>>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.