Doing Business in China

What are four great ancient Chinese inventions

China is located in Asia. It has the oldest surviving civilization in the world. Ancient China began between 500,000 and 5000 years ago. The first villages were built about 5000 years ago. No single date marks the end of Ancient China.
 
The Chinese have many ancient inventions. The great four ancient Chinese inventions are compass,gunpowder,papermaking,printing.

Compass

The earliest reference to magnetism in Chinese literature is found in a 4th century BC book called Book of the Devil Valley Master (???): "The lodestone makes iron come or it attracts it."

The earliest reference to a magnetic device used as a "direction finder" is in a Song Dynasty book dated to AD 1040-44. Here there is a description of an iron "south-pointing fish" floating in a bowl of water, aligning itself to the south. The device is recommended as a means of orientation "in the obscurity of the night."However, the first suspended magnetic needle compass was written of by Shen Kuo in his book of AD 1088.

For most of Chinese history, the compass that remained in use was in the form of a magnetic needle floating in a bowl of water.[11] According to Needham, the Chinese in the Song Dynasty and continuing Yuan Dynasty did make use of a dry compass, although this type never became as widely used in China as the wet compass.

Gunpowder
 
The prevailing academic consensus is that gunpowder was discovered in the 9th century by Chinese alchemists searching for an elixir of immortality.[14] By the time the Song Dynasty treatise, Wujing Zongyao (????), was written by Zeng Gongliang and Yang Weide in AD 1044, the various Chinese formulas for gunpowder held levels of nitrate in the range of 27% to 50%.[15] By the end of the 12th century, Chinese formulas of gunpowder had a level of nitrate capable of bursting through cast iron metal containers, in the form of the earliest hollow, gunpowder-filled grenade bombs.

Papermaking
 
Papermaking has traditionally been traced to China about AD 105, when Cai Lun, an official attached to the Imperial court during the Han Dynasty (202 BC-AD 220), created a sheet of paper using mulberry and other bast fibres along with fishnets, old rags, and hemp waste.[19] However a recent archaeological discovery has been reported from near Dunhuang of paper with writing on it dating to 8 BC.[20]

Printing

The Chinese invention of Woodblock printing, at some point before the first dated book in 868 (the Diamond Sutra), produced the world's first print culture. According to A. Hyatt Mayor, curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "it was the Chinese who really discovered the means of communication that was to dominate until our age."Woodblock printing was better suited to Chinese characters than movable type, which the Chinese also invented, but which did not replace woodblock printing. Western printing presses, although introduced in the 16th century, were not widely used in China until the 19th century. China, along with Korea, was one of the last countries to adopt them.
 
The intricate frontispiece of the Diamond Sutra from Tang Dynasty China, AD 868 (British Museum)Woodblock printing for textiles, on the other hand, preceded text printing by centuries in all cultures, and is first found in China at around 220,then Egypt in the 4th century,[27] and reached Europe by the 14th century or before, via the Islamic world, and by around 1400 was being used on paper for old master prints and playing cards.