China's long history has seen some extremely important inventions emerge, most noticeably gunpowder ... Before paper was invented, the ancient Chinese carved characters on pottery, animal bones ...

We'll begin with arguably the most famous ancient Chinese invention. Legend has it that gunpowder was accidentally discovered by alchemists looking for a concoction that would create immortality ...

Other historians attribute the origins to China's Song dynasty (960-1279 AD) where people manufactured firecrackers using tubes made from rolled sheets of paper containing gunpowder and a fuse.