Gunpowder, modern canal building with locks, porcelain? Just off the top of my head. Porcelain is a particularly relevant example; Europeans experimented with it for about a century, intentionally trying to duplicate the Chinese process, finally having success c. 1700 or so with trade secrets being smuggled out by the Jesuits.
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."
> the Chinese invented the concept of the civil service and examinations, as we think of them today.
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.
It’s often stated that the Chinese invented gunpowder, but we have evidence that it existed hundreds of years before it’s supposed date of invention making the original inventor completely unknown.
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.
All of those things were taken well after any reasonable patent would have expired, so I don’t think they are comparable to the ip theft currently being discussed in this thread. I thought the upstream comment was talking about more recent examples.
Did China try to prevent gunpowder or porcelain from being made by outsiders?
They definitely did try to keep porcelain a secret. As of gunpowder it wasn't stolen by Europeans, rather it seems that it was Mongol invasion that let the knowledge spread.
> All of those things were taken well after any reasonable patent would have expired, so I don’t think they are comparable to the ip theft currently being discussed in this thread.
"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.
Gunpowder might have been invented by China, but it was copied and refined by the Arabs.
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.
Computers are not "a technology". They're processed rocks.
Insofar as tea involves technique, including selection, cultivation, harvest, processing, and preparation, it's a technology. One that I personally dislike.
The notion of pouring hot water over plant leaves is not something that had to be "stolen" from China. For example it's been known in Ancient Egypt already.
That is a bizarre argument to me. "Stolen"? Plant species spread. Sometimes they're even being spread by animals. Humans have spread numerous plant species across the world. Yet tea plants were "stolen"? Not to mention that even claiming it in the context of Europe is nonsensical to begin with as tea doesn't grow in Europe, where there simply isn't a climate for it. As far as consumption of tea in Europe is concerned, virtually all of it is imports from countries outside of Europe, not something being produced in Europe.
> the context of Europe is nonsensical to begin with as tea doesn't grow in Europe
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).
True but the British did steal tea from China. It’s actually pretty interesting it’s akin to espionage the way one British guy secretly went around learning how the tea was grown and taking seeds before setting up shop in India to grow it.
So I recently watched a video on this. Black tea is fermented green tea, Europeans did not know this before getting that knowledge through a spy. Europeans "stole" everything regarding the production of tea, and poached a few Chinese tea masters along with it.
Gunpowder spread to Middle East first, pasta was already being made in Ancient Rome at the very least, and lots of, if not most of "Chinese food" is Chinese-in-name-only.
It is vanishingly unlikely pasta was invented in Ancient Rome. China had been trading with the West since the earliest possible founding of Rome, at the latest. 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, but don't confuse who invented with who consumed: a culturally Chinese cook in ancient Rome is not Roman (though not logically impossible, there could have been a Chinese Roman citizen, but I strongly doubt there were any).
- 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.
> Chinese noodles and Italian pasta have nothing in common save for the shape of some variants.
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.
By your logic the Jomon culture imported the knowledge of ceramics from Moravia because the Venus of Dolní Věstonice predates the Jomon culture. I'm not quite sure this is how it works.
> 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?
> It is vanishingly unlikely pasta was invented in Ancient Rome
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.
This may surprise you, but American Chinese food is not served in China, or a Chinese dish, but actually an invention based on American food that people associate with the Chinese.
Thanks, that is quite interesting, but I was already aware. So let's not confuse which culture invents with which culture consumes. Also should add the stirrup, paper, hand guns, and using petroleum as fuel. I wonder if any of these IP thefts could be successfully litigated, and if so, what the result would be.
You are wildly incorrect. Intellectual property rights were invented by ~500BC by Greek colonists in Sybaris (Italy) predating the invention of movable type and the use of gunpowder in warfare by well over a millennia.
Not disputing this but what technologies did Europeans ever steal from China? I’m only aware of tea and silkworms..