ANTIQUES.(China had a highly advanced civilization centuries before medieval Europe, but it withdrew into isolation in the 16th and 17th centuries)(Brief Article)

The Chinese do habitually call and consider Europeans "barbarians"; meaning by that term "peoples in a rude, uncivilized state, morally and intellectually uncultivated"....Those Chinese who have had direct opportunities of learning something of our customs and culture... mostly consider us beneath their nation in moral and intellectual cultivation....They are always surprised, not to say astonished, to learn that we have surnames, and understand the family distinctions of father, brother, wife, sister, etc.; in short, that we live otherwise than as a herd of cattle.

Thomas Taylor Meadows, Shangae Almanac for 1854

When Francis Bacon remarked around 1620 that the world was being made over by printing, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass, he did not mention that all three had appeared first in China. Nowadays it is generally conceded that eleventh-century China was at a level of economic development not achieved by any European state until at least the eighteenth century. The paradox that haunts Chinese patriots today is why the country has lagged so far behind in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

China was not only the equal of the Roman Empire but far ahead of medieval Europe. Between the eighth and the twelfth centuries the country was transformed by improved methods of rice cultivation, the creation of an integrated system of waterways, advances in shipbuilding that included watertight bulkheads, the use of copper money, and the availability of credit.

A century before Columbus and his fellow Europeans began to make their way to the new world, fleets of giant Chinese junks carried porcelains, lacquerware, copper coins, and silks far and wide. Seven epic expeditions between 1405 and 1433 took the Chinese treasure ships to the Spice Islands of Indonesia and the Malabar Coast of India and on to the ...