There are few controlled experiments in history

From A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade. Page 215.

I wouldn't invest too much significance into this but it is none-the-less, revealing.

In 1608 Hans Lippershey, a spectacle maker in the Dutch town of Middelburg, invented the telescope. Within a few decades, telescopes had been introduced from Europe to China, to the Mughal empire in India and to the Ottoman empire. All four civilizations were thus on equal footing in terms of possessing this powerful new instrument with its latent power for observing the universe and deducing the laws of planetary motion.

There are few controlled experiments in history, but the historian of science Toby Huff has discovered one in the way that the telescope was received and used in the 17th century. The reactions of the four civilizations to this powerful new instrument bear on the very different kinds of society that each had developed.

In Europe the telescope was turned at once toward the heavens. Galileo, hearing a description of Lippershey's device, immediately set to building telescopes of his own. He was firt to observe the moons of Jupiter, and he used the fact of Jupiter's satellites as empirical evidence in favor of Copernicus's then disputed notion that the planets, including the Earth were satellites of the sun. Galileo's argument that the earth revolved around the sun brought him into conflict with the church's belief that the Earth cannot move. In 1633 he was forced to recant by the Inquisition and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.

But Europe was not monolithic, and the Inquisition was powerless to suppress the ideas of Copernicus and Galileo in Protestant countries. What Galileo had started was carried forward by Kepler and Newton. The momentum of the Scientific Revolution scarcely faltered.

In the Muslim world, the telescope quickly reached the Mughal empire in India. One was presented in 1616 by the British ambassador to the court of the emperor Jahangir, and many more arrived a year later. The Mughals knew a lot about astronomy, but their interest in it was confined to matters of the calendar. A revised calendar was presented to the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in 1628, but the scholar who prepared it based it on the Ptolemaic system (which assumes that the sun revolves around an immobile Earth).

Given this extensive familiarity with astronomy, Mughal scholars might have been expected to use the telescope to explore the heavens. But the designers of astronomical instruments in the Mughal empire did not make telescopes, and the scholars created no demand for them. "In the end, no Mughal scholars undertook to use the telescope for astronomical purposes in the seventeenth century," Huff reports.

Wade goes on.

Telescopes had reached Istanbul by at least 1626 and were quickly incorporated into the Ottoman navy. But despite Muslim eminence in optics in the 14th century, scholars in the Ottoman empire showed no particular interest in the telescope.

What about China?

Outside of Europe, the most promising new users of the telescope were in China, whose government had a keen interest in astronomy. Moreover, there was an unusual but vigorous mechanism for pumping the new European astronomical discoveries into China in the form of the Jesuit mission there. The Jesuits figured they had a better chance of converting the Chinese to Christianity if they could show that European astronomy provided more accurate calculations of the celestial events in which the Chinese were interested. Through the Jesuits efforts, the Chinese certainly knew of the telescope by 1626, and the emperor probably received a telescope from Cardinal Borromeo of Milan as early as 1618.

[snip]

The puzzle is that throughout this period the Chinese made no improvements on the telescope. Nor did they show any sustained interest in the ferment of European ideas about the theoretical structure of the universe, despite being plied by the Jesuits with the latest European research. Chinese astronomers had behind them a centuries-old tradition of astronomical observation. But it was embedded in a Chinese cosmological system that they were reluctant to abandon. Their latent xenophobia also supported resistance to new ideas. "It is better to have no good astronomy than to have Westerners in China," wrote the anti-Christian scholar Yang Guangxian.