The "4 Great Inventions" from Ancient China That Shaped the Western World (and Several More That May Surprise You!)

At a time when tribes were crisscrossing Europe in search of the best lands to settle—long before they could even imagine the existence of large continents across the Atlantic Ocean—Chinese civilization was making revolutionary strides in science and technology. While it will be forever debated whether the Italian merchant Marco Polo actually visited China in 1271, it was his writings that revealed the astonishing advancements of the Chinese to the Western World.

And let there be no doubt—ancient China was responsible for a mind-boggling number of inventions that have altered the course of world history. Of four inventions from ancient China that made the greatest impact on the outside world, perhaps this one made the biggest bang of them all.

Gunpowder—the real shot heard ‘round the world

Arguably, the most famous invention of the ancient Chinese was gunpowder. The technology behind this world-changing invention was discovered by Chinese monks in the mid-ninth century who were seeking an elixir to extend human life. The key ingredient, saltpeter (potassium nitrate), had already been in use in China for medicinal purposes for centuries. But after adding sulfur and charcoal in the right proportions, they found that the mixture would burn rapidly and explode as a propellant.

While the incendiary properties of gunpowder were put to good use for things like fireworks, the military applications were not lost on the Chinese. And the reigning Sung dynasty quickly put the new discovery to use against the Mongols, who would be the first to be the recipients of "flying fire"— arrows fixed with tubes of gunpowder that would propel themselves across enemy lines before igniting. More sophisticated gunpowder-based weapons invented by the Chinese—including the first cannons and grenades—would soon follow and be perfected against the Mongol invaders.

By some miracle or fluke of history, China was able to hold onto the secret of gunpowder all the way up to the 13th century, when the science was passed along the ancient Silk Road to Europe and the Islamic world. And once gunpowder arrived in Europe, everything changed. Cannons enabled kings to destroy the castles of feudal lords, which led to the establishment of centralized nation-states, fundamentally reshaping the European world.

As gunpowder spread throughout the world, China didn’t sit on its laurels. After discovering how ignited gunpowder was the counterforce required to set a rocket in motion, the ancient Chinese invented multiple-stage rockets—a revolutionary concept that would one day help to put a man on the moon. And the fundamental idea of an explosion in a self-contained cylinder paved the way for the development of the internal combustion engine and the steam engine.

The way gunpowder has completely transformed the way wars are fought makes one wonder. Even if those Chinese monks had realized the military applications of gunpowder, do you suppose they saw the irony of looking for a formula to extend life—and coming up with something that did more to shorten human lives than anything before or since?

Instead of shortening any lives, another invention from ancient China sure made life significantly easier…

Paper—not papyrus, not parchment, actual paper

While some might say, "Hey, what about Egypt? Weren’t they producing papyrus since around 3,000 BC?" Well, papyrus certainly served its purpose quite well for the Egyptians for many centuries, but it wasn’t paper. Credit for that goes to China.

Paper had already existed in China well before 105 A.D, the date when Cai Lun, a eunuch from China’s imperial court, is credited for inventing the first high quality writing paper. It was something he fashioned from tree bark, hemp, linen, rags, and scraps of fishing nets. After crushing and combining the materials, he then used lye to break the mixture down into finer fibers—and voila! Cai Lun’s advanced paper-making technology would eventually follow established trade routes along the Silk Road and spread to Central Asia and the rest of the world.

For several centuries, Europeans continued to buy papyrus from Egypt while China used real paper, a material that was far more durable and convenient. In the 14th and 15th centuries, Europe finally made the switch. Meanwhile, China was finding several creative ways to take advantage of their paper-making technology. By the ninth century AD, they began using paper to print money, with the first paper bills serving as credit or exchange notes for Silk Road traders. And with so many foreign merchants unable to speak the Chinese language, they put paper to good use by printing restaurant menus for hungry traders.

As far as "innovative" goes, you could say that China was on a roll. Which brings us to one more invention that might have been in the back (or at least the backside) of people’s minds—toilet paper. Its first recorded use in China dates back to AD 851 during the Tang Dynasty, then it gained increasing popularity with the imperial court during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). Perhaps not the most important way China’s invention of paper shaped the world, but it certainly made life a bit easier—and more hygienic. Especially when you consider that it wasn’t until the second half of the 19th century that commercial toilet paper became available in the Western world.

The Compass—where would ships be without it? Probably lost …

The compass is right up there with the greatest inventions of ancient China. Developed between the second century BC and first century A.D., it was initially used in Feng Shui for the layout of buildings and by fortunetellers (to point out the direction of inner harmony). But by the 10th century, navigational compasses were in common use on all Chinese ships. It is thought that Arab traders sailing to China learned of this groundbreaking technology and eventually brought it to the West.

Unlike modern compasses that point north, ancient Chinese compasses pointed south. The "needle" took the form of a spoon made of lodestone, a type of magnetite (iron ore that becomes highly magnetized when struck by lightning). The resulting mineral will point to both the north and south poles. The Chinese considered south their cardinal direction, not north. And since south is always the direction of the sun at mid-day, Chinese sailors also gained a strategic advantage when they were out to sea.

While we’re on the subject of groundbreaking navigational aids, ancient China also came up with the rudder. Enabling ships to steer without using oars, rudders made it much easier to navigate. Invented in the first century A.D., rudders would take a millennium to reach the West, just in time to help Christopher Columbus and a slew of explorers navigate the oceans.

The Printing Press—sorry Gutenberg, China has you beat

If you wish to ignore an entire continent, then sure, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in Mainz, Germany, around 1440 A.D. But the thing is, a Chinese peasant named Bi Sheng was already doing the exact same thing—150 years before Gutenberg was even born.

But we can go back a lot further than that. Nearly 600 years before Gutenberg was born, Chinese monks were setting ink to paper using block printing, a technique where wooden blocks are coated with ink and then pressed onto sheets of paper. An ancient Buddhist text known as The Diamond Sutra, created this way in 868 A.D., is considered the oldest printed book in the world.

Then, early in the 11th century, Bi Sheng took woodblock printing to a whole new level with the invention of the world’s first movable type. To remove all doubt as to the creator of this ingenious and innovative method of printing utilizing hundreds of individual characters, his achievement was well documented by a contemporary of Bi Sheng’s, a scholar and scientist named Shen Kuo.

Kuo went into great detail about Sheng’s invention in an 11th-century work, describing how Sheng’s movable characters were made out of baked clay, and the ink he used was a mix of pine resin, wax, and paper ashes. He also wrote that Sheng’s method could be used to print thousands of copies of a document quickly and easily.

There are countless more inventions from ancient China that continue to shape world history. Not all of them were technological innovations centuries ahead of their time, but many do indeed meet that high bar. Of course, there were also a few that China probably wished they hadn’t come up with at all—Linchi comes to mind. You might know this gruesome method of public execution in ancient China better as the "Death by a Thousand Cuts."

But here’s just a partial list of more inventions from ancient China that have helped make the world a better—or at least a different—place …

• Alcohol—Complex analysis of organic materials in ancient jars indicates that Chinese people were drinking alcoholic beverages as early as 9,000 years ago. Scientists now believe that China was the first nation to discover the fermentation and distillation processes used to produce alcohol. Cheers!


• Forks—The recent excavation of a tomb of an ancient Chinese emperor has provided proof that the Chinese created forks that are strikingly similar to our modern version. Why they found chopsticks preferable is another question altogether …


• Seismograph—In 132 A.D., Chinese scientist Zhang Heng introduced a device for detecting distant earthquakes. It took the form of a bronze urn with a pendulum inside. When a vibration was picked up, the pendulum’s motion caused a metal dragon to release a ball into a metal frog—which created a loud warning clang. The court was initially unimpressed with the device since nobody felt any tremor—until a messenger arrived several days later to inform the emperor that an earthquake had struck a village 400 miles away.


• Mechanical clocks—Another timely invention of ancient China was the mechanical clock. In 725 A.D., a Buddhist monk named Yi Xing fashioned a device that used dripping water to power a large wheel that made one revolution every 24 hours. A clock tower was built during the Song Dynasty modernized Xing’s design with a chain-driven mechanism and a system of gears and wheels that made the clock turn—but Yi Xing’s original idea beat the clock of anyone in the West by two centuries.

We’d rather not get into the endless debate about the invention of noodles, but other inventions from ancient China include wheelbarrows, silk, porcelain, tea, umbrellas, kites, suspension bridges, blast furnaces, toothbrushes … and any more would just be piling on.

Learn more about the history and culture of China during O.A.T.’s New! China’s Imperial Cities, Natural Splendor & Modern Marvels adventure.