Quote:
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Originally Posted by Roland_M
"The simple answer is iron and steel"
It is not as simple as you may think, because they had dozens of different types of steel and iron without any industrial standard. The quality of the different types was also very different.
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Yes. That's all well-known. That's why the papers/books (e.g., Williams, as cited) describing work where specimens are examined to determine
(a) composition,
(b) physical properties such as hardness, and
(c) microstructure
are so useful. Sometimes, it's important to go beyond the simple answer, and get to the details it leaves out. In particular, that's information we can't get from any pre-modern historical sources, so we
need to do that kind of analysis.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Roland_M
Only one country in the world has a complete history of its steel manufacturing, Japan.
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IMO, that overstates how much we know about early manufacture of steel in Japan (we know very little about their early iron industry).
Japan does have the advantage that steel-making is more recent than in many other countries, and was literate. So, while we know more about traditional steel-making in China than in Japan, there's also more we don't know about steel-making in China.
(But I think we have a more complete history of steel-making in the USA than in Japan.)