Traditional Manchu Bow 60lb@35" Yarha Alibow Review

Today we will talk about the history of Manchu archery and review Alibow's heaviest Yarha bow, made of fiberglass and it's much cheaper than their laminate Manchu bow.
Alibow's Laminated Manchu (Xongkoro 海東清) is now available for purchasing!
Both are based on traditional Qing dynasty horsebows from East Asia.

Yarha description on Alibow website:

The manchu bow emerged in the wars and chaos of the late Ming dynasty (1368-1644), and flourished in China in the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). The Manchu warriors brought this bow with their conquest, and it became a symbolic bow of China. With a long limb, and long, reflexed siyah, this bow trades in arrow speed for efficiency shooting heavy arrows at very long draw.

Our advanced manchu bow is a newly upgarded version of the our old manchu bow. The Manchurian word "Yarha" means "Leopard".

The new version is more efficient, more smooth when drawing (the draw-force curve feels more similar to the antique manchu bow), and has less hand shock due to a special material used. This bow will be a delight to use.

-String Length: regular version 145cm, long version 150cm
-Draw length: regular version up to 35’’, long version up to 38" (45lbs or less), or 36" (more than 45lbs)

-Draw Weight: 20 to 60 lbs (at 35'', NOT 28")

Transcript of historical component of video:

During the 17th century, Nurhaci, a chieftain of a Jurchen tribe, began a campaign against the Chinese Ming Empire. He reunified the Jurchen tribes and established a military system called the "Eight Banners", which organized Jurchen soldiers into groups of "Bannermen”. Now the transition of when Jurchen people are called manchus, started after his son Hong Taiji began driving Ming forces out of the Liaodong Peninsula and declared a new dynasty, the Qing, in the 1636.
So now that we talked briefly about the origins of the manchus, lets talk about their bows. Although other bows were used, what we call today as the Manchu is a type of reflex composite static recurve bow historically used in Manchuria, and later spread to Mongolia, southern china and Tibet during the Qing dynasty.
It is characterized by very large siyahs, long draw length, prominent string bridges, and use with of very large and heavy arrows. Eventually, this bow design almost completely displaced all other types of hornbows in the Qing Empire. Here is a image showing the cross section difference of the Manchu bow compared to other composite designs.
The traditional Manchu bow theoretically shoots heavy arrows the fastest compared to most bow designs. Basically, the force draw curve of the Manchu design has
a higher area than most other bows, so it has the most theoreitical potential energy to transfer to the arrow. A heavy arrow can take advantage of efficiently transferring this maximum potential energy, while a light arrow will suffer due to the much heavier siyah weights.in the future, I will go into detail about the physics in a future video, but in a nutshell, Manchu bows shoot heavy arrows faster than “lighter tip” bow designs, while shooting light arrows the slower than “lighter tip” bow designs.
Now lets talk about the Manchu yarha i am reviewing today.

Maybe you watched War of Arrows, the bows they used in the movie was not a good representation of manchu bows unfortunately and depicted too many crossbows.

Music 1:
By Akšan

Music 2:
"Opium" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Видео Traditional Manchu Bow 60lb@35" Yarha Alibow Review канала Historical Archery