Around the world, glittering fireworks signal a celebration: Canadians light them on July 1 for Canada Day, the United States sets them off for Independence Day, and they light up the beaches of Brazil on New Year’s Eve. But these glowing displays wouldn’t be possible if not for the ancient Chinese.

As you can imagine, the story of fireworks started with a bang. Historians think that about 2,000 years ago, around the year 200 BCE, someone in China threw a piece of bamboo into a fire. The air pockets in bamboo stalks expand quickly with a fire’s heat, bursting the stalk apart in an explosion. Knowing this reaction, people sometimes carried bamboo stalks to make loud bangs with fire.

About a thousand years later, someone combined sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate together, an invention that became known as gunpowder. When put into a bamboo stalk and lit with a flame, the gunpowder made a noisy, glittering orange display. People in China began lighting these early fireworks for entertainment. Fireworks spread to other countries around the 14th century, but they remained the same orange color for hundreds of years.

Colorful fireworks wouldn’t come into existence until the 1830s, when advances in chemistry showed that adding strontium and barium to the mix created colors like red and green. By this point, fireworks were increasingly common in celebrations around the globe.

Despite being more than a thousand years old, firework chemistry is still evolving. Blue fireworks are made using copper, which will work only if the fireworks are set off at just the right temperature. This is a particularly difficult thing to get just right, so blue fireworks can be rare to see. 

Although fireworks have taken off in countless countries, China remains the world’s largest producer.