Most people know that the Chinese invented printing and gunpowder long before the West, but there is much more to Chinese science and technology than that. They also pioneered the use of blast furnaces and mining technology, the use of paper money, casting in bronze, the decimal system, the stirrup (in the 3rd century AD), even playingcards. In maritime navigation they seem to have been the first in the field (or rather, in the sea) with the compass, and they also understood the use of watertight compartments many centuries before European shipbuilders admitted their use. And in spite of the (generally undeserved) reputation of the Chinese as an unwarlike people, they were using poison gas and other methods of scientific killing more than two millennia ago; later they invented the flame-thrower. Their medicine, too, was in many respects in advance of the rest of the world. So that it seems strange that China in more recent centuries grew dangerously contemptuous of science, and of the science of the Western "barbarians" in particular, thereby surrendering her proud position as the Celestial Empire.
By Brian Fallon