Classical China’s Gifts to the World

September 10, 2025

The “Four Great Inventions”: the compass, paper, printing, and gunpowder.

Sinologists speak of the “Four Great Inventions” of China. The infamous “one-child policy” is not one of them; that is a political contrivance of more recent times and is producing a demographic catastrophe (see The Ultimate Central Planning Nightmare).

The Four Great Inventions are the compass, paper, printing, and gunpowder. They date to ancient times, and their impact worldwide has been massive and largely, if not overwhelmingly, beneficial. In the early 17th century, the English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon credited modern Europe’s emergence to the adoption of three of them. Readers may recall that these inventions were celebrated prominently in the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Of the handful of books published on the subject in English, the most comprehensive one appeared in 2002 and is titled The Four Great Inventions of Ancient China: Their Origin, Development, Spread and Influence in the World. Its author, Pan Jixing, passed away in 2020 at the age of 89 after a long life of research into the scientific contributions of China. He was famous at home and abroad for his career at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. I draw liberally from his work in this article.

Did these inventions and their subsequent global influence come our way because of wise and generous government? Evidence in the affirmative is, at best, scant. Pan Jixing notes, “This could not have been done by any empire, religion, or great man in history.” The records strongly suggest that the inventions themselves derived, sometimes serendipitously, from the initiative of individuals—either in search of profit or to satisfy curiosities. Governments later adopted them to serve their own purposes which, in the case of gunpowder, were not always constructive. And it was commerce that introduced them to other parts of the world.

The Compass

Two small towns on Italy’s Amalfi Coast claim to be the birthplace of a mariner named Gioja who, each also claims, invented the compass in 1302. However, the scientist, mathematician, and historian Amir D. Aczel published The Riddle of the Compass: The Invention That Changed the World in 2001 in which he convincingly argued for an earlier Chinese origin. Alan Gurney’s 2005 book, Compass: A Story of Exploration and Innovation, suggests a Chinese origin as well, and quotes a 13th-century pre-Gioja source who referenced a compass in China. Europeans greatly improved the device but likely did not invent it.

Pan Jixing believed that the impetus for the invention of the compass in China came from two directions: trade with foreigners, which required directional knowledge; and geomancy, the pseudo-scientific art of interpreting geographical patterns.

For more than 2,000 years, people have known of the magnetic attributes of lodestone. Strike it a few times against a piece of iron, and you can magnetize the iron. Shape the iron into a slender needle, put it in a vessel of water, and it aligns itself with Earth’s magnetic field. Some version of that, without the water, was employed in parts of China to determine one’s location on land as long ago as 400 BC. We know that sometime in the 12th century AD, Chinese mariners used it at sea. Pan Jixing notes that European navigation by compass “was roughly 100 years later than Chinese.” Christopher Columbus used a compass to navigate during four transatlantic voyages.

No one disputes the difference the compass made in navigation. For guiding travelers, explorers, merchants, and sailors, it was revolutionary. This short video explains that significance.

Paper

When I taught college economics at Northwood University nearly 50 years ago, as many as 430 students per semester sat in my classes and took exams every three weeks. I’m grateful they didn’t have to chisel their answers on chunks of rock as in the (very) olden days, or I would have had to grade them on the spot or haul them home in a dump truck.

We can be grateful to the Chinese for inventing paper in the 2nd century BC. They did not use it at first for writing, but for wrapping and padding, according to Cambridge University scientist and China scholar Joseph Needham. In those early times, Chinese people wrote on animal skins, rocks, leaves, pottery, even the shoulder blades of oxen.

A eunuch named Cai Lun is credited with revolutionizing papermaking in 105 AD. He experimented with new materials such as hemp and mulberry bark that finally made paper useful for writing, and cheap as well, as explained in this short video.

Cai Lun’s improvements, writes Pan Jixing, constitute “an important milestone in the history of human civilization’s development.” It promoted the exchange of ideas and information so that people could “express what they think and what they want to say, record them on the writing materials, and transmit them to distant places and even to later generations.” Once Cai Lun’s work spurred the mass production of inexpensive paper, it was only a matter of time before books would appear. For a comprehensive look at papermaking and its transmission through trade from China to Europe, see Dard Hunter’s 2011 work on the topic.

The Chinese also invented paper money, around 1100 AD. It was issued privately at first and circulated as receipts for gold and silver, long before it was first used in Europe. The Chinese government was also the first state to manufacture unbacked “fiat” paper money and produce hyperinflation, long before the French became the first Europeans to destroy their paper money. Burned by the experience, China abandoned paper money in 1455 and did not return to it for centuries. Then in the 1930s and 1940s, the Chinese government created one of the most notable runaway paper money inflations in history.

Printing

Once you have cheap, mass-produced paper, all you need to mass-produce books, money, newspapers, and the like is a printing press. Without it, reproducing a text requires each copy to be tediously created by hand.

Most Westerners believe the German craftsman Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the mid-15th century. While Gutenberg’s movable-type press did allow for the fastest printing the world had yet seen, credit for the first printing press goes to China. People there used presses made of wood blocks for a thousand years until the 1040s, when a poor, self-taught rural peasant named Bi Sheng invented a movable-type machine that employed letters formed on hardened clay—400 years before Gutenberg.

Over the centuries, governments proved to be the greatest enemy of the printing press. Socialist and communist regimes and dictators of every stripe banned their private ownership because they represent an existential threat to government power. But that did not stop the spread of ideas and information. In my own pre-1989 travels to totalitarian countries, including the Soviet Union and Poland, I was amazed at the lengths to which people who loved freedom went in illegally printing whatever they wanted.

Gunpowder

Credit for the invention of gunpowder goes to Chinese alchemists around 850 AD. Historians are divided as to what those medieval experimenters were attempting to create: some say it was gold; others such as Pan Jixing say it was a substance that would grant immortality. In any event, one of them randomly combined saltpeter (potassium nitrate), sulfur, and charcoal and nearly blew himself up.

Word quickly spread about the new “fire drug” and the noise and light it produced. Refinements and adaptations led to crude rockets and fireworks that proved popular at festivals. By the early 10th century, the technology had advanced to military use in the form of the “gunpowder arrow.” Chinese troops attached small packages of the explosive stuff on arrows and shot them at their enemies, hoping it would catch fire on impact. They also made primitive bombs. (Having been a teenager once, I can relate to that.)

Historian Jack Kelly is the author of a very entertaining book titled Gunpowder: The History of the Explosive That Changed the World (2004). He writes:

A deeply rooted misconception in the West holds that the Chinese never used gunpowder for war, that they employed one of the most potent inventions in the history of mankind for idle entertainment and children’s whizbangs. This received wisdom is categorically false. The notion of China’s benign relationship with gunpowder sprang in part from Western prejudices about the Chinese character. Some viewed the Chinese as dilettantes who stumbled onto the secret of gunpowder but couldn’t envision its potential. Others saw them as pacifist sages who wisely turned away from its destructive possibilities.

In the 10th century, the Chinese were putting gunpowder in bamboo tubes, adding a few metallic pellets, and igniting them to propel the pellets at their enemies. They called them fire lances; we call them guns.

From China, traders and travelers in the 1200s brought gunpowder weapons to Europe via the Silk Road. Combat would never be the same again.

My colleague Katrina Gulliver, FEE’s Editorial Director, is working with me on a future e-book about Chinese history. I close with an observation from her about these four Chinese inventions:

While the Chinese may have given us the building blocks for much of what developed in the West (from our material of exchange: whether exchanging cash for goods or exchanging bullets), we should also note the smaller aspects of our lives that trace back to China. Silk, noodles, and even ice cream (definitely three “great inventions” in my view) all had their origins in China hundreds of years ago. This ingenuity and sophistication made China a source of fascination to Europe from the Middle Ages onwards, and few nations could claim such an influence on the pre-modern world. That they would later import one of Europe’s worst inventions, communism, is a tragic twist.