> When Chinese were ahead, European stole and smuggled manufacturing technologies from China.
Not disputing this but what technologies did Europeans ever steal from China? I’m only aware of tea and silkworms..
Not disputing this but what technologies did Europeans ever steal from China? I’m only aware of tea and silkworms..
But these days I think it's the immaterial cultural/cognitive tools that came from China which tend to be underrated. For example, the Chinese invented the concept of the civil service and examinations, as we think of them today. Meritocratic experts admitted based solely on an anonymous written examination (duplicated by scribes so even the handwriting couldn't given the applicant away). This would influence the British East India Company, which ultimately led to it being implemented in Britain:
> Even as late as ten years after the competitive examination plan was passed, people still attacked it as an "adopted Chinese culture." Alexander Baillie-Cochrane, 1st Baron Lamington insisted that the English "did not know that it was necessary for them to take lessons from the Celestial Empire."[184] In 1875, Archibald Sayce voiced concern over the prevalence of competitive examinations, which he described as "the invasion of this new Chinese culture."
I'm not sure that's patentable, though.
That's a bit of overstatement I think, regarding the civil service I mean. Civil service was known in Babylon, in Egypt and in Roman Empire. From some point Roman Empire also introduced requirements for public servants' education. Not a formalized meritocratic system like in Han China, but we don't have a formalized examination of public servants today either.
Heck of a job brownie!
That said, people living in what is now China likely invented some of the earliest forms of guns, but again it’s fairly ambiguous. Fire Lances for example where used circa 1132CE which didn’t fire projectiles. Mongols used gunpowder bombs delivered via trebuchet in 1274, but again it’s unclear where those bombs where first invented and if cannons where unknown or simply ineffective. All we can say is over these timescales information was flowing in and out of various nations. Possibly because the actual inventors where also moving around.
By 1350 cannons were in common use in Italy and much of Europe, but there is evidence they existed in some form in 1128. Though if they had been effective it was likely they would have seen widespread use much earlier. What’s more clear is many early advancements occurred in Asia and quickly spread.
Did China try to prevent gunpowder or porcelain from being made by outsiders?
"IP" is broader than patents that tend to have an expiry date - but even the expiration periods of patents is determined by the host government and not the appropriator. The US has a lot of classified information that would have long since expired had it been a patent, e.g. 1970's nuclear tech, alloys used in submarines, stealth coating on jets. Porcelain and the other examples gp gave would have fallen under the blanket of "National Security" rather than patents.
The Muslim world acquired the gunpowder formula some time after 1240, but before 1280, by which time Hasan al-Rammah had written, in Arabic, recipes for gunpowder, instructions for the purification of saltpeter, and descriptions of gunpowder incendiaries. Gunpowder arrived in the Middle East, possibly through India, from China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gunpowder#Spread_th...
For more information, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_inventions
Insofar as tea involves technique, including selection, cultivation, harvest, processing, and preparation, it's a technology. One that I personally dislike.
It does grow just fine in India which was mostly controlled by Europeans at the time. As much as all of this seems bizarre to you it's still a historical fact. The Chinese government (wanting to maintain its global monopoly) banned the export of tea plants. In the 1840's a British botanist Robert Fortune (commissioned by the East India company) travelled to the tea growing provinces of China, disguised himself as Chinese and illegally smuggled several tea plants back to India. After replicating them in greenhouse he introduced them to the Darjeeling region in Northern India.
To be fair tea was already grown in India before 'the Great Tea Heist' it was just different kinds of tea (e.g. Assam) and Chinese teas were more popular and much more expensive (largely due to Chinese monopoly on trade, western ships were only allowed to trade at specifically designed trade ports).
Also in terms of further back history, wasn’t the recipe behind silk kept as a Chinese secret for years and also foundational for the “silk road”?
And er... china. That stuff you make nice cups and saucers from.
- Chinese noodles and Italian pasta have nothing in common save for the shape of some variants.
- Mixing water, flour and egg yolk isn't exactly a massive qualitative leap from simply having flour around.
- Spice were carried over long distances in the ancient world because of their high value density. Food wasn't. Nobody was shipping around noodles. It's still inefficient enough that all process foods are more or less locally made now.
And finally, I don't understand why you're hypothesizing that Roman pasta would have necessarily been related to Chinese people in Rome. It makes absolutely no sense.
While Chinese noodles may be made of rice or wheat flour and Italian pasta is made of wheat flour, the noodles, regardless of what material they're made of, are indeed made in more or less the same way. And indeed, as you have left it, insisting they have nothing in common does not change that it's entirely unsupportable. That the earliest evidence of Italian pasta around the 4th century BC postdates the earliest evidence of China trading with the West, which predates Rome's founding, it is clear when taken in context of the earliest evidence of Chinese noodles around the 4th millennium BC that the recipe for noodles migrated to the West. While it is possible some intrepid Roman chef independently divined the magical process of inducing noodles from wheat flour coincidentally right around the time of the earliest evidence of Chinese trade with the West, it is slightly more complicated than the recipe, a staple of Chinese cuisine for maybe 3500 years by then, being passed along with silk, tea and ivory by traders.
I am completely flummoxed that you can't seem to grasp this, that not only did Romans not invent pasta, they could not possibly have ever made or even tasted pasta sauce, as Christopher Columbus hadn't yet been born when the last Roman died, nor could he have invented the tomato before 1492. Italy basically imported everything, invented nothing, even the Romans themselves were imported and stole most of the innovations attributed to them from the Etruscans, themselves having migrated from S. Turkey, and who the Romans pretty much wiped out within a few hundred years. Italians like to trace their roots in a flattering way because Rome happens to be there, but I don't think there were any Italians before 1946.
> they could not possibly have ever made or even tasted pasta sauce, as Christopher Columbus hadn't yet been born when the last Roman died, nor could he have invented the tomato before 1492
You seem to have a penchant for continuously shifting goalposts. What does sauce to have with this?
I never said it was. It's just that by then, it had already been known in Europe. So it certainly wasn't an import from China.
> American-Chinese cuisine was invented by Chinese in America, and I doubt any Romans tasted it, ancient or otherwise, but it is possible there was some Ancient Roman analog
What do these two things have to do with each other? Why are you mixing Roman pasta and Chinese cuisine? I merely juxtaposed them in a list of claims, beyond that they have nothing in common.