This is a photocopy of a portion of the official Qing documents (钦定军器则例) on the provision of armaments. It is a partial list of the weapons and equipment of the Qing Green Standard Army based in Guangdong province.... You can see some of the two-handed stuff here as well.

The wodao, beidao, zhanmadao, chuanweidao were all 2-handed sabers...Their dimensions (blade and handle lengths) are clearly given on my website:

http://thomaschen.freewebspace.com/photo5.html

Quite surprising that the written language hasn't changed much till now.

It has changed a bit if you're using the Jianti (simplified) characters introduced by the PRC.

True,but when comparing the text in those pics to the fan ti characters, i don't seem to notice a difference.

There's essentially no difference between Chinese characters since the Han dynasty and the fanti characters of today, although pronunciations have changed quite a bit. This is what allows inscriptions and calligraphy from ancient China to be readable by most Chinese today, unlike Shang oracle bone writings or Zhou bronze vessel writings or even Qin seal script characters. Of course, cursive scripts like caoshu and xingshu can be very hard to read, but this is not because the characters themselves have changed - only that they have been simplified and stylised.