European firearms entered China from the sixteenth century and played a significant role in the warfare of the Ming and Qing dynasties.Some Chinese military books,which include contents on European firearms,appeared in the early seventeenth century and helped to expand the weapons' influence.Certain parts in these books concerning European artilleries are highly similar,indicating that they might have been extracted from a mutual source.Bing lu 兵錄 (Records of military art) is a typical example of such Chinese military treatises.Its illustrations and data demonstrate that Pratica manuale di arteglieria written by Luys Collado in 1586 is an important source of the Western knowledge in certain chapters of Bing lu.
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