Ferdinand Verbiest
Qing armies in the eighteenth century may not have been as well-armed as their European counterparts, but under pressure from the imperial throne they proved capable of innovation and efficiency, sometimes in difficult circumstances. The Qing were consistently very keen on adopting Western military technology. In the Second Jinchuan War, for instance, the Qianlong emperor despatched the Jesuit Felix da Rocha, the director of the Bureau of Astronomy, to the front to cast heavy field cannon that could not be transported to the deep mountains in which the Jinchuan tribes lived. The Qing army produced new cannons based on the designs supplied by the Jesuit Missionaries Ferdinand Verbiest in the 1670s and Felix da Rocha in the 1770s. These cannon designs continued being reproduced in China until the First Opium War.