While some historians still contend that the guandao was simply an uncommon weapon prior to the Tang dynasty and was thus not illustrated before then, historical evidence leans towards the attribution being an instance of creative license. By the time of Qing Dynasty the guandao, for the most part, was not actually intended for field use, but was instead used as a tool to test the strength of those who wished to become military officers: weapons of various weights were made, the test composed simply of performing various required maneuvers using such weapons. During the Qing dynasty some extraordinarily heavy versions of guandao were made for this purpose: a candidate had to be able to wield a weapon weighing 80, 100, or 120 jin (48, 60 or 72 kg, using the modern value for 1 jin = approximately .6 kg), with weapons of each weight being successively higher grades in the exam, the passage of which led to appointment as military officers of various ranks based on the grade. The heaviest known "testing guandao", which resides in a museum at Shanhaiguan, weighs 83 kilograms. While the examples are taken from the Qing dynasty and therefore may have been influenced by the book (which was written in the Ming dynasty), military officer tests (which began in the Tang dynasty) have always involved lifting heavy stones of standardized weight and maneuvering them about, possibly contributing to the writer's decision to assign an unusual weight to Guan Yu's weapon.