Chinese science and technology
8 min readThe history of Chinese science and technology is a major part of Chinese civilization, as well as the historical process through which the nation familiarizes itself with nature, makes use of it while developing a civilization in harmony with it, and thus contributes greatly to mankind’s civilization and development.
The earliest major technical inventions of the Chinese nation known to us so far date back to over two milion years ago when Chinese ancestors started to make stone wares. The stone wares, which were unearthed from the Renzi Cave of Fanchang county, Anhui province, date back to 2.4-2 million years ago, as the earliest relics of mankind found sofar across the country and in Asia, as well as one ofthe earliest stone ware sites around the world. Then, 500,000 years ago our ancestors created one more technical invention-the use of fire. The vestiges of used fire from the Peking Man site at Zhoukoudian ofBeijing were once identified as the earliest sign of man’s use of fire. In the hundreds of thousand years that followed, the early ancestors of the Chinese nation mainly utilized two major technical inventions, stoneware making and fire use, lived on hunted animals and gathered plant fruits in the natural environment, gradually evolving into Homo erectus and then Homo sapiens.
As a key invention, use of fire spurred appearance of technologies such as pottery and agriculture.
Around 10,000 years ago, the early Chinese ancestors entered the agricultural society stage and became one of the agricultural origins of the world, along with West Asia and South America. After that, our early ancestors turned out five additional technological inventions including farming and herding, building, tex-tile, ship-making, and smelting, which laid a technical foundation for agricultural civilizations. Around 6,000 years ago the drainage basins along the Yellow and Yangtze rivers in China, the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers in West Asia, the Nile river in North Africa, the Ganges and the Indus rivers in South Asia spawned four major civilizations which together grew independently into the cradle lands for the four major civilizations of the world. China’s entry into civilized stage proper was marked by the appearance of cities, the shaping of the written form of Chinese language as well as the output of bronze wares.
When China evolved into the early ancient times of iron-implement applied cultivation and the cattle-pulled plow (the Spring and Autumn & Warring States period and then Qin and Western Han dynasties), the Chinese ancient science and technology enjoyed fundamental and great development forming certain paradigms for later generations. The same period witnessed the foundation of Chinese traditional technologies and the shaping of mutli-disciplinary paradigms in celestial study, arithmetics, geoscience (geography), agriculture, medicine, building, smelting and silk, etc. By this time, Chinese traditional science and technology had already reached a fairly high level with some of the achievements can not even be explained entirely till today.
In the late Western Han dynasty, Emperor Wudi adopted then chief minister and scholar Dong Zhong-shu’s proposal to”pay supreme tribute to Confucianism while banning all other schools of thought”and thus established the exclusively high status of Confucianism as the official ideology of the Chinese imperial state. From then on, except for the Taoism and the Yin-Yang School, most or all of the other ideological schools were rejected. In addition, Dong Zhongshu made Confucianism a religion from a complete set of the world views of theology, and also established his systematic,”heaven-dominated”theory of “instinctive connection between heaven and man'”on the basis of the ideology of “heaven-man unity”prior to Qin dynasty, which severely restrained the development of Chinese ancient science and technology. These obstacles were not obviously manifested during the rising stage of feudalism in the mid-ancient times but became fully exposed in the late ancient times.
The mid-ancient times, from Eastern Han to Song and Yuan dynasties (from the 1st to the mid-14th century) was a prime period for development of Chinese ancient science and technology.
During the period there appeared at least two developmental peaks-one is the period from Eastern Han to Southern and Northern dynasties and the other is Song and Yuan dynasties. In particular, during Song and Yuan dynasties the ancient Chinese science andtechnology enjoyed their greatest development. As a result, the traditional mathematics, astronomy and calendar making, medicine, agriculture, building, smelting, pottery and porcelain and other fields all reached unprecedented levels. In mathematics brilliant achievements were made by the four mathematic masters of Song and Yuan dynasties(Qin Jiushao, Li Zhi, Yang Hui, and Zhu Shijie), who took the lead several hundred years than any elsewhere in the world inthe aspects of equation or equation set of higher de-gree, sum of higher arithmetic progression, solution of simultaneous equation of linear congruencies, the Tianyuan system of algebra for polynomial equations, and the system of quaternion equations. In agriculture there were also four masters (Chen Fu, Meng Qi, Wang Zhen, and Lu Mingshan) who represented the highest agricultural technology in China and around the world. In medicine the four masters of Jin and Yuan dynasties (Liu Wansu, Zhang Congzheng, LiGao, and Zhu Zhenheng) represented four medicinal schools of the two dynasties each respectively summing up a set of medicinal theories to enrich the traditional medicine on the basis of their own updated clinical experience. In technology three out of the fourmajor inventions of ancient China (gunpowder, printing and the compass) were already applied widely during Song and Yuan dynasties, and had reached an advanced stage. During the same period, porcelain, building, smelting, silk production, etc, had already reached a renowned level in Chinese history. In addition to the several groups of four masters of that period there were many other renowned technological specialists including Bi Sheng, Su Song, Li Xie, Yan Su, Wang Weiyi, Hua Shou, Huang Daopo, Guo Shoujing, Zhu Siben, Yelu Chucai, and the greatest scientist in Chinese ancient history of science and technology, Shen Kuo.
The late ancient time was the prime period of Chinese traditional science and technology. Science and technology went on developing, particularly in the late Ming dynasty with the occurrence of a hard-won climax, when scientists and scholars best known in China and the world wrote their masterpieces including Compendium of Materia Meadica by Li Shizhen, Complete Encyclopedia of Agriculture Administration by Xu Guangqi, Xu Xiake’s Travelogue by Xu Xiake, and Exploitation of the Works of Nature by Song Yingxing. However, the wars in the late Ming dynasty and the policies of the rulers of Qing dynasty hinderedopportunities for Chinese traditional science and technology to develop further in the modern times. Almost in the same period, through the scientific revolution in Europe following the Renaissance, there appeared a group of scientists there including the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus who formulated the heliocentric cosmology, the Belgian anatomist and physician Andreas Vesalius who established the modern science of human anatomy, the Italian astronomer and philosopher Galileo Galilei who invented the telescope and identified the law of inertia and established the law of freely falling bodies, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler who discovered three empirical laws of planetary motion, the English physician William Harvey who first described the systemic circulation and properties of blood and laid the foundation of embryo studies, and the English physicist Isaac Newton who put forth the three laws of motion in his works Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica and founded classical mechanics. In that period of history, specifically from 16th to 17th century Chinese science and technology started to lag behind the West, and Chinese modern science was introduced from the West.
It is clear from the aforesaid that Chinese traditional science and technology is characterized by the following:
①A long history with unbroken continuity. China remains a region which nurtured the world’s earliest civilizations in terms of its stoneware making and fire use early in the remote antiquity, or the later emergence of agricultural technology and civilization. Moreover, two million years ago or earlier, the Chinese ancestors already lived, multiplied and evolved on this land, counted amongst the earliest civilizations of the world, and unlike other regions of the world civilizations such as ancient Egypt, Babylon, India, Greek and Arab, China enjoyed uninterrupted development of its traditional science and technology until the 16th and 17th centuries.
②Emphasis on integrity. While Western science and technology stresses the analytical approach, Chinese science and technology puts emphasis on integrity. While the Western approach can be most typically exemplified by the ancient Greek classifications of human knowledge with Aristotle as the chief representative to divide disciplines, the Chinese approachcan be represented by its ontology-based classifica-tions of the knowledge with the first extant Chinese dictionary Erya(Approaching Refinemen) as the most typical from the Spring and Autumn through the Warring States period(770-221 B.C.) onwards.
③Generative and mechanical views of the world.Unlike the Western views of the antagonistic relationship between man and the God, the Chinese traditional science and technology emphasizes integrity; for instance, to make full and integrative use of favorable climatic, geographical and human conditions, toview the world according to generative and organic principles, and to advocate reverence for nature and its proportional exploitation and conservancy. As a result, there was a tradition of “taboos for the four seasons”retained for 2,000-odd years in ancient China, thus maintaining a relatively high foundation for paleontological resources reproduction. Such Chinese theory that man is integral part of nature and that of harmony between man and nature is quite dif-ferent from the western theory of opposition between man and nature.
④Prominent practicality. China’s four major in-ventions(papermaking, printing, compass, and gunpowder) were representative indicators of the country’s considerable development in science and technology of the ancient time, and their influences on the world’s historical progress were then unmatchable worldwide, in breadth or depth. However, concerning the effects on the ancient scientific theories of the world, China seemed to be hardly equal to Greece though the Chinese traditional science and technology features prominent practicality in astronomy, arithmetics, medicine, agriculture, and geonomy.
⑤Briliant achievements. China could already cast huge bronze wares such as Simuwu rectangular cauldron early in Shang dynasty, when there appeared at least some 10 town handcraft industries including bronze ware casting, pottery, bone/horn/tooth/clam-shell ware processing, jade, textile, distllng, building, weaving, leather-tanning, and wooden ware painting. In the Shang Capital site in Zhengzhou and the Yin Ruins of the same historical period in Anyang, large quantities of fossils of seashells, whale bones, sea clams, large tortoises and jade wares have been unearthed, and apparently all these fossils were not lo-cally produced;; for instance the jade ware fossils were from present-day Xinjiang and those of seashells, whales and large tortoises from the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. From the inscriptions on oracle bones unearthed so far, the decimal system of counting was then already popular and the largest figure amounted to 30,000. To sum up the above, China’s ancient science and technology took the lead world-wide dating back to several thousand years ago from Shang and Western Zhou dynasties, the Spring and Autumn & Warring States period through Qin and Han dynasties, and until 3rd -16th centuries. According to the statistical figure in The Historical Encyclopedia of Chinese Science and Technology published in 1993, the ancient literatures and writings on Chinese science and technology add up to 57 million-odd Chinese characters, which stands as an internationally unrivaled figure and a sum of precious treasure of China as acountry with the largest quantities of accumulative knowledge and literature on ancient science and technology.
