 There were many advances and new designs in gunpowder weapons during the beginning of the dynasty , but by the mid to late Ming the Chinese began to frequently employ European @-@ style artillery and firearms . The Huolongjing , compiled by Jiao Yu and Liu Bowen sometime before the latter 's death on 16 May 1375 ( with a preface added by Jiao in 1412 ) , featured many types of cutting @-@ edge gunpowder weaponry for the time . This includes hollow , gunpowder @-@ filled exploding cannonballs , land mines that used a complex trigger mechanism of falling weights , pins , and a steel wheellock to ignite the train of fuses , naval mines , fin @-@ mounted winged rockets for aerodynamic control , multistage rockets propelled by booster rockets before igniting a swarm of smaller rockets issuing forth from the end of the missile ( shaped like a dragon 's head ) , and hand cannons that had up to ten barrels . 
