After all, China has lagged behind western powers in science and technology in modern times, and some people directly traced this pot back to Qin Shihuang.
So, is this really the case? Of course not. In fact, China's ancestors were also ahead of the West in science and engineering before the Ming and Qing Dynasties.
The two books we are going to talk about today are works on mathematics and astronomy in the Han Dynasty. The theories in these two books are hundreds of years ahead of those in the West.
These two books are Zhou Kuai Shu Jing and Nine Chapters Arithmetic.
Nine Chapters of Arithmetic is the work of Zhang Cang, the prime minister of Han Dynasty, and Geng Shouchang, a financial expert. The biggest feature of this book is to apply mathematical knowledge to practice, and everything starts from the reality of life.
Geng Shouchang used to be the chief accountant and consultant of the Ministry of Finance in the Western Han Dynasty, and was responsible for the management of national grain prices and national grain and grass reserves.
Geng Shouchang used his own mathematical knowledge to "build positions in Bering border counties, increase the price of grain when it is cheap, and increase its price when it is expensive to help the poor, which is called continuous liquidation". The "continuous liquidation mode" has also become the most advanced grain management and reserve system in Han Dynasty.
Therefore, Geng Shouchang was named Shanhaiguan Hou, and Prime Minister Zhang Cang was in charge of finance and food work, so he ordered Geng Shouchang and others to compile the essence of previous mathematical theories into the book Nine Chapters of Arithmetic.
This book almost contains the most advanced mathematical theory at that time, which has been highly valued by people and passed down to future generations, ranking among the ten classic books on calculation.
This book put forward the arithmetic of negative addition and subtraction for the first time, earlier than the western world.
It was the most efficient and practical mathematical theory book in the world at that time.
The author of Weekly Parallel Computing Classics is unknown. Some people think that this book was written by later generations in the name of Shang Gao, and it is a collection of mathematical works by hundreds of scholars in Qin and Han Dynasties.
This book puts forward the Pythagorean theorem, which is 500 years earlier than the West. So that Huang Zongxi in the late Ming and early Qing Dynasties thought that western geometry originated from Zhou Pian Shu Jing.
Nine Chapters Arithmetic and Zhou Piai Suan Jing are famous mathematical works in the Western Han Dynasty. In fact, there were some mathematical works at that time, such as Xu Shang Arithmetic and Du Zhong Arithmetic, but they didn't spread for a long time.
In a word, the wisdom of China ancestors before 2000 was definitely not lower than that of westerners. On the contrary, we are far ahead of the western world in many key issues of science and engineering.
Therefore, China's backwardness in modern times does not need to be traced back to the source, nor does it need to say "how Qin Shihuang's autocratic system led to China's modern times". This is a kind of "great shift of Gankun", which is meaningless inference from the historical timeline and background.
The fact is that the backwardness of China in modern times is mainly attributed to the rulers of Ming and Qing Dynasties, especially the rulers of Qing Dynasty.