Amiram Hayardeny's My China Experience

China - Gaps Bridged

I will have to ask my Chinese colleagues and friends to skip the following entry.  They, obviously, know the facts.  As I wrote here many times before, China is a country in transition.  When you walk the streets in Beijing, and then visit the Forbidden City and the Great Wall, you may find it difficult to bridge the gap between the two: current and Old Glory.  The fact is that China has a glorious history.  History of great accomplishments, innovation and inventions reaching far back.  In fact, many inventions and discoveries that are so proudly presented by the West as original, have been invented and discovered centuries earlier by Chinese scientists and inventors.

Why did I suddenly choose to write about it?  There are two reasons.  The Chinese New Year celebration is done with a lot of fireworks.  Fireworks is a great Chinese invention.  I was watching a Discovery Channel special about fireworks, and I was fascinated.  The Chinese had invented the first self propelled rocket almost a full millennium before it was invented in the West.  I saw a model of multiple arrowheads with a programmed delay, which was used at wars almost a thousand years ago!

But that was only one reason.  The other reason was that my two teenage daughters and my nephew were visiting here in Beijing for the Spring Festival - the Chinese New Year celebration.  We went to many places and I had to explain and bridge the gap for them, between what they are seeing today and the glorious past.

So here is a partial list of Chinese inventions that I was able to find in a short time. 

Emperor Wu Di financed a research done by alchemists on the subject of eternal life.  The research yielded the substance now called gun powder.  But its advantages as a weapon were not discovered until the 8th century.

The first seismoscope was invented in China in roughly 132 A.D. The instrument was said to resemble a large jar with 8 dragons in a circle, each depicting a direction on a compass.  Each of the dragons was holding a ball in its mouth.  When an earthquake occurred, the dragon closest to the direction where the earthquake occurred, would drop the ball.  It is said that the instrument predicted many earthquakes, and that the ruler was able to send help to the affected provinces on a timely manner.  One time, a ball was dropped from one of the dragons' mouths, but no earthquake was felt.  It was days after that when messengers arrived and told about a major earthquake in a remote province.  It was then that everyone understood how sensitive the instrument was.

During the Qin dynasty (221-206 B.C.), Chinese fortune tellers were using lodestone (a mineral known to align itself in a north-south direction).  Eventually some noticed this alignment quality of lodestone and invented the compass!

The list goes on and on: paper, printing (yes, printing was invented in China in the 7th century A.D., the Gutenberg print was invented many centuries after that in 1445), the modern sail structure, silk production process, porcelain (after which China is named), the ship's rudder, the crossbow, guns, kites, and many more inventions adopted (or reinvented) by the West centuries later.  http://inventors.about.com/od/chineseinventors/Chinese_Inventions.htm

Walking the streets of Beijing today, I often find myself looking for explanations.  A wise man once told me that a good measure for a country's development is the percentage of people who are working in agriculture.  The larger the population working in agriculture with relation to the entire population of the country - the less advanced it is.  As an example, the USA and Canada have between 20%-40% rural population.  China has 60%-80% (source: http://www.fao.org/es/ess/chartroom/gfap.asp#).  From what I gather, in the past, the ratio in China was much lower, giving way to science and culture.  Consecutive famines and wars caused large parts of the population to turn to agriculture for survival.  It is obvious that in today's China, there are less people working on the food supply of the rest.  It is also obvious that science and culture are picking up again.

Again, I find similarities between the Jewish people and the Chinese people.  Jews were expelled from their country about two thousand years ago.  They were spread around the world, and when they came back to the homeland and established their state, seventy years ago, a very significant gap had to be bridged.  Walking the streets of Jerusalem today, you quickly realize that an explanation is necessary to bridge between the era of the kingdoms of King David and King Solomon, to the current one.

So here is my lesson: when you see something that is not self explanatory - look for explanations.  You will find that while the gaps are interesting, the explanations are even more interesting.  There is always more than meets the eye!

For more about inventions and discoveries made in China and the time in which the corresponding invention was made in the western world, see: http://www.computersmiths.com/chineseinvention/index.html
 

Posted at 03:39PM Feb 26, 2007 by Amiram Hayardeny in Personal  |  Comments[2]