Wujing Zongyao Circulates Gunpowder Formulas

1053

Copies of the Wujing Zongyao, China's comprehensive military manual compiled a decade earlier by Zeng Gongliang, continued spreading through Song military bureaucracy. Its pages contained the first precisely documented gunpowder formulas - recipes for incendiary bombs, poison-smoke devices, and fire arrows with propellant tubes. The manual treated gunpowder not as alchemical curiosity but as ordnance, a conceptual leap the rest of the world would not make for centuries.