The bow is pronounced as "gong" in Chinese. There are various kinds of bows including wanggong, jiagong, shougong, tanggong, dagong, diaogong, jiaoduangong, lugong, and cianggong. There are three different kinds of arrows, jian, which always goes with the bow, namely majian, syujian and bujian.

       It is said that the slingshot was the primitive precursor to the bow in the remote ancient times in China. When funeral by burial was not yet practiced and the dead body was merely left on the land, the slingshot was used by the relatives of the dead to prevent animals from eating, gnawing and chewing the corpse (believe it or not). Huangdi, the legendary person regarded as the forefather of the Chinese people, reevaluated the slingshot by "stringing the arched wood and slicing wood into arrows", so this new weapon was able to "shake the world". A myth about Huangdi says that when Huangdi was riding a dragon to ascend to the sky after he completed the self-discipline process to become an immortal, his officials and people grasped the dragon's beard because they did not want him to leave. Their hopes were in vain. The dragon's beard broke and Huangdi's bow fell on the ground. The people who could not ascend to the sky by holding onto the bow, and cried, so the bow invented by Huangdi is called the crying bow, wuhaogong.

       A myth says that there were nine suns in the sky a long time before and the heat was unbearable, until the master archer Hou Yi shot down eight of them. Yang Youji, a master archer in the Warring States Period, could shoot through a willow twig from one hundred steps away and he never missed. When he demonstrated his shooting skill, it could always attract more than one thousand in the audience. One of his colleagues Ji Kang, also a famous archer, challenged him by wrapping seven pieces of armor together then shooting them trough from a distance of fifty steps. Yang aimed his arrow at the rear butt of Ji's arrow that was sticking through the armor and shot. When Yang's arrow pushed Ji's out of the armor, Ji was stunned. Ji paid his greatest tribute to Yang's ability. General Li Guang of the Han Dynasty was famous for his mobility, which won him a reputation as the "Flying General". He was also a well-known master archer. Once on a safari he came across a big stone, which he thought was a hiding tiger. He shot the target immediately; his strength was so great that even the butt of the arrow entered the stone. General Syue Rengui of the Tang Dynasty was the protagonist of another story. Once in a battlefield confronting about ten thousand Turks in the Tianshan Mountains, continuously he shot three times and killed three Turk Generals. The Turks surrendered without hesitating, and this battle won Syue the special reputation as the one who "conquered the Tianshan enemy by three shoots."

       In the huaben short story collection, Singshih Hengyan, by Fong Menglong, there is a story called Jhengjieshih Ligong Shenbigong. 'Jheng' is the family name of the protagonist, Jheng Sin. 'Jieshih' is the abbreviation of the ranking official 'Jiedushih', the Regional Military Commander. 'Shenbigong' is the name of a bow, which was a gift from a goddess. Employing this bow, Jheng had many military achievements and eventually becomes a ranking official. A story in another book of Fong, Gujin Tangai, called ?I>Shenshe,?I> tells of a young man, Wang Lingjhih, who wants to kill his master, Du Jyunmo, after studying archery from Du for three years. Wang thinks that he has learned everything from his master and that after the death of his master, a great master of archery, Wang can be the number one archer. Wang was wrong. Du beat Wang by catching the incoming arrow with his teeth. The protagonist Li Shengnan in the wusia novel, Yunhai Yugong Yuan, by Liang Yusheng uses a heavy bow made of jade.