The straight sword is the hardest of hand-held weapons to master, requiring great inner strength and mental concentration to ensure that one's force is transmitted through the tip of the weapon. Swordsmith Juan Tzu-hsing, who has trained with swords ever since he was a child, says that to be truly skilled with the sword you have to reach the stage where the weapon is deadly in your hands, but there is no thought of violence in your head. (photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang) (photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang)

Since ancient times, heroes have been paired with famous swords. The bravos of the martial arts world also have long prized swords of distinction and many have lost their lives in pursuit of such weapons. Not surprisingly then, the sword is generally also the preferred weapon of the heroes of China's chivalric romances. The plot of the recent film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, for example, revolves around the martial artist Li Mu Bai's sword Green Destiny. Why must a knight-errant always carry a sword? What role did the sword play in traditional China? How do the Chinese and Japanese "ways of the sword" differ?

Why is it that with 18 traditional weapons to choose from, China's knights-errant always carry a straight sword, or jian? Huang Te-chuan, executive director of the ROC Arts Knife and Sword Preservation Association, believes this preference is related to the weapon's form and its manufacture: "A jian has two edges and a spine, and is much harder to make than the curved saber or dao. The least mistake during the forging or shaping of the blade will leave it twisted." Huang, who collects prize swords, also notes that numerous impurities in the steel were a problem. Therefore, even though Qin and Han dynasty swordsmiths were already using smelted steel and their technology had advanced to include folding the steel and tempering just the edges, blades were still often flawed. Huang estimates that probably only one good jian was produced for every hundred good dao. The difficulty of forging a prize jian ensured that when one was made, a legend quickly formed around it. These legends typically tell of a difficulty arising at a critical point in the sword's making, as with the famed swords Mo Xie and Gan Jiang, both of whose makers fed their own bodies to their forges to complete the swords.