AHC: Song Dynasty Inventions Spread Outside of China

Think of a plausible way that the inventions of Song Dynasty China spread to other parts of the world outside of it's native region. You get 10 points if these inventions spread to other culturally Chinese-influenced nations such as Japan or Korea, 20 points if they spread to the rest of East Asia (i.e. India, Malaysia, Siam, etc.), 30 if these inventions spread to the Middle East, 50 if they reach Eastern Europe and North Africa, and you win everything if you manage to find a plausible way to make them reach Western Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa.
 
Hmm... Gunpowder and paper IOTL spread very quickly. Hard to see them spreading much more quickly, as did the navigational compass. They're all things that can spread fairly easily by trade routes on ship or caravan, and technologically they're immediately very useful at almost any level of navigation or sedentary society.

Printing happens, probably independently, pretty much as soon as paper spreads and production gets to a level to make mass production economical. It's just an obvious idea once the scale of production is about.

Other Song inventions seem harder to imagine spreading because certainly Europe and probably the Near East and India of the mid 10th to early 12th century did not really have the commerical society required to sustain or need them. Probably ditto Japan of the time. Restaurants in Europe of the High Middle Ages?

Paper money is another example of a Song invention, but it's hard for that to happen unless you have paper and printing first, a shortage of metals and any kind of plausible agents to act as a guarantor.

(Without being a Goldbug, you could question whether paper money necessarily had any long term positive effects over the longer haul, and so whether this would do much good for the world at large. Periods of hyperinflation and problems with multiple competing currency standards may have been consequential on innovation of paper money.)

Song type porcelain is somewhat imaginable to spread more than it did? That mainly requires an understanding of vitrification and kaolin to spread.

I guess it's hard to talk about this topic in general without specific innovations in mind.
 
@Optical_Illusion

I was more or less thinking about the Song Dynasty's innovations in mechanical and civil engineering. In other words, the one of the things which allowed it to become such a great candidate for early industrialization. I am aware that there were other factors to the Song Dynasty being such a foundation for an industrial revolution such as it's large population, larger than most late medieval nations and it's highly developed capitalist economy. However I think that there is a possibility that the rest of the nations of the world can pull of a sort of "Gunpowder Empire". Just like how the introduction of gunpowder prompted the complete overhaul of Ottoman military organization, the introduction of proto-industrial machines into a polity may result in a complete overhaul in their societies just like how we saw during the industrial revolution.

But that's just my two cents on the subject. I don't really know much about the Song Dynasty to accurately guess how different cultures will react to their inventions.
 
Ah, industrial machinery and civil engineering specifically. It's hard to think of how that could become more of a portable and diffusable product than it was.

One possibility I'll try, when Europeans pulled ahead in mechanical engineering, one item of luxury trade where they were dominant was the export of automata (extremely elaborate clockwork toys https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0229pbp) and portable clocks (timepieces). One of the few things where there was a comparative advantage despite greater nominal labour costs (which generally made Europe->Asia exports non-feasible despite reasonable parity in general technology for production).

In our time line, this doesn't seem to have stimulated much in the end, but perhaps if the Song changed to include a fashion or focus on this kind of thing, then that is a portable enough export good that could then be reverse engineered at the end of receiving markets and stimulate development of mechanical engineering? Though I don't know if their engineering capabilities at small scale would be sufficient for that to be possible.
 
@Optical_Illusion

Maybe the schematics? Just like how the method for creating silk was taken from China, the blueprints for the machines could be taken from China as well. It would also give us some good parallels to Samuel Slater and how he stole the schematics for the steam engine and brought it over to America. We can also go an IKEA route and have the components distributed with the instructions inside.

The issue is that most European automatas were made during the early modern to late modern periods (15th to 19th centuries). The Song Dynasty only survived until 1279 when it was conquered by the Mongols. This means that Song Dynasty inventions wouldn't exist outside of remnants left by the Mongols and by that point in Europe's history, the Song's inventions wouldn't change much of Europe's history.

I think automata has potential. The Middle East has had automatas for ages and Europe would still have a reason to use automatas during the 13th century. They would be a good way for people to learn about mechanical engineering at a small scale and slowly build up their knowledge on mechanical engineering as time progresses resulting in civil engineering and large scale industrial projects.
 
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