Talk:Miao dao

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I'm currently going through the print and online writings of Philip Tom, Scott Rodell, and others to get more hard info about the miaodao; in the meantime I've deleted the debate over Japanese influence (irrelevant to an early 20th century sword, and the general topic has been covered in other Chinese sword articles) and clarified that this is a historically recent sword (which I believe the previous edit was trying to state). Ergative rlt 02:38, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The name

When I was learning the sword, I was told the name meant "young rice shoot", or something like; the sword being curved like the shoot. I've no reference for this. — Johan the Ghost _seance 15:13, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

That sounds odd. "Miao" is a generic name for various minority groups in southern china, thus I suspect it really means "as used by those minority people". Note that this sword style is rather recent, and differs from older, more typical Chinese style weapons. Fittingly, swords of Tibetan style are called "Zang Dao (藏刀)", where "Zang" is Tibet. -- Ledrug 23:50, 14 July 2006 (UTC)