Why are the long spears in the hands of warriors so flexible?

When I was a child, I loved listening to storytelling, especially "The Story of Yue," "The Story of Tang," and "The Generals of the Yang Family," these big-spear-and-pole books about riding horses into battle. The characters in these books share one thing in common: the warriors who wield long spears are born with a touch of protagonist charisma, while those who wield mao spears are not.

In these books, the difference between the qiang spear and the mao spear lies mainly in the material of the long shaft. The mao is used for charging and thrusting, so it needshardshafts, often made of jujube wood, while the qiang is meant to showcase a character's martial skill, so it needsflexibility, and must use a white wax pole, that is, the wood of theChinese ashtree.

Chinese ash. Image: Xemenendura / wikimedia

Flowers without splendor, the wind lends a hand

The Chinese ash Fraxinus chinensis is a plant in the genus Fraxinus [chén] of the family Oleaceae. This genus is widely distributed across the northern temperate zone, collectively called ash in English, derived from the Latin word for "spear." It seems the ancient Europeans probably really did use it to make long-shafted weapons.

The grayish-brown bark of the Chinese ash has obvious fine vertical fissures, and the branches have only a slight curve, spreading outward in all directions like the water column of a fountain, rarely gnarled [qiú] or twisted. The Chinese ash has odd-pinnate compound leaves,and the leaf rachis also has an elegant curve, with the base of each leaflet tilting slightly upward。

Every spring is the flowering season of the Chinese ash, with inflorescences growing on the new branches of the year.Dioecious, both female and male flowers are very tiny,male flowers cluster into a greenish mass tinged with red, while female inflorescences are loose spikes。

Male inflorescence of the Chinese ash. Image: oleaceae.info

Because they arewind-pollinated flowers, without showy corollas to attract insects, the flowers of the Chinese ash are often only noticed when they have already reached the fruiting stage.The fruit is a slender samara like a small spoon, hanging in clusters at the tips of the female branches, turning brownish-yellow when mature and drifting down everywhere in autumn.

The slender ones are the samaras of the Chinese ash. Image: Krzysztof Ziarnek, Kenraiz / wikimedia

Where does white wax come from

The candles Europeans used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were mainly made fromyellow beeswax; there was also a kind of white wax traded from the East, with a high melting point and hard texture, which candle makers assumed was a product made by Easterners through secondary bleaching and processing of beeswax.

Beeswax at room temperature. Image: Frank Mikley / wikimedia

The white wax that first reached Europe may have been transshipped through Japan, so Europeans thought Japan also produced this kind of wax, and that it was a plant wax produced from some kind of tree. Only later did they learn that both of these points were wrong.

White wax is not bleached beeswax. Image: yamakei.jp

White wax is indeed related to the Chinese ash, but it is not directly produced by the Chinese ash. At that time, the only place white wax was produced was also China.

The full name of white wax should be insect white wax, and it is made by a kind of homopteran insect--the wax insect. The second-instar male wax insects secrete and accumulate wax filaments on their body surface, and when enough accumulates they form dense wax blossoms. People collect the wax blossoms and boil them down to extract high-purity wax, which is white wax.The Chinese ash is precisely the main host of the wax insect, hence its name.

FE~FA3 is the life history of the female wax insect, ME~MA is the life history of the male wax insect. Image: Pu Yang, et al./Scientific Reports (2015)

Wax insects gathered together. Image: geocities.jp

Our ancestors had a long history of using white wax, with records appearing in documents of the Wei and Jin periods, and by no later than the end of the Southern Song, people had begun to rear wax insects.

"Xu Guixin Zashi Xu Ji" describes it as "...before Grain in Ear, use yellow grass cloth to make small bags storing more than ten insects, hang them all over among the trees; by the fifth month, from each one emerge several hundred insects, as fine as ants and midges [měng], leaving white droppings on the branches and stems, this is white wax..." Although the wax substance is mistakenly regarded here as insect droppings, the description of releasing and harvesting wax insects is quite accurate. By the Ming and Qing periods, rearing insects to obtain wax in many places in the southwest had already become a specialized field of agricultural production.

Young one, do you want to light a candle or wield a spear

The wood of the Chinese ash is white, with long fibers, good flexibility, and easy to process, and can be used to weave baskets; it is also a great material for making long spear shafts. Whenever I see Ron holding an ash wand in the "Harry Potter" series, an image of a young warrior on a white horse with a silver spear always surfaces in my mind.

Young one, silver spear, all that's missing is a white horse. Image: twitter

The wood state of the Chinese ash is mostlywhite wax poles, and this is not a wooden stick made by felling the Chinese ash and then cutting it into strips and turning it. Rather, it is a distinctive cultivation method in places such as Henan and Shandong. Young Chinese ash trees have a strong branching ability, and people, through repeated cutting, cultivate them into clustered small shrubs used for windbreaks and field protection. Cutting once every few years yields many straight young trunks, which after peeling and drying become white wax poles.

White wax pole wood. Image: 1688.com

Europe and the Americas originally did not have this species of Chinese ash, but they have many close relatives in the same genus. Although these cannot produce wax, their wood properties are not too different, and since ancient times they have been used by people on various occasions and have also appeared in every corner of the halls of civilization.

The most famous among them isthe world tree in Norse mythologyYggdrasill. This giantEuropean ashF. excelsior has branches linking nine worlds, and when its roots are bitten through, Ragnarok will arrive. The European ash is also an important source of timber. Europeans do not cultivate white wax poles; instead, they directly saw adult large trees into boards to make furniture and flooring.

The world tree in Norse mythology. Image: rebloggy.com

In the domestic flooring market now,"white ash wood"this name can specifically refer to imported European ash and the like, or broadly refer to various woods of the genus Fraxinus, which brings confusion to consumers.

The easiest to confuse with imported white ash wood isManchurian ashF. mandshurica. In China, the Manchurian ash is mainly distributed in the north, especially most abundant in the northeast, and is one of the three major broadleaf hardwoods of the northeast. Due toexcessive logging and use, the number of large trees has sharply decreased, and young plant regeneration is also insufficient, so its survival is already greatly threatened, and it has been listed as a key protected tree species. Most of the Manchurian ash wood seen on the market today comes from Russia.

Manchurian ash. Image: Herman, D.E., et al./North Dakota tree handbook

There are quite a few members of the ash family threatened like the Manchurian ash, for examplethe Hubei ashF. hupehensis, whose natural distribution is only on the southern foot of the Dahong Mountains in Hubei, and which was only named in 1980.

The Hubei ash is beautiful in appearance, easy to root and tolerant of pruning, and its tough wood is also easy to shape, making it an advanced tree species much hyped in the bonsai world.After years of digging, almost none of the wild resources of the Hubei ash remain, and because its seeds have a long dormancy period, it is difficult to rapidly restore its population. At present, there is an urgent need to strengthen protection and research on artificial breeding.

Hubei ash bonsai. Image: senbaoyy.cn

This article is the 159th article of the fourth year of the Species Calendar, from Species Calendar author @Desert Porcupine.

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