Ming dynasty engineers built pressure-triggered mines centuries before Europe
A 14th-century Chinese manual, the Huolongjing, describes buried bamboo mines set off when enemies stepped on hidden boards, dropping a weight that spun steel wheels against flint. Leonardo da Vinci sketched a similar spark mechanism for an early wheellock musket around 1500.
Historians divide land mine history into three phases: buried spikes in antiquity, gunpowder mines from the Ming dynasty to the American Civil War, and high explosives afterwards. Roman forts were ringed with hidden hazards such as lilia, pits holding sharpened stakes in a five-point pattern, named for their resemblance to lilies. Julius Caesar's double ring of such defences helped him win at Alesia, and similar pits reappeared at Bannockburn in 1314 and at Passchendaele in World War I.
The caltrop, 12 to 15 centimetres across, has four spikes arranged so one always points upward. It was meant to disable rather than kill and worked especially well against cavalry. Jin forces scattered caltrops to slow Genghis Khan's army at Zhongdu, Joan of Arc was wounded by one at Orléans, and Japanese ninjas used them, calling them tetsu-bishi, from the fourteenth century.
Chinese chemists had combined charcoal, sulfur and saltpetre into gunpowder by the 900s. The Huolongjing's bamboo mine was about 3 metres long, waterproofed with oiled cowhide, packed with powder and metal pellets and sealed with wax; its trigger was fully described only in the early 17th century. Another device, the underground sky-soaring thunder, used weapons planted upright as bait. In Europe, Samuel Zimmermann of Augsburg devised the Fladdermine in 1573, about a kilogram of black powder fired by a flintlock when stepped on or tripped.
Modern mines come in anti-tank and anti-personnel types and can stay dangerous for years after fighting ends. A campaign by groups in the International Campaign to Ban Landmines led to the 1997 Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel mines, which 164 nations have signed; China, Russia and the United States have not.
Source: Land mine
