Yueya chan

Quick Facts

OriginChina

Weapon typeBladed polearm

How it worksPolearm

MaterialIron

Period of useEarly modern, Present day

Original purposeMilitary weapon, Civilian self-defence and duelling

Carried byClergy and monks, Infantry

About the weapon

Yueya chan (Chinese 月牙铲, literally moon-blade spade) is a Chinese pole weapon, also known as the monk's spade or chanzhang (禅杖). Tradition holds that wandering Buddhist monks carried it on their travels: if they found a dead body on the road, they could bury it with Buddhist rites using the spade, while also defending themselves against bandits with it. The spade as a weapon grew out of a farming tool. We have not been able to establish when it took its present form. It consists of a long shaft with a flat, spade-shaped blade at one end and a smaller crescent-shaped blade at the other. The iron head was fitted onto a wooden or iron shaft. The monk's fangbian chan (方便铲) combined an outer crescent with an axe-shaped blade, and often had holes with ringing rings and red silk tassels. With the crescent, a monk defended himself against small and medium-sized predators such as wild dogs or leopards: he hooked it around the animal's neck and kept it away from his body. Under the Ming dynasty, military theorists valued long-shafted spades, and the scholar Zheng Ruozeng ranked the spade with an inner crescent first among infantry weapons. In folk wushu, it is still practiced with today. The Xinhua news agency links it to the characters Lu Zhishen from Water Margin and Sha Wujing from Journey to the West.

Parts of the weapon

• Blade
• Shaft

Care and maintenance

• Caring for steel and iron blades