Most people did. 2300 years ago Eratosthenes not only proved it was round but calculated it's circumference with amazing precision. I don't know why anyone, besides cretinous imbeciles, would think it was flat.
The list of cretinous imbeciles is quite big and it includes ancient China and ancient India not exactly the kind of people that you would define as cretinous .
I'd like to see a source that claims china or india believed the world to be flat. Actually flat. I'd like to read the words of someone from that time stating that that is what they actually believed, not just someone interpretation of a cave painting or poem. It's true that at times the earth may have been depicted in art as a disk, but that is because people had a very limited understanding of what lay beyond distances we now cover with a medium length bus journey. The rest of the planet frankly didn't concern them.
Not sure about China.. But Indian did not believe that Earth was flat.. I'm not even going to quote the works of Aryabhatta. Even the Ancient Hindu scripture found in Purana tells a story about the Ganehsa (the elephant head) - However the funny this story is, it clearly points out that even ancient Hindus knew that the world was round, not flat.. Other texts in Vedas point out the knowledge of 7 planets, other than the earth, among many other things (like estimating the orbital time of earth around the sun as 360 days, so yeah, they did not even believe that earth was the center of the universe)
I think you didn't interpret well this time. Arya Bhatta predicted the rotations for planets.He even predicted elliptical orbits.It does suggests its not FLAT. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryabhata
@The Webby There you have it,here is the true value of cyber friendships.In reality they are fickle and have no real value.But do not despair as you still have your imaginary friend "rabbit" to fill the empty void of your days and nights.