Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

4. Yong Yap and Arthur Cotterell, The Early Civilisation of China, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975, page 199.

5. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book, London: Verso, 1976, page 71.

6. The oldest samples of paper were discovered by Sir Aurel Stein in central Asia, in the stonework of an abandoned tower on the Great Wall which had been evacuated by the Chinese army in the mid-second century AD. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 72. Microscopic analysis revealed that the pages – letters written in Sogdian – were made solely from hemp. (Sogdiana was a central Asian kingdom near Samarkand, now modern Uzbekistan.) Paper thus spread rapidly. See Richard N. Frye, The Heritage of Central Asia: From Antiquity to the Turkish Expansion, Princeton, New Jersey, and London: Markus Wiener/ Princeton University Press, 1998, pages 151ff, for the Silk Road; pages 183ff, for the world of the Sogdians.

7. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., pages 72–73.

8. Gernet, Op. cit., page 332. For the intellectual effects of printing, see: Hucker, China’s Imperial Past, Op. cit., page 272. Wang Tao, personal communication, 28 June 2004.

9. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 75.

10. Gernet, Op. cit., page 335.

11. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 76.

12. Ibid.

13. Hucker, Op. cit., page 317. Curiously, the Europeans seemed singularly uninterested in what the East had to offer in this area. For example, the Mongols sent a number of xylographs with bright red seals printed on some messages to the kings of France and England, and to the pope, in 1289 and again in 1305, but no one in the West picked up on the new technique. Even Marco Polo, inveterate traveller and a man of normally extraordinary curiosity, marvelled at the banknotes he saw in China but seems not to have grasped that they had been printed from engraved woodblocks. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 76.

14. Yu-Kuang Chu, ‘The Chinese language’, in: John Meskill et al. (editors), An Introduction to Chinese Civilisation, New York: Columbia University Press, 1973, pages 588–590.

15. Ibid., page 592.

16. Ibid., page 593.

17. Ibid., page 595 and 612.

18. Ibid., pages 597–598.

19. Ibid., page 603. See Hucker, Op. cit., page 197, for a discussion of the difference between ‘new text’ and ‘old text’ Chinese writing, and the scholarship attached to old words.

20. Gernet, Op. cit., page 325.

21. Hansen, Op. cit., page 271. Among other things, paper money aided the development of the Chinese merchant navy which, at the time, was by far the largest in the world (see here).

22. Raymond Dawson, The Chinese Experience, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978, pages 181–182. Gernet, Op. cit., page 324.

23. A completely different set of innovations was introduced in China as a result of advances in ‘wet rice’ growing. From the sixth century on, the Chinese began the systematic selection of seeds so that, by the eleventh century, five hundred years later, yields had been dramatically improved and there were two harvests a year. Traditional keng (rice) had needed 120–150 days to ripen. But, by the turn of the eleventh century, an early-ripening and drought-resistant form had been evolved at Champa on the south coast of Vietnam. Although its yield was less, the fact that it ripened in sixty days solved many problems (fifty-day rice was developed in the sixteenth century and a forty-day variety in the eighteenth century). Early-ripening rice had a major impact on the population of China and meant that the country was able to meet its food needs more adequately than was possible in Europe during the same period. ‘It was precisely because of her more abundant food supply that China’s population began to increase relatively rapidly since the opening of the eleventh century, while the rapid growth of Europe had to wait till the late eighteenth century.’ Ho Ping-Ti, ‘Early-ripening rice,’ in James Liu and Peter Golas (editors), Change in Sung China, Lexington, Massachusetts: D. C. Heath and Co., 1969, pages 30–34. In association with the new form of rice, the crank gear, the harrow and the rice-field plough were all developed at this time. Probably the most effective piece of new technology was the chain with paddles (long guzhe), which allowed water to be lifted from one level to another by means of a crank gear. Hansen, Op. cit., page 265.

24. The wheelbarrow (the ‘wooden ox’), by means of which loads of 300 lb could be carried along narrow, winding paths, was invented in the third century.