History of printing in East Asia

For the article on the development of printing in Europe, see History of western typography.

Both woodblock printing on paper and movable type were invented in China and Korea before their invention in Europe.

Woodblock printing

Woodblock printing on paper, whereby individual sheets of paper were pressed into wooden blocks with the text and illustrations carved into them, was first recorded in Chinese history, and the oldest surviving printed book to be documented, a copy of the Buddhist Diamond Sutra, is dated 868 AD. As a method for printing patterns on cloth the earliest surviving examples from China date to before 220, and from Eygpt to the 6th or 7th centuries. By the 12th and 13th centuries, many Chinese libraries contained tens of thousands of printed books.

The earliest woodblocks used for printing in Europe, in the fourteenth century, were remarkably similar to Chinese woodblocks, leading some pioneering scholars of Asian subjects to hypothesize a connection: "the process of printing them must have been copied from ancient Chinese specimens, brought from that country by some early travelers, whose names have not been handed down to our times" (Robert Curzon, 1810-1873). Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China has a chapter that suggests that "European block printers must not only have seen Chinese samples, but perhaps had been taught by missionaries or others who had learned these un-European methods from Chinese printers during their residence in China." But historians of the Western prints themselves see no need for such a direct and late connection, as they see a clear progression from patterns to images, both printed on cloth, then to images printed on paper, when it became widely available in Europe in about 1400. Text and images printed together only appear some sixty years later, after metal movable type

Movable type

Movable type in China

The first known movable type system was created in China around 1040 AD by Pi Sheng (990-1051) (spelled Bi Sheng in the Pinyin system). Pi Sheng's type was made of baked clay. As described by the Chinese scholar Shen Kuo (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.

However, Pi Sheng's fragile clay types were not practical for large-scale printing. Clay types also have the additional handicap of lacking adhesion to the ink.

Wooden movable type

Wooden movable type was developed by the 13th century. 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. This system was later enhanced by pressing wooden blocks into sand and casting metal types from the depression in copper, bronze, iron or tin,. The set of wafer-like metal stamp types could be assembled to form pages, inked, and page impressions taken from rubbings on cloth or paper,.

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.

Later in the Jin Dynasty, people used the same but more developed technique to print paper money and formal official documents, the typical example of this kind of movable copper-block printing is a printed "check" of Jin Dynasty in the year of 1215.

Movable type in Korea

The transition from wood type to movable metal type occurred in Korea during the Goryeo Dynasty, sometime in the thirteenth 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 Chae 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.):

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.

Among books printed with metal movable type, the oldest surviving books are from Korea, dated at least from 1377. Korea witnessed, though, never 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 devised a simplified alphabet of 24 characters (Hangul) for use by the common people, which could have made the typecasting and compositing process more feasible. But Sejong's brilliant creation did not receive the attention it deserved. Adoption of the new alphabet was stifled by the inertia of Korea's cultural elite, who were "…appalled at the idea of losing Chinese, the badge of their elitism."

Movable type in Japan

Though the Jesuits operated a Western movable type printing-press in Nagasaki, Japan, printing equipment brought back by Toyotomi Hideyoshi's army from Korea in 1593 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.

Movable type in other East Asian countries

Printing using movable type spread from China during the Mongol empire; among other groups, the Uighurs of Central Asia, whose script was adopted for the Mongol language, used movable type.

Possible influence on European use of movable type

Since the use of printing from movable type arose in East Asia well before it did in Europe, it is relevant to ask whether Gutenberg may have been influenced, directly or indirectly, by the Korean or Chinese discoveries of movable type printing. There is no actual evidence that Gutenberg may have known of the Korean processes for movable type. However, some authors admit this possibility, and argue that movable metal type had been an active enterprise in Korea since 1234 (although oldest preserved books are from 1377) and there was communication between West and East.. Despite these conjectures, there is no evidence that movable type from the East ever reached Europe.

Mechanical presses

While printing has taken place for centuries in China, it is not clear if a machine like the European printing press was used. East Asian printing was done on one side of the paper only, and it appears that the back of the paper was pressed onto the inked block by manual "rubbing" with a hand tool. It is a major, if often overlooked, advantage of the Western printing-press that it allows printing on both sides of the paper.

Further reading

Twitchett, Denis. Printing and Publishing in Medieval China., New York, Frederick C. Beil, 1983.

See also

• History of western typography
• Typography
• movable type
• printing press