China has oceans to her east, steppes and deserts to her north and northwest, and mountains and jungles to her west and south. She has long seemed to be an outstanding example of isolation. Yet the Chinese succeeded long ago in breaking through these geographic barriers and opening trade routes to link their country with the outside world. As long as hundreds of years ago, materials and inventions and ideas traveled between China and the civilizations of India, Persia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Throughout the Middle Ages contact between China and the countries of Europe continued. In modern times the contact has increased. China has never been as isolated as we have often assumed.
The earliest of the trade routes between China and the outside world was a route for caravans. It led overland from Northwest China across the deserts of Central Asia (Turkestan), through Persia, and on to the shores of the eastern Mediterranean. From Central Asia, a branch which passed southward through Afghanistan, linked China with India. It is the route westward to the Mediterranean, however, with which we are here concerned. The Chinese conquest of Turkestan in the first century B.C. made it possible for caravans to carry goods over this road between China and the Mediterranean. Until 500 years ago it was the most important line of contact between China and the rest of the world. Over it passed many travelers, among them Marco Polo when he journeyed from Europe to reach China in the year 1275.
The second major trade route was the southern sea route by way of India. At its western end the route began either at the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf. It went south and then east across the Indian Ocean to India and Ceylon, from there around the tip of Malaysia past the present Singapore, and up along the coast of Indo-China to Canton and other southern Chinese ports. The Chinese end of this route was opened in the second century A.D., but did not attain real importance until the coming of Arab ships to the Far East in the seventh century. In still later times the Chinese replaced the Arabs as the main seafarers between China and India. They developed the sea route so that it rivaled and at times even surpassed the overland road by caravan. When the Portuguese, Dutch, English, and others came to China from the sixteenth century on, this sea route became the main road to the East. Trade on the overland route declined. Ships had proven superior to camels as carriers of trade.
A third route approached China from the ocean side — across the Pacific Ocean by way of the Americas. This route became very important in the nineteenth century after the United States gained its independence. With the development of the New England clipper-ship trade with China, the route became as important as the older Indian Ocean route. Trade lines across the Pacific are in modern times a prime factor in the close and friendly relations between the United States and China.
For more than two thousand years, goods and ideas have been carried between China and the Western world by these three routes. China has contributed much to the Western world, and Europe and America to China. The story to be told here deals only with the gifts from China to the West. These contributions have influenced very greatly the development of Western civilization. For the two thousand years between 200 B.C. and A.D. 1800, China gave to the West more than she received in return.
It is difficult for the historian to trace in detail the path of ideas from one region to another. It is easier to trace the route of material things as they pass from one center of civilization to another. China has given many ideas and ideals to the rest of the world; she has also given certain material goods or inventions or discoveries — silk, porcelain, tea, paper, printing, gunpowder, the compass, lacquer, medicines, plants, kites, playing cards, to mention only a few. The story of how these material gifts reached the Western world from China is a fascinating one. It is that story that this pamphlet tells.
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