Late last year, I presented a poster on the Asian war bow. The paper that appeared in the proceedings is available here:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.1677

It's about the physics and engineering of the bow, so doesn't get very much into the history etc. There was also a 4 page limit.

One thing that I didn't put in, because it didn't occur to me until the paper was written, submitted, reviewed, and accepted was that the Manchu/Chinese thumb ring (the cylindrical ring) gives about 3% more energy than the tabbed thumb ring that just about everybody else used/uses (e.g., Korean, Indian, Turkish, Persian, Tatar, Russian, Hungarian). For lots of pics of thumb rings, the best online resource I know of is University of Missouri Museum of Anthropology tumbring collection.

Another important point is the cost of the bow. Scott Rodell gives a little mid-Qing military price list in Chinese Swordsmanship, in which a bow costs about 2 muskets, 2/3 of a sword, and about the same as a bundle of arrows. Japanese prices from the 17th century have a bow being worth about 1/15 of a sword (and no, that isn't an exceptional expensive sword, comparing with the prices of spears, naginata, and arrows - it's about 1 sword = 100 arrows). The Japanese bow is of laminated bamboo or bamboo + wood construction, not a horn-wood-sinew composite bow.

Physicists like toys, bows are nice toys. Therefore:

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/26258/

Was the statement that composite bows "never spread south to India" yours or the journalist's? I'd take issue with it since it's patently untrue, what with India having several types of composite bows (one of which--the "crab bow"--is largely unique to it). The shapes of the famous Indian steel bows* are also noticeably patterned after those of composite bows, and this would be hard to explain without accepting the existence of composite bows in India.

*) there's a good overview in this series of articles:

http://sagittarius.student.utwente.nl/artikel...elbow.html

http://sagittarius.student.utwente.nl/artikel...teel1.html

http://sagittarius.student.utwente.nl/artikel...teel2.html