Dao (sword) - Recent History

Recent History

Some of the blades from the Qing Dynasty lived on and even had descendants see military action in the 20th century. The dadao was used by some Chinese militia units against Japanese invaders in the Second Sino-Japanese War, as was the miao dao, a descendant of the changdao. These were used during planned ambushes on Japanese troops because the Chinese military and patriotic resistance groups often had a shortage of firearms.

Most Chinese martial arts schools still train extensively with the dao, seeing it as a powerful conditioning tool and a versatile weapon, with self defense techniques transferable to similarly sized objects more commonly found in the modern world, such as canes, baseball or cricket bats, for example. There are also schools that teach double broadsword shuang dao 雙刀, forms and fencing, one dao for each hand.

One measure of the proper length of the sword should be from the hilt in your hand and the tip of the blade at the brow and in some schools, the height of shoulder. Alternatively, the length of the sword should be from the middle of the throat along the length of the outstretched arm. There are also significantly larger versions of dao used for training in some Baguazhang and Taijiquan schools.