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Background reading · Social Sciences

Paper, printing, compass and gunpowder: ideas on the move

Four Chinese inventions travelled the trade routes and changed the world, carried by merchants, monks and travellers.

Goods were not the only things that travelled. Traders, monks and travellers carried languages, foods, beliefs and inventions. Some of those ideas changed life thousands of kilometres from where they began.

Four inventions

  • Paper: in 105 CE, a Han official called Cai Lun improved a way to make paper from bark, rags and old fishing nets. Paper-making reached Samarkand in the 700s, Baghdad soon after, and Europe hundreds of years later.
  • Printing: Chinese printers carved whole pages into wooden blocks. The Diamond Sutra, printed in 868 CE and found in a cave near Dunhuang, is the oldest dated printed book in the world. Around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg built a printing press in Germany.
  • Compass: Chinese scientists found that a magnetised needle points north and south. By about 1000 CE, sailors were using it to navigate when clouds hid the stars.
  • Gunpowder: Chinese alchemists mixed it by accident in the 800s while searching for medicines. It spread west and changed how wars were fought.

    • Monks and beliefs

    Buddhism travelled from India into China along the routes. The monk Xuanzang walked from China to India and back between 629 and 645 CE, crossing deserts and mountains, and returned with hundreds of Buddhist texts. Later, Islam and Christianity also spread along the roads.

    Two famous travellers

    Marco Polo left Venice in 1271 and spent about 17 years in China. His book made Europeans hungry for Asian goods, although some historians question parts of it. Ibn Battuta, a scholar from Morocco, set out in 1325 and travelled about 120,000 km across Africa, the Middle East, India and China.

    Not everything was welcome

    Trade routes also spread disease. In the 1340s the plague known as the Black Death moved along routes from Asia into Europe and killed a huge share of the population.

    Sources and further reading

    Written for Kōkiri Learn students in our own words. Check facts against the sources.

    Used in: Silk Roads and Sea Routes: When Worlds Trade