Items8The creator’s order
  1. 1PaperPaperThe best-documented westward journey on this list, and a good lesson in legend versus evidence. Tradition credits the court official Cai Lun with paper in 105 CE, but fragments from Gansu are far older, reaching back to the 2nd century BCE. The famous story says Chinese prisoners taken at the…0
  2. 2SericultureSericultureSilk production Raising silkworms and reeling their cocoons began in China in the Neolithic period. Silk cloth traveled west for centuries before the know-how did, which is what makes the transfer so interesting. The technique moved in stages. It reached Khotan in the Tarim Basin by the first…0
  3. 3CompassCompassThe magnetic compass The first incontestable Chinese reference to a magnetized needle comes from Shen Kuo's Dream Pool Essays in 1088, written for geomancers rather than sailors. Within a few decades Zhu Yu's Pingzhou Table Talks, from 1111 to 1117, describes sailors who look at the south-pointing…0
  4. 4GunpowderGunpowderGunpowder began as a by-product of the search for an elixir of life. Tang-era Daoist texts give the earliest evidence, from 808 and about fifty years later, and the earliest chemical formula for gunpowder appears in the Wujing Zongyao, compiled by Zeng Gongliang between 1040 and 1044. Westward,…0
  5. 5TrebuchetTrebuchetThe traction trebuchet Before the famous counterweight machines of medieval castles came the traction trebuchet, a long throwing arm hauled down by a crew pulling on ropes. Its first recorded use is in ancient China, probably by the Mohists as early as the 4th century BCE, with descriptions in the…0
  6. 6PorcelainPorcelainPorcelain is the case where the objects traveled long before the method. Glazed stoneware had become porcelain by the Eastern Han dynasty, and by the late Sui and early Tang potters had achieved the whiteness and translucency the word now implies. By the 9th century Tang wares were being exported…0
  7. 7BanknoteBanknotePaper money The westward trip of paper money is documented almost to the year, and it ended badly. Notes called jiaozi began as a private merchant scheme in Chengdu under the Song, and after several issuers went bankrupt the government took over, founding an official note office in 1023. The Yuan…0
  8. 8Playing cardPlaying cardPlaying cards were most likely invented in Tang China around the 9th century, closely tied to woodblock printing, though whether they descend from the old "leaf" game described by the Song scholar Ouyang Xiu is disputed. The route west runs through Egypt. Cards were spreading across Asia by the…0