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The Forum > Article Comments > Asian Century or Asian Millennium? > Comments

Asian Century or Asian Millennium? : Comments

By Tania Cleary, published 30/3/2012

Does the Asian tortoise trump the European hare?

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If someone actually manages to read this longwinded article could you please summarise it in a paragraph. The title is interesting but she lost me after that. Life is too short.
Posted by mralstoner, Friday, 30 March 2012 1:08:17 PM
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The point of the article is to make us rethink the asian century... and she has succeeded in doing that...
Posted by colbernrae, Friday, 30 March 2012 2:25:37 PM
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Well I like it! History is not takeaway unless yesterday is as deep as you want to go. This historian just lays out a smorgasbord of artifacts from asia that i and most of us know little or nothing about but lead out to so many other interesting things. How densely packed is history and how intriguing are these artifacts! I particularly like the story of Flinders crossing paths with the trepang hunter, Pobasso, and virtually meeting the descendants of the Indonesian legend still sailing to unknown waters.
Great stuff. We should all consider longer timeframes and then many of the things that alarm us, for example, about the Chinese Han or the Koreans, assume a different and more rewarding perspective.

Thanks. More from this author!
Posted by readr, Friday, 30 March 2012 3:04:36 PM
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I agree with readr, this article is well written and is extremely interesting....

It is History , which obviously put one of our readers off, but it is not a " re-writing" of History, which is so common nowadays.

The only area missing, and I have to admit I don't know what documentation exist , is Japan. Perry’s Agreement with the Japanese perhaps ?.After that the Japanese matched the Rest of the world in Industrial manufacture and Innovation very quickly, defeating Russia ,militarily, within almost 50 years..

More from this Author , Please !
Posted by Aspley, Friday, 30 March 2012 4:16:57 PM
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Hindu mathematicians also invented our modern decimal numbering system. They had the marvellous idea of using a zero as a placeholder. So the number 408.05 means:

Four hundreds

ZERO tens

Eight units

ZERO tenths

Five hundredths

Now try doing that with Roman numerals!

I think you can say that the decimal system is what made the modern world possible.

I don’t know if you would count present day Iraq as part of Asia but that's where modern astronomy was invented three thousand years ago. Using naked eye astronomy the Babylonians discovered that 235 lunar months equalled 19 tropical years. They invented a calendar in which there were 7 leap months in every 19 year cycle. That calendar lives on as the Hebrew calendar.

Asia is home to the two oldest surviving civilisations, the Chinese and the Persian. We can argue which is the older.

There has always been some debate as to whether the Europeans or the Ottomans were ahead in science and technology prior to the "middle-ages." In fact the Chinese were probably ahead of both.

On the other hand, not to overstate the obvious, China and much of Asia stagnated scientifically and technologically for centuries. So, no I don't think we can talk about an Asian millennium. I think in fact we are coming to the end of a European millennium.

But it's an interesting and thought-provoking piece.
Posted by stevenlmeyer, Friday, 30 March 2012 6:29:59 PM
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A few more snippets.

Hindu mathematicians had discovered "Pythagoras'" theorem before Pythagoras. It is possible that Pythagoras had heard of the Hindu discovery before coming up with his own proof.

The Babylonians almost invented a numerical system using zero as a placeholder using a base of 60 rather than 10. Some clay tablets in the British museum indicate they were thinking along those lines.

The Hindus had also worked out the value of pi to an amazing degree of accuracy – probably to around 6 decimal places in modern terms.

At one time Chinese naval architecture was ahead of anything anywhere in the world.

It is hard to know just why Asia went to sleep making this past millennium the millennium of Europe.
Posted by stevenlmeyer, Friday, 30 March 2012 6:38:48 PM
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