Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
world's first true guns appeared in China during the Song-Yuan tran-
sition. Gun technology then quickly spread from China and reached
Europe by 1320.
China was the first civilization to print books, although printing
itself was not invented in China. (The use of carved seals to stamp
names on various surfaces goes back to the ancient Mesopotamian
civilization of Sumeria, which far outdates Chinese civilization.) The
Chinese did invent and perfect woodblock printing, or the art of carv-
ing obverse images and hundreds of words onto fruitwood blocks,
which were then inked and applied to paper. The first complete printed
topic in world history was probably a Buddhist work, the Diamond
Sutra, in Tang China in 868. By early Song times entire collections of
writings were printed and circulated among friends. A 130-volume set
of the Confucian classics was published in Song China in 953 and sold
to the public. Korea was the first country to which Chinese woodblock
printing spread, and from Korea it probably was transmitted to Japan.
It is almost universally believed in the West that Johann Gutenberg
was the first in the world to invent movable type printing in 1458.
(Some Koreans have also argued that movable print type was first
invented in Korea.) Recent studies in Chinese technological history
have shown that movable type was actually another Chinese first.
Song scholar Shen Gua records the first use of a complete set of mov-
able printing type in China during the 1040s. Even so, movable type
technology did not find immediate and extensive use in China because
of its impracticability. Thousands of individual characters were used
in ordinary Chinese writing, and the meticulous process of arranging
individual character types was often more difficult than simply carv-
ing up entire page blocks from scratch. Movable type was more practi-
cally applicable to alphabetic languages, and its first revolutionary
effects were undeniably felt in the West.
Other lesser-known inventions of the Chinese are somewhat
surprising. The world's first mechanical clock was invented in Tang
China during the eighth century. By the eleventh century, the ingen-
ious Chinese inventor Su Song had perfected a mechanical clock that
ran in good time from 1092 until Kaifeng, the Northern Song capital,
was overrun by the Jurchens in 1126. Descriptions of his and other
Chinese mechanical clocks eventually made their way to Europe,
where a working mechanical clock was first constructed in the early
fourteenth century.
The Chinese also understood the principles of what Europeans call
Mercator map projections, or the flat maps of the world that typically
show Greenland to be much larger than it really is in relation to North
