China’s Four Most Important Achievements
... bronze, and silk. Paper was thick and spongy so the Chinese people used it like cloth. Chinese men had jackets and hats made from paper. There were also paper shoes, blankets, and even paper armor, that was made from thick folded paper. Later on, Chinese people started to use paper for books and for writing too. Over the centuries, papermaking became an important craft for many people. The second achievement was the compass, which was made by the Chinese. The Chinese people made the compass in about 100 because directions were so important in ceremonies, in religion, and in daily life. The Chinese people believed directions were powerful because the Chinese legend says that the Yellow Emperor, God of the Universe, lived in the center of the world and the four other gods ruled the north, south, east, and west. The compasses that the Chinese people made were different because south was the most important direction in China so their compasses pointed south. The needle on our compasses point north and the line of the needle points north and south. The first compasses didn’t have needles, but instead they had a magnetic stone shaped like a fish or a spoon that turned to show the direction. The Chinese people used their first compasses to find the best places for buildings and graves because they believed that certain placements were lucky and fortunate, but others could bring misfortune. Geomancers use complicated compasses to find the right spots and the rules and ideas that they used are called feng shui. Feng shui is still being used today by many people. The third achievement was the woodblock printing, which was made by the Chinese people. The Chinese people invented block printing around 710 because Chinese people were used to making copies with backward words. Also they stamped coins, pressed official seals, carved bronze molds backward, and copied books by hand before they invented block printing. Sometimes the Chinese people carved important messages in stone so the messages would last a very long time. The Chinese people learned to put paper over the stone messages and rub the paper with ink to copy the whole page overtime. It is almost like a block print and a block print is a full page carved into wood like the words on a rubber stamp. Printers can use that wooden page to make many copies of it. To make a block print, a calligrapher copied pages on to thin paper and then the printer glued the paper, face down, onto a block of wood. The characters showed through the paper and they were backwards. Trained carvers then slice away the wood between the characters. The wood block had raised backward characters now. The printer spread ink on the woodblock, laid a paper across it, and rubbed the ink into the paper with a special pad and then the calligrapher hung up the paper to dry. The last achievement was gunpowder, which was discovered by alchemists. The alchemists discovered gunpowder ...