How did the Chinese invent gunpowder without having two of the three ingredients?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Probably every inhabitant of the Earth knows from school that gunpowder was invented by the Chinese. At least this is what children were taught in the USSR, and even now this is what they are taught in Russia. But is it really so?

The fact is that for the production of gunpowder, three constituent ingredients are needed: saltpeter, sulfur and coal. There is and has always been coal in China. The other two ingredients are trickier.

Until the eighteenth century, they did not know how to extract sulfur by chemical reactions, and native sulfur was available only in one place on planet Earth - in the mouth of Mount Etna, in Sicily. It was only in the eighteenth century that they learned to sublimate sulfur from pyrite, and the beginning of the massive use of artillery on the battlefields dates back to this time.

There is no saltpeter in China either, and there never was. Moreover, even the nearest deposit of this most important component for the production of gunpowder is very far from China - on the island of Ceylon.

So what happens, the Chinese invented gunpowder without saltpeter? It just can't be. It also does not work to assume that saltpeter was brought to the Middle Kingdom by merchants in ancient times. The fact is that saltpeter was widely used in agriculture only at the end of the 19th century. Tell me, why, in this case, would someone import to China completely unnecessary salt, especially for the invention of gunpowder or what? Moreover, there is practically no information about Chinese merchants and, in general, about world trade relations with ancient China.

Someone will think that the cunning Chinese have replaced saltpeter and sulfur with some other substances. But from the entire periodic table, only saltpeter and sulfur can be components of black powder. Modern black powder for hunting rifles is also made. Smokeless or pyroxylin powder was invented in the middle of the nineteenth century. It is made as follows: ordinary cotton is processed with nitric acid, pyroxylin is obtained, and coarse-grained artillery powder and fine-grained rifle powder are already made from it. All other fast-burning substances are explosive! They cannot be used as substitutes for gunpowder - any cannon will be blown to smithereens, even a small charge.

Another quite logical question. If China invented gunpowder and even made fireworks out of it, why did they not figure out how to use it for military purposes?

When gunpowder got to Europe, the Europeans, thanks to this Chinese invention, managed to bring the whole world to its knees, dividing it among themselves into colonies and spheres of influence. And China, having the technology of gunpowder, on the contrary, eventually fell victim to European empires, since it did not even know about its military potential.

According to the official version, this was not necessary. For millennia, the Celestial Empire has been the state with its sole right to violence. Even the times of troubles still ended with the establishment of a dynasty, which was ruled by strict laws, Confucian rules and Buddhism.