Four Great Inventions of China Traditional Culture

China is the first country in the world to raise silkworms and weave silk. In ancient China, the working people used silkworms to weave silkworms, and the rest of the evil cocoons and sick cocoons were all bleached from silkworms. After bleaching, the residual wool left by the mat will accumulate into a layer of fiber sheets, which can be peeled off after drying and can be used for writing. It can be seen that the origin of papermaking in China is related to silk floss. In the first year of Yuan Xing in the Eastern Han Dynasty, Cai Lun made plant fiber paper suitable for writing with bark, broken fishing nets, rags and hemp heads as raw materials, and improved the paper-making technology, making the paper a widely used writing material.

compass

Compass is a simple tool to judge the direction. Originally known as Sina. The main component is a magnetic needle that can rotate freely on the shaft. The magnetic needle can be kept in the tangential direction of magnetic meridian under the action of geomagnetic field. The north pole of the magnetic needle points to the geographical north pole, which can be used to identify the direction. It is often used in navigation, geodesy, tourism and military affairs. N of the compass refers to the north, e to the east, w to the west and s to the south. China is regarded as the country that invented the compass in the world. The invention of the compass is the result of long-term practice and understanding of the magnetism of objects by the working people in ancient China.

gunpowder

The study of gunpowder began with the ancient Taoist alchemy. The ancients refined Dan medicine to live forever. The purpose and motive of alchemy are advanced, but its experimental method still has some advantages, which eventually led to the invention of gunpowder. Gunpowder was first made into powder, and later it was generally made into particles of different sizes for different purposes. Smokeless powder was used as the only military propellant until it was adopted.

print

China was the first country in the world to invent printing. Early printing was to carve pictures and texts on wooden boards and print them with ink. This method is still used in woodcut watermark painting, which is collectively called "woodcut printing" (also called "woodcut"). The predecessor of block printing is the popular seal cutting in BC and the rubbings and inscriptions that appeared later. After the emergence of production technologies such as papermaking and inkmaking, block printing technology was gradually invented. According to the research of historian Deng Guangming, block printing was invented in the Tang Dynasty and was widely used in the middle and late Tang Dynasty. Although movable type printing was invented in Song Dynasty, block printing is still widely used.