四大发明是谁说的？

English (for the teacher)

Ask a Chinese child, “What are the four great inventions of ancient China?” They will probably answer at once: “Papermaking, printing, gunpowder and the compass!” These four are in every history textbook, and almost everyone can recite them. But few people know that the idea of the “Four Great Inventions” first grew out of something an Englishman wrote.

Over four hundred years ago, the English philosopher Francis Bacon wrote that three inventions, printing, gunpowder and the magnet, had changed the face of the whole world. The interesting part is that Bacon had no clear idea where they came from. Later, Western scholars found that all three first appeared in China, added papermaking, and that is how the idea of the “Four Great Inventions” was born. In the twentieth century the British scholar Joseph Needham wrote books on the science of ancient China, and the idea spread even further.

Paper first. Textbooks often say that Cai Lun of the Eastern Han invented paper in the year 105. In fact, archaeologists have found paper several hundred years older than him. Cai Lun's real achievement was making cheap, practical paper from tree bark, rags and old fishing nets. From then on, people no longer had to write on heavy, bulky bamboo slips.

Printing also came in two steps. At first, people carved a whole page of characters onto a wooden block, brushed it with ink and pressed it onto paper; the oldest dated printed book we can still see today is the Diamond Sutra of 868. In the Northern Song, an ordinary man called Bi Sheng thought of a cleverer way: make every character a separate piece of clay, fire it hard, set whatever characters you need, and after printing lift the characters out to use again. We know almost nothing about his life; his name survives only because the scientist Shen Kuo mentioned him in a book.

The story of gunpowder is even better. In the Tang dynasty some Taoist priests were trying to brew a medicine that would let you live forever; they never managed it, but they did brew up something that burst into flames as soon as it touched fire. That's why its Chinese name, 火药, “fire medicine”, still has the word for medicine in it. The compass wasn't for sailing at first either: over two thousand years ago people shaped lodestone into a spoon and used it for fortune-telling and feng shui; only in the Song did magnetic needles go on board ships, helping sailors find their way at sea.

Of course, some Chinese scholars think naming just these four isn't fair: ancient China's achievements in farming, medicine, astronomy and mathematics may have mattered even more to Chinese people's own lives. Still, these four really did leave China and spread across the world. Today you can find traces of them in the book in your hands and in the fireworks over the New Year sky.