Some things the Chinese invented or discovered:
- -7000s: rice, millet
- -6000s: rice paddy, alcoholic drink
- -5000s:
- -4000s: lacquer
- -3000s: silk, nail polish
- -2000s: tea, ink, umbrella, noodles, soybeans
- -1000s: Chinese characters, pontoon bridge, inoculation, kite, chopsticks
- -1000
- -900s: go (board game)
- -800s:
- -700s:
- -600s:
- -500s: crossbow
- -400s: compass, blast furnace, cast iron
- -300s: mouldboard plough, stirrup (possibly from nomads)
- -200s: hot air balloon
- -100s: paper, wrapping paper, acupuncture, tofu
- -000s:
- +1
- 000s:
- 100s: seismometer
- 200s: wheelbarrow, negative numbers, stir frying, junk (ship)
- 300s: oil well
- 400s:
- 500s: horse collar, toilet paper, civil service exam, pill?
- 600s: china (porcelain)
- 700s: mechanical clock (escapement)
- 800s: gunpowder, printed book, paper money, playing cards
- 900s: canal lock
- 1000
- 1000s: movable type, clock tower, chain drive
- 1100s: cannon, fireworks
- 1200s: bomb (iron), rocket, land mine, dominoes, restaurant menu
- 1300s: gun (musket), water-powered spinning machines
- 1400s: toothbrush
- 1500s:
- 1600s:
- 1700s:
- 1800s: mahjong
- 1900s: barefoot doctor
- 2000
- 2000s: electronic cigarette, hoverboard
And that is just according to Western sources!
Compare that to when words for some of these entered English:
- 1000s:
- 1100s:
- 1200s: rice
- 1300s: gun, silk, wheelbarrow
- 1400s: compass, crossbow, horse collar, pill, (playing) card, millet
- 1500s: tea, cannon, bomb, fireworks, lacquer, china
- 1600s: rocket, toothbrush, kite, umbrella, chopsticks, blast furnace, cast iron, acupuncture, junk (ship)
- 1700s: paper money, wrapping (paper), negative number, soybean, noodle, inoculation
- 1800s: toilet paper, civil service examination, nail polish, menu, domino, tofu
- 1900s: stir fry
- 2000s: electronic cigarette
Shakespeare knew less than half of these – even though all but electronic cigarettes had already been invented in China.
In the 1200s China was so amazing that many in the West did not believe Marco Polo’s account.
In 1368 the Ming dynasty came to power, overthrowing Mongol rule. While it was understandably xenophobic, it took it too far and shut off China from the outside world: it cut off the Silk Road, it destroyed the shipyards that built ocean-going ships, it turned its back on machines.
The West, meanwhile, was doing the opposite, just as the Four Great Inventions – paper, printing, gunpowder and the compass – were arriving from China.
By the 1800s China had fallen so far behind that Britain could force it to buy opium at gunpoint – the Opium Wars. China had become a weak giant that foreign powers could walk all over. It did not regain its independence and pride till the late 1900s with the rise of Mao.
Remarks:
- rice – feeds twice as many people for a given amount of land than wheat. The West could not match it on a large scale till it got maize from Native Americans after 1492.
- tea – seen as medicine till the 200s. Safer than water, it helped to make big cities possible.
- compass – used for geomancy by the Chinese, for guiding ships by Arabs and Persians (by 1100).
- mouldboard plough – cuts through the roots of weeds, turns up the soil and requires only one ox. Not common in the West till the 1600s.
- stirrup – makes fighting from horseback much easier.
- stir frying – brought to the West by Chinese Americans.
– Abagond, 2016.
Sources: mainly “1001 Invnetions That Changed the World” (2009) by Jack Challoner; “The Ancient Engineers” (1963) by L. Sprague de Camp; “Guns, Germs and Steel” (2005) by Jared Diamond; Wikipedia (2016); Etymology Online (2016).
See also:
- Welcome to Asian American Heritage Month 2016
- The last 6,000 years
- China
- The White Inventor argument
- Aryanism
- technocentric history
555
A vastly improved post over the prior one. See what happens when you avoid using single sources?
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@ Abagond
You have “rocket” listed under both 900s and 1200s.
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@ Solitaire
Thanks. It belongs under the 1200s.
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Did not know China invented rice when cultivation of rice in the Americas came from West Africa by enslaved Black people
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Rice comes in two main varieties: Oryza sativa (Asian rice) or Oryza glaberrima (African rice). The Asian version is the older of the two, 8,200–13,500 years whereas the African version is 3,500 years old and less widespread. It is being displaced by the Asian version, which is less hardy, even in the Senegambia region! Capitalism gone mad?
“Rice is not native to the Americas but was introduced to Latin America and the Caribbean by European colonizers at an early date. Spanish colonizers introduced Asian rice to Mexico in the 1520s at Veracruz; and the Portuguese and their African slaves introduced it at about the same time to colonial Brazil.[65] Recent scholarship suggests that enslaved Africans played an active role in the establishment of rice in the New World and that African rice was an important crop from an early period.[66] Varieties of rice and bean dishes that were a staple dish along the peoples of West Africa remained a staple among their descendants subjected to slavery in the Spanish New World colonies, Brazil and elsewhere in the Americas…In 1694, rice arrived in South Carolina, probably originating from Madagascar.[65]
In the United States, colonial South Carolina and Georgia grew and amassed great wealth from the slave labor obtained from the Senegambia area of West Africa and from coastal Sierra Leone. At the port of Charleston, through which 40% of all American slave imports passed, slaves from this region of Africa brought the highest prices due to their prior knowledge of rice culture, which was put to use on the many rice plantations around Georgetown, Charleston, and Savannah.
From the enslaved Africans, plantation owners learned how to dyke the marshes and periodically flood the fields. At first the rice was laboriously milled by hand using large mortars and pestles made of wood, then winnowed in sweetgrass baskets (the making of which was another skill brought by slaves from Africa). The invention of the rice mill increased profitability of the crop, and the addition of water power for the mills in 1787 by millwright Jonathan Lucas was another step forward.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice
http://www.pnas.org/content/99/25/16360.full.
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The Chinese did not “invent” gunpowder, and you cannot “invent” a substance, you discover it! And no the Chinese were not the first to discover it! There are Ancient Indian and even African records of the use of the gun powder substance, there has been potassium nitrite residue found in Crusades battle sites. Many of the so called inventions attributed to the Chinese weren’t actually invented by them, or they were independently invented later on by other peoples , as is the case of the rocket and the discovery of gun powder. Modern rockets are mostly based on the Iron rockets used by Indians like Tipu Sultan, since they are metallic then early Chinese rockets.
Also the modern compass is not really based on the Ancient Chinese compass, the Ancient Chinese compass was basically a metallic spoon, that spun on a table top, and it was absolutely terrible in it’s performance. Many so called Chinese “guns” were also extremely terrible, and had to be improved upon by other peoples. Many independent peoples and cultures independently invented paper, and or substituted with materials that compensated for it in another way utilizing it for the same purpose. China has to got to be the most overrated civilization in history, it was never a “dominant power”, as ignorant people like to believe and they were pretty late to stuff like actual written scripts and literacy, and iron smelting compared to other ancient civilizations.
This ignorance about world history and China, and how much of an overrated civilization it was, never ceases to baffle me!
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@gro jo
Like.
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Dang, I got Wiki icky thrown at me. But, this is my source that dates after the 2002 article.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2007/11/american-rice-out-africa
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Dang, you also got pnas’ed which is even more authoritative than sciencemag.org, since it is the mouthpiece of the US Academy of science. Black Rice, the book that’s the source for the article you link to deals with the contribution of Africans to the enrichment of the USA. When some white supremacist starts talking sh*t about what Blacks contributed to the modern world, they should be reminded of this, Jan Matzeliger’s shoe last machine that helped cheapen shoes to the point that their grandparents could afford them, and Edmond Albius’ technique for pollinating vanilla outside of Mexico. Lest’s not forget the fact that four 19th and 20thcentury literary geniuses (Pushkin, the Dumas’, Colette, Machado de Assis, etc.) were of African descent.
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@gro jo
I feel you on this one… I remember some co-workers 16 yrs back at the mail handling station were not in good shape. Some Ghana boys and I noticed that they were eating the simple less hardy Jasmin rice in excess. Even back then I was going for ‘Wild Rice’ though I did eat alot of simple enriched grain foods and to this day my health line is up and down. I suggest trying to eating any time of grain to a minimal if you already kind of chunky or have other ‘inflammatory’ conditions.
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@ gro jo
Excellent comment. Thank you.
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You are welcome sir.
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Reblogged this on IBHE Collaborative University.
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