Billiton Island. However, the lower carrying surface made the European wheelbarrow clearly more useful for short-haul work. As of the 1960s, traditional wheelbarrows in China were still in wide use. Chinese sailing carriage Although there are records of Chinese sailing carriages from the 6th century these land sailing vehicles were not wheelbarrows, and the date of which the sail assisted wheelbarrow was invented is uncertain. Engravings are found in van Braam Houckgeest's 1797 book. European interest in the Chinese sailing carriage is also seen in the writings of Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest in 1797, who wrote: Near the southern border of Shandong one finds a kind of wheelbarrow much larger than that which I have been describing, and drawn by a horse or a mule. But judge by my surprise when today I saw a whole fleet of wheelbarrows of the same size. I say, with deliberation, a fleet, for each of them had a sail, mounted on a small mast exactly fixed in a socket arranged at the forward end of the barrow. The sail, made of matting, or more often of cloth, is high, and broad, with stays, sheets, and halyards, just as on a Chinese ship. The sheets join the shafts of the wheelbarrow and can thus be manipulated by the man in charge. Ancient Greece and Rome M. J. T. Lewis surmised the wheelbarrow may have existed in ancient Greece in the form of a one-wheel cart， Two building material inventories for 408/407 and 407/406 B.C. from the temple of Eleusis list, among other machines and tools, "1 body for a one-wheeler ()", although there is no evidence to prove this hypothesis.( in Greek): Since () and () mean nothing but "two-wheeler" and "four-wheeler," and since the () body is sandwiched in the Eleusis inventory between a four-wheeler body and its four wheels, to take it as anything but a one-wheeler strains credulity far beyond breaking point. It can only be a wheelbarrow, necessarily guided and balanced by a man...what does now emerge as certainty is that the wheelbarrow did not, as is universally claimed, make its European debut in the Middle Ages. It was there some sixteen centuries before. M. J. T. Lewis admits that the current consensus among technology historians, including Bertrand Gille, Andrea Matthies, and Joseph Needham, is that the wheelbarrow was invented in China around 100 AD and spread to the