The Machines of Ancient China — Part 4/4

October 29, 2010

Qin Shi Huangdi (259 to 210 BC), the first emperor who unified China, summoned 700,000 people to build his tomb. These people probably worked at least ten years or longer.

Modern day workshops that duplicated what it took to create the Terra Cotta warriors used ancient materials and methods. It took twenty days to complete one warrior.  Each warrior used an average of 130 kilos or 286 pounds of clay.

To complete the entire army, more than one thousand tons was needed.

Another Chinese inventor during the Song Dynasty created a machine known as the Cosmic Engine, the ancient world’s astronomical computer.

Su Song was the inventor.  The Cosmic Engine was so complicated that for centuries no one (even Westerners) understood how it worked. Today, few westerners know that it existed.

However, records show that the Cosmic Engine was created in 1092 AD.

The Cosmic Engine calculated time—not just hours and minutes but weeks, months and seasons reflecting how the earth moves around the sun. It also calculated how the earth and planets moved through space.

The Cosmic Engine was five stories tall and its working innards are complex.

Today, we know exactly how this device was created since Su Song left detailed blueprints and directions of exactly how it was built. Song’s Cosmic Engine worked from the eleventh century until enemies of the Song Dynasty destroyed it.

Using Song’s blueprints, the Science and Technology Museum in Beijing built a fully accurate reconstruction. Another reconstruction exists in London.

This ingenious device led to the invention of Western clocks centuries later.

Today, we know that many of the inventions and discoveries the modern world is built on originated in ancient Imperial China.

Return to the Machines of Ancient China – Part 3 or to discover more inventions see China Points the Way

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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The Machines of Ancient China — Part 3/4

October 29, 2010

More evidence has been discovered that the Chinese had a long history using geared machines.

Beautiful, engraved jade rings were found in tombs dated back to 400 BC. 

After studying the elaborately designed rings, archeologists believe the only way to produce this precision was by using a machine—a device known as a compound machine is one that synchronizes rotational with linear motion.

Over thousands of years, these technological innovations traveled from east to west along the Silk Route.

In fact, there is an archeological site in China that provides solid evidence of the abilities of China’s ancient engineers and craftsmen.

The first emperor of China’s Terra Cotta army is that evidence.

Located near Xian, it is considered by many to be the eighth wonder of the ancient world.

Over eight thousand human sized statues were created by Chinese engineers and craftsmen to protect Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi more than twenty-two hundred years ago.

These Terra Cotta warriors were armed with over ten thousand bronze weapons—the exact weapons used in combat. Amazing as it sounds, these weapons were coated with chromium, which wasn’t developed in the West until the 1930s.

It is believed that these warriors and their weapons were mass-produced in factories that match today’s modern factories.

The most impressive discoveries were the emperor’s full-scale chariots made of gold, silver and bronze. During the Qin Dynasty, the Chinese had established high standards for metallurgy and metal production.

The methods used to build these chariots were highly advanced and are still in use today.

Return to the Machines of Ancient China – Part 2 or to discover more inventions see With or Without Paper

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The Machines of Ancient China — Part 2/4

October 28, 2010

Modern iron works used the same method that ancient China used, but today we use electrical air pumps to feed the fire.

How did the ancient Chinese develop a method to drive enough air into a furnace to heat it to the necessary high temperatures?

In fact, the Chinese used water to drive the bellows for a blast furnace. With these inventions, the groundwork was laid for other sophisticated machinery used in mass production.

One such invention in ancient China was an odometer designed to measure distance.  This device was known as the range finder chariot. A cart that was rolling along with troops measured every five hundred meters by banging a drum automatically.

This device was used to measure the distance to enemy camps and measure how far the troops had marched from the royal city.

 

What is amazing about this ancient odometer is that the gears match exactly those found in modern motorcycle engines.

There is also evidence of the application of gear engineering on a massive industrial scale during the Song Dynasty (960 – 1276 AD) based in eastern China.

We now know that the Chinese had huge operational factories capable of mass production.

Another ancient machine recently discovered is the hydraulic trip hammer and it is believed to have been developed two millennia ago. The texts from that time tell us that the huge machine was used to crush grain but also to pound metal as is still done today.

The ancient Chinese then invented a more efficient way to grind grain-using millstones. However, the Chinese took this machine to an advanced level known as a multiple geared gristmill, which was also powered by water.

This technology wouldn’t be seen again for nearly a thousand years when the industrial revolution started in England.

Return to the Machines of Ancient China – Part 1 or to discover more intentions see Invented in China – Printing

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The Machines of Ancient China — Part 1/4

October 27, 2010

It is a common assumption in the West that we invented the machines that power our modern lifestyles.

However, new discoveries from ancient China are forcing us to rewrite history.

While Europe was mired in the so-called dark ages, ancient China ruled supreme as the world’s technological super power.

Now we are discovering that many of the inventions that have shaped our modern world had their roots in China’s ancient civilization.

There were complex geared machines that allowed production on an industrial scale such as precision seismographs that detected earthquakes, drilling machines that bored for natural gas hundreds of meters beneath the earth, or a super-scale Cosmic Engine that not only told the time but also predicted the passages of the planets and the stars.

 

Some of these technologies were so complex, they remained a mystery for centuries.

Two thousand year old books show in detail things that are still needed today — sixteen hundred years ahead of the West.

Another discovery from ancient China is still important – drilling for oil. We assume it was modern engineers that developed oil-drilling techniques.

In fact, the techniques used in gaining access to oil and natural gas were reinvented from what the Chinese had already invented two thousand years ago.

During the Song Dynasty (960 – 1276 AD), China’s innovations reached their peak. Inventers and engineers were creating machines that wouldn’t be seen in the West for another thousand years.

For example, in Shantung province, a recent discovery demonstrated the advanced metal forging abilities of ancient China – the remains of a giant cast iron pagoda built during the Song Dynasty.

To discover more inventions see Chinese Crossbow and other Inventions

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Maoism Alive

October 27, 2010

Caution—do not confuse Maoists with the Communist Party that currently rules China.

The Maoists in China want a return to the Cultural Revolution and pure socialism with no capitalism. Chinese Maoists consider the current leaders as traitors.

After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the Communist Party under Deng Xiaoping repudiated revolutionary Maoism and embarked on the path toward a socialist-capitalist economic model that has led to the prosperity in China today.

However, Maoism did not vanish. The Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM) was founded in 1984 and included the Communist Party of Peru (also known as the “Shining Path”).

Recently, the Chinese “Maoist” Communist Party thought they had a leader in Bo Xilai because of the crackdown on crime in Chongqing until Bo had thirty members of the Maoist Party arrested and locked up.  Source: Serve the People


China’s last Maoist village

Then there is the Maoist Communist Party of Nepal that formed a coalition government in Nepal in 2009, which collapsed a few months later as different rebel factions fought with each other. The Maoist’s goal was to turn Nepal into a Marxist Republic. Source: Nepal Assessment 2010

In India, there is an ongoing Naxalite-Maoist rebellion against the democratic government.

The Maoist influence in India comes from the lack of progress to end starvation among rural Indians, who have had no improvement in their lifestyles for decades. See: Naxalite-Maoist insurgency

In the US, the Black Panthers (1967) were a militant Maoist organization. In Paris in 1968, the National Liberation Front, another Maoist group, caused street combat.

Maoism, known as Mao Zedong thought, is a variant of Marxism derived from the teachings of the late Chinese leader Mao Zedong. 

Maoism was widely applied as the political and military guiding ideology in the Communist Party between 1949 and 1976, which led to the horrors of the Cultural Revolution.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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