Talk:History of science and technology in China

The Printing Press: Who Made it First?

The Wiki article on scientific advancement in Korea credits Korea with the first movable type -- i.e. the printing press. I've also seen this in numerous Asian history books. Can anyone confirm who got it first, and then correct it in either of the Wiki articles?

R. Robinson, 22 October 2008 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.71.207.72 (talk) 00:14, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

UPDATE: This has been resolved (distinction made between porcelain and metal movable printing machines).

R. Robinson, 01 February, 2009 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.71.207.72 (talk) 08:24, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

The "Scientific and technological stagnation" section

I don't agree with the way it concludes. It's arguing for a point of view that can be said about other philosophies/religions. Xiner (talk, email) 20:22, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Firstly, Needham is the main scholarly source for research on Chinese science, and other views are also represented. Secondly, true science developed in the environment of the Scholastic universities during the Renaissance of the 12th century. The limitations to science from other philosophies/religions occurs in varying degrees and for different reasons, but scholars find it is of particular note as to why the major Chinese technological innovations did not develop into science. --Grimhelm 20:47, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

I think it's possible to rephrase the section so that it appears less argumentative and more NPOV. The "However..." needs not be there, for example. If we say, "Needham believes, and most scholars agree...Other theories include..." then it'll convey the same message. Xiner (talk, email) 21:12, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

I agree it would make more sense if we grouped the political and cultural factors together, and had the more recent economic theories come after it. I have changed it accordingly. --Grimhelm 22:25, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Cool. Thank you. Xiner (talk, email) 22:28, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

You're welcome. :-) --Grimhelm 22:29, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

I agree. There was no mention of the Qing conquest theory. Friendship & Rainbows (talk) 10:01, 14 July 2019 (UTC)

Failed GA

This article is absolutely not comprehensive enough. The subject is vast. --Ideogram 02:11, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Can we have a few points that most need expansion? It might give editors a good place to start. Thanks. :-) --Grimhelm 17:09, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

I am not really familiar with the subject; I was hoping to learn more from the article. Two things spring to miind: Chinese history is supposed to go back thousands of years, but here we have only the four great inventions and the middle ages; and a lot more can be said about Needham's work. --Ideogram 19:20, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

May I recommend a brief summary of Needham's work: Robert Temple: The Genius of Chins ISBN 978-0233002026 [1]. It's popular rather than academic, but it's a nice overview of inventions, and could be a fine strating point for a longer version of this article.--Niels Ø (noe) 20:06, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

You can also integrate material from Chinese mathematics here, although that article is terribly thin. I'm also interested in discussion of the five elements wood, earth, metal, water, fire; the emphasis on the number five and numerology in general; acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine; Chinese constellations; the list goes on and on.

One of the problems with copying material was the lack of citations. I intentionally left out Chinese mathematics, as the History of Science articles go by the following: "The history of mathematics… [is] covered in other articles. Mathematics is closely related to, but distinct from science (at least in the modern conception). Technology concerns the creative process of designing useful objects and systems, which differs from the search for empirical truth." Acupuncture and medicine are certainly ancient areas that would do well to be included. --Grimhelm 23:04, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

I would rather include material that was not well cited than no material at all. Your point on mathematics is well-taken. --Ideogram 00:12, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Additional material

You may want to add material from Book of Silk, Han Dynasty silk comet atlas, and Mawangdui Silk Texts here. Those articles themselves need to be merged, but that's a separate matter. --Ideogram 03:25, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Great work

Keep it up! --Ideogram 21:21, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! :-) What happened to the Han Dynasty silk comet atlas article, by the way? I saw it briefly and it looked quite substantial, and I can't tell if it was merged somewhere. Also, how far off being a good article would you say it is now (and what other areas should we work on next), considering that it is 17 KB long at this point. --Grimhelm 16:15, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

That article has been moved to Comets and the swastika motif. It is not really related to China. The primary obstacle to GA is more citations/references. 17 KB is not long, the article could still use expansion. The coverage looks pretty balanced now, I think mainly you just need more depth. --Ideogram 20:56, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

I know 17 KB isn't that long, but I would have thought that the current inline citations were quite good (although some more would be nice, particularly in the final section); unless you mean copying material from other articles, where the lack of citation is a problem. Is suppose that getting the balance was the hard part, and more depth should be achieveable. --Grimhelm 21:07, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Feel free to submit it for GA again. It has a pretty good chance of passing. --Ideogram 22:05, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

I have added some more on Zhang Heng, and renominated it for GA. Thanks again. --Grimhelm 16:18, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

I should be thanking you, you are doing all the work. --Ideogram 16:21, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Still, you were the one who provided the links to the articles on the early texts and gave direction. :-) --Grimhelm 16:27, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

It was a pleasure working with you and I hope we can do so again. --Ideogram 16:33, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Passed GA

Note that this GA review was separate from and uncoordinated with the previous one above.

1.

• (a) Prose is straightforward, and follows an easily understandable chronologic format.
• (b) Again, chronological structure, grouped by era. The lead is there and looks good.
• (c) Looks good in relation to standards. I fixed one header myself, but nothing serious.
• (d) Plenty of active links to explain terms.

2.

• (a) References are here and cited.
• (b) Some citations are not in the right format. Look at the section "Scientific and technological stagnation" and change the two bare links into proper cite format.
• (c) Sources seem to be from reliable sources.
• (d) No original research, has quotes from experts.

3.

• (a) I would prefer a bit more about the early Chinese philosophy of science. Right now it is a little unclear as to how the basic Chinese view of science spurred invention. Still has enough info to go on, in my opinion.
• (b) Very focused, no deviations.

4.

• (a) Several viewpoints are represented without bias.
• (b) No undue assertion of viewpoints.

5. Seems stable, good crew working on it.

6.

• (a) Good tagging and captions.
• (b) Images present.
• (c) All images seem to be public domain.

In summary:

• 1. Pass
• 2. Pass minus
• 3. Pass minus
• 4. Pass
• 5. Pass
• 6. Pass

Overall: Pass

Nice work. Please consider the citation and comprehensiveness issues I raised above. --Danaman5 19:26, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Congratulations! --Ideogram 22:57, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Thank you both. :-) --Grimhelm 23:03, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

New info

I just added new cited information for Ma Jun and his South Pointing Chariot. I also expanded upon the achievements of Shen Kuo and Su Song.--PericlesofAthens 02:53, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

14th to 15th century gap

There seems to be a gap of information about what was going on tech-wise 14th and 15th century, even if nothing was going on there should be some note of it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.52.215.67 (talk) 03:44, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Pictures

Rules about pictures on Wikipedia that should be uncontroversial:

• Don't use fixed image sizes. Different users have different resolutions. The MediaWiki software scales pictures for anonymous users when sizes are not specified, and logged in users can set a preference.
• Alternate image placement between left and right. This is recommended in the Manual of Style.
• Don't place two pictures so close that the text gets sandwiched in the middle. Also recommended in the Manual of Style.

More personal preferences:

• Don't use too many pictures. One per section is sufficient. This also avoids the problem of sandwiching mentioned above.
• Keep pictures relevant. For example, the picture on the pudding process of smelting has nothing to do with "Scientific and technological stagnation".
• Avoid pictures with extreme aspect ratios like the paper money picture. Pictures are sized by width which looks bad when the aspect ratio is extreme.

--slashem (talk) 06:47, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

New material

It should be noted that User:Jagged 85 has recently added a bunch of new material under the Middle Ages section of this article that I had originally wrote for Science in the Middle Ages. Just to clear up any confusion if someone stumbles across repeated materials here or elsewhere. I would like to state for the record, though, that I prefer paraphrasing of others' work instead of wholesale copying of material from one article to the next.--Pericles of Athens^Talk 05:28, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

History of Science and Technology of China in Chronological Order

Could the editors here please merge anything important from this article and redirect it to this location? It would be better if the author was directed to this article for his contributions. J Milburn (talk) 15:33, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

Period divide and name

Why there is a part named Middle Ages? China has no period and no term Middle Ages. Does it use European experience, European way and Europe standard to divide and name Chinese history? -Znzznz (talk) 16:22, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

On a related note, here is an appeal to include Mohist logic in the history of science in China. The link includes some watchlists which might be useful for this article. --Ancheta Wis (talk) 10:41, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

I should mention that in the links on Mohist logic given above, they mention that one of the threads which was cut short 2400 years ago, during the Qin burning of books and burying of scholars was the integrated development of modal logic and Mohist logic. The loss of something that coud very well have taken thousands of years to develop (given that modal logic was discovered only in the Western world in the last 800 years, and that few people work on this, even in the previous century) may have had catastrophic effects for the entire globe, as evidenced by the severe imbalance and instability of values we see today. --Ancheta Wis (talk) 16:53, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

Indian writing?

Removed "Needham notes that writing was well established in Indian culture 3500 years ago." It's a great sentence, but what's it doing here? Hanfresco (talk) 08:28, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Worse, it's completely wrong. There is no evidence for writing in the 2nd millennium BC in India, not even proto-writing. Had writing been "well established" in the Vedic period, there should be at least some tangible evidence – but there are only highly implausible fringe speculations attempting to derive Brahmi from the Indus symbols. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 01:52, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Peiping union medical college, department of biochemistry

http://books.google.com/books?id=VFgXAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA395#v=onepage&q&f=false

Rajmaan (talk) 06:18, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Gap of History of Science and technology in Ancient China

The article starts from the Warring States period, but on the right hand side we can see the ancient China started way earlier than that. May I ask why these early days were not included? Are they not categorized as a part of Chinese history? Are there not enough reliable sources to be found? Or are there not enough contents that can be viewed as "Science" or "technology"? Thank you. Shikele (talk) 00:19, 17 February 2018 (UTC)

Yes, they should absolutely be included. There's an article on Neolithic China here and a full list here that includes plenty of stuff from the earlier period. We should only be glossing an overview and linking over for details, but yes it's WP:BIASy and WP:UNDUE to list 2500+ characters on the Jesuits and none at all for the Qin, Warring States, Zhou, and Chinese prehistory. — LlywelynII 13:50, 25 December 2022 (UTC)

WP:BIAS

There's also a ridiculous amount of uninformed western and hindsight BIAS in the idea that the Qing were "stagnant". 1) Europe figuring out the scientific method and being forced (despite its own better judgment) to apply it via geopolitics doesn't mean China actually stagnated prior to the Taiping Rebellion. Europe just blew past and wasn't shy about taking advantage of it. The sections should just be the broad dynastic periods, with minor exceptions (eg) for the Jesuits.

2) Yes, you can use Guns, Germs, and Steel to briefly stand in for Western conventional wisdom. No, you can't actually use it to make any concrete points with the idea that they're accurate (as is happening with its tone and placement in the current discussion). It's rock solid on someone from Eurasia always being more likely to dominate other areas than vice versa; it's actively unhelpful in dealing with which parts of Eurasia would end up dominant and why; and none of it is based on actual mastery of current scholarship or bulletproof research. It's just the modern California version of sitting down at a London club two centuries ago and harrumphing with the other members about how the Raj was just "inevitable", "nothing to be done", and eh we'll give 'em railways, wot.

3) This is more contentious, obviously, and doesn't need to go into the article unless more scholars have gotten on board the reality train lately: At the end of the day, sure, Cixi thought the Guanyin Boddhisattva was her grrl and she was never keen on modernizing. That wasn't because the Chinese were stupid or benighted, couldn't see the writing on the wall as clearly as the Japanese, or even the condescending thing we're currently doing where we source statements about them "developing differently" in ways "we still can't measure". After robust growth under the Ming and early Qing, China fell behind in the late Qing because the government was a Manchu raiding party trying to tamp down hundreds of millions of Han who wanted their hair and their country back. That and 19th century science started exploding with truly awesome machinery and weaponry, which the Chinese (and everyone else) had absolutely no historical context for. The West leveraged that into colonial exploitation and tied development to domination in ways China would naturally push back against. All the same, Li Hongzhong and tons of other Chinese figures were pushing for locally controlled development, but it was inevitable that powerful small arms (instead of easily controlled cannon moving along easily controlled canal routes) or greater access to technology that could produce such arms was going to lead to uprisings and Cixi was far more worried about that than the Europeans. It wasn't until the massive 1850 floods that shifted the Yellow River across the entire Shandong peninsula + the complete destruction of the south with the Taipings that China was broken in the way we're pretending was an inevitability... largely on the basis of narratives about the Ottomans, India, and China created by the Europeans to further justify divvying them up. — LlywelynII 14:28, 25 December 2022 (UTC)

Fwiw 4) something that should eventually be added would be turning the #Jesuit section into something like a #European contact section. The information coming back from China about an empire as powerful and rich as Rome effectively ruled by an enlightened class of scholars placed by merit who were (generally speaking natch) profoundly moral on no religious basis stronger than "bring honor to the family" and "help the country" was hugely influential on the Encyclopedie guys, Voltaire, and a bunch of what gets lumped into the Enlightenment. It showed a massive society could be run rationally on a morality unmoored by the Bible... and better in many ways than the situation most Europeans were living under at the time. — LlywelynII 14:36, 25 December 2022 (UTC)

w0t?

Derived from Taoist philosophy, one of the newest longstanding contributions of the ancient Chinese are in Traditional Chinese medicine...

I mean, obviously the person writing this was using an automatic translator inside a blender. Does anyone have any idea what they're trying to say with this?

In architecture, the pinnacle of Chinese technology manifested itself in the Great Wall of China, under the first Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huang between 220 and 200 BC. Typical Chinese architecture changed little from the succeeding Han dynasty until the 19th century. The Qin dynasty also developed the crossbow, which later became the mainstream weapon in Europe...

All of this silliness needs to go as well. I get it that teachers grade for patriotism on Chinese writing assignments but the "pinnacle of Chinese technology" "manifested itself" in the crossbow ahead of the Warring States period (not under the Qin) and the various flood control projects that improved irrigation, crop yields, provided useful but easily centrally controlled transportation, and (incidentally) provided an easy garbage and waste disposal service that kept Chinese cities relatively cleaner and healthier than those elsewhere, part of the reason China had the dragon's share of the world's largest cities for most of the last 2000-3000 years.

Qin Shihuang’s Great Wall wasn't even just a ditch and a pile of mud. It was just several projects connecting the ditches and piles of mud that were already built up by the northern states against the Xiongnu & friends during the Spring & Autumn and Warring States periods. It wasn't nearly as imposing or long as the Ming project. It's all well and good to be proud of it as a symbol of government concern for its people's welfare (ignoring the forced labor bits which frankly were generally less severe in China than elsewhere like the slave economy Rome was built on) and to cheer it as a massive public works project that involved tons of logistics... but it wasn't high technology. It wasn't any technology. At the time, it was mostly just a pile of dirt. Praise it, but be more sensible about it. — LlywelynII 13:50, 25 December 2022 (UTC)

Cultural issues: Chinese legends about invention

I know what I just said about taking out most of the puffery in this article's current text. That said, China has always been immensely proud of its relative civilization and the inventiveness that put it there. When they told stories about their versions of the Biblical patriarchs, they didn't drone on and on about divine favor and punishment, prophesies, and convenants. They didn't even talk all that much about military glory. They kept track of their genealogies so they knew who to be most grateful to and they focused on the inventions that their culture heroes used to improve everyone's standard of living.

We should point at actual history and use reliable modern scholarship for most of the article, but it's actually a disservice to our WP:READERs if we completely omit the traditional Chinese accounts of their early inventions. We should present it as legends and myths, sure, but we should still be linking to the silkworm lady and Old Foureyes and God the Farmer in a new (shortish, sure) first section on the more important Chinese legends and cultural traditions about their own culture. They're the main touchstones to any actual Chinese person thinking about this topic and we can be pretty sure Western readers won't have any good idea where to turn to find them if they aren't here or any of the related pages (Neolithic list & standard list). — LlywelynII 14:04, 25 December 2022 (UTC)

Genetic sequencing and the I Ching

Although there is a citation for "and one of the earliest examples of genetic sequencing", I believe the book cited is not respected by most scientists. The similarities between the I Ching and genetic sequencing are mathematical. This does not mean that the I Ching *was* an early example of genetic sequencing. 23.93.191.99 (talk) 07:35, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

Agreed, I've removed the mention entirely, it's fairly ridiculous. Remsense留 12:10, 2 January 2024 (UTC)