Battle of Caishi

Battle of Caishi
Part of the Jin-Song wars
Date 1161 Location Caishi, on the Yangtze River Result Song victory
Belligerents
Jurchen Jin	Southern Song
Commanders and leaders
Hailingwang	Yu Yunwen

The naval Battle of Caishi (采石之战) took place in 1161 and was the result of an attempt by forces of the Jurchen Jin to cross the Yangtze River, thus beginning an invasion of Southern Song China.

The Song navy consisted primarily of paddlewheel ships, which were faster and more maneuverable than the Jin ships, providing the Song with a great advantage. They hid their fleet behind the island of Jinshan, and brought them out at the signal of a mounted scout atop the island's peak. The Song then bombarded the invaders with traction trebuchets, launching "thunderclap bombs", which were soft-cased explosives filled with lime, which would create a noxious cloud when the fuses went off and broke the soft cases. The Jin were so badly defeated that the Jin Emperor was assassinated by his own men.

On the significance of this battle and the development of the Song navy, the historian Joseph Needham states:

From a total of 11 squadrons and 3,000 men [the Song navy] rose in one century to 20 squadrons totalling 52,000 men, with its main base near Shanghai. The regular striking force could be supported at need by substantial merchantmen; thus in the campaign of +1161 (AD) some 340 ships of this kind participated in the battles on the Yangtze. The age was one of continual innovation; in +1129 (AD) trebuchets throwing gunpowder bombs were decreed standard equipment on all warships, between +1132 (AD) and +1183 (AD) a great number of treadmill-operated paddle-wheel craft, large and small, were built, including stern-wheelers and ships with as many as 11 paddle-wheels a side (the invention of the remarkable engineer Kao Hsuan), and in +1203 (AD) some of these were armored with iron plates (to the design of another outstanding shipwright Chhin Shih-Fu)...In sum, the navy of the Southern Sung held off the [Jurchen Jin] and then the Mongols for nearly two centuries, gaining complete control of the East China Sea.

See also

• Battle of Tangdao
• Naval warfare

References

• Fighting Ships of the Far East 1 - "China and Southeast Asia 202 BC - AD 1419" (2002) Turnbull, Stephen. Oxford: Osprey Publishing.
• Needham, Joseph (1986). Science and Civilization in China: Volume 4, Part 3.