Chapter 006 Heartland

"Hello everyone, I'm Teacher Xiaobai." As soon as Teacher Bai Ling spoke, the demeanor full of soft murmurs made people drunk, Wang Fang felt that the content was no longer important, just like a well-sung and melodic little song, who would pay attention to the lyrics?

[There was a British scholar named Joseph Needham who asked a question: "Although ancient China made many important contributions to the development of human science and technology, why did the scientific and industrial revolution not take place in modern China?" ”

In today's program, we will discuss this issue. First of all, we have to confirm that ancient Chinese science and technology are "monkey thunder" in the country, this is controversial, but it is not important for us to discuss, let's just think that ancient Chinese science and technology is the most thunder.

On the knowledge community of Zhihu, some people asked: "Why is the era of the Han and Tang dynasties in ancient China so powerful, but there is no ** to expand outward?" "Where's the pattern! You know, the most powerful Tang Dynasty in ancient China was in the era of Li Shimin, and China didn't expand outward, did you build it? The Tang Dynasty was defeated in Central Asia, and it was also defeated in Goguryeo.

It is precisely because of the great defeat that it has a great impact on the economy and politics of the imperial court, and Emperor Yang of Sui was also a generation of heroes before the conquest of Goguryeo, but he could not kill Goguryeo even with all the strength of the whole country, and Yang Guang's cousin Li Shimin almost followed in the footsteps of Yang Guang. Let's think about it, although this Goguryeo includes part of the northeast, the whole territory is within the current Chinese territory, and the powerful Tang Army will not be able to destroy Goguryeo in the era of Li Shimin, let alone Central Asia, which is far away in the sky?

The Tang Dynasty is already very big, in ancient times when transportation was underdeveloped, a big empire like the Tang Dynasty was already the limit of imperial rule, except for the Tang Dynasty, no country could have such a vast territory and so many people. From this point of view, ancient China can indeed be said to be the world's first power.

However, the point of our show is this, although China is strong, China faces competition from the whole West. And even not only in the West, but almost in the world.

Another British scholar, Mackinder, submitted a paper to the Royal Geological Society in 1904, in which he made an interesting point that was considered one of the ideological factors that led to the First and Second World Wars.

This idea is called the "Heartland Theory."

He put his perspective on the height of space to get a bird's-eye view of the earth, and believed that the main part of the entire earth's land mass was a "world island" composed of three continents: Europe, Asia, and Africa. The British also love to put gold on their faces, and they are an island country, so they see the whole world as a world island in a fit of anger, which is a bit of a cover-up and stealing the bell.

What is the concept of World Island? It's basically connected, and one of the most successful countries in the Middle East, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, has made itself a transit city, and one of the reasons it's basically in the center of Asia, Europe and Africa.

From the perspective of space, the Middle East is the center of the world island, but because the Sahara Desert divides Africa into two compartments, the most populous, the most diverse civilizations and the richest possibilities in the world are actually in North Africa, Europe and Asia.

The rest of Britain and Japan are "offshore islands", and North and South America and Australia are centrifugal islands, and neither of them can become places to dominate the world.

At the time of 1904, mankind's understanding of the entire world geography has been relatively modern, and when thinking about the future of mankind, it is inevitable to think about whether there is a super earth empire in this world, which will bring the entire earth under its rule.

Mackinder argues that this was basically impossible in the case of inconvenient means of transportation in ancient times, because there is a huge barrier between Europe and Asia - the Himalayas, the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush, which can be called the Pamirs. It divides the World Island into two compartments.

The left and right sides of this partition, which included parts of Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Siberia, resembled the form of a heart, which he called the heart of the World Island. Since ancient times, this area has been the place where bloody conflicts have often erupted, and it can be said to be the heart of bloodshed, because it is the only channel between the East and the West.

From a military point of view, it is basically impossible to penetrate this wall with strong logistical supplies. However, things are changing as the railway network is gradually built, and as long as a European power controls Central Asia and Eastern Europe to the west of the wall, it is possible to conquer all of Asia eastward.

Who wouldn't want to conquer the entire world island? Do you know who named the name "Silk Road"? Hehe, it's not ourselves, it's a German, at that time Germany had already occupied Qingdao, and they were conducting an in-depth investigation of the western part of China, why? Because Germany was blocked by the Royal Navy of the British Empire on the European continent, in order to break through the naval blockade, the Germans were ready to build a super railway across Eurasia on the Silk Road!

World War I took place 10 years after Mackinder's paper was published, and it is indeed possible that the political figures involved in the decision-making of the time could have been influenced by the paper. That's not the point. We note that in Mackinder's paper, he sees all the so diverse countries, peoples, and cultures west of the heartland as a cohesive whole, and that's the key.

Although China is huge, it lacks vitality due to its political and cultural unity. For example, a chestnut: Westerners call China a porcelain country, but do you make it? As soon as the Qing Dynasty was founded, in order to rule conveniently, a piece of paper banned the maritime trade of the whole of China, which was the notorious maritime ban. The daimyo of the porcelain country instantly became unworthy of its name, and this is the power of the unity of government. In China's dynasties, sea bans have been frequent.

It is difficult for us to imagine that there could be a ban on navigation in Europe, that the Spanish people, the Portuguese people, would not have agreed, that they had all agreed, that the Dutch people would not have agreed, that they had all fallen, and that the British would not have agreed. Even at the height of Napoleon the Great's reign, his efforts to ban maritime trade ended in failure.

In fact, ancient China was a civilization and a culture to compete with the incomparably diverse countries and ethnic associations west of the heartland. In terms of area, they are not opponents, and if the eighteen provinces of Han are regarded as the core of Han culture, they are even less opponents.

The fact that all of the world's major religions arose west of the Heartland may be telling. Religion is absurd and funny now, but when it was born, it represented the deepest imagination, and it could unite many unrelated tribes, nations, and countries.

Moreover, the exchanges between these religions are very deep, and the "monotheistic religions" of Christianity and Islam, which are considered to be the advanced forms of religion, have their origins in the Old Testament, the literary works of the Jews. The Jews' own religion certainly remained faithful to its own Old Testament.

Not only did the Indians contribute Buddhism to the world, but they also invented Arabic numerals, which were first transmitted to the Arab region and then to the West, so they are called Arabic numerals. Ancient mathematicians in India also invented the number "zero", a placeholder that provided the basis for large-scale mathematical calculations.

Ancient Chinese mathematics was relatively backward, and you think, even the placeholder zero has not become popular, how can there be room for deep development? In ancient China, there was a very simple understanding of the right triangle of "hook three strands, four strings and five", which is a very intuitive calculation method, but in ancient Greece, there was a Pythagorean school, and their most prominent achievement is the Pythagorean theorem, which is not something that can be understood by simple elementary school students such as three, four, and five.

Science has already appeared in ancient Greece. While ancient Chinese craftsmen were doing arithmetic problems with their fingers, the ancient Greeks were studying geometry. Basically, arithmetic problems only need to face natural numbers, and you can reminisce about your primary school life. Geometry is dealing with complex changes in space, and there will be complex mathematical categories such as fractions and decimal points, so when zero was introduced to the West, it was called the devil's number at first because of logical errors when dividing by zero, but it soon discovered its wonderful use in dealing with geometric problems, and geometry soon became like zero ** and glue.

The Greeks were lost by the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, and the baton of science passed to the Italians in Roman times. Constantine the Great of the Roman Empire completed a spiritual fusion of Europeans, as he found that the followers of Monotheistic Christianity were very united and could use Christianity to give their subjects a sense of belonging.

Monotheistic religion is considered to be the superior of religion, because all the honors and all the divine powers are gathered in one, which makes the awe of the believers more thorough. In Hinduism, there are too many gods, an animal is a god, elephants are just that, monkeys are just monkeys, even mice are gods, there are some places that worship rats, and the streets are full of rats, and they have to be protected, and they can't shout and shout to kill, do you say it's bad? Such indiscriminate affection for the gods clearly weakens the authority of religion.

But this kind of spiritual unity, which began with Constantine the Great, was not forbidden, and the kings of various countries were mainly unhappy, and they could rebel against religious forces as soon as they gritted their teeth, stamped their feet, and glared. This is different from the imperial system in ancient China since the First Emperor.

What's more, there are Vikings in the north who continue to go south, these fighting races gradually replaced the military power of the Roman Empire, and the Germanic barbarian power that did not fall off finally collapsed the Roman Empire, but it can also be said that it was assimilated by Roman civilization, and the power of Christianity was to take advantage of the barbarians to take the Roman Empire when they went south to further seize power, because the barbarians would not engage in politics, and the gods successfully fooled these barbarians, so that they converted to Christ and became their own minions.

It was the enthusiastic Italians who finally could not stand the brutal rule of theocracy in the dark Middle Ages, and began the "people-oriented" Renaissance movement from Florence.

The Renaissance movement also had an unexpected scientific event, in which artists such as Leonardo da Vinci dissected many corpses in order to better depict the human body, which promoted the development of anatomy, and the understanding of the inside of the human body was the basis for the further development of medicine. Like the ancient Chinese situation where a single hair is cherished, at most it is used to tie the villain and draw circles to curse the rival.

What about using the method of "suspensory filament diagnosis" to avoid incompatibility between men and women? Is it good to dismantle the human body into eight pieces? Which approach is better for the development of modern medicine? It's obvious. Once again, the singularity of culture is a fatal blow to the development of science. No matter how large the population of the porcelain country is, no one dares to dissect corpses every day.

Galen, the founder of anatomy, was a gladiator health care physician in ancient Rome, and this strange identity gave him plenty of opportunities to observe the human body, and everyone made up for themselves what a cruel origin, "Spartacus! ”

In a place where the whole country is benevolent, righteous, courteous, wise, trustworthy, gentle, courteous, and frugal, how can there be such "scum" who have made outstanding contributions to human medicine?

We can take a closer look at the four great inventions of our antiquity. Let's see if it's an earth-shattering black technology. Gunpowder, the compass, paper, and printing.

Papermaking and printing can be said together, paper was invented by the Chinese, but the machine qì papermaking was invented by the French during the industrial revolution, and the emergence of paper did not solve the shortage of books, the flow of movable type printing in ancient China is limited, because there are too many Chinese characters, and the real development has to wait until Gutenberg invented the machine qì, the alphabet text is easy to make movable type, and at the same time he also solved the problem of ink, using the chemical knowledge that had made great progress at that time.

The truly revolutionary printing press began with the popularity of the Gutenberg Bible, and everyone could see that the Bible was also the beginning of a new era for the congregants who were bound by the Roman See, and Christianity began to split as more and more people participated in contests to interpret the Bible.

Gunpowder was discovered by the Taoist priests of ancient Chinese alchemy, and the original form was a deflagrated black fire, which was so powerful that it could be made into a cannon, but it was bulky and inaccurate, because no one could think of using rifling, and even if they did, they probably couldn't think of how to process rifling on the inner wall of the barrel. The residue of the black fire after the explosion is very strict, and this kind of cannon may have to be cleaned once after a shot, and it will be more troublesome and troublesome.

The first muskets also needed to be manually ignited, and they had to use open flames to start a war, what if it rained? What if there is a strong wind and you can't light it at all? The explosion of later smokeless gunpowder was slightly milder and lasted longer in the chamber of the gun, giving the bullet more power. And the black fire will explode too violently, and it will often explode. It is conceivable that soldiers often have to calculate the size of their psychological shadow when training.

There's a reason why Black Fire didn't catch on in its birthplace, it's just a thing, and it can only be used to light artillery and set off fireworks.

Just as Watt went down in history for improving the steam engine, the focus is not on who first invented gunpowder, but on who maximized its power.

Europe's population has always been small, especially compared to China. It is said that the GDP of ancient China can account for more than two-thirds of the world's GDP, in fact, it is because of the large amount of food produced. Everyone knows that Italy is a southern European country, but not many people notice that the latitude of Rome is almost the same as BeiJing, and according to Chinese standards, most of Europe is a bitter cold place.

In the bitter cold land, the grain production will naturally not be high. The population is not that much.

With a small population and constant military threats from their neighbors, Europeans had to endure the shortcomings of black fire as long as they had a chance.

When China was unified in history, most of the times were peaceful, and at this time, knives and guns would definitely be put into storage, and maybe they would have to buy kitchen knives with real names, and they would not be allowed to make firearms casually. This is regarded as an advantage of a great unified country, and military technology has also slept to death in this beautiful and gentle country.

The small countries on the western side of the island of the world are constantly facing the threat of war, they are interested in the continuous improvement of firearms, and gradually invent dense formations to make up for the lack of shooting accuracy, flintlock pistols instead of arquebuses, and paper shells to improve the speed of loading, so that basically firearms can completely defeat the bow and arrow.

Because a little girl can kill a strong man with a flintlock pistol for ten years after three days of practice, dozens of Spanish explorers conquered a large country with a population of millions in the Americas, and the Anglo-French army, mainly Indians and North Africans, defeated tens of thousands of cavalry of the Mongol prince at the Bali Bridge at the cost of almost zero casualties.

In the final analysis, our politics are too homogeneous, just like some people call the vast ocean far from the land a blue desert, when there are no warm and cold currents to stir up nutrients on the bottom of the sea, the plankton that is the basis of the ecology cannot survive, and the large animals are even more likely to survive, and the sea area there is even more barren than the desert. Ancient China, which was unified by a single government, was a crowded wasteland.

Let's talk about the compass. You don't need a compass on land, because there are endless references, and you can't walk where there is no road, but in ancient China, the sea was often banned, and this thing could only be reduced to a compass to see feng shui, and this thing is still played with today. Even Zheng He didn't need this thing when he went to the West, because he just walked along the coastline and landed when he saw the wind and waves, and I was very skeptical of some people's touting of Zheng He's fleet's sailing skills.

What's even more ironic is that due to political reasons, all of Zheng He's navigation records have been destroyed, and a huge fleet of tens of thousands of people has not even left a bit of scum, which is simply a fight with smokeless gunpowder, so how can future generations believe in the great achievements of Zheng Daguan?

The longships of the Vikings have also left some wreckage for archaeologists to study.

Generally speaking, legends that have left nothing are best marked with a question mark.

Navigation is a key technology for great geographical discoveries, and it is by no means something that can be developed by a country in a short period of time. In the era of the Great Discoveries, the first type of sailing ship suitable for the ocean, the Clark sailing ship, originated from the popular Kirk sailing ship in the Mediterranean, the Kirk sailing ship was the invention of the Arab navigators, and its main feature was the spinnaker.

The spinnaker is lighter and more agile than the original sail of the Europeans, but the Kirk is a dhow that cannot be sailed against the wind, while the Clark has three or four masts and a spinnaker at the tail, which can be adjusted by guò to adjust the blowing angle of the sail from multiple angles, making it possible to sail against the wind.

The power of the spinnaker continued to be exploited by European seafaring explorers, who often had to sail unfamiliar narrow shores to explore the Americas and Africa.

Speaking of which, the development of new shipping routes by European explorers is also due to the interruption of the Silk Road to the East, which passed through too many countries, is in the heart of the world island, and the political situation is often turbulent, and the Silk Road has always been fragile.

While the great unified Eastern powers were resting on their laurels, the civilizations of Europe, the Arab world, the Turkic world of Ottoman Turkey, and the Persian world were playing a great drama of loving and killing each other, competing with each other and learning from each other. Competition and stiflation will lead to cracking methods to promote technological improvements, and good things, once invented, will be quickly copied.

European countries that will learn from it have risen one after another, and the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, which refuse to keep pace with the times, have been beaten by rising European countries. Due to geopolitical relations, even Tsarist Russia, which was still a serfdom system at that time, was seeking to change and become stronger.