Joseph Needham who wrote a major work on Chinese science and technology once asked a famous question, known as the Needham question

Why was China and India overtaken by Europe in science and technology, despite their earlier successes?

""Why did modern science, the mathematization of hypotheses about Nature, with all its implications for advanced technology, take its meteoric rise only in the West at the time of Galileo [but] had not developed in Chinese civilisation or Indian civilisation?

" "Gunpowder, the magnetic compass, and paper and printing, which Francis Bacon considered as the four most important inventions facilitating the West's transformation from the Dark Ages to the modern world, were invented in China". "