chinese renaissance & influence in East & southeast asiaBasic themes of Chinese civilization underwent vital consolidation during the postclassical period. Although less fundamental innovation occurred than in the Middle East, the Americas, and Europe, important developments took place in technology. Political turmoil followed the fall of the Han, and the empire’s bureaucratic apparatus collapsed. The scholar-gentry class lost ground to landed families. Non-Chinese nomads ruled much of China, and a foreign religion, Buddhism, replaced Confucianism as a primary force in cultural and political life. There was economic, technological, intellectual, and urban decline. New dynasties, the Sui and Tang, from the end of the 6th century brought a restoration of Chinese civilization.
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Su Sung's clock was possibly the greatest mechanical achievement of the Middle Ages anywhere on the globe, and knowledge of its principles spreading to Europe led to the development of mechanical clocks in the West two centuries later.
The Chinese did not invent the first clock of any kind, merely the first mechanical one. Water clocks had existed since Babylonian times, & the earliest Chinese got them indirectly from that earlier civilization of the Middle East, just as they got much of their earliest forms of astronomy from them. The Chinese certainly did invent improved water clocks of various kinds, including a 'stop-watch' portable one which used mercury rather than water and measured small periods of time. It used weighted balances, or steelyards, rather than just a rising indicator in a bucket as water flowed in and buoyed it up. But these were improvements of an invention which was not originally Chinese. Nor did the Chinese invent the clock dial. That was an invention of either the Greeks or the Romans, and is mentioned by the architectural writer Vitruvius, 1st century BCE. |
Su-Sung's clock was stolen when invading Tatars put an end to the Sung dynasty in 1126. The Tatars weren't able to get it running again, and the high art of Chinese clock-making completely disappeared. But even before the Tatar invasion, Taoistic reformers had come into power. They saw fancy clock-building as part of the older regime and did little to sustain it. Su-Sung's book on the operation of his clock didn't surface in the West until the 17th century.
The peoples on China’s borders naturally emulated their great neighbor. Japan borrowed heavily from China during the 5th and 6th centuries when it began forming its own civilization. To the north and west of China, nomadic peoples and Tibet also received influence. Vietnam and Korea were part of the Chinese sphere by the last centuries b.c.e. The agrarian societies of Japan, Korea, and Vietnam blended Chinese influences with their indigenous cultures to produce distinctive patterns of civilized development. In all three regions, Buddhism was a key force in transmitting Chinese civilization.
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CH 14 Overview Notes Very Beneficial
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