Human Bones Add “Spirit” to Taiwanese Swords

Kuo Chang-hsi’s earliest attempts at swordmaking where met with failure, and he’s not afraid to tell you why: He forgot to “throw a man into the furnace.”

While Kuo doesn’t mean that in a precisely literal sense, it’s not a mere figure of speech, either. As Taiwan’s last known practitioner of the traditional art of Chinese swordmaking, he employs the ancient technique of adding human bones to the fire in which he forges his swords.