[Dan Howard]

I'm trying to find sources that list the Chinese names for various armour components.
There is a thread here
http://www.myArmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=8060
in which Mr Grigg pulls out all of the Chinese shields from Robinson but I've gone through the book and can find very little about armour terms. These are all I can find:
lamellar is called k'ai ("metal leaf")
the entire panoply is called k’ai i (“armor clothing”)
The corselet is called kia i
underpadding is called lei
abdomen armour is called shang

I'm specifically trying to find armour terms from the Warring States or Qin periods.

[Michael Curl]

Can't help you that far back, but Robinson himself recommends the Wu Pei Ching. But that is from the 16th or 17th century. To be honest with you I think chinese military history in general is way underdeveloped.

If I recall Zhou or perhaps warring states wore a lot of rhino leather armour, and it was called something like jia.

[Timo Nieminen]

The best English language source on early Chinese armour I know is Albert E. Dien, A Study of Early Chinese Armor, Artibus Asiae 43, 5-66 (1981). At first glance, the only useful thing in Needham is references to Chinese langauge sources, namely a series of papers by Yang Hung (also cited by Dien).

Old, out of copyright, and freely available is Laufer's Chinese clay figures, the first part of which is a history of (very early) Chinese armour, including a rather long section on the rhinoceros in China.

The other sources worth checking are E. T. C. Werner, Chinese Weapons, and Yang Hong, Weapons in Ancient China.

[Timo Nieminen]