A Chinese alchemical text from 492 noted that saltpeter gave off a purple flame when ignited, providing for the first time a practical and reliable means of distinguishing it from other inorganic salts, making it possible to evaluate and compare purification techniques.

One difference between mythology and science is exemplified in Chinese mythology: Shennong and Huangdi ( often known as " the Yellow Emperor ") were supposedly friends and fellow scholars, despite the 500 years or seventeen or eighteen generations between the first Shennong and Huangdi ; and, that together they shared the alchemical secrets of medicine, immortality, and making gold.

The most famous Chinese alchemical book, the Tan Chin Yao Ch ’ eh (" Great Secrets of Alchemy ," dating from approximately 650 AD ), discusses in detail the creation of elixirs for immortality ( mercury, sulfur, and the salts of mercury and arsenic are prominent, and most are ironically poisonous ) as well as those for curing certain diseases and the fabrication of precious stones.

According to J. C. Cooper's " Chinese Alchemy: The Taoist Quest for Immortality ," Taoism had two distinct parts, the classical Tao Chia, which was mystical and stemmed primarily from Laozi and Zhuangzi, and the more popular Tao Chiao, which was the popular, magical and alchemical side of Taoism.

Doctrine can be accessed to describe these methods in greater detail ; the majority of Chinese alchemical sources can be found in the Taozang, the " Taoist Canon ".

The meaning of waidan derives from wai ( outside, exterior ) and dan referring to alchemical operations, such as the preparation of chemical elixirs, made from cinnabar, realgar, and other substances generally involving mercury, sulfur, lead, and arsenic or else the animal and botanical products which are found in Chinese herbology and Traditional Chinese medicine.

" Chinese alchemical yoga depended on exercises, breathing techniques, and an ordered and balanced diet which was designed to increase longevity.

Recent surveys of the history of Daoism in Chinese have also emphasized Ge ’ s importance in the history of science, based on his detailed descriptions of alchemical processes, which are frequently studied in terms of modern chemistry.

While other Chinese sources was found to discredit the Liu An invention theory, stating Liu An lived with a lot of vegetarian monks and the method was taught by them, or it is the Chinese daoists that was recruited by him used alchemy methods and made both soy milk and bean curd in a more alchemical method as medicines of eternal life, and Liu An is only the powerful noble at that time where he can order the mass-production of such items and spread it around thus making him famous for soy milk and bean curd.

* Wills, Jr., John E. Mountain of Fame: Portraits in Chinese History ( 1994 ) excerpt and text search 20 essays on leading figures across 4000 years

The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History ( 2008 ), a favorable look at artistic production excerpt and text search

Chinese History in Economic Perspective, University of California Press, 1992 complete text online free

He puts the greatest emphasis on the importance of study, and it is the Chinese character for study () that opens the text.

This formulary was also the earliest Chinese medical text to group symptoms into clinically useful " patterns " ( zheng 證 ) that could serve as targets for therapy.

The first systematic Chinese historical text, Shiji or Records of the Grand Historian, was written by Sima Qian.

* Wengu text database ( Classic of Poetry, Analects of Confucius, Tao Te Ching, and I Ching, in Chinese and translations )

* Chinese classic text online

The Tao Te Ching, Daodejing, or Dao De Jing ( 道德經: 道 dào " way "; 德 dé " virtue "; 經 jīng " classic " or " book ") also simply referred to as the Laozi, is a Chinese classic text.

The text is fundamental to both philosophical and religious Taoism ( Daojia,, Pinyin: Dàojiā ; Daojiao,, Pinyin: Dàojiào ) and strongly influenced other schools, such as Legalism, Confucianism and Chinese Buddhism, which when first introduced into China was largely interpreted through the use of Daoist words and concepts.

The received Tao Te Ching is a short text of around 5, 000 Chinese characters in 81 brief chapters or sections ().

Many translations are written by people with a foundation in Chinese language and philosophy who are trying to render the original meaning of the text as faithfully as possible into English.

Critics of these versions, such as Taoism scholar Eugene Eoyang, claim that translators like Stephen Mitchell produce readings of the Tao Te Ching that deviate from the text and are incompatible with the history of Chinese thought.

Chinese calligraphic influence had been weakened after the Heian period ; this text was an example of the different way it was evolving in Japan.

The foundational text of Chinese medicine is the Huangdi neijing, or Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon, which is composed of two books: the Suwen 素問 (" Basic Questions ") and the Lingshu 靈樞 (" Divine Pivot ").

This text and its thirty-three manifestations of Guanyin, of which seven are female manifestations, is known to have been very popular in Chinese Buddhism as early as in the Sui Dynasty and Tang Dynasty.

The famous 14th century Chinese text of the Huolongjing, which was the first to describe hollow cast iron cannonball shells filled with gunpowder, was also the first to describe the invention of the land mine in greater detail than references found in texts written beforehand.

However, further description of how this flint device operated was not made until a Chinese text of 1606 AD revealed that a weight drive ( common in medieval clockworks ) had been used to work the ' steel wheel '.

The Khitan, however, had two scripts of their own and many Mongolic words are found in their half-deciphered writings that are usually found with a parallel Chinese text ( for example, nair = sun, sair = moon, tau = five, jau = hundred, m. r = horse, im. a = goat, n. q = dog, m. ng = silver, ju. un = summer, n. am. ur = autumn, u. ul = winter, heu. ur = spring, tau. l. a = rabbit, t. q. a = hen and m. g. o = snake ).

However, some written languages like Chinese, Japanese and Thai do not mark word boundaries in such a fashion, and in those languages text segmentation is a significant task requiring knowledge of the vocabulary and morphology of words in the language.

In Kuei-t ' ien-lu, a Chinese text redacted in the 11th century, domino cards were printed during the Tang Dynasty, contemporary to the first printed books.

According to his imprinting text, he had drawn his maps using about twenty foreign charts and mappae mundi ( Arab, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Indian and Greek ) including one of Christopher Columbus.

This text also mentioned the use of the first known multistage rocket, the ' fire-dragon issuing from the water ' ( huo long chu shui ), used mostly by the Chinese navy.

Many visual effects are possible, and the SVG specification automatically handles bidirectional text ( for composing a combination of English and Arabic text, for example ), vertical text ( as Chinese was historically written ) and characters along a curved path ( such as the text around the edge of the Great Seal of the United States ).

The two oldest printed Chinese calendars are dated 877 and 882 ; they were found at the Buddhist pilgrimage site of Dunhuang ; Patricia Ebrey writes that it is no surprise that some of the earliest printed items were calendars, since the Chinese found it necessary to calculate and mark which days were auspicious and which were not.

Record of Chinese history dated back to the Shang Dynasty.

The oldest extant Chinese maps come from the State of Qin, dated back to the 4th century BC, during the Warring States Period.

Examples of surviving Chinese chain stitch embroidery worked in silk thread have been dated to the Warring States period ( 5th-3rd century BC ).

Turkish inscriptions dated earlier than the Orkhon inscriptions used about 150 symbols, which may suggest tamgas at first imitating the Chinese script and then gradually refined into an alphabet.

A Chinese playing card dated c. 1400 AD, Ming Dynasty, found near Turpan, measuring 9. 5 by 3. 5 cm.

* The oldest known painted depiction of a wheelbarrow is found in a Chinese tomb of Chengde, Sichuan province, dated to this year.

* The oldest known bronze handgun in the world is dated to this year, a Chinese gun found in Acheng District that was once used to suppress the rebellion of the Christian Mongol Prince Nayan in 1287 – 1288.

As reported in 2011, Chinese archaeologists have uncovered the remains of an imperial sized palace — dated to about 1700 BC — at Erlitou in Henan, lending further questions to the existence of the dynasty.

The observation of a circadian or diurnal process in humans is mentioned in Chinese medical texts dated to around the 13th century, including the Noon and Midnight Manual and the Mnemonic Rhyme to Aid in the Selection of Acu-points According to the Diurnal Cycle, the Day of the Month and the Season of the Year.

* 28 BC – Chinese history book Book of Han makes earliest known dated record of sunspot.

* May 10 – The earliest dated record of a sunspot by Chinese astronomers.

One of the earliest known depictions of a landscape in Chinese art comes from a pair of hollow-tile door panels from a Western Han Dynasty tomb near Zhengzhou, dated 60 BCE.

Left: Bronze 方樽 fāngzūn Chinese ritual bronzes | ritual wine container dated about 1000 BC.

The Diamond Sutra of the China | Chinese Tang Dynasty, the oldest dated printed book in the world, found at Dunhuang, from 868 CE.

The earliest description of a toothbrush was made in a Chinese historical work, dated to approximately 1600 BC.

The first written document describing Japanese archery is the Chinese chronicle Weishu ( dated around 297 AD ), which tells how in the Japanese isles people use " a wooden bow that is short from the bottom and long from the top.

The radiocarbon evidence is a suite of 28 measurements, for which all but the first four, from the early days of the use of that method and now viewed as inaccurate, support the twelfth to fifteenth centuries chronology, In the 1970s, a beam that produced some of the anomalous dates in 1952 was reanalysed and gave a fourteenth century date, as do dated finds such as Chinese, Persian and Syrian artifacts also support the twelfth and fifteenth century dates.

A lacquer ed Chinese liubo board game set excavated from Tomb No. 3 of Mawangdui, Changsha, Hunan province, China, dated to the 2nd century BCE during the Western Han Dynasty.

The ancient Chinese historian Xu Zheng ( 220 – 265 AD ) in his Three Five Historic Records dated the creation of the world by Pangu 36, 000 years ( 2 x 18, 000 ) before the reign of the legendary Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors.

The history of Chinese wine has been dated back thousands years before the present time, based on the analysis of residues from ancient ceramic containers, which show the ancient use of grains, fruits, or various combinations of ingredients.

Ming Dynasty Chinese lacquerware container, dated 16th century.