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For several thousand years, tea—made by letting tea leaves steep in boiling water—was drunk mostly as medicine. However, by the 8th century C.E., tea had become a hugely popular everyday beverage throughout China. Tea houses had sprung up throughout the country.
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Your compass
is a magnetized needle that aligns itself with Earth’s magnetic poles so that one end points north and the other south. By the Song dynasty, the Chinese were using this type of compass to help them navigate on long voyages.People still use the same kind of device today. -
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The Chinese first made steel, a very useful metal, before 200 B.C.E . Steel is made from iron, but it is less brittle than iron and easier to bend into different shapes.
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Porcelain Another Chinese invention is a type of fine pottery called porcelain. Some historians think that the Chinese produced the first porcelain as early as the 1st century C.E.
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The Chinese invented the art of papermaking by the second century C.E. The earliest Chinese paper was
probably made from hemp and then the bark of the mulberry tree. Later, the Chinese used rags. -
The invention of paper made another key
development possible: printing. In about the 7th century,
the Chinese invented a technique called woodblock
printing. The printer first drew characters (symbols) on
paper. He then glued the paper to a wooden block. When
the glue was dry, the printer carved out the wood around
the characters, leaving the characters raised on the wood. -
The Chinese developed the first mechanical clock in about the 8th
century. The new clock was more accurate than earlier timekeeping devices, such as sundials and hourglasses. The
Chinese devised a wheel that made one complete turn every 24 hours. -
Rocket technology was developed in China during the Song dynasty. Rockets were powered by a black powder made of saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur. At first, rockets were used only in fireworks. Later, the Chinese used them as weapons. They even developed a two-stage rocket for their armies. The first stage propelled the rocket through the air. The second stage dropped arrows down on the enemy.
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Movable type consists
of separate blocks for each character. Printers made their
type by carving characters out of clay and baking them.
To print, they selected the characters they needed and
placed them in an iron frame in the order they would
appear on the page. When the printing job was done, the
type could be removed from the frame and rearranged to use again
