Was China really that far ahead of everyone else in the past?

[Common Soldier]

After doing my research on the Zheng He Treasure Ships,and finding claims for their enormous sizds rather exaggerated, I am finding a lot of other claims for the Chinese also exaggerated or just plain incorrect. There seems to be an industry running around saying how great the Chinese werez but when you examine the facts closely. The achievements and claims are not as great as it seems. Also, you have to counterbalance the Chinese achievements with the things they did not achieve to arrive at a true assessment of what the Chinese achieved.


For example, we see a lot of how the Chinese were the first to record sunspots and such things before everyone else. But those discoveries have to be balanced with the fact that alone among their peers in Old World civilizations, only the Chinese persisted in a belief rhe earth was not a sphere but flat. And even in the Dark Agesz when European Civilization was at its lowest, the Venerable Need knew things that the Chinese at their peak never discovered. Unlike the Chinese, Bede understood why length of daylight changed with the seasons, and the relationship of the moon with the tides. Knowing the Earth is a sphere and how the tides changed with the moon is far more important than simply observing sunspots as the Chinese did.

And while it is claimed the Chinese were the first to have ships with multiple mast, actually the oldest Roman evidence predates rhe earliest examples of Chinese ships with multiple mast by centuries. And while we have multiple textual and physical evidence of very large ships of several hundred tons of more, the largest contemporary Chinese ships we have found were only around 60 tons, a fraction of the size. And while watertight bulkheads were hailed as some great advance, anyone who could build a watertight bill could build a watertight bulkhead if they chose. Watertight bulkheads have disadvantages in cargo placement, which is why the Portuguese and others chose to build lorchas in Chinese waters, ships with European hull designs but Chinese sails. They felt the disadvantages ofnrhr watertight bulkheads outweighed any advantages they had in their eyes.

The Chinese might have invented cast iron 1500 years ahead of everyone else, the Romans invented concrete 2000 years before the Chinese, and of the 2, concrete is more important in the modern world

So while the Chinese was the equal of any pre-modern civilization, it was not the superior to all others as is so often claimed