Having grown up in the US I really feel I only learned US and to a lesser degree european history. Its interesting to learn that some discoveries and inventions that were hailed as groundbreaking in europe had been discovered in China long before Europe had them.
Examples would be:
treatments for scurvy - The Chinese were using ginger to treat and prevent scurvy around the 2nd century CE, while Europe didn’t begin to have this knowledge until nearly the 16th century.
Movable type printing press - I think the Chinese invented this 2 centuries before Europe.
Compasses - invented in China centuries before Europe had them.
Gunpowder
I know China had the 4 great inventions, which I’ve pretty much already covered (if you count printing and paper as one invention). Did China discover other things long before Europe?
The earliest description of the Camera Obscura comes from China, with two different possible sources dating to just before and just after about 500 BCE. I strongly suspect that knowledge of the effect has been present around the world going way back (and has been poorly documented), but it’s also true that Chinese description of the effect significantly predate Western writings.
Not just gunpowder. The Chinese also invented the rocket (which used gunpowder as a propellant, but is not an identical discovery or invention) and pyrotechnics (again, not the same – there’s technique and engineering in using gunpowder to create firecrackers or fireworks)
The Chinese were drilling down hundreds of feet for oil, brine, and natural gas hundreds of years BCE using bamboo pipes (also using it to transport the material).
Noodles maybe. While cooking dough by boiling may have been done all around the world,
the noodle or pasta is where the dough is first dried and it takes a permanent shape, which it retains during boiling. So noodles are a type of pasta and the oldest pasta was found to be 4000 years old, in China , Lajia near the yellow river.
Pasta was probably independently invented in the mediterranean area probably, but possibly the idea had come from overland in small steps over time from the east… well before Marco Polo
They were using primitive hygrometers since sometime in the Shang Dynasty (1600 BC - 1045 BC). It was a staff with a lump of charcoal at one end and a lump of dirt at the other. The weights of each end were taken, they were exposed to the air, then weighed again, giving a rough estimate of the relative humidity. Or something like that.
This wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Chinese ferric metalurgy was based on cast iron rather than wrought iron as in the West. Cast iron has the advantage in being able to immediately put it into the desired shape. It’s also much easier to remove the slag.
But it has disadvantages too. Brittleness is the big one. For some things, like pots and pans, the brittleness is unimportant. But for things like swords and knives, it’s critical. You don’t want your sword breaking in the middle of battle.
Another disadvantage is that cast iron requires much hotter temperature than wrought iron. That requires more fuel and more work† by the guys operating the bellows‡. And they added phosphorus, which reduced the temperature needed. Still more than what’s required for wrought iron and the phosphorus makes the resulting cast iron even more brittle.
At any rate, European swords and knives were superior. Chinese weapons had a steel outer layer around a brittle cast iron core, while European weapons had a steel outer layer around a more resilient wrought iron core.
† That additional bellows work is probably more than balanced by all the work to hammer the wrought iron into the desired shape. Especially since the hammerer had to be a trained smith and bellows workers just had to have a lot of endurance.
It led to lots of cast iron domestic goods. I’d say it was a good thing.
The Chinese were able to create malleable decarburized iron from cast iron very early on, and they used it in their swords, as well as some bloomery iron(Cite). They also used folding techniques in these swords. I’m not convinced they were necessarily inferior products.
Outside of China, it’s probably also worth including India and the Arabic Golden Age - both often overlooked in American histories.
It’s also often glossed over that nearly everything invented in Europe was invented in Scotland. Almost any technology that you can think of that’s non-electronic was invented in the 19th or late 18th century, in Scotland.
Not exactly a discovery, but they had far better astronomical records than Europeans. There are no European records at all of the Supernova of 1054, bright enough to be easily visible during the daytime, but the Chinese did record it.
Can you please provide a cite for this ? From what I have heard, Wootz steel (Damascus steel) Wootz steel - Wikipedia originated in India, and was the best steel for swords and knives.
Also the Iron pillar of Delhi, made circa 400 AD is forge welded wrought iron.Iron pillar of Delhi - Wikipedia. It still stands today, unrusted.
If you ever go to Taiwan, absolutely visit the National Palance Museum. They have a historic timeline up comparing “discoveries”. The place is amazing, but the timeline is just a tad slanted and does not take into account parallel discoveries (ex. noodles). And totally ignores the invention from the application (ex. gun powder)
Qianli chuan or “thousand league boats” were human-powered paddle-wheelers that could travel hundreds of kilometers per day, invented possibly as early as the 5th century. They may not have been steam-powered, but they were pretty cool.
Five of the “thousand league boats” fought and lost a naval battle against British steamboats during the Opium Wars. By that time, the British had not only steam power, but superior armaments.