Fire lance

The fire lance was a gunpowder weapon of tenth-century China, made by strapping a bamboo tube packed with gunpowder and a slow match to a spear or other polearm and lighting it in combat, so that it worked like a short-range mix of flamethrower and shotgun with a reach of about three meters. Soldiers later packed iron pellets into the tube to add a lethal spray of shrapnel to the flame, and the weapon saw heavy use through the Jin-Song wars. By the thirteenth century the bamboo tube had been replaced with a metal barrel and the polearm shaft eventually dropped altogether, turning the fire lance directly into the hand cannon and, through it, into the ancestor of every modern firearm; a version of the weapon was still being used as late as the 1643 storming of Bristol in England.