Four Great Inventions of ancient China
| Four Great Inventions | |||||||||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 四大發明 | ||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | 四大发明 | ||||||||||||||
| Literal meaning | four great inventions | ||||||||||||||
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| Transcriptions | |
|---|---|
| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | sì dà fā míng |
| Wade–Giles | ssu⁴ ta⁴ fa¹ ming² |
| Yue: Cantonese | |
| Yale Romanization | sei³ daai⁶ faat³ ming⁴ |
| Jyutping | sei³ daai⁶ faat³ ming⁴ |
The Four Great Inventions (simplified Chinese: 四大发明; traditional Chinese: 四大發明) are inventions from ancient China that are celebrated in Chinese culture for their historical significance and as symbols of ancient China's advanced science and technology.
The Four Great Inventions are:
These four discoveries had a large impact on the development of civilization throughout the world. However, some modern Chinese scholars have opined that other Chinese inventions were perhaps more sophisticated and had a greater impact on Chinese civilization – the Four Great Inventions serve merely to highlight the technological interaction between East and West.
Although Chinese culture is replete with lists of significant works or achievements (e.g. Four Great Beauties, Four Great Books of Song, Four Great Classical Novels, Four Books and Five Classics, Five Elders, Three Hundred Tang Poems, etc.), the concept of the Four Great Inventions originated from the West, and is adapted from the European intellectual and rhetorical commonplace of the Three Great (or, more properly, Greatest) Inventions. This commonplace spread rapidly throughout Europe in the 16th century and was appropriated only in recent times by Chinese scholars. The origin of the Three Great Inventions—these being the printing press, firearms, and the nautical compass—was originally ascribed to Europe, and specifically to Germany in the case of the printing press and firearms. These inventions were a badge of honor to modern Europeans, who proclaimed that there was nothing to equal them among the ancient Greeks and Romans. After reports by Portuguese sailors and Spanish missionaries began to filter back to Europe beginning in the 1530s, the notion that these inventions had existed for centuries in China took hold. By 1620, when Francis Bacon wrote in his Instauratio magna that "printing, gunpowder, and the nautical compass . . . have altered the face and state of the world: first, in literary matters; second, in warfare; third, in navigation," this was hardly an original idea to most learned Europeans.
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