I Have This Old Gun: Chinese Broomhandle Mausers

One of the world's first successful semi-automatic handguns, the C96 "Broomhandle" Mauser pistol is often associated with Germany and other Western users, but huge numbers of Broomhandle Mausers were bought by the Chinese during the country's Warlord period. The gun was in such demand, in fact, that many copies of the C96 were made domestically by the Chinese. Watch our "American Rifleman Television" I Have This Old Gun segment above to see the details of these Chinese Broomhandle Mausers.

 "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."

Large numbers of Chinese-made Broomhandle pistols came from notable manufacturers like the Taku Naval Dockyard or the Shanxi Arsenal, which notably produced versions of the gun chambered for .45 ACP. However, many other smaller producers also manufactured copies of the Mauser, and quality varies significantly between these guns.

 "The thing about a Broomhandle is, yes, it's an ungainly pistol, but you put a shoulder stock on it that also happens to be your holster, and it is a magnificent gun out to about 100, 150 yards, depending on what the chambering is, which is typically .30 Mauser, which is, you know, a hot, flat-shooting pistol round," NRA Media Editorial Director Mark Keefe said. "But you get that stability from having the shoulder stock on it. You can tear stuff up out to at least 100 yards."

Due to the wide variation of guns out there, as well as the unique history of the Chinese Broomhandle and the subsequent rarity of certain models following the communist takeover in 1949, there has been particular collector interest in these guns. Prices of certain Chinese Broomhandle guns have encouraged a fairly robust market of counterfeits, particularly of the .45 ACP-chambered examples, which are exceedingly rare. An example sold by Rock Island Auction in December 2021 had an estimate of between $6,500 to nearly $10,000.

"Out of all the million plus guns that were produced over a period of decades, the Chinese government literally is the only one that ever adopted the gun as a service standard for its military," NRA Museums Director Philip Schreier said. "It was always substitute standard for everybody else that used it throughout the world in its, you know, almost 70-year practical history."

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