Sorry, maybe you didn't study history or just focusing on the European history too much. China history is very ancient. It is much much longer than the European history.
Many historians called ancient China the cradle of civilization. There is a reason for it.
Agriculture, animal husbandry and pottery started in China 22,000 years ago. Ancient Chinese learned how to domesticate and raise dogs, chickens, pigs and cows for meat, making kitchenware like glasses/pans/water and grain pots for storage and raising grain crops like rice, millet and wheat. Ancient Chinese were very adventuresome. They migrated as far as South Americas during the Ice Age. Farming and pottery didn't spread to other civilizations until 10,000 years ago from China. I think Sumerian people were Chinese migrated from China because they had water buffalo, rice farming and pictographs text.
Just to mention a few. Musical instruments, baked pastry and alcohol wine beverage first appeared in China 9,000 years ago. Iron-making, machinery, rocketry, explosives, chemistry, flight, math and many others like silk making/wall/castle building started in China 3,000 to 5,000 thousand years ago. Chinese also learned how to harness the power of steam, wind and water couple thousand years ago. They had windmill, watermill and steam engines. The sport game of golf and soccer invented in China couple thousand years ago.
These founded the foundation of Western Civilization. You might think the West started all these. But China history of this is much much longer and technologies have a way to spread to other cultures slowly through diffusion .
Why don't you Check out what Leonardo da Vinci studying in the Age of the Renaissance? Or where Albert Einstein got all the inspiration from before he got interested in physics?
