Ancient Chinese Contributions

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Ancient Chinese Contributions World Cultures March 3, 2013 In today’s society we take a lot of things for advantage. It’s easy to forget about those before our time who made it so easy for us to glide through life as effortlessly as possible. The Ancient Chinese culture quite possibly has made the most significant contributions to the lifestyles we live. The Ancient Chinese are responsible for many great inventions that are still widely used in today’s society. For example, the Ancient Chinese invented alcohol during the Xia Dynasty. Regular beer that had an alcoholic content of 4-5% was regularly consumed in China. The Chinese also realized that adding more cooked grain in the water during the fermentation process increased the alcoholic content of the drink. The Zhou Dynasty references drinks that had an alcoholic content of 11% or more (Liyao, 2011). Furthermore, the Ancient Chinese also invented the mechanical clock. Yi Xing, a Buddhist monk and mathematician of the Tang Dynasty, is credited with this invention. The clock worked by having water drip steadily on a wheel that made a full turn every 24 hours. The modern clock that we use today was created in the Song Dynasty by Su Song several hundreds of years later (Liyao, 2011). In addition, the Ancient Chinese also were the first people to learn how to harvest silk and use it in clothing and paper. The oldest silk discovered dates to around 3.630 BC and came from the Chinese Neolithic period. Silk was not just an important invention for life but it also was a bridge that connected China to the world. The Silk Road is over 2000 years old and it is still an important path for cultural, commercial, and technological exchanges that occur between the East and West (Liyao, 2011). Also, archaeological evidence confirms that iron was developed
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