Chinese Invention and Innovation

Brian McElney

Museum of East Asian Art

9 September 2004

To-day I want to talk about China’s early scientific discoveries and innovations in the fields of geology, map-making, and ship building techniques and to contrast the position in Europe then and later in the same areas of science. The number of innovations and inventions by the Chinese prior to the mid-15^th century is truly awesome and includes paper, gunpowder, the compass for navigation, and printing to name but the best known of these; the full list however is almost endless. A recent addition to the list is the stirrup, which used to be thought of as a Central Asian invention of about the 4^th century AD. However the recent discovery in a tomb at Changsha dated 302 AD of a pottery man on a horse, using what is obviously a stirrup, dates the invention back to the China of that period. Without the stirrup the medieval knight could hardly have functioned. The earliest mention of the stirrup in Europe is by the Byzantine Emperor Maurice Tiberius in his work on military strategy entitled Strategikon of 580 AD.

The reasons for choosing these particular subjects are primarily because of the connection of geology and map-making with William Smith, a Bathonian and early member of the Institute, whose famous geological map of 1815 led to the foundation of the new science of geology at that time, the connections of Bath with naval architecture, and the recent interest caused by Gavin Menzies’s book 142: the year China discovered the world, which in his conclusions I believe to be about 90% accurate.

China has always been a heavily populated country with an extensive agricultural base. The Daoist religion encouraged a deep study of nature and this lead to all sorts of discoveries, which the Chinese immediately put to practical use. In many cases the scientific basis of their discoveries was unknown to them until many years after the discovery was first described and put to practical use. For instance Shen Gua, born 1030 AD, described fossils and realised that they had been animals in the remote past. This contrasts with Europe where such a conclusion at that time would have been viewed as heresy and it was not until the 18^th century that a similar conclusion was reached in the West.

1 Geology and Map making

Geographical descriptions of the various provinces of China, their kinds of soil, characteristic products, and waterways existed for most of China from an early period. The Tribute of Yu probably dating to the 5^th century BC is probably the earliest of these works. Other works described the waterways of China, so important to the Chinese. The earliest of these descriptions is the Shui Ching (Waterways Classic) of 1^st century BC giving a brief description of 137 rivers. About the 6^th century it was enlarged to nearly 40 times its size by the great geographer Li Tao-Yuan and re-named Shui Ching Chu (Commentary on the Water Classic). Local topographies called gazetteers, covering a province both geographically and historically, were popular and exist for virtually every province. The earliest gazetteer relates to Sichuan and mentions an earlier map of Sichuan made about 150 AD. Many gazetteers are recorded from the late 6^th century on, and in 610 the Emperor ordered them all to be compiled and delivered to the Imperial Secretariat. Revisions and updates covering the whole of China were ordered in 971AD.and this colossal task was finished by 1010 in a work running to 1566 chapters. No comparable records were made in Europe, though the nearest equivalent without a map was the Doomsday book.

Great progress was made in cartography when Chang Heng, the Chinese inventor of the seismograph, invented quantitative cartography in the 2^nd century AD presenting a map with grid-lines to the Emperor in 116 AD. His grid system for maps enabled relative positions, distances and itineraries to be calculated and studied. Later Chinese cartographers such as P’ei Hsiu, appointed minister of works in 267 AD, prepared further maps and wrote a preface to his great map, giving the history of map making in China. Apparently map-making dated back to China’s earliest dynasties. The early maps, however, were inaccurate and did not use a grid. Good accurate maps were and still are treated as being necessary to political and military success and in consequence maps were jealously guarded and few ancient examples have survived the dynastic changes and other upheavals in China’s history. Buying a map today in China, as I myself experienced only last year, is practically impossible, as they still seem classified as state secrets. Shen Gua already mentioned in connection with fossils hunts in the late 11^th century that the grid lines on maps were being supplemented by compass-bearings.

Relief maps also had an early start in China. We know from contemporary literature that the tomb of the 1^st Emperor of China (died 210 BC) contains a relief map of China showing its rivers filled with mercury. This is the first mention of a relief map I have traced. The tomb, to which the famed terracotta warriors at Xian were placed as a guard, is still unexcavated; it is known however that the tomb was sacked shortly after he died. Two magnificent maps, which still exist, were carved in stone in 1137 AD. Both have grid patterns and one gives the scale of 1 side of the square being 100 li. These maps show the positions of China’s network of river systems and are almost as accurate as a modern day map. The fine cartographer Chu Ssu Pen (1273-1337) took advantage of the ease of travel resulting from the Mongol control of Asia to make a comprehensive map of China between 1311 and 1320. This map was revised and enlarged by Lo Hung Hsien and printed in about 1555 under the title Kuang Yu Thu, i.e. Enlarged Terrestrial Atlas. Chu had already recognised the basic shape of Africa and the way the Cape of Good Hope pointed, whereas these details were not known in Europe until the mid 15^th century.

The position in Europe after Ptolemy was that maps were so influenced by religion that they became scarcely credible and it was only in the Renaissance when Leonardo Da Vinci and others turned their hand to the subject that decent maps started to be made in Europe, some 1300 years after Chang Heng. The Europeans also adopted compass-bearings on their portolans, e.g. the Visconte portolan of 1311, over 200 years after Shen Gua. One of the argument of Gavin Menzies as to the pre-Columbus maps being based on Chinese originals is the Southern hemisphere compass bearing shown on the Piri Reis map which shows the same co-ordinates of Beijing, the Chinese capital transposed to the Southern hemisphere. Why should the mapmaker chose those particular co-ordinates for his compass bearing, unless it was a Chinese cartographer?

Gavin Menzies’s book propounds the premise that the Chinese armadas despatched at that time mapped the world between 1421 and 1424 rounding Cape Horn, the Cape of Good Hope and Greenland and discovering Antartica, the Caribbean, the Cape Verde islands and both coasts of America. This book is highly controversial but I believe his premise is correct. What is certain is that China had the skills to map the world at that time. It is difficult to explain how various pre-Columbus maps and portolans could show with remarkable accuracy the shape of the various continents and islands, many of which were still to be discovered by the West in 1492. One Western writer has tried to explain this away by alleging that the early European map makers must have had access to a map dating from ante-diluvian times or copies of an earlier map from those times. The evidence for an antediluvian civilisation is dubious, and I think this writer’s suggestion is far-fetched. I believe that access to a Chinese map is a much more likely explanation and Menzies is correct in his essential premise.

2. Nautical matters and Shipbuilding

It is not generally known that from at least the 12^th century through to the mid-15^th century China was a great maritime power. Its vessels are known to have reached the Kamchatka peninsula in the North East and Madagascar to the South West by the 12^th century at the latest. China did have a substantial fleet of vessels from at least the 1^st century BC and had two particular innovations in the field of shipbuilding to its credit. The first is the use of bulkheads and watertight compartments, which were fundamental to Chinese shipbuilding from at least the 2^nd century AD. The idea is derived, it has plausibly been suggested, from the segmented sections of the giant bamboo, used in the remote past as river rafts. The other innovation was rudders with windows to let the water through thereby reducing resistance and greatly increasing the efficiency and ease of operation of the rudder. Fenestrated rudders were certainly in use by the Chinese at the latest by the 13^th century AD. The efficiency of rudders with holes in was probably noted by a Taoist sailor, who, noting its efficacy, was fully content to follow the Daoist principle of wu wei (no action contrary to nature). It took Europe 1100 years to adopt the same principle, which is being applied today when you see the extension of plane flaps to permit the air to flow though the extended wing when landing the plane.

It is known for certain that the Chinese principle of watertight compartments was first adopted in Europe by the naval architect Sir Samuel Bentham in 1795 for his designs for a new type of naval vessels. He acknowledged that he had got the idea from seeing large Chinese vessels in Siberia in 1782. Before this new design the minor holing of a vessel could well lead to its sinking. How novel this technique was at that time may be seen from a letter written in 1787 by Benjamin Franklin about the mail packets which were envisaged between the US and France. His letter reads, ‘As these vessels are not to be laden with goods, their holds may without inconvenience be divided into separate compartments, after the Chinese manner, and each of these apartments caulked tight so as to keep out water.’ As late as 1824 naval writers were still breathlessly expostulating upon the miracle of this simple technique. Why this technique took so long to be adopted in the West is a bit of a mystery as Marco Polo in 1295 and a later writer Nicolo de Ponti in 1444 both mention the technique. It should however be mentioned that about 1712 some English fishermen adopted the Chinese principle of a sealed hull compartment, which could be free flooded under controlled conditions, for use to keep fish fresh and alive far longer. This idea was described in a 5^th century Chinese text but probably was adopted by the Chinese much earlier than this.

Discussion

There then followed a lively discussion on other aspects of history and cultural differences between Europe and China.

In answer to the question of why it was that China was so creative for so long, it appears that one reason may well have been the two competing philosophies - of Daoism and Confucianism. Each vied to bring scientific and other innovations to the attention of the Emperor who then, if he approved, encouraged the spreading of the innovations. This rivalry was a spur to the generation of ideas, but when Neo-Confucianism absorbed many of the tenets of Daoism in the 12^th century, much of this rivalry disappeared and this seems to have led to a gradual decline in creativity. The Yuan Dynasty with its conquest of much of Asia and the influx of foreigners into China at that time led to a renewed burst of creativity in that Dynasty (1279-1368). However, the early Ming Emperors reverted to strict Confucian principles and China withdrew into its shell and creativity all but ceased. Schools were always widespread in China, entry to the civil service was competitive, and the general population have always valued education and still do to this day.

One difficulty China has in the modern world is that their writing system is too cumbersome for current technology and takes years to learn even for the better-educated people. Also the present regime may be too centralised for widespread innovation to take place.