History of typography in East Asia
Encyclopedia
The history of printing in East Asia refers to the use of woodblock printing
and movable type
printing by East Asian artisans. The former existed in Tang China
as early as the 7th century, and the latter in Song China
by the 11th century. Use of woodblock printing quickly spread to other East Asia
n countries. While the Chinese used only clay-character movable type at first, use of metal movable type was pioneered in Korea
by the 13th century. The Western-style printing press
became known in East Asia by the 16th century but wasn't fully adopted until centuries later.
Traditionally, there have been two main printing techniques in Asia, those of woodblock printing (xylography) and moveable type printing. In the woodblock technique, ink is applied to letters carved upon a wooden board, which is then pressed onto paper. With moveable type, the board is assembled using different lettertypes, according to the page being printed. Wooden printing was used in the East from the 8th century onwards, and moveable metal type came into use during the 12th century.
The earliest woodblock printed fragments to survive are from China and are of silk printed with flowers in three colours from the Han Dynasty (before 220 CE).
The earliest specimen of woodblock printing on paper, whereby individual sheets of paper were pressed into wooden blocks with the text and illustrations carved into them, was discovered in 1974 in an excavation of Xi'an
(then called Chang'an
, the capital of Tang China), Shaanxi
, China. It is a dharani
sutra printed on hemp
paper and dated to 650 to 670 AD, during Tang Dynasty
(618–907). Another printed document dating to the early half of the Chinese Tang Dynasty has also been found, the Snddharma pundarik sutra printed from 690 to 699.
A copy of the Buddhist Dharani Sutra called the Pure Light Dharani Sutra (Hanja
: 無垢淨光大陀羅尼經 Hangul
:; Revised Romanization: Mugujeonggwangdaedaranigyeong), discovered in a Silla Korean pagoda that was repaired in 751 AD, was undated but must have been created sometime before the reconstruction of the Shakyamuni Pagoda of Pulguk Temple, Kyongju Province in 751 AD. The document is estimated to have been created no later than 704 AD. Joseph Needham states that the Pure Light Dharani Sutra utilizes the extinct writing system of Empress Wu
, who reigned over China
from 690 to 705. Choi Junshik states that the characters on the Pure Light Dharani Sutra were invented by Silla, noting the invention of characters by Silla throughout its existence. Pan Jixing refutes this, stating that research has shown that the dharani sutra discovered in Korea was translated in China from Sanskrit in 701 and printed in 702 at Luoyang
, the capital of China under Wu Zetian,then sent to Korea in [703] in several batches.
Joseph Needham
notes that the intricate artistic designs and fine lines of calligraphy found in the Diamond Sutra attest to the level of refinement reached in woodblock printing in the time between the printing of it and the Pure Light Dharani Sutra of 704. The oldest known printed calendars
in the world also come from Tang China
, printed in 877 and 882.
Four proof-readings are normally required - the transcript, the corrected transcript, first sample print from block and after any corrections have been made. A small correction to a block can be made by cutting a small notch and hammering in a wedge-shaped piece of wood. Larger errors require an inlay. After this the block is washed to remove any refuse.
To print, the block is fixed firmly on a table. The printer takes a round horsehair inking brush and applies ink with a vertical motion. The paper is then laid on the block and rubbed with a long narrow pad to transfer the impression to the paper. The paper is peeled off and set to dry. Because of the rubbing process, printing is only done on one side of the paper, and the paper is thinner than in the west, but two pages are normally printed at once.
Sample copies were sometimes made in red or blue, but black ink was always used for production. It is said that a skilled printer could produce as many as 1500 or 2000 double sheets in a day. Blocks can be stored and reused when extra copies are needed. 15,000 prints can be taken from a block with a further 10,000 after touching up.
was printed. A reprint in 1237-51 used 81,258 blocks of magnolia wood, carved on both sides, which are still kept almost intact at Haeinsa
. A printing office was established in the National Academy in 1101 and the Goryeo
government collection numbered several tens of thousands.
In Japan
, one thousand copies of the Lotus sutra
were printed in 1009 as a pious work, not intended to be read and therefore legibility was not so important. The spread of printing outside Buddhist circles didn't develop until the end of the 16th century.
The westward movement of printing started from eastern Turkestan
where printing in the Uighur language appeared in about 1,300, though the page numbers and descriptions are in Chinese. Both blocks and moveable type printing has been discovered at Turfan as well as several hundred wooden type for Uighur. After the Mongols conquered Turfan, a great number of Uighurs were recruited into the Mongol army and after the Mongols incorporated Persia in the middle of the 13th century, paper money was printed in Tabriz
in 1294, following the Chinese system. The first description of the Chinese printing system was made by the Grand Vizier
Rashid-al-Din in 1301-11 in his history of the world.
Some fifty pieces of printed matter have been found in Egypt
printed between 900 and 1300 in black ink on paper by the rubbing method in the Chinese style. Although there is no transmission evidence, experts believe there is a connection.
According to the print scholar A. Hyatt Mayor
, "it was the Chinese who really discovered the means of communication that was to dominate until our age." Both woodblock and movable type printing were replaced in the second half of the 19th century by western-style printing
, initially lithography
.
The first known movable type system was invented in China
around 1040 AD by Bi Sheng
(990
-1051). Bi Sheng's type was made of baked clay. As described by the Chinese scholar Shen Kuo
(1031–1095):
The claim that Bi Sheng's clay types were fragile and "not practical for large-scale printing" and "short lived" was refuted by Pan Jixing, who pointed out that clay type, after being baked in an oven, becomes hard and difficult to break, such that it remains intact after being dropped from two meters onto a marble floor. Clay type printing was practiced in China from the Song dynasty thru the Qing dynasty, never "short lived". Bronze movable type printing was invented in China as early as 11th century in large scale bronze plate printing of paper money with embedded bronze metal types for anti counterfeit markers. Hua Sui
in 1490 AD during the Ming Dynasty
used this method in printing books(1368-1644 AD).
As early as 1154 Jin Dynasty, people used copper block embedded with bronze movable type to print paper money and formal official documents. The typical example of this kind of bronze movable type embedded copper-block printing is a printed "check" of Jin Dynasty in the year of 1215, with two square holes for embedding two bronze movable type characters, each selected from 1000 different characters, such that each printed paper money has different combination of markers.
A number of books printed in Tangut script
during the Western Xia (1038–1227) period are known, of which the Auspicious Tantra of All-Reaching Union
that was discovered in the ruins of Baisigou Square Pagoda
in 1991 is believed to have been printed sometime during the reign of Emperor Renzong of Western Xia
(1139–1193). It is considered by many Chinese experts to be the earliest extant example of a book printed using wooden movable type.
Wang Zhen
, the author of the Nong Shu (農書) was also a pioneer in this field. Although the wooden type was more durable under the mechanical rigors of handling, repeated printing wore the character faces down, and the types could only be replaced by carving new pieces. Before the pioneer of bronze-type printing of China, Hua Sui
in 1490 AD, Wang Zhen had experimented with metal type using tin, yet found it unsatisfactory due to its incompatibility with the ink
ing process.
A particular difficulty posed the logistical problems of handling the several thousand logographs whose command is required for full literacy in Chinese language
. It was faster to carve one woodblock per page than to composit a page from so many different types. However, if one was to use movable type for multitudes of the same document, the speed of printing would be relatively quicker.
The transition from wood type to movable metal type occurred in Korea
during the Goryeo Dynasty, some time in the 13th century, to meet the heavy demand for both religious and secular books. A set of ritual books, Sangjeong Gogeum Yemun were printed with movable metal type in 1234. The credit for the first metal movable type may go to Choe Yun-ui
of the Goryeo
Dynasty in 1234.
Examples of this metal type are on display in the Asian Reading Room of the Library of Congress
in Washington, D.C. The oldest extant movable metal print book is the Jikji
, printed in Korea in 1377.
The techniques for bronze casting, used at the time for making coins (as well as bells and statues) were adapted to making metal type. Unlike the metal punch system thought to be used by Gutenberg, the Koreans used a sand-casting method. The following description of the Korean font casting process was recorded by the Joseon dynasty
scholar Song Hyon (15th c.):
While metal movable type printing was invented in Korea and the oldest extant metal print book had been printed in Korea, Korea never witnessed a printing revolution comparable to Europe's:
A potential solution to the linguistic and cultural bottleneck that held back movable type in Korea for two hundred years appeared in the early 15th century—a generation before Gutenberg would begin working on his own movable type invention in Europe—when King Sejong
devised a simplified alphabet
of 24 characters called Hangul
for use by the common people, which could have made the typecasting and compositing process more feasible.
printing-press in Nagasaki, Japan
, printing equipment brought back by Toyotomi Hideyoshi
's army in 1593 from Korea had far greater influence on the development of the medium. Four years later, Tokugawa Ieyasu
, even before becoming shogun
, effected the creation of the first native movable type, using wooden type-pieces rather than metal. He oversaw the creation of 100,000 type-pieces, which were used to print a number of political and historical texts.
An edition of the Confucian
Analects was printed in 1598, using Korean moveable type printing equipment, at the order of Emperor Go-Yōzei
. This document is the oldest work of Japanese moveable type printing extant today. Despite the appeal of moveable type, however, it was soon decided that the running script style of Japanese writings would be better reproduced using woodblocks, and so woodblocks were once more adopted; by 1640 they were once again being used for nearly all purposes.
during the Mongol Empire
; among other groups, the Uyghurs
of Central Asia, whose script was adopted for the Mongol language, used movable type.
and photolithography
in the 19th century. To understand this it is necessary to consider both the nature of the language and the economics of printing.
Given that the Chinese language does not use an alphabet it was usually necessary for a set of type to contain 100,000 or more blocks, which was a substantial investment. Common characters need 20 or more copies, and rarer characters only a single copy. In the case of wood, the characters were either produced in a large block and cut up, or the blocks were cut first and the characters cut afterwards. In either case the size and height of the type had to be carefully controlled to produce pleasing results. To handle the typesetting, Wang Zhen used revolving tables about 2m in diameter in which the characters were divided accoding to the five tones and the rhyme sections according to the official book of rhymes. The characters were all numbered and one man holding the list called out the number to another who would fetch the type.
This system worked well when the run was large. Wang Zhen's initial project to produce 100 copies of a 60,000 character gazetteer of the local district was produced in less than a month. But for the smaller runs typical of the time it was not such an improvement. A reprint required resetting and re-proofreading, unlike the wooden block system where it was feasible to store the blocks and reuse them. Individual wooden characters didn't last as long as complete blocks. When metal type was introduced it was harder to produce aesthetically pleasing type by the direct carving method.
It is unknown whether metal movable types used from the late 15th century in China were cast from moulds or carved individually. Even if they were cast, there were not the economies of scale available with the small number of different characters used in an alphabetic system. The wage for engraving on bronze was many times that for carving characters on wood and a set of metal type might contain 200-400,000 characters. Additionally, the ink traditionally used in Chinese printing, typically composed of pine soot bound with glue, didn't work well with the tin originally used for type.
As a result of all this, movable type was initially used by government offices which needed to produce large number of copies and by itinerant printers producing family registers who would carry perhaps 20,000 pieces of wooden type with them and cut any other characters needed locally. But small local printers often found that wooden blocks suited their needs better.
an printing remained unknown in East Asia. Instead, printing remained an unmechanized, laborious process with pressing the back of the paper onto the inked block by manual "rubbing" with a hand tool. In Korea, the first printing presses were introduced as late as 1881-83, while in Japan, after an early but brief interlude in the 1590s, Gutenberg's printing press arrived in Nagasaki in 1848 on a Dutch ship.
Contrary to Gutenberg printing, which allowed printing on both sides of the paper from its very beginnings (although not simultaneously until very recent times), East Asian printing was done only on one side of the paper, because the need to rub the back of the paper when printing would have spoilt the first side when the second side was printed. Another reason was that, unlike in Europe where Gutenberg introduced more suitable oil-based ink, Asian printing remained confined to water-based inks which tended to soak through the paper.
Woodblock printing
Woodblock printing is a technique for printing text, images or patterns used widely throughout East Asia and originating in China in antiquity as a method of printing on textiles and later paper....
and movable type
Movable type
Movable type is the system of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document ....
printing by East Asian artisans. The former existed in Tang China
Tang Dynasty
The Tang Dynasty was an imperial dynasty of China preceded by the Sui Dynasty and followed by the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period. It was founded by the Li family, who seized power during the decline and collapse of the Sui Empire...
as early as the 7th century, and the latter in Song China
Song Dynasty
The Song Dynasty was a ruling dynasty in China between 960 and 1279; it succeeded the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period, and was followed by the Yuan Dynasty. It was the first government in world history to issue banknotes or paper money, and the first Chinese government to establish a...
by the 11th century. Use of woodblock printing quickly spread to other East Asia
East Asia
East Asia or Eastern Asia is a subregion of Asia that can be defined in either geographical or cultural terms...
n countries. While the Chinese used only clay-character movable type at first, use of metal movable type was pioneered in Korea
Korea
Korea ) is an East Asian geographic region that is currently divided into two separate sovereign states — North Korea and South Korea. Located on the Korean Peninsula, Korea is bordered by the People's Republic of China to the northwest, Russia to the northeast, and is separated from Japan to the...
by the 13th century. The Western-style printing press
Printing press
A printing press is a device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium , thereby transferring the ink...
became known in East Asia by the 16th century but wasn't fully adopted until centuries later.
Woodblock printing
The earliest woodblock printed fragments to survive are from China and are of silk printed with flowers in three colours from the Han Dynasty (before 220 CE).
The earliest specimen of woodblock printing on paper, whereby individual sheets of paper were pressed into wooden blocks with the text and illustrations carved into them, was discovered in 1974 in an excavation of Xi'an
Xi'an
Xi'an is the capital of the Shaanxi province, and a sub-provincial city in the People's Republic of China. One of the oldest cities in China, with more than 3,100 years of history, the city was known as Chang'an before the Ming Dynasty...
(then called Chang'an
Chang'an
Chang'an is an ancient capital of more than ten dynasties in Chinese history, today known as Xi'an. Chang'an literally means "Perpetual Peace" in Classical Chinese. During the short-lived Xin Dynasty, the city was renamed "Constant Peace" ; yet after its fall in AD 23, the old name was restored...
, the capital of Tang China), Shaanxi
Shaanxi
' is a province in the central part of Mainland China, and it includes portions of the Loess Plateau on the middle reaches of the Yellow River in addition to the Qinling Mountains across the southern part of this province...
, China. It is a dharani
Dharani
A ' is a type of ritual speech similar to a mantra. The terms dharani and satheesh may be seen as synonyms, although they are normally used in distinct contexts....
sutra printed on hemp
Hemp
Hemp is mostly used as a name for low tetrahydrocannabinol strains of the plant Cannabis sativa, of fiber and/or oilseed varieties. In modern times, hemp has been used for industrial purposes including paper, textiles, biodegradable plastics, construction, health food and fuel with modest...
paper and dated to 650 to 670 AD, during Tang Dynasty
Tang Dynasty
The Tang Dynasty was an imperial dynasty of China preceded by the Sui Dynasty and followed by the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period. It was founded by the Li family, who seized power during the decline and collapse of the Sui Empire...
(618–907). Another printed document dating to the early half of the Chinese Tang Dynasty has also been found, the Snddharma pundarik sutra printed from 690 to 699.
Hanja
Hanja is the Korean name for the Chinese characters hanzi. More specifically, it refers to those Chinese characters borrowed from Chinese and incorporated into the Korean language with Korean pronunciation...
: 無垢淨光大陀羅尼經 Hangul
Hangul
Hangul,Pronounced or ; Korean: 한글 Hangeul/Han'gŭl or 조선글 Chosŏn'gŭl/Joseongeul the Korean alphabet, is the native alphabet of the Korean language. It is a separate script from Hanja, the logographic Chinese characters which are also sometimes used to write Korean...
:; Revised Romanization: Mugujeonggwangdaedaranigyeong), discovered in a Silla Korean pagoda that was repaired in 751 AD, was undated but must have been created sometime before the reconstruction of the Shakyamuni Pagoda of Pulguk Temple, Kyongju Province in 751 AD. The document is estimated to have been created no later than 704 AD. Joseph Needham states that the Pure Light Dharani Sutra utilizes the extinct writing system of Empress Wu
Chinese characters of Empress Wu
Chinese characters of Empress Wu, or the Zetian characters , are Chinese characters introduced by Empress Wu Zetian, the only reigning female in the history of China, to demonstrate her power. The characters were not created by the Empress herself, but were suggested by an official named Zong...
, who reigned over China
Wu Zetian
Wu Zetian , personal name Wu Zhao , often referred to as Tian Hou during the Tang Dynasty and Empress Consort Wu in later times, was the only woman in the history of China to assume the title of Empress Regnant...
from 690 to 705. Choi Junshik states that the characters on the Pure Light Dharani Sutra were invented by Silla, noting the invention of characters by Silla throughout its existence. Pan Jixing refutes this, stating that research has shown that the dharani sutra discovered in Korea was translated in China from Sanskrit in 701 and printed in 702 at Luoyang
Luoyang
Luoyang is a prefecture-level city in western Henan province of Central China. It borders the provincial capital of Zhengzhou to the east, Pingdingshan to the southeast, Nanyang to the south, Sanmenxia to the west, Jiyuan to the north, and Jiaozuo to the northeast.Situated on the central plain of...
, the capital of China under Wu Zetian,then sent to Korea in [703] in several batches.
Joseph Needham
Joseph Needham
Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham, CH, FRS, FBA , also known as Li Yuese , was a British scientist, historian and sinologist known for his scientific research and writing on the history of Chinese science. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1941, and as a fellow of the British...
notes that the intricate artistic designs and fine lines of calligraphy found in the Diamond Sutra attest to the level of refinement reached in woodblock printing in the time between the printing of it and the Pure Light Dharani Sutra of 704. The oldest known printed calendars
Chinese calendar
The Chinese calendar is a lunisolar calendar, incorporating elements of a lunar calendar with those of a solar calendar. It is not exclusive to China, but followed by many other Asian cultures as well...
in the world also come from Tang China
Tang Dynasty
The Tang Dynasty was an imperial dynasty of China preceded by the Sui Dynasty and followed by the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period. It was founded by the Li family, who seized power during the decline and collapse of the Sui Empire...
, printed in 877 and 882.
The printing process
The manuscript is transcribed onto thin slightly waxed sheets of paper by a professional calligrapher. The paper is placed face down on a block on which a thin layer of rice paste has been thinly spread and the back rubbed with a flat palm-fibre brush so that a clear impression of the inked area is left on the block. The engraving uses a set of sharp-edged tools to cut the characters with a double edged tool used to cut away any extra surfaces. The knife is held like a dagger in the right hand and guided by the middle finger of the left hand, drawing towards the cutter. The vertical lines are cut first, then the block is rotated 90 degrees and the horizontal lines cut.Four proof-readings are normally required - the transcript, the corrected transcript, first sample print from block and after any corrections have been made. A small correction to a block can be made by cutting a small notch and hammering in a wedge-shaped piece of wood. Larger errors require an inlay. After this the block is washed to remove any refuse.
To print, the block is fixed firmly on a table. The printer takes a round horsehair inking brush and applies ink with a vertical motion. The paper is then laid on the block and rubbed with a long narrow pad to transfer the impression to the paper. The paper is peeled off and set to dry. Because of the rubbing process, printing is only done on one side of the paper, and the paper is thinner than in the west, but two pages are normally printed at once.
Sample copies were sometimes made in red or blue, but black ink was always used for production. It is said that a skilled printer could produce as many as 1500 or 2000 double sheets in a day. Blocks can be stored and reused when extra copies are needed. 15,000 prints can be taken from a block with a further 10,000 after touching up.
Spread of printing in Asia
Printing started in Korea in the 7th century. Printing was promoted by the spread of Buddhism and between 1011 and 1082 the first Tripitaka KoreanaTripitaka Koreana
The Tripitaka Koreana or Palman Daejanggyeong is a Korean collection of the Tripitaka , carved onto 81,258 wooden printing blocks in the 13th century...
was printed. A reprint in 1237-51 used 81,258 blocks of magnolia wood, carved on both sides, which are still kept almost intact at Haeinsa
Haeinsa
Haeinsa is a head temple of the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism in the Gaya Mountains , South Gyeongsang Province South Korea...
. A printing office was established in the National Academy in 1101 and the Goryeo
Goryeo
The Goryeo Dynasty or Koryŏ was a Korean dynasty established in 918 by Emperor Taejo. Korea gets its name from this kingdom which came to be pronounced Korea. It united the Later Three Kingdoms in 936 and ruled most of the Korean peninsula until it was removed by the Joseon dynasty in 1392...
government collection numbered several tens of thousands.
In Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
, one thousand copies of the Lotus sutra
Lotus Sutra
The Lotus Sūtra is one of the most popular and influential Mahāyāna sūtras, and the basis on which the Tiantai and Nichiren sects of Buddhism were established.-Title:...
were printed in 1009 as a pious work, not intended to be read and therefore legibility was not so important. The spread of printing outside Buddhist circles didn't develop until the end of the 16th century.
The westward movement of printing started from eastern Turkestan
Turkestan
Turkestan, spelled also as Turkistan, literally means "Land of the Turks".The term Turkestan is of Persian origin and has never been in use to denote a single nation. It was first used by Persian geographers to describe the place of Turkish peoples...
where printing in the Uighur language appeared in about 1,300, though the page numbers and descriptions are in Chinese. Both blocks and moveable type printing has been discovered at Turfan as well as several hundred wooden type for Uighur. After the Mongols conquered Turfan, a great number of Uighurs were recruited into the Mongol army and after the Mongols incorporated Persia in the middle of the 13th century, paper money was printed in Tabriz
Tabriz
Tabriz is the fourth largest city and one of the historical capitals of Iran and the capital of East Azerbaijan Province. Situated at an altitude of 1,350 meters at the junction of the Quri River and Aji River, it was the second largest city in Iran until the late 1960s, one of its former...
in 1294, following the Chinese system. The first description of the Chinese printing system was made by the Grand Vizier
Grand Vizier
Grand Vizier, in Turkish Vezir-i Azam or Sadr-ı Azam , deriving from the Arabic word vizier , was the greatest minister of the Sultan, with absolute power of attorney and, in principle, dismissable only by the Sultan himself...
Rashid-al-Din in 1301-11 in his history of the world.
Some fifty pieces of printed matter have been found in Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
printed between 900 and 1300 in black ink on paper by the rubbing method in the Chinese style. Although there is no transmission evidence, experts believe there is a connection.
According to the print scholar A. Hyatt Mayor
A. Hyatt Mayor
A. Hyatt Mayor was an American art historian and curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a leading figure in the study of prints, both old master prints and popular prints....
, "it was the Chinese who really discovered the means of communication that was to dominate until our age." Both woodblock and movable type printing were replaced in the second half of the 19th century by western-style printing
Typography
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...
, initially lithography
Lithography
Lithography is a method for printing using a stone or a metal plate with a completely smooth surface...
.
Movable type
Movable type in China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
around 1040 AD by Bi Sheng
Bi Sheng
Bì Shēng was the inventor of the first known movable type technology. Bi Sheng's system was made of Chinese porcelain and was invented between 1041 and 1048 in China.-Movable type printing:...
(990
990
Year 990 was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Julian calendar.- Religion :* The Pax Ecclesiae, an edict by the church in southern France attempting to outlaw acts of war against non-combatants and the clergy, is promulgated.- Births :* Conrad II, Holy Roman Emperor * Edmund II of England,...
-1051). Bi Sheng's type was made of baked clay. As described by the Chinese scholar Shen Kuo
Shen Kuo
Shen Kuo or Shen Gua , style name Cunzhong and pseudonym Mengqi Weng , was a polymathic Chinese scientist and statesman of the Song Dynasty...
(1031–1095):
- When he wished to print, he took an iron frame and set it on the iron plate. In this he placed the types, set close together. When the frame was full, the whole made one solid block of type. He then placed it near the fire to warm it. When the paste [at the back] was slightly melted, he took a smooth board and pressed it over the surface, so that the block of type became as even as a whetstone.
- For each character there were several types, and for certain common characters there were twenty or more types each, in order to be prepared for the repetition of characters on the same page. When the characters were not in use he had them arranged with paper labels, one label for each rhyme-group, and kept them in wooden cases.
The claim that Bi Sheng's clay types were fragile and "not practical for large-scale printing" and "short lived" was refuted by Pan Jixing, who pointed out that clay type, after being baked in an oven, becomes hard and difficult to break, such that it remains intact after being dropped from two meters onto a marble floor. Clay type printing was practiced in China from the Song dynasty thru the Qing dynasty, never "short lived". Bronze movable type printing was invented in China as early as 11th century in large scale bronze plate printing of paper money with embedded bronze metal types for anti counterfeit markers. Hua Sui
Hua Sui
Hua Sui was a Chinese scholar and printer of Wuxi, Jiangsu province during the Ming Dynasty . He belonged to the wealthy Hua family that was renowned throughout the region. Hua Sui is best known for creating China's first metal movable type printing in 1490 AD...
in 1490 AD during the Ming Dynasty
Ming Dynasty
The Ming Dynasty, also Empire of the Great Ming, was the ruling dynasty of China from 1368 to 1644, following the collapse of the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty. The Ming, "one of the greatest eras of orderly government and social stability in human history", was the last dynasty in China ruled by ethnic...
used this method in printing books(1368-1644 AD).
As early as 1154 Jin Dynasty, people used copper block embedded with bronze movable type to print paper money and formal official documents. The typical example of this kind of bronze movable type embedded copper-block printing is a printed "check" of Jin Dynasty in the year of 1215, with two square holes for embedding two bronze movable type characters, each selected from 1000 different characters, such that each printed paper money has different combination of markers.
Wooden movable type
Tangut script
The Tangut script was a logographic writing system, used for writing the extinct Tangut language of the Western Xia Dynasty. According to the latest count, 5863 Tangut characters are known, excluding variants...
during the Western Xia (1038–1227) period are known, of which the Auspicious Tantra of All-Reaching Union
Auspicious Tantra of All-Reaching Union
The Auspicious Tantra of All-Reaching Union is the title of a set of nine volumes of Buddhist printed texts written in the Tangut language and script which was discovered in the ruins of the Baisigou Square Pagoda in Helan County, Ningxia, China in 1991 after it...
that was discovered in the ruins of Baisigou Square Pagoda
Baisigou Square Pagoda
Baisigou Square Pagoda was a brick pagoda in Helan County, Ningxia, China, built during the Western Xia period . It is situated in an isolated location about 10 km into the Baisigou Valley on the eastern side of the Helan Mountains, northwest of Yinchuan, but may have been the site of an...
in 1991 is believed to have been printed sometime during the reign of Emperor Renzong of Western Xia
Emperor Renzong of Western Xia
Emperor Renzong , born Li Renxiao, was the 5th emperor of the Western Xia dynasty .Li Renxiao was the eldest son of Emperor Chongzong, and succeeded him at the age of sixteen. After ascending into the throne, Renzong made friendly overtures to the Jin Dynasty...
(1139–1193). It is considered by many Chinese experts to be the earliest extant example of a book printed using wooden movable type.
Wang Zhen
Wang Zhen (official)
Wang Zhen was an official of the Yuan Dynasty of China. He is credited with the invention of the first wooden movable type printing in the world, while his predecessor of the Song Dynasty , Bi Sheng , invented the world's first earthenware movable type printing...
, the author of the Nong Shu (農書) was also a pioneer in this field. Although the wooden type was more durable under the mechanical rigors of handling, repeated printing wore the character faces down, and the types could only be replaced by carving new pieces. Before the pioneer of bronze-type printing of China, Hua Sui
Hua Sui
Hua Sui was a Chinese scholar and printer of Wuxi, Jiangsu province during the Ming Dynasty . He belonged to the wealthy Hua family that was renowned throughout the region. Hua Sui is best known for creating China's first metal movable type printing in 1490 AD...
in 1490 AD, Wang Zhen had experimented with metal type using tin, yet found it unsatisfactory due to its incompatibility with the ink
Ink
Ink is a liquid or paste that contains pigments and/or dyes and is used to color a surface to produce an image, text, or design. Ink is used for drawing and/or writing with a pen, brush, or quill...
ing process.
A particular difficulty posed the logistical problems of handling the several thousand logographs whose command is required for full literacy in Chinese language
Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese , also called Ancient Chinese by the linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese language spoken during Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties...
. It was faster to carve one woodblock per page than to composit a page from so many different types. However, if one was to use movable type for multitudes of the same document, the speed of printing would be relatively quicker.
Movable type in Korea
Korea
Korea ) is an East Asian geographic region that is currently divided into two separate sovereign states — North Korea and South Korea. Located on the Korean Peninsula, Korea is bordered by the People's Republic of China to the northwest, Russia to the northeast, and is separated from Japan to the...
during the Goryeo Dynasty, some time in the 13th century, to meet the heavy demand for both religious and secular books. A set of ritual books, Sangjeong Gogeum Yemun were printed with movable metal type in 1234. The credit for the first metal movable type may go to Choe Yun-ui
Choe Yun-ui
Choe Yun-ui was a Korean civil minister during the Goryeo Dynasty. Choe Yun-ui compiled the Sangjeong yemun with another 16 scholars. They collected all courtesies from ancient to present and published 50 copies....
of the Goryeo
Goryeo
The Goryeo Dynasty or Koryŏ was a Korean dynasty established in 918 by Emperor Taejo. Korea gets its name from this kingdom which came to be pronounced Korea. It united the Later Three Kingdoms in 936 and ruled most of the Korean peninsula until it was removed by the Joseon dynasty in 1392...
Dynasty in 1234.
Examples of this metal type are on display in the Asian Reading Room of the Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
in Washington, D.C. The oldest extant movable metal print book is the Jikji
Jikji
Jikji is the abbreviated title of a Korean Buddhist document, whose title can be translated "Anthology of Great Buddhist Priests' Zen Teachings". Printed during the Goryeo Dynasty in 1377, it is the world's oldest extant movable metal print book...
, printed in Korea in 1377.
The techniques for bronze casting, used at the time for making coins (as well as bells and statues) were adapted to making metal type. Unlike the metal punch system thought to be used by Gutenberg, the Koreans used a sand-casting method. The following description of the Korean font casting process was recorded by the Joseon dynasty
Joseon Dynasty
Joseon , was a Korean state founded by Taejo Yi Seong-gye that lasted for approximately five centuries. It was founded in the aftermath of the overthrow of the Goryeo at what is today the city of Kaesong. Early on, Korea was retitled and the capital was relocated to modern-day Seoul...
scholar Song Hyon (15th c.):
- At first, one cuts letters in beech wood. One fills a trough level with fine sandy
[clay] of the reed-growing seashore. Wood-cut letters are pressed into the sand, then the impressions become negative and form letters[molds] . At this step, placing one trough together with another, one pours the molten bronze down into an opening. The fluid flows in, filling these negative molds, one by one becoming type. Lastly, one scrapes and files off the irregularities, and piles them up to be arranged.
While metal movable type printing was invented in Korea and the oldest extant metal print book had been printed in Korea, Korea never witnessed a printing revolution comparable to Europe's:
- Korean printing with movable metallic type developed mainly within the royal foundry of the Yi dynasty. Royalty kept a monopoly of this new technique and by royal mandate suppressed all non-official printing activities and any budding attempts at commercialization of printing. Thus, printing in early Korea served only the small, noble groups of the highly stratified society.
A potential solution to the linguistic and cultural bottleneck that held back movable type in Korea for two hundred years appeared in the early 15th century—a generation before Gutenberg would begin working on his own movable type invention in Europe—when King Sejong
Sejong the Great of Joseon
Sejong the Great was the fourth king of the Joseon Dynasty of Korea. During his regency, he reinforced Korean Confucian policies and executed major legal amendments . He also used the creation of Hangul and the advancement of technology to expand his territory...
devised a simplified alphabet
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...
of 24 characters called Hangul
Hangul
Hangul,Pronounced or ; Korean: 한글 Hangeul/Han'gŭl or 조선글 Chosŏn'gŭl/Joseongeul the Korean alphabet, is the native alphabet of the Korean language. It is a separate script from Hanja, the logographic Chinese characters which are also sometimes used to write Korean...
for use by the common people, which could have made the typecasting and compositing process more feasible.
Movable type in Japan
Though the Jesuits operated a Western movable typeMovable type
Movable type is the system of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document ....
printing-press in Nagasaki, Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
, printing equipment brought back by Toyotomi Hideyoshi
Toyotomi Hideyoshi
was a daimyo warrior, general and politician of the Sengoku period. He unified the political factions of Japan. He succeeded his former liege lord, Oda Nobunaga, and brought an end to the Sengoku period. The period of his rule is often called the Momoyama period, named after Hideyoshi's castle...
's army in 1593 from Korea had far greater influence on the development of the medium. Four years later, Tokugawa Ieyasu
Tokugawa Ieyasu
was the founder and first shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan , which ruled from the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Ieyasu seized power in 1600, received appointment as shogun in 1603, abdicated from office in 1605, but...
, even before becoming shogun
Shogun
A was one of the hereditary military dictators of Japan from 1192 to 1867. In this period, the shoguns, or their shikken regents , were the de facto rulers of Japan though they were nominally appointed by the emperor...
, effected the creation of the first native movable type, using wooden type-pieces rather than metal. He oversaw the creation of 100,000 type-pieces, which were used to print a number of political and historical texts.
An edition of the Confucian
Confucius
Confucius , literally "Master Kong", was a Chinese thinker and social philosopher of the Spring and Autumn Period....
Analects was printed in 1598, using Korean moveable type printing equipment, at the order of Emperor Go-Yōzei
Emperor Go-Yozei
was the 107th Emperor of Japan, according to the traditional order of succession.Go-Yōzei's reign spanned the years from 1586 through 1611, corresponding to the transition between the Azuchi-Momoyama period and the Edo period....
. This document is the oldest work of Japanese moveable type printing extant today. Despite the appeal of moveable type, however, it was soon decided that the running script style of Japanese writings would be better reproduced using woodblocks, and so woodblocks were once more adopted; by 1640 they were once again being used for nearly all purposes.
Movable type in other East Asian countries
Printing using movable type spread from ChinaChina
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
during the Mongol Empire
Mongol Empire
The Mongol Empire , initially named as Greater Mongol State was a great empire during the 13th and 14th centuries...
; among other groups, the Uyghurs
Uyghur people
The Uyghur are a Turkic ethnic group living in Eastern and Central Asia. Today, Uyghurs live primarily in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the People's Republic of China...
of Central Asia, whose script was adopted for the Mongol language, used movable type.
Comparison of Woodblock and Movable type in East Asia
Despite the introduction of movable type from the 11th century, printing using woodblocks remained dominant in East Asia until the introduction of lithographyLithography
Lithography is a method for printing using a stone or a metal plate with a completely smooth surface...
and photolithography
Photolithography
Photolithography is a process used in microfabrication to selectively remove parts of a thin film or the bulk of a substrate. It uses light to transfer a geometric pattern from a photomask to a light-sensitive chemical "photoresist", or simply "resist," on the substrate...
in the 19th century. To understand this it is necessary to consider both the nature of the language and the economics of printing.
Given that the Chinese language does not use an alphabet it was usually necessary for a set of type to contain 100,000 or more blocks, which was a substantial investment. Common characters need 20 or more copies, and rarer characters only a single copy. In the case of wood, the characters were either produced in a large block and cut up, or the blocks were cut first and the characters cut afterwards. In either case the size and height of the type had to be carefully controlled to produce pleasing results. To handle the typesetting, Wang Zhen used revolving tables about 2m in diameter in which the characters were divided accoding to the five tones and the rhyme sections according to the official book of rhymes. The characters were all numbered and one man holding the list called out the number to another who would fetch the type.
This system worked well when the run was large. Wang Zhen's initial project to produce 100 copies of a 60,000 character gazetteer of the local district was produced in less than a month. But for the smaller runs typical of the time it was not such an improvement. A reprint required resetting and re-proofreading, unlike the wooden block system where it was feasible to store the blocks and reuse them. Individual wooden characters didn't last as long as complete blocks. When metal type was introduced it was harder to produce aesthetically pleasing type by the direct carving method.
It is unknown whether metal movable types used from the late 15th century in China were cast from moulds or carved individually. Even if they were cast, there were not the economies of scale available with the small number of different characters used in an alphabetic system. The wage for engraving on bronze was many times that for carving characters on wood and a set of metal type might contain 200-400,000 characters. Additionally, the ink traditionally used in Chinese printing, typically composed of pine soot bound with glue, didn't work well with the tin originally used for type.
As a result of all this, movable type was initially used by government offices which needed to produce large number of copies and by itinerant printers producing family registers who would carry perhaps 20,000 pieces of wooden type with them and cut any other characters needed locally. But small local printers often found that wooden blocks suited their needs better.
Mechanical presses
Mechanical presses as used in EuropeEurope
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
an printing remained unknown in East Asia. Instead, printing remained an unmechanized, laborious process with pressing the back of the paper onto the inked block by manual "rubbing" with a hand tool. In Korea, the first printing presses were introduced as late as 1881-83, while in Japan, after an early but brief interlude in the 1590s, Gutenberg's printing press arrived in Nagasaki in 1848 on a Dutch ship.
Contrary to Gutenberg printing, which allowed printing on both sides of the paper from its very beginnings (although not simultaneously until very recent times), East Asian printing was done only on one side of the paper, because the need to rub the back of the paper when printing would have spoilt the first side when the second side was printed. Another reason was that, unlike in Europe where Gutenberg introduced more suitable oil-based ink, Asian printing remained confined to water-based inks which tended to soak through the paper.
See also
- History of Western typography
- TypographyTypographyTypography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...
- Printing pressPrinting pressA printing press is a device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium , thereby transferring the ink...
- Samuel DyerSamuel DyerSamuel Dyer 台約爾 , was a British Protestant Christian missionary to China in the Congregationalist tradition, who worked among the Chinese in Malaysia. He arrived in Penang in 1827. Dyer, his wife Maria, and their family lived in Malacca and then finally in Singapore...
- Wang Zhen (official)Wang Zhen (official)Wang Zhen was an official of the Yuan Dynasty of China. He is credited with the invention of the first wooden movable type printing in the world, while his predecessor of the Song Dynasty , Bi Sheng , invented the world's first earthenware movable type printing...
- Hua SuiHua SuiHua Sui was a Chinese scholar and printer of Wuxi, Jiangsu province during the Ming Dynasty . He belonged to the wealthy Hua family that was renowned throughout the region. Hua Sui is best known for creating China's first metal movable type printing in 1490 AD...
General references and further reading
- Carter, Thomas Frances. The Invention of Printing in China and its spread Westward" 2nd ed., revised by L. Carrington Goodrich. NY:Ronald Press, 19355. (1st ed, 1925)
- Fifty Wonders of Korea: Volume 1. Seoul: Samjung Munhwasa, 2007. ISBN 9780979726316.
- Lane, RichardRichard Douglas LaneRichard Lane was an American scholar, author, collector, and dealer of Japanese art. He lived in Japan for much of his life, and had a long association with the Honolulu Academy of Arts in Hawaii, which now holds his vast art collection.-Life:...
. (1978). Images from the Floating World, The Japanese Print. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 10-ISBN 0192114476/13-ISBN 9780192114471; OCLC 5246796 also published in Taipei: Caves Books, Ltd., 1986. - Twitchett, Denis. Printing and Publishing in Medieval China., New York, Frederick C. Beil, 1983.