on Cao Cao's troops. It is certain that from then on, trebuchets with wheels were indeed used in a field situation.

You may also consider giant crossbows as a form of field artillery. They were probably an adaptation of the static siege crossbows known since the Warring States, by mounting them on ox wagons. In the Age of Fragmentation, as normal crossbows lost much of their effectiveness against heavily-armoured cataphract cavalry, giant crossbows on wagons became increasingly important as an anti-cavalry weapon.

Thanks for the reply. I remember reading something about the pili che during the Three Kingdoms. Unless someone else can come up with evidence I guess we can assume field artillery were not employed on the battlefield during the Warring States for the the time being.

I am inclined to think there well may well have been crossbow based war machines capable of being used on the field during East Zhou & Han, but whether it was done is the unclear part.
The bolt heads from apparently winch loaded arcuballista are simply larger versions of the regular crossbow bolt, so must be anti-infantry (rather than the Song 'stepping spear' for attacking walls). It was suggested the earlier arcuballista were used to shoot defenders from walls however, and if the defenders had a device on the walls the the besieging force may well want something to fire back in a static siege.
There are the references on the Mozi which outline a weapon for use in defending cities in particualr but with so many rival states I suspect the devices may have existed in different forms & sizes.
That the largest Qin bolts were not fired from a hand held crossbow seems clear when they are 1.8-2.2 m long.
They seem to not have made much of an impact in literature, and with massed crossbows of the capablities that have been mentioned it seems unlikely to be strictly nessecary to field heavier devices that were not as mobile.
An assumption it was not employed on the field is sound enough as there is no evidence to the contrary and only a little evidence they even existed at all.

Yun,

Li Ling's Campaign in 99 B.C. saw the use of what Michael Loewe translates from the Han Shu as Repeater Crossbows.

Do you know what these were? Thomas says they were wagon mounted arcuballistas.

Were they really wagon mounted arcumallistas (repeater ones to boot), or warring states double barrelled repeating crossbows or early versions of the zhuge nu, or just another lian nu (ie. mistranslation of lian again to read repeater instead of multiple bolt)?

It appears that the text of Huai Nan Tzu (sometime around 100 BC) also mentions the lian nu...

Hm, very interesting thread. Can I bring it back to Yun's attention, please.