Karl Marx's Camel
15th July 2006, 20:07
China's "ahead of time" achievements...
In the late eleventh century two arms-production works alone employed over 8,000 workers and made 32,000 swords and suits of armour a year. Another special bow-and-arrow works made over 16 million bows, arrows and steel arrowheads every year. By 1160 central arms production was over 3.2 million weapons a year (production in provincial factories was additional to this figure).
As early as the eight century Liu Yen, the commissioner for salt and iron under T'ang, had over 2,000 boats built for service on the Yangtze alone. Each could carry about ten tons of cargo and in total they were equivalent to a third of the total British merchant fleet a thousand years later. When Marco Polo visited China in the late thirteenth century (after a period of very destructive warfare) he found over 5,000 ships afloat in Yangtze at the one port of I-ching and learnt that there were similarly vast numbers in the other 200 ports.
Source: WORLD HISTORY: A NEW PERSPECTIVE by Clive Pointing.
Other interesting ahead-of-time achievements?
In the late eleventh century two arms-production works alone employed over 8,000 workers and made 32,000 swords and suits of armour a year. Another special bow-and-arrow works made over 16 million bows, arrows and steel arrowheads every year. By 1160 central arms production was over 3.2 million weapons a year (production in provincial factories was additional to this figure).
As early as the eight century Liu Yen, the commissioner for salt and iron under T'ang, had over 2,000 boats built for service on the Yangtze alone. Each could carry about ten tons of cargo and in total they were equivalent to a third of the total British merchant fleet a thousand years later. When Marco Polo visited China in the late thirteenth century (after a period of very destructive warfare) he found over 5,000 ships afloat in Yangtze at the one port of I-ching and learnt that there were similarly vast numbers in the other 200 ports.
Source: WORLD HISTORY: A NEW PERSPECTIVE by Clive Pointing.
Other interesting ahead-of-time achievements?