One of the most popular pistols in Warlord Era China was the FN 1900, a compact and reliable officer's pistol in .32 ACP. The Chinese also found great use for the Mauser C96, but this was seen as a sort of combat carbine, where the FN was more a defensive weapon and status symbol.

Several large Chinese arsenals (notably the Shanghai Arsenal and the Jinling Arsenal) produced high-quality exact copies of the FN model 1900 - but a huge number of less strict copies were made by a plethora of other workshops and arsenals. Today we're going to look at the main categories of these copies, including straight-grip, curved-grip, and baby models. These are the most accessible type of Warlord Era pistol for collectors today, and no two guns are quite the same.

Except for the serial number, as nearly half of the examples I examined had basically the same serial number...