Riding the Iron Rooster

They still make grandfather clocks—the chain-driven mechanical kind that go tick-tock and bong! Is this interesting? I think it is, because the Chinese invented the world's first mechanical clock in the late Tang Dynasty. Like many other Chinese inventions, they forgot about it, lost the idea, and the clock was reintroduced to China from Europe. The Chinese were the first to make cast iron, and soon after invented the iron plow. Chinese metallurgists were the first to make steel ("great iron"). The Chinese invented the crossbow in the fourth century B.C. and were still using it in 1895. They were the first to notice that all snowflakes have six sides. They invented the umbrella, the seismograph, phosphorescent paint, the spinning wheel, sliding calipers, porcelain, the magic lantern (or zoetrope) and the stink bomb (one recipe called for fifteen pounds of human shit, as well as arsenic, wolfsbane and cantharides beetles). They invented the chain pump in the first century A.D. and are still using it. They made the first kite, 2000 years before one was flown in Europe. They invented movable type and devised the first printed book—the Buddhist text, the Diamond Sutra in the year 868. They had printing presses in the eleventh century, and there is clear evidence that Gutenberg got his technology from the Portuguese who in turn had learned it from the Chinese. They constructed the first suspension bridge and the first bridge with a segmented arch (this first one, built in 610 is still in use). They invented playing cards, fishing reels and whiskey.

In the year 1192, a Chinese man jumped from a minaret in Canton (Guangzhou) using a parachute, but the Chinese had been experimenting with parachutes since the second century B.C. Gao Yang (reigned 550–559) tested "man-flying kites"—an early form of hang glider—by throwing condemned prisoners from a tall tower, clinging to bamboo contraptions; one flew for two miles before crash landing. The Chinese were the first sailors in the world to use rudders; Westerners relied on steering oars until they borrowed the rudder from the Chinese in about 1100. Every schoolboy knows that the Chinese invented paper money, fireworks and lacquer. They were also the first people in the world to use wallpaper (French missionaries brought the wallpaper idea to Europe from China in the sixteenth century). They went mad with paper. An excavation in Turfan yielded a paper hat, a paper belt and a paper shoe, from the fifth century A.D. I have already mentioned toilet paper. They also made curtains and military armor of paper—its pleats made it impervious to arrows. Paper was not manufactured until the twelfth century in Europe, about 1200 years after its invention in China. They made the first wheelbarrows, and some of the best Chinese wheelbarrow designs have yet to be used in the West. There is much more. When Professor Needham's Science and Civilization in China is complete it will run to twenty-five volumes.

It was the Chinese who came up with the first design of the steam engine in about A.D. 600. And the Datong Locomotive Works is the last factory in the world that still manufactures steam locomotives. China makes big, black choo-choo trains, and not only that—no part of the factory is automated. Everything is handmade, hammered out of iron, from the huge boilers to the little brass whistles. China had always imported its steam locomotives—first from Britain, then from Germany, Japan and Russia. In the late 1950s, with Soviet help, the Chinese built this factory in Datong, and the first locomotive was produced there in 1959. There are now 9000 workers, turning out three or four engines a month, what is essentially a nineteenth-century vehicle, with a few refinements. Like the spittoons, the sewing machines, the washboards, the yokes and the plows, these steam engines are built to last. They are the primary means of power in Chinese railways at the moment, and although there is an official plan to phase them out by the year 2000, the Datong Locomotive Works will remain in business. All over the world, sentimental steam railway enthusiasts are using Chinese steam engines, and in some countries—like Thailand and Pakistan—most trains are hauled by Datong engines. There is nothing Chinese about them, though. They are the same gasping locomotives I saw shunting in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1948, when I stood by the tracks and wished I was on them.