Jingal All the Way... with a very long gun

The passage from Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “The Grave of the Hundred Head,” may not have been one of the author’s more jingoistic works — or even his most familiar — but its description of the events during the British pacification of Upper Burma in 1886 likely added a new word to the Victorian lexicon: “Jingal.”

Also known as a “gingal” or “gingall” (from the Hindi word, janjal), it was the name that the British soldiers in India and China used to describe an unusually long type of rifle that was often wielded by Queen Victoria’s enemies in the Far East. To the Chinese, however, it was the t’ ai-chi’iang. Even today, the very long gun is typically called the “jingal.”

While never abundant, it was to be one of the more feared firearms that the men in scarlet (and later, khaki) tunics would face in their efforts to build and maintain the vast British Empire.

A VERY LONG GUN

Today, we use the term “long gun” to