Passage Three Europeans have been using the wheelbarrow for about eight hundred years. But the Chinese invented it at least ten centuries before that. Ancient Chinese gave the wheelbarrow nice names - Wooden Ox and Gliding Horse. "In the time taken by a man (with a similar burden) to go six feet, the Wooden Ox could get twenty feet," wrote an admiring historian in AD 430. "It could carry the food supply (of one man) for a whole year, and yet after twenty miles the porter would not feel tired." A famous general called Chuke Liang developed wheelbarrows two hundred years before this historian was writing, to help carry supplies for his army. But, very recently, pictures have been discovered on ancient tombs, and bricks, of even earlier wheelbarrows. So perhaps they were invented in the first century AD. No one knows how people in Europe found out about the wheelbarrow - or, for that matter, about many other Chinese inventions. Perhaps the idea came overland across the steppes, with nomadic ( 游牧的 ) tribes. Or perhaps traders using the famous silk-route to the great city of Constantinople, on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, talked about things seen in far-off China. Probably someone who heard the talk worked out his own version, because the wheelbarrow used in Europe is a different design from the Chinese. It has the wheel out in front, so that the load is supported both by the wheel and the man pushing it. The wheelbarrow in China has the wheel in the middle, right under the load, and the pusher only has to steer and balance it. At all events, some time in the twelfth or thirteenth century, workmen building the great castles and cathedrals of Europe had, to their great relief, a new simple device to help them. One man with a wheelbarrow could carry the same load as two men and much more easily and quickly. The wheel took the place of a man.