An elixir of immortality, a garbage-fused sheet and a feathered display of power. Can you match each one to three of China's most famous inventions? The 'what' and the 'when' may not surprise you, but the 'how' certainly will.

1)  Paper

Convenient, useful and cheap, paper is one of China's Four Great Inventions. Before paper, anyone who wanted to record an event in China had the option of using bone, bamboo or silk. Bone and bamboo were far too cumbersome or heavy to be useful (imagine writing a contract on the side of a tree—in triplicate please!) and silk was too expensive to be useful. So around 200 BCE or earlier, someone in China (we don't know who exactly) discovered how to mash plants together and dry them out to make an absorbent, flexible and easy to make sheet. And just like that, human civilization took a huge leap.

The weird part? The original formula for paper used garbage.

What gives paper its flexibility is that paper is made up of millions of fibres. Where the fibres themselves come from doesn't really matter. The ingenious Cai Lun wrote a treatise on the process, which describes how torn rags, old clothing, used fishing nets, plant refuse and hair can all be mashed together and dried out to make thin and absorbent sheets. And voila! Toilet paper was born.

Of course as the art was perfected and specialised trees were bred in later years, the use of the litter bin as raw material died out. However it takes a fair bit of genius to go from dirty rags and back-hair to the major medium of communication for the last thousand years. For this, Cai Lun deserves a collective tip of our hats.

2)  Fireworks

Your kids love them, your landlord hates them and in China you can't escape from them. Fireworks have been a part of Chinese culture for more than a thousand years, sending bright colours and wonderful explosions all throughout the streets. Where many countries have worked hard to keep these small, colourful explosives out of the hands of regular people, the Chinese happily blast away at every chance they can get, filling the world with colour and light at every possible chance.

The weird part? Fireworks came before proper gunpowder, making it the ancestor of the modern world's most effective way of killing people.

The formula for gunpowder was created by Chinese alchemists who were trying to find an elixir of immortality, in the hopes that the Emperor and other powerful figures could live forever. What they got instead was a mixture of nitrates and sulphur that burns very quickly when you set it on fire. Eventually these alchemists, having completely failed in this task, passed off this strange dirt as a way to scare off evil spirits—and the Chinese people took to it rather quickly. Mixing the powder with various different elements produced different coloured smokes and fires, and with a bit of experimenting came the dazzling displays that Chinese festivals are known for today.

However with time, different alchemists figured out that increasing the level of nitrates leads to a hotter and faster explosion, eventually giving this humble little powder the strength to send an iron ball out of a tube—the first cannon and the start of 800 years of more efficient ways to slaughter the enemy.

3)  Fans

From the decorated display of folding flowers of the Japanese geishas to the Chinese "fan dance", the humble little fan has become a part of the Asian costume. Be it in novelty shops or musty museums, the fan is ever present and has more uses than keeping yourself cool on hot days.

The weird part? How important the fan actually was.

The fan was first created in China and consisted of large feathers attached to a stick. It was carried only by important people (e.g. Zhuge Liang, one of the greatest strategists in Chinese history, often depicted holding a fan of crane feathers) as fans were rather time consuming to make. Through trade and a few episodes of gift giving, the fan found its way to Japan where the folding paper fan was invented, quickly becoming the Pokemon of 11th Century Asia.

Cheaper and easier to make than the feather fan, yet just as graceful and delicate, the paper fan become an indispensable tool for fashion-conscious women of the day. Any woman worth knowing had her own hand crafted paper fan, which was often decorated with personal symbols and poems. The truly couture fans were made of rare woods, ivory or even jade, and were just as much as symbol of power as they were a symbol of beauty.

The folding fan was reintroduced to China during the Ming Dynasty, where it was an even bigger hit than in Japan. Chinese women also took up the fan as a feminine art, with many strict rules of etiquette governing their use. In time they became a vital part of court intrigue—fans containing hollow spaces for daggers or poison have been discovered, and the Iron Fan became a weapon in its own right used for parrying swords. 

Yet for all of these uses, and its importance in Asian societies, the fan is useless for actually keeping you cool, as the energy used to wave it actually makes you warmer.
 

Related links
Top 10 Urban Innovations, Chinese-Style
Chinese Scientific Breakthroughs: Leprosy, Blood from Rice and More
How Well Do You Know China? Trivia Tidbits about the Middle Kingdom

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Keywords: history Chinese inventions trivia about inventions truths about Chinese items paper China fireworks China China’s famous inventions