Thread 17929081

>700AD
>China looks like this
>Westerners living in thatch huts while last remnants of civilization are being ass fucked by rando tribes.
How did China not conquer the world? They were basically 1000 years ahead of the west at the time in terms of governance and technology.

>>17929081 (OP)
>>G*rms living in thatch huts
Fixed

The only good expansion route was by sea but chinks didn't really need anything from abroad besides shit they'd get as tribute anyway. As for why they didn't blaze ahead technologically it must've been the downside of their literati class dominance. They only cared for the artsy gentleman's crafts like poetry, calligraphy, music, painting and shitting out quotes by the Confucian sages.

>>17929081 (OP)
Multiple giant fuck of mountain ranges between China and the world.

>>17929081 (OP)
>They were basically 1000 years ahead
The further back you go in history the less this actually matters. Technological gap between civilizations is a relatively recent thing.

>>17929081 (OP)
>They were basically 1000 years ahead of the west at the time in terms of governance and technology.
The Tang weren't particularly ahead of the Romans at all in either of those.

China were at 1500 in 200 and were at 1500 in 1900.
Same way Japan was in 2000 in 1985 and are in 2000 in 2025.

Because Wuslop was not reality. China was behind in many ways, they lacked Euclidean geometry, the Archimedean screw, chainmail, greek fire, Roman concrete. People point to paper, kites and the blast furnace, but even the blast furnace is of limited utility compared to the bloomery furnace, which produces steel not pig iron.

If they were literally 1000 years ahead, this would place them in the 1700 with Isaac Newton and the steam engine, it would place them at about the time Jesuits taught them said Euclidean geometry, which was rejected later with the Qing returning to isolationism.

>>17929081 (OP)
From chinese pov they basically held all places of relevance. What were they going to conquer? Nomadic wastelands? Ocean? Deserts?

>>17929081 (OP)
oh great the chink spammers have found /his/

>>17929772
have a discussion about china (or say anything positive about the nation) and people come out of the woodwork to call you a "wumao shill"

>>17929081 (OP)
the reason white people conquered the world was darwinistic competition between many different countries plus the civilization the west built up during the middle ages that surpassed the rest of the world in most metrics. also western eurasian geography is much more stressful and competitive than eastern eurasia.

>>17929081 (OP)
Damn, China looks like the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland????

>>17929201
In what world do you think blast furnaces are of limited utility? The chinese had finery forges to process the not inconsiderable amount of pig iron they produced into wrought iron which was then processed into steel since the 3rd century bc. With a blast furnace you are getting much more yield and purer iron than any bloomery furnace could pull out of ore. By the Tang the gap is arguably pretty big as by that point they already have gunpowder and astronomical clocks. They may have not had euclidean geometry but they did have the 9 chapters which discussed geometry and systems of equations and gaussian elimination. Rome didnt really even have a true number system. You could do math with it but it wasnt particularly great. Admittedly chinese numerals werent great either but rod numerals are far more applicable to math than roman numerals because they are a positional numeral system. Ultimately it would be the indian numerals that came out on top cause it was easier to write with.

>>17930444
Finery forges are not particularly effective at removing impurities like phosphorous. It wouldn't be until the industrial revolution and modern science that they could do so, it was then that the blast furnace took off elsewhere. Until then the blast furnace's advantages were limited relative to a bloomery furnace, and it varied depending on local resources. Bloomeries were also built on a large scale complete with water powered bellows and adjacent finery forges, metalsmiths deliberately avoided fully melting the ore since they could pick out the high quality steel from the resulting bloom and reprocess the low quality iron, which they could not were it melted together. The idea the blast furnace was some kind of pivotal advance is a misconception.

Euclid and Archimedes together pretty much cover everything in the Nine Chapters and more. It is telling that the Chinese depended on Muslim astronomers until the Jesuits arrived and predicted an eclipse with far greater accuracy using renaissance era astronomy. The Muslims could have told them about Euclid's elements, but apparently never once did they ask, or perhaps the Muslims kept it a secret. In any case the Jesuits sought to translate everything into Chinese, yet were evicted anyway.

China produced many unique innovations, paper, gunpowder, leeboards, kites, but literally 1000 years in advance? Not really.

>>17930676
It wouldn't be until the industrial revolution and modern science that they, ie. metallurgists, could do so, rather.

You really think that's what the average location in China looked like at the time? Chinamen were living in poor, undeveloped villages up until the 2000's.

>>17930676
I agree that the OP's 1000 years in advance is pretty ridiculous. I think people generally underestimate what smart cookies people were back then. I know quite a bit of people refer to the antikythera mechanism in these kinds of comparisons a lot but even that wasnt 1000 years ahead (sundial calenders, ciceros orrery, and zhang hengs armillary sphere are pretty comparable).You talk of the bloomeries with water powered bellows, I would be interested to know more about that. As far as i recall, furnaces with hydraulically powered bellows only existed in the han empire at the time of rome. I study both empires in my free time. Also I would disagree with the blast furnace not being a pivotal advance. The economies of scale you could achieve with them made them worth it which is why bloomeries were all but abandoned in china past the 3rd century bc. A han blast furnace could have around 100-200 convicts working them and produce hundreds of tons of iron per furnace per year. Most would be pretty crap iron for warfare but more good enough to support agriculture and salt boiling Industries. I mostly mentioned the 9 chapters as a counter to the notion they had no math but I concede that their mathematics were not as robust as what you could get from MENA at the time. During the song they did not rely on external mathematics but by the ming it seems they lost a lot of progress they made with Shen Kuo.Hydraulic infrastructure is their mastercraft imo.

>>17930776
I dont think OP implied the average place looked like that, just that places like that existed. Even rome at its zenith only had an urbanization rate of around 30 percent and that was ridiculously high for antiquity.

>>17929081 (OP)
Most chinese lived in huts too. They still do, actually. Cities were for the middle and upper classes. There wasn't anything particularly impressive about them either. In what way were they ahead? Chinese were absolutely awful at governance. Utterly incompetent. The region was in permanent state of instability. There was always some sort of war, revolt or famine. Rome went from republic to empire, while China at the same time swapped between dozens of different countries and dynasties. Eventually they got raped and buckbroken by mongols and never truly recovered from it.

>>17929081 (OP)
The Chinese used the exact same building process to build their houses, except instead of limewash they used rice paper.

>>17930291
>why tho

>>17930315
>Damn, China looks like the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland????
You know how Chinese students copy their teachers exactly (and also each other's homework). That's how they think you "master" something, it's all about doing the right moves. That's China as a country where they copy Disneyland and create a cheaper version and that at least goes back to knockoff porcelain in the 17th century. Here's their Halloween stuff:
https://youtu.be/T-VpijW6qtI

But they don't view it as bad though. Chang studies from the master.

>>17929201
How is roman concrete superior to chinese building methods