The Four Great Inventions of Ancient China

Hello everyone. Thank you for checking out my YouTube channel, The Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. My name is Nick Barksdale, and today on this beautiful Sunday morning, I am excited to announce that I am presenting you with another excellent episode from the China History Podcast. This episode, titled The Four Great Inventions, it really dives into not just the contributions of ancient China to antiquity and the Middle Ages, but really how its inventions completely shaped and formed the modern world as we know it today. The four inventions specifically explored by Laszlo in this episode is gunpowder, the compass, printing, and papermaking. Once he's through exploring those four inventions with you, another thing that I liked is he actually takes some time to actually discuss other inventions and contributions that ancient China has also given us today. One of those, I'm not going to spoil it all, but one of those inventions that I actually had not known is row farming. As always, I am happy to bring you another excellent episode from an excellent podcast presented by an excellent podcaster. Like I said before in some of my earlier videos, if you're not familiar with Laszlo Montgomery jump on there, check out the description below this video. It's going to provide a variety of links where you can show him your full support, give him some stars, give him some shares, give him some excellent reviews, and the support that he so rightfully deserves for his contributions to not just entertaining us, but his historical pursuits in general when it comes to educating us on the subject of China. If you support what this channel is doing, definitely feel free to comment your support, give us a share, give us a like, and honestly, I'm just happy to be here with all of you discussing one of our favorite subjects in general, which is the history of antiquity and the Middle Ages. Thank you all so much and have a wonderful day. Hey everyone, thanks for listening. This is Laszlo Montgomery and welcome to the China History Podcast. Let's get right into it. Originally, the topic for this show was going to be a simple summary of all the scientific achievements in China and all the inventions and discoveries they gave to promote human civilization on this planet. I have this book I bought a long time ago called The Genius of China by Robert Temple. The foreword was written by the very respected China hand and scholar, Dr. Joseph Needham. He's considered hands down the greatest Western scholar of the history of scientific achievement in China. Dr. Needham's magnum opus is called Science and Civilization in China, 27 volumes and still growing, even after his death in 1995. I featured the life of Joseph Needham in a two-part series, CHP Episodes 155 and 156 If you want to hear about this great sinologist's epic story, go check those two out. After investigating this subject and scratching the surface a little, I realized the magnitude of presenting it. Instead, I thought perhaps it would be better to focus on the four great inventions, or Si Da Fa Ming. Then, after I introduce the four great inventions, I'll quickly run through a list of other notable Chinese inventions and discoveries from ancient times that you might find interesting. The term four great inventions, as designated by Dr. Needham, were the discovery of the compass, gunpowder, paper, and printing. Francis Bacon, one of my heroes from history, said of three of the four inventions that quote, they had done more than anything else to completely transform the modern world and mark it off from antiquity in the Middle Ages, end quote. He wrote the following in his work from 1620, Novum Organum, quote, again, we should notice the force, effect, and consequences of inventions which are nowhere more conspicuous than in those three which were unknown to the ancients, namely, printing, gunpowder, and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and state of the whole world, first in literature, then in warfare, and lastly in navigation, and innumerable changes have been thence derived so that no empire, sect, or star appears to have exercised a greater power and influence on human affairs than these three mechanical discoveries, end quote. Lord Bacon died completely unaware in 1626 that all three of these inventions came from China. Karl Marx said of these three same inventions that quote, gunpowder, the compass, and the printing press were the three great inventions which ushered in bourgeois society. Gunpowder blew up the knightly class, the compass discovered the world market and founded the colonies, and the printing press was the instrument of Protestantism and the regeneration of science in general. Both Lord Bacon and Marx mention only three of the four great inventions. They did not include papermaking, I can only assume that while paper was a quantum leap from carving language on tortoise shells, clay tablets, papyrus, and bamboo, it didn't quite rise to the level of the other three. These Si Da Fa Ming, Si means four, Da means great, and invention is Fa Ming, they were and remain a source of great pride amongst all Chinese. These four great inventions are celebrated in China not only for their historical significance but probably most of all as a clear and proven historical record attesting to ancient China's advanced science and technology relative to the West. So let's look at the four great inventions one by one. We'll start with the compass back in the fourth century BCE, this was the time of Alexander the Great in the West. Dr. Needham established that Europe acquired the compass from the Chinese. The compass is mentioned for the first time in the West in the year 1190 by the English scholar Alexander of Neckham. In his De Naturis Rerum he wrote, quote, The sailors, moreover, as they sail over the sea, when in cloudy weather they can no longer profit by the light of the sun, or when the world is wrapped up in darkness of the shades of night, and they are ignorant to what point of the compass their ship's course is directed, they touch the magnet with a needle. This then, whirls round in a circle until when the motion ceases, its point looks direct to the north, end quote. When Alexander of Neckham wrote about this, it was already an established tool of Western navigators but probably not for too long. The Arabs with their strategic location at the crossroads between East and West were not instrumental in passing this invention to the West like they did with papermaking. The compass isn't even mentioned in Arabic writings until 1232. Chinese compasses pointed south. In fact, in Mandarin, compasses were called jernan. Jer means to point and nan means south. They were probably made from lodestone, a type of magnetite that naturally aligns itself with the earth's magnetic field. The earliest compasses used a kind of, well, for lack of a better description, looks like a ladle, in which the handle serves as a needle or pointer that pointed to the south. It's said this ladle-type compass is the oldest known instrument in the world. It didn't look like a compass at all, it wasn't functional at all for navigation, and looking at a photo of one, it's hard to tell whether it's a compass or a bowl of soup. This soup-ladle-looking device, made from lodestone, rested on a square, smooth plate made from bronze. There was a circular, smooth surface upon which the spoon rested on, and the circle represented heaven, and the bronze plate itself was square, which represented the earth. The handle of the spoon always pointed to the south. The ladle is thought to represent the Big Dipper, or Great Bear constellation. The four sides of the bronze plate were inscribed with the four directions. The first mention of actually using a needle, instead of some other less accurate method of pointing out the direction, like these ladles, was around 70 or 80 CE, the Han Dynasty. By the 11th century, compasses were standard fare on the high seas. In the Song Dynasty, the Leonardo da Vinci of his time, Shan Kuo, a great polymath and one of China's most renowned scientists, first described the floating compass in his work The Dream Pool Essays, or Mengxi Bitan, in 1088. This was during the Northern Song Dynasty, and then, as I said, Alexander of Nakum described this again about a century later, in 1187. Beginning with this compass, and then between the 12th and 14th centuries, there will be a number of other discoveries that will grease the wheels to usher in the great age of Western exploration in the 15th and 16th centuries. All right, enough about the compass. Let's look at gunpowder next. There are quite a few scientists that say most likely the chemical composition for gunpowder came from Chinese alchemists looking for an elixir of immortality. Before cryogenics and living a regimented healthy lifestyle became viable options, those who could afford it tried to find shortcuts to eternal life in the form of these elixirs. Now, how's that for irony? A substance that was painstakingly studied and developed for immortality instead turned out to be an ingredient that would end up killing as many people as it did over the next 10 centuries. You don't first hear anything about gunpowder in the West until the 12th century. By this time, the Chinese had already perfected it from its crudest state during the 9th century in the Common Era. Between then and the time the West discovered gunpowder, the Chinese were already using a cannon and a barrel gun. By the 2nd century, there are writings that mention something that was probably gunpowder in describing fireworks. By the 4th century, for sure, the Chinese knew what gunpowder was, but they were still trying to figure out a few apps that could apply this energy. Gunpowder really started to become a force to reckon with in a battle around the end of the Tang Dynasty in the 10th century. The earliest weapons were crude, glorified bottle rockets, and later, rocks that were used as projectiles shot out of hollowed-out bamboo devices. This is before Europeans even knew what it was or that it existed. To make gunpowder, as a terrorist might tell you, you need three ingredients. Most important was saltpeter. Those with a working knowledge of chemistry know it as potassium nitrate. It's the explosive element of gunpowder. The more saltpeter you used, the bigger the bang. The next ingredient is sulfur. What does the sulfur do? It lowers the ignition temperature to 250 degrees Celsius, which facilitates easier combustion, and on combustion, this raises the fusion point of the saltpeter to 335 degrees Celsius. The third ingredient is charcoal. The charcoal and sulfur serve as fuels, and the saltpeter is the oxidizer. These clever ancient Chinese, through trial and error, figured out the formula was fifteen parts saltpeter, three parts charcoal, and two parts sulfur. Boom. The landmark year for gunpowder was 1040 A.D., when it was mentioned in the Wujing Zongyao by Song Dynasty scholar Zeng Guoliang. The Wujing Zongyao was the first book in history to record the formulas for gunpowder as containing saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal, along with various other ingredients. This work, known in English as the Complete Essays for Military Classics, was the go-to source for all things related to military science, including strategy and weaponry. Being a work of military science, the Wujing Zongyao presented various gunpowder-based weapons used during the Song Dynasty, mostly all of the cannonball type. In the 12th and 13th centuries, mostly thanks to the Mongols, the secrets of gunpowder first spread to the Arab countries, then to Greece, then other European countries, and finally all over the world. But it was ultimately from the Chinese first, from whom it was gifted to humankind. Let's touch on printing. It all started with the Babylonians and Sumerians who carved seals. These could be seen as the forerunner of woodblock carving that arose in China around the 7th century CE. Necessity, always being the mother of invention, the Chinese needed to develop ways to mass-produce written material on paper. Stone rubbing was one way. Text would be carved into stone or bronze or some other substrate, and just like they used to do with those old credit card machines before the magnetic stripe became part of our daily life, you formed an impression by the friction created when rubbing the paper surface with some charcoal or some other material. Now a landmark time period might be between 704 and 751 AD. This is considered the earliest time period that produced the earliest printed text in the world. It was a Buddhist charm scroll printed in China that made its way to Korea and was discovered in 1966 and is preserved today in the Pulgaksa Temple in Gyeongju in the southeast of the Korean Peninsula. Just as Bibles later on would drive the book printing business, it was the Buddhists who really drove the early development of printing. They needed a quick and easy way to print their various sacred texts and to propagate these wherever they traveled. The first complete printed book is thought to be the Buddhist Diamond Sutra, the Jingangjing, printed in the year 868 and discovered by Sir Oral Stein in 1907. You can see it preserved in pristine condition at the British Museum. It consists of a scroll, 17 and a half feet long and 10 and a half inches wide, and contains the complete text of a Sanskrit work translated into Chinese. I saw it at a private showing in 2016 when the local Getty Museum ran this exhibit on the treasures of Dunhuang. Among other priceless works, they got the British Museum to loan them the Diamond Sutra. Not only did I get to see it, but because this was an after hours private showing, I got to take it in all by myself. The security guard was telling me that normally people were like shoulder to shoulder in this room and craning their necks and fighting the copaganda at this oldest woodblock printed book in the world, beating the Gutenberg Bible by 587 years, and I hid it all to myself. We know the Diamond Sutra was printed in the year 868 because it is inscribed with the words, quote, on the 15th day of the fourth moon of the ninth year of the Xiantong Emperor, end quote. Today we, of course, have a matrix that shows us for every single era name of every single emperor going back to the first one. There's a corresponding year in our Gregorian calendar. In the ninth century, the Chinese printing industry was booming. There were print runs in the thousands, even hundreds of thousands, even one million copies of a sutra printed in Japan after the Chinese Buddhists introduced the technology there. You even had personalized calendars back then. So we have the Buddhists, I guess, to thank for the early development of printing. However, this significant invention did not make a great impact in China compared to the way Gutenberg's movable type of the 1450s revolutionized the Western world. It's believed this was due to the fact that the individual Chinese characters used were so many, while the English language only needed 26 letters. It was much easier to manipulate the latter on a printing press than the most common 3,000 to 5,000 Chinese characters. Nevertheless, commercial printing in ancient China changed the way people reproduced their printed materials. Printing went from China to Korea first around the year 700. These were the days of block printing. The blocks were made from various woods. By the way, the Chinese were also the first to print in multicolor. Yeah, to prevent counterfeiting, paper money was printed in three colors. That was a pretty high bar back then to leap over. This was in 1107. The real milestone in the world of printing were the years between 1041 and 1048. Let me quote what Shen Kuo said in the Dream Pool Essays. During the reign of Qingli, Bisheng, a man of unofficial position, made movable type. His method was as follows. He took a stick of clay and cut it in characters as thin as the edge of a coin. Each character formed, as it were, a single type. He baked them in fire to make them hard. He had previously prepared an iron plate, and he covered his plate with a mixture of pine resin, wax, and paper ashes. When he wished to print, he took an iron frame and set it on the iron plate. In this, he placed the types set close together. When the frame was full, the whole made one single block of type." End quote. The use of wooden type was perfected 250 years after Bisheng's time. That leaves the fourth of the Sidafaming paper. Now, this was the invention that Lord Bacon left off his list of the three inventions that changed the world. Paper was invented during the second century BCE. A paper sample made from rags was discovered in Gansu province and was dated to 150 BCE. Today's paper was nothing like the paper that came out of China back then. Today's paper that we use comes from basically wood pulp, mostly from Canada, Finland, Chile, or other countries where you have lots of trees. The oldest surviving piece of paper in the world was discovered by archaeologists in 1957 in a tomb near Xi'an, the old capital of Qin Shi Huang, who you might recall from the last episode. It is a 10 centimeter square sheet and can be dated precisely between the years 140 and 87 BCE. This sample and others like it from a similar time were thick, coarse, and uneven in texture. As early as paper is made from pounded and disintegrated hemp fibers, it was hardly satisfactory for writing, but hey, you got to start somewhere. Actually, paper's first uses were not for printing, but for clothing, wrapping, for toilet paper, even the earliest form of what we know today as Kleenex. Paper made from pounded bark of the mulberry tree was used first as clothing from about the 2nd century BCE onwards. We know from writings from the 9th century that this tough, pounded bark paper was also used as military armor. As for the sanitary uses of paper, in 1393, during the early Ming Dynasty, the Bureau of Imperial Supplies manufactured 720,000 sheets of toilet paper, measuring 2 feet by 3 feet each. This supplied the Imperial Court for one year. I'm going out on a limb here, but I'm assuming they didn't need the whole 6 square foot sheet for each use. Also, 15,000 special sheets of toilet paper, 3 inches square, perfumed and especially soft, were prepared for exclusive use of the Imperial family. Boy, as Mel Brooks once said, it was great to be the king. It was a eunuch from the Eastern Han Dynasty, Cai Lun, who invented a more developed art of papermaking using plant fibers, rags, and fishnet as raw materials. The first batch made, which was supervised by Cai Lun himself, was presented to the Han Emperor in 105 AD. It so delighted the emperor that he named the material Marquis Cai's Paper. So Cai Lun is highly regarded in Chinese history as paper's discoverer, but no one knows for sure if he did it by himself, with the collaboration of others, or not at all. The technique of papermaking was exported to Korea in about 384 AD. The Koreans always seemed to be the first ones to get these latest innovations from China. A Korean monk then took this skill with him to Japan in 610 AD. Then later on, during a war between the Tang Dynasty and the Arab Empire, the Arabs captured some Tang Dynasty soldiers and papermakers at the Battle of Samarkand in 712. This led to a paper factory being set up by the Arabs, and they jealously guarded their papermaking secret from the Europeans. All the European traders of that age could do was buy the finished paper from the Arabs. Around the end of the 8th century, though, paper slowly began to make its way to Europe. The first manufacturer of paper in the West dates from the 12th century, and it wasn't until the 13th century that an Italian paper industry was in operation. This is a good 1,500 years after its invention in China. So those, my friends, were the Si Da Fa Ming, the Four Great Inventions, as first mentioned by the great polymath, sinologist, and one of the great eccentrics of his time, Dr. Joseph Needham. Now, for the rest of the episode, I'll just comb through Robert Temple's book and pick out some of the more interesting inventions brought to us by the Chinese. First is lacquer. It didn't make it to the Big Four, but it was a great invention all the same. The Chinese were using lacquer by the 13th century BCE, and this material is the oldest invention named in Robert Temple's book. Dr. Needham called lacquer, quote, the most ancient industrial plastic known to man. It has been continually in use by mankind around the world for 3,000 years, and it all began in China. The Chinese also brought us the agricultural innovation of row cultivation and intensive hoeing. Even a novice gardener knows that growing crops in rows and taking care to weed them all the time and keeping the garden organized is a good thing. But European farmers weren't practicing this idea till the 18th century when English agricultural pioneer Jethro Tull preached about the benefits of weeding and turning the soil constantly. This was more than 200 years before Aqualung came out. The Chinese farmers were already doing this at least by the 6th century BCE, 2,200 years before the West caught on to what is today such an obvious necessity. The Scandinavians used cast iron as early as the 800s, and it was not widely available in Europe prior to 1380. But China had been using cast iron since the 4th century BCE, and the Chinese were the first to produce steel from cast iron about 200 years later in the 2nd century BCE. The Bessemer steel process, patented in 1856, ultimately is the Chinese to thank. The first suspension bridge, a flat roadway suspended from cables, was invented in China in the 1st century AD. Believe it or not, the wheelbarrow did not exist in Europe until the 11th or 12th century, but it was a well-known tool in China as early as the 1st century BCE. The oldest surviving picture of a wheelbarrow dates from about the year 100. The Chinese are also credited with the fishing reel in the 3rd century. No representation of the fishing reel can be found in the West before 1651. The Chinese were also the inventors of the stirrup, another practical device that had been unknown to all the great armies going back to the ancient Greeks, the Persians, Romans, Assyrians, Egyptians. No stirrups. Back in the day, you held on to the horse's mane to support yourself. The Chinese got smart in the 3rd or 4th century of the Common Era, probably observing this useful invention first from the nomads of the steppes. In any case, stirrups didn't catch on in the West until the Middle Ages, and now anyone who has ever galloped on horseback might wonder how mounted soldiers put up with not having them for as long as they did. Porcelain, of course, what we also refer to as china with a small c, originated in China anywhere between the 1st and 3rd century. The Song Dynasty from 960 to 1279 saw what many call the apex of China's porcelain making. The Chinese had that kaolinite, or gaoling clay, that was perfect for making porcelain. It would take until 1709 before Johann Friedrich Boettger became the first in the West to discover how to make porcelain like the Chinese did. The umbrella came from China around the end of the 4th century. In the year 577, China brought us matches. We all know China gave us paper money around the 9th century, and I mentioned that one already. The decimal system was in use as early as the 14th century BCE during the Shang period in China. Credit is also given to Hindu mathematicians in the early centuries of the Common Era for their contribution to decimals and their application in everyday life. After paper was invented, people first flew kites in China in the 4th and 5th century BCE. It isn't even mentioned in Europe until 1589 by the scientist, polymath, and universal man Jean-Baptiste de la Porte in Natural Magic, where he talked about a flying sail. The idea of a parachute first came to Leonardo da Vinci, and he left drawings of them in his sketchbooks. From the great China historian Sima Qian, we know parachutes went back as far as the 2nd century BCE. In the 1st century, China brought us the rudder. The Chinese invented, developed, and perfected tuned bells long before anyone else. This was in the 6th century BCE. The crossbow came from China. It was invented around the 4th century BCE and served as the weapon of choice for the Chinese for 2,000 years. About 8 or 10 years ago, I'm not sure, in Qinghai province next door to Gansu, all the way out in the wilds of western China. It was discovered that noodles came from China after a 4,000-year-old archaeological site was discovered there. The earliest silk is dated to 3630 BCE, and tea, add that one to the list as well. Legend has it that the mythical god Shennong, the divine farmer, the god of agriculture, and a whole lot more, discovered tea in 2737 BCE. The secrets of silk, tea, and porcelain were kept under wraps by the Chinese for thousands of years and were among the icons that define them in the eyes of the inhabitants of this world. Well, I can go on and on. The list keeps going. But the ones I mentioned are what I thought might be of most interest to you. You could read the massive work written by Dr. Joseph Needham if you just can't get enough. As I said, there's 27 volumes. Or may I suggest you can go listen to my two-part series on Needham's life. He was quite a character. The four great inventions are definitely a 24-carat badge that Chinese wear proudly and guarantees them lifetime membership among the greatest ancient civilizations on planet Earth. So, that's about it. Just a little introduction to the genius of China, as Robert Temple called his book about the 3,000-year history of science, technology, and invention in China. May I seize the day to introduce you to two other podcast programs presented by your humble narrator. One is the Chinese Sayings Podcast, which features a short, simple Chinese saying in each episode and then gives you the historic backstory about how the saying came about. You don't have to be a Chinese speaker to enjoy these short, entertaining eight- to ten-minute episodes. Most all of these sayings are four syllables long, and I'll teach you how to say them. There are real hoots to use on your friends or at the office. The other program is called the China Vintage Hour. These are readings from antiquarian books written by Westerners who went to China during the 17 and 1800s and wrote about all the things they saw. Many of these passages are fascinating and offer us eyewitness accounts of China during the Qing Dynasty. Both the Chinese Sayings Podcast and China Vintage Hour are part of Teacup Media, teacup.media. We're going to bring you programs that offer you the greatest hits of Chinese culture. Thanks a million for listening, everyone. This is Laszlo Montgomery wishing you a fond and friendly farewell from the wilds of Los Angeles, California. Join us anytime here at the China History Podcast, where we have more than 100 hours of entertaining and informative podcast episodes from 50 centuries of Chinese history. You don't have to listen in order, and you can skip the ones that don't interest you. Just dive in and check it out. Take care, everyone. See you next time.