China has been the source of some of the world's most significant inventions, including the Four Great Inventions of ancient China: paper, the compass, gunpowder, and printing (both woodblock and movable type). The list below contains these and other inventions which first appeared in China. It does not include foreign-born technologies which the Chinese cultural realm acquired through contact, such as the windmill from the Islamic Middle East or the telescope from Early modern Europe. It also does not include technologies which were originally invented elsewhere but were later invented separately by the Chinese in their own right, such as the chain pump and odometer. Since there is no evidence that the Chinese were the first to invent writing or the calendar, Chinese inventions such as Chinese writing and the Chinese calendar do not need to be mentioned or described. The same may be applied to articles like Chinese opera, Chinese mathematics, and Chinese architecture. This is also not a list of Chinese discoveries of natural phenomena which can be found in the human body, other organisms, the environment of the world, and immediate solar system.

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