“I see how great is your virtue, how admirable your vast achievements”, (Ellis, 2010, p. 92). The Ancient Chinese developed multiple inventions that have heavily influenced the modern world today. Some of those inventions include paper, gunpowder, and silk. The use of paper and gunpowder are more widely popular in the modern society today, while silk is not as widely used, but is still an important invention that has still heavily influenced our modern day society.
Paper is probably one of the most used inventions that was created by the Ancient Chinese. It was one of the greatest inventions of ancient China. Paper was invented during the Han Dynasty between 206 BC - 220 AD, and since it was such a great invention, it made its way to the Silk Road through all the trade. Traditionally, paper was made by an chinese imperial official named Cai Lun. He made the sheet of paper using mulberry, fishnets, old rags, hemp waste, and other bast fibres. Once it began to get into the Shang and Zhou dynasties, the Ancient Chinese would use bone or bamboo to write on, and a lot of their documents were written on
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During the Han dynasty, around 142 AD, a man named Wei Boyang was the first to come up with the idea of gunpowder. By 300 AD, a scientist named Ge hong wrote and explained the ingredients and explosion of gunpowder. It is a mixture of sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter. Potassium nitrate can also be replaced with saltpeter to make gunpowder. It was not until the Tang Dynasty, around 700 AD, when the real idea of using gunpowder was actually thought of. Emperors would put on extravagant displays of fireworks. By 904 AD, Chinese inventors realized that it is possible to use gunpowder, and use them with powerful weapons, such as rockets or cannons. By 1100 AD, other empires slowly began to learn the secret of gunpowder. Not long after that, the rest of Europe learned how to use gunpowder, (Carr, "Gunpowder from