Things You Didn't Know About China

Friday, Aug 28, 2020, 12:31 pm

By:Tony Williams

1.Longest civilization

The Chinese civilization is seen as being the longest continuous civilization in the world as it has been in existence for approximately 6000 years. The same goes for their ability to write because the earliest people to write are now long gone whereas this civilization has managed to stay together.

2.Poetic

If you were an educated person and lived during the Tang dynasty, then you would want to avoid meeting people. The reason? Every single time you had to say hello or goodbye to somebody you were expected to do so in a poem.

3.Fortune cookies

Even though we associate them with Chinese food, fortune cookies were not actually invented in China. Instead, they come from San Francisco and they are the result of a guy working in a noodle factory that just had too much time on his hands.

4.Big language

We all know that Chinese as a language is difficult, but do you know that there are 40,000 different characters in it? The problem here is that most people only learn around 500, so even they think that their own language is a bit too over the top.

5.Natural gas

It is believed that the Chinese were drilling for natural gas and using it as a heat source some 2300 years before the west ever got around to working out how to do it. By then they were absolute experts at it all and showed how far we were behind them.

6.Ketchup

Sorry to say, but the Chinese were also the first people to invent ketchup, but it was certainly not in the form that we currently find it in. Instead, it was based on a fish sauce which they called ke-tsiap, so you can see it is not a big leap to ketchup.

7.Paper addicts

The Chinese invented paper and we know that they did so around 105AD. They kept it a secret from Europe for around 700 years, but it is another example of how advanced they have always been and how they have been responsible for inventing a number of key items.

8.Silk

We all know that China is famous for silk making, but did you know that the secret as to how to make it used to be a secret that you had to guard with your life? If you told anybody, then you could be executed, so everything had to be done very carefully indeed.

9.Ice cream

Even though we associate it with Italy, ice cream was actually invented in China around 2000BC. This early ice cream was a mixture of rice, milk, and snow to chill it down, so thankfully it is a bit different now or it may never have managed to take off.

10.A single time zone

China is massive, but to keep things simple they have ensured that the entire country is on the same time zone. That must make it strange for parts to the extreme west and east and their lives would be a lot different if they were in time zones like the rest of us.

11.Busy babies

Everybody knows that there are a lot of people in China, but then on average you are looking at 35 being born every single minute. They have been in a baby boom for years even though they were limited to only one child.

12.Hong Kong flights

Even though Hong Kong is once again ruled by China any flight between the two is still classified as being an international flight. This just seems a strange thing to do as it would be like Texas to Florida being treated in the same way.

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