"The C96 Broomhandle Mauser, it's a great pistol. Ten rounds, .30 caliber, reliable, beautifully made, and they made these things from 1896 up into the 1930s," American Rifleman Field Editor Garry James said. "Well, at, at some point, some of these made their way to China. Well, the Chinese military and the Chinese warlords especially, thought, 'This is just the ticket.' These are wonderful, wonderful guns. So they wanted to have these as some of their primary pistols to issue their troops. They bought German guns, but that wasn't enough."
Well, history may not always repeat itself, but it definitely finds ways to rhyme. The Chinese military set about reverse-engineering and copying the original C96. The results were more or less what a modern American might expect.
Said
American Rifleman's Evan Brune, "One of the notable elements of Chinese Broomhandle Mauser copies is the fact that they're kind of all over the board. They range pretty much everywhere in terms of quality. You've got the bottom of the barrel quality guns, all the way up to pretty decent copies of what Mauser was making at the time."
Because there were multiple outfits producing these copies of the C96--which the Chinese called the "Box Cannon," not a "Broomhandle"--the copies are marked with a wide variety of strange markings. Some of them are completely unmarked.
This wasn't by accident, nor was it a matter of taste. The markings were meant to disguise who might have actually manufactured them. (Of course, this means that tracking down the provenance of a given Chinese Broomhandle Mauser can be tough!) It's fascinating stuff. Enjoy this wonderful #TBT from our friends at American Rifleman!
