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The Advanced Technology of Ancient China

An Overview

Around 2500 years ago, when no one in Europe or the Middle East could melt even one ounce of iron the Chinese were casting multi-ton iron objects. It was not until the mid-1700's in Europe that such feats of metallurgy were achieved in Britain, the technically most advanced country of Europe. The early success in iron-casting in China was due j n large part to a superior form of bellows that delivered a continuous stream of air to a furnace instead of an interrupted stream as from the type of bellows used in the West. No one beforehand would have given much thought or attention to such a seemingly unimportant device as the Chinese bellows, but it turned out to be a crucial technological development.

   

The Chinese bellows expels air on the forward stroke and on the backward stroke. The Western bellows expels air only on the down stroke. In Western furnaces there was no air enhancing the fire about half of the time. The Chinese bellows had air enhancing the furnace fire continuously. This enabled the Chinese furnaces to reach temperature hot enough to melt iron into a liquid state.

But ancient China was not just technically advanced in iron-making. In a wide variety of technical fields China of 300 BCE was many centuries ahead of Europe and the Middle East. And what happened to China is that it stagnated technologically so that by the nineteenth century it was so far behind the West that it was weak and primitive. China had regressed so much that almost everyone, in China as well as the West, had forgotten that China was once technically far advanced compared to the West.

The answer is that Qin Shihuang, the king of the state of Qin (Ch'in) in western China, conquered the six other Chinese kingdoms, uniting them into one empire and created a class of bureaucrats to run and regulate it. He created this bureaucracy to centralize control and break the power of feudalists who were always usurping the power of the central authorities. The Qin Empire did not last long after the death of its founder.

The Qin bureaucrats were of a different type than the bureaucrats who were later chosen under the Han Empire. The Qin bureaucrats were hard-nosed administrators who adhered to a philosophy of administration called Legalism. Legalism was a totalitarian ideology that, among other things, held that books and scholarship were a waste of resources. They burned books and buried some scholars alive to discourage that waste of time.

After the Qin Empire collapsed the State of Han rose to power but kept some of the institutions of the Qin. Their empire also was to be run by bureaucrats but the Han bureaucrats, called mandarins, were to be followers of the Confucian doctrines and were chosen through a competitive examination based upon history, literature and philosophy.

Instead of being ruled by feudalists the China of the Han Empire and thereafter was ruled by scholar-bureaucrats who over time stultified the civilization. The Mandarins were a privileged class and did not want anyone disturbing their status quo and endangering the system. Over the centuries the heavy hands of these bureaucrats slowed the previously dynamic society of China to a standstill and ultimately caused it to regress. But before considering the stagnation and regression it is enlightening to review how stunning was the ancient flowering of Chinese civilization.

A Review of the Record

These are just some of the technological acheivements of ancient China. There were also major early developments in mathematics, astronomy, philosophy and literature. There were also numerous inventions of less technological significance such as kites. There are some technologies that are important in China that were never adopted in the West such as bamboo scaffolding in building construction and renovation.

Dr. Joseph Needham was a British official who discovered the nearly forgotten history of science and technology in ancient China. He found numerous individuals who each knew one part of the story. He put it all together in a work intended to have twenty five volumes. He entitled it Science and Civilization in China. A condensation is avaible in the book "The Genius of China" by Robert Temple.

Chinese technology did not immediately stagnate under the control of the Mandarins. In the fifteenth century China sent armadas of ships vastly larger than those of the Europeans. The story of the treasure fleets of the early fifteenth century is told elsewhere. Without a doubt that technology was explicitly destroyed by the Mandarins.

(To be continued.)


For more on the history of China see China.


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