Printing emerged as early as the 4th millennium BCE in the form of cylinder seals used by the Proto-Elamite and Sumerian civilizations to certify documents written on clay tablets. Other early forms include block seals, hammered coinage, pottery imprints, and cloth printing. Initially a method of printing patterns on cloth such as silk, woodblock printing for texts on paper originated in Tang China by the 7th century, to the spread of book production and woodblock printing in other parts of Asia such as Korea and Japan. The Chinese Buddhist Diamond Sutra, printed by woodblock on 11 May 868, is the earliest known printed book with a precise publishing date. Movable type was invented in China during the 11th century by the Song dynasty artisan Bi Sheng, but it received limited use compared to woodblock printing. However, the use of copper movable types was documented in a Song-era book from 1193, and the earliest printed paper money using movable metal type to print the identifying codes were made in 1161. The technology also spread outside China, with the oldest extant printed book using metal movable type being the Jikji, printed in Korea in 1377 during the Goryeo era. Woodblock printing was also used in Europe until the mid-15th century. Late medieval German inventor Johannes Gutenberg created the first printing press based on previously known mechanical presses and a process for mass-producing metal type. By the end of the 15th century, his invention and widescale circulation of the Gutenberg Bible became responsible for a burgeoning economical book publishing industry spreading globally across Renaissance Europe and eventually among the colonial publishers and printers that emerged in the British American colonies. This industry enabled the communication of ideas and the sharing of knowledge on an unprecedented scale, leading to the global spread of the printing press during the early modern period. Alongside the development of text printing, new and lower-cost methods of image reproduction were developed, including lithography, screen printing and photocopying.
Stencil
Hand stencils, made by blowing pigment over a hand held against a wall, have been found in Asia and Europe dating from over 35,000 years ago, and later prehistoric dates in other continents. Stencils may have been used to colour cloth for a very long time; the technique probably reached its peak of sophistication in katazome and other techniques used on silks for clothes during the Edo period in Japan. In Europe, from about 1450 they were commonly used to colour old master prints printed in black and white, usually woodcuts. This was especially the case with playing-cards, which continued to be coloured by stencil long after most other subjects for prints were left in black and white. Stencils were used for mass publications, as the type did not have to be hand-written.
Brick stamps
Brick stamps were used by the Akkadian Empire (2334–2154 BCE) in Mesopotamia in order to dedicate the bricks used in temples, by inscribing the name of the ruler. A typical brick stamp of the ruler Naram-Sin for example would read "Naram-sin builder, the temple of Goddess Inanna". Not all the bricks of a temple would be imprinted in this way, but only several of them, enough to make clear who built the temple and for which god. The reason for using stamps was to replace the slow and cumbersome process of inscribing the bricks by hand. In Indian Buddhism, great merit is thought to accrue from copying and preserving texts. Asanga, the 4th-century master listed the copying of scripture as the first of ten essential religious practices. The importance of perpetuating texts is set out with special force in the longer Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtra, which urges the devout not only to hear, learn, remember and study the text but to obtain a good copy and to preserve it. This "cult of the book" led to techniques for reproducing texts in great numbers, especially the short prayers or charms known as dhāraṇīs. Stamps were carved for printing these prayers on clay tablets from at least the 7th century, the date of the oldest surviving examples.
Seals In China, seals have been used since at least the Shang dynasty (c. 1600 – c. 1046 BCE. In the Western Zhou, sets of seal stamps were encased in blocks of type and used on clay moulds for casting bronzes. By the end of the 3rd century BCE, seals were also used for printing on pottery. In the Northern dynasties textual sources contain references to wooden seals with up to 120 characters. The seals had a religious element to them. Taoists used seals as healing devices by impressing therapeutic characters onto the flesh of sick people. They were also used to stamp food, creating a talismanic character to ward off disease. The first evidence of these practices appeared under a Buddhist context in the mid-5th century. Centuries later, seals were used to create hundreds of Buddha images.
In the West the practice of sealing documents with an impressed personal or official insignia, typically from a worn signet ring, became established under the Roman Empire, and continued through the Byzantine and Holy Roman empires, into the 19th century, when a wet signature became customary.
... there were some major diversities which led perhaps to development in different directions. Chinese seals were mostly made in a square or rectangular shape with a flat base, inscribed with characters in reverse, and used to stamp on paper. These characteristics are very close to those of block printing. Although the surface and inscriptions of most seals were small or limited, some wooden seals were as large as printing blocks and were inscribed with texts more than one hundred characters long. The seals of the West, on the other hand, were cylindrical or scaraboid, round or oval, and inscribed primarily with pictures or designs and only occasionally with writing. The cylindrical seals used to roll over clay had no potential to develop into a printing surface.
Stone, clay and bronze blocks Stone and bronze blocks have been used to print fabric. Archaeological evidence of them has been unearthed at Mawangdui and in the tomb of the King of Nanyue, while block printed fabrics have been discovered at Mashan Zhuanchang in Jiangling, Hubei. Pliny the Elder described clay block printing of textiles in 1st-century CE Egypt, with extant Egyptian, Roman, Byzantine, Ukrainian, and Russian examples known, dating from the 4th century CE. In the 4th century the practice of creating paper rubbings of stone carvings such as calligraphic models and texts took hold in East Asia. Among the earliest evidence of this is a stone inscription cut in mirror image from the early 6th century.
Woodblock printing
Woodblock printing, known as xylography today, was the first method of printing applied to a paper medium. It became widely used throughout East Asia both as a method for printing on textiles and later, under the influence of Buddhism, on paper. As a method of printing on cloth, the earliest surviving examples from China date to the Han dynasty (before 220 CE). Ukiyo-e is the best known type of Japanese woodblock art print. Most European uses of the technique on paper are covered by the term woodcut, except for the block books produced mainly in the 15th century.
Legendary origins According to the Book of the Southern Qi, in the 480s, a man named Gong Xuanyi (龔玄宜) styled himself Gong the Sage and "said that a supernatural being had given him a 'jade seal jade block writing', which did not require a brush: one blew on the paper and characters formed." He then used his powers to mystify a local governor. Eventually he was dealt with by the governor's successor, who presumably executed Gong. Timothy Hugh Barrett postulates that Gong's magical jade block was actually a printing device, and Gong was one of the first printers, if not the first. The semi-mythical record of him therefore describes his usage of the printing process to deliberately bewilder onlookers and create an image of mysticism around himself.
East Asia
Inscribed seals made of metal or stone, especially jade, and inscribed stone tablets probably provided inspiration for the invention of printing. Copies of classical texts on tablets were erected in a public place in Luoyang during the Han dynasty for scholars and students to copy. The Suishu jingjizhi, the blibography of the official history of the Sui dynasty, includes several ink-squeeze rubbings, believed to have led to the early duplication of texts that inspired printing. A stone inscription cut in reverse dating from the first half of the 6th century implies that it may have been a large printing block. The rise of printing was greatly influenced by Mahayana Buddhism. According to Mahayana beliefs, religious texts hold intrinsic value for carrying the Buddha's word, and act as talismanic objects containing sacred power capable of warding off evil spirits. By copying and preserving these texts, Buddhists could accrue personal merit. As a consequence the idea of printing and its advantages in replicating texts quickly became apparent to Buddhists. By the 7th century, they were using woodblocks to create apotropaic documents. These Buddhist texts were printed specifically as ritual items, and were not widely circulated or meant for public consumption. Instead they were buried in consecrated ground. The earliest extant example of this type of printed matter is a fragment of a dhāraṇī (Buddhist spell) miniature scroll written in Sanskrit unearthed in a tomb in Xi'an. It is called the Great spell of unsullied pure light (Wugou jingguang da tuoluoni jing 無垢淨光大陀羅尼經) and was printed using woodblock during the Tang dynasty, c. 650–670. Radiocarbon dating by the University of Arizona confirmed that the material was likely produced sometime between 618 and 770. A similar piece, a copy of the Lotus Sutra, was also discovered and dated to 690 to 699. This coincides with the reign of Wu Zetian, during which the Longer Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtra, which advocates the practice of printing apotropaic and merit-making texts and images, was translated by Chinese monks. From 658 to 663, Xuanzang printed one million copies of the image of Puxian Pusa to distribute to Buddhist devotees. Evidence of woodblock printing appeared in Korea and Japan soon afterward. The Great Dharani Sutra was discovered at Bulguksa, South Korea in 1966 and dated between 704 and 751 in the Later Silla era. The document is printed on a 8 cm × 630 cm (3 in × 248 in) mulberry paper scroll. A dhāraṇī sutra was printed in Japan c. 770. One million copies of the sutra, along with other prayers, were ordered to be produced by Empress Shōtoku. As each copy was then stored in a tiny wooden pagoda, the copies are together known as the Hyakumantō Darani. The oldest extant evidence of woodblock prints created for the purpose of reading are portions of the Lotus Sutra discovered at Turpan in 1906. They have been dated to the reign of Wu Zetian (690 to 705) using character form recognition. The oldest text containing a specific date of printing was discovered in the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang in 1907 by Aurel Stein. This copy of the Diamond Sutra is 14 ft (4.3 m) long and contains a colophon at the inner end, which reads: "Reverently [caused to be] made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents on the 13th of the 4th moon of the 9th year of Xiantong" – i.e., 11 May 868. It is considered the world's oldest securely-dated woodblock scroll. The Diamond Sutra was closely followed by the earliest extant printed almanac, the Qianfu sinian lishu (乾符四年曆書), dated to 877. From 932 to 955 the Twelve Classics and an assortment of other texts were printed. During the Song dynasty, the directorate of education and other agencies used these block prints to disseminate their standardized versions of the Classics. Other disseminated works include the Histories, philosophical works, encyclopedias, collections, and books on medicine and the art of war. In the state of Wuyue, Qian Chu published the dharani-sutra Baoqieyin tuoluonijing in 956, 965, and 975. Each purportedly in the form of 84,000 miniature scrolls. A copy of the 956 edition was reprinted in Korea in 1007. In 971 work began on the complete Tripiṭaka in Chengdu. It took 10 years to finish the 130,000 blocks needed to print the text. The finished product, the Sichuan edition of the Kaibao Canon, also known as the Kaibao Tripitaka, was printed in 983. During the Song dynasty, the three major centers of printing were Hangzhou, Jianyang, and Chengdu.
Carvers tended to congregate in centers of book production. By the mid-thirteenth century, thus, they worked in at least ninety-one prefectures in south China, but mainly in Hangzhou, Jianyang in northern Fujian, and Chengdu in Sichuan. In the Jin and Yuan dynasties, the centers of production were Pingyang prefecture in southern Shanxi Province and, once again for southeast China, Hangzhou and Jianyang. By the late Ming, the lower Yangzi delta, mainly Suzhou and Nanjing, would dominate along with Jianyang. By the early seventeenth century, carvers would also have found their way to provinces that, in the Song and Yuan, had produced only a few books (e.g., Hunan, Shaanxi, and Guangdong) but had recently started to print a fair number of imprints for the book market. In 989 Seongjong of Goryeo sent the monk Yeoga to request from the Song a copy of the complete Buddhist canon. The request was granted in 991 when Seongjong's official Han Eongong visited the Song court. In 1011, Hyeonjong of Goryeo issued the carving of their own set of the Buddhist canon, which would come to be known as the Goryeo Daejanggyeong. The project was suspended in 1031 after Heyongjong's death, but work resumed in 1046 after Munjong's accession to the throne. The completed work, amounting to some 6,000 volumes, was finished in 1087. Unfortunately the original set of woodblocks was destroyed in a conflagration during the Mongol invasion of 1232. King Gojong ordered another set to be created and work began in 1237, this time only taking 12 years to complete. In 1248 the complete Goryeo Daejanggyeong numbered 81,258 printing blocks, 52,330,152 characters, 1496 titles, and 6568 volumes. Due to the stringent editing process that went into the Goryeo Daejanggyeong and its surprisingly enduring nature, having survived completely intact for centuries, it is considered the most accurate of Buddhist canons written in Classical Chinese as well as a standard edition for East Asian Buddhist scholarship.
Modern era
In Japan, from the Edo period in the 1600s, books and illustrations were mass-produced by woodblock printing and spread among the common people. This was due to economic development and a relatively high literacy rate for the period. The literacy rate of the Japanese in the Edo period was almost 100% for the samurai class and 50% to 60% for the chōnin and nōmin (farmer) class due to the spread of private schools (terakoya). There were more than 600 rental bookstores in Edo, and people lent woodblock-printed illustrated books of various genres. The content of these books varied widely, including travel guides, gardening books, cookbooks, kibyōshi (satirical novels), sharebon (books on urban culture), kokkeibon (comical books), ninjōbon (romance novel), yomihon, kusazōshi, art books, play scripts for the kabuki and jōruri (puppet) theatre, etc. The best-selling books of this period were Kōshoku Ichidai Otoko (Life of an Amorous Man) by Ihara Saikaku, Nansō Satomi Hakkenden by Takizawa Bakin, and Tōkaidōchū Hizakurige by Jippensha Ikku, and these books were reprinted many times. From the 17th to the 19th century, ukiyo-e depicting secular subjects became very popular among the Japanese common people and were mass-produced. Ukiyo-e is based on kabuki actors, sumo wrestlers, beautiful women, landscapes of sightseeing spots, historical tales, and so on, and Hokusai and Hiroshige are the most famous artists. In the 18th century, Suzuki Harunobu established the technique of multicolor woodblock printing called nishiki-e and greatly developed Japanese woodblock printing culture such as ukiyo-e. Ukiyo-e influenced European Japonism and Impressionism. In the early 20th century, shin-hanga, which fused the tradition of ukiyo-e with the techniques of Western paintings, became popular, and the works of Hasui Kawase and Hiroshi Yoshida gained international popularity.
Impact of woodblock printing Prior to the introduction of printing, the size of private collections in China had already seen an increase since the invention of paper. Fan Ping (215–84) had in his collection 7,000 rolls (juan), or a few hundred titles. Two centuries later, Zhang Mian owned 10,000 juan, Shen Yue (441–513) 20,000 juan, and Xiao Tong and his cousin Xiao Mai both had collections of 30,000 juan. Emperor Yuan of Liang (508–555) was said to have had a collection of 80,000 juan. The combined total of all known private book collectors prior to the Song dynasty number around 200, with the Tang alone accounting for 60 of them. Following the maturation of woodblock printing, official, commercial, and private publishing businesses emerged while the size and number of collections grew exponentially. The Song dynasty alone accounts for some 700 known private collections, more than triple the number of all the preceding centuries combined. Private libraries of 10–20 thousand juan became commonplace while six individuals owned collections of over 30,000 juan. The earliest extant private Song library catalogue lists 1,937 titles in 24,501 juan. Zhou Mi's collection numbered 42,000 juan, Chen Zhensun's collection lists 3,096 titles in 51,180 juan, and Ye Mengde (1077–1148) as well as one other individual owned libraries of 6,000 titles in 100,000 juan. The majority of which were secular in nature. Texts contained material such as medicinal instruction or came in the form of a leishu, a type of encyclopedic reference book used to help examination candidates. Imperial establishments such as the Three Institutes: Zhaowen Institute, History Institute, and Jixian Institute also followed suit. At the start of the dynasty the Three Institutes' holdings numbered 13,000 juan, by the year 1023 39,142 juan, by 1068 47,588 juan, and by 1127 73,877 juan. The Three Institutes were one of several imperial libraries, with eight other major palace libraries, not including imperial academies. According to Weng Tongwen, by the 11th century, central government offices were saving tenfold by substituting earlier manuscripts with printed versions. The impact of woodblock printing on Song society is illustrated in the following exchange between Emperor Zhenzong and Xing Bing in the year 1005:
The emperor went to the Directorate of Education to inspect the Publications Office. He asked Xing Bing how many woodblocks were kept there. Bing replied, "At the start of our dynasty, there were fewer than four thousand. Today, there are more than one hundred thousand. The classics and histories, together with standard commentaries, are all fully represented. When I was young and devoted myself to learning, there were only one or two scholars in every hundred who possessed copies of all the classics and commentaries. There was no way to copy so many works. Today, printed editions of these works are abundant, and officials and commoners alike have them in their homes. Scholars are fortunate indeed to have been born in such an era as ours! In 1076, the 39-year old Su Shi remarked upon the unforeseen effect an abundance of books had on examination candidates:
I can recall meeting older scholars, long ago, who said that when they were young they had a hard time getting their hands on a copy of Shiji or Han shu. If they were lucky enough to get one, they thought nothing of copying the entire text out by hand, so they could recite it day and night. In recent years merchants engrave and print all manner of books belonging to the hundred schools, and produce ten thousand pages a day. With books so readily available, you would think that students' writing and scholarship would be many times better than what they were in earlier generations. Yet, to the contrary, young men and examination candidates leave their books tied shut and never look at them, preferring to amuse themselves with baseless chatter. Why is this? Woodblock printing also changed the shape and structure of books. Scrolls were gradually replaced by concertina binding (經摺裝) from the Tang period onward. The advantage was that it was now possible to flip to a reference without unfolding the entire document. The next development known as whirlwind binding (xuanfeng zhuang 旋風裝) was to secure the first and last leaves to a single large sheet, so that the book could be opened like an accordion. Around the year 1000, butterfly binding was developed. Woodblock prints allowed two mirror images to be easily replicated on a single sheet. Thus two pages were printed on a sheet, which was then folded inwards. The sheets were then pasted together at the fold to make a codex with alternate openings of printed and blank pairs of pages. In the 14th century the folding was reversed outwards to give continuous printed pages, each backed by a blank hidden page. Later the sewn bindings were preferred rather than pasted bindings. Only relatively small volumes (juan 卷) were bound up, and several of these would be enclosed in a cover called a tao, with wooden boards at front and back, and loops and pegs to close up the book when not in use. For example, one complete Tripitaka had over 6,400 juan in 595 tao. The rise of woodblock printing technology led to a decline in book prices by about one tenth what they had been before the 11th century. Not all areas experienced the same price reductions, which was also dependent on other factors besides the technology, resulting in regional variations in the price of print works by as high as 600 percent during the 12th century. Woodblock printing did not replace manuscripts either, which continued to remain commercially viable through substantially reducing their prices. According to the Ming dynasty author Hu Yinglin, "if no printed edition were available on the market, the hand-copied manuscript of a book would cost ten times as much as the printed work", also "once a printed edition appeared, the transcribed copy could no longer be sold and would be discarded". The result is that despite the mutual co-existence of hand-copied manuscripts and printed texts, the cost of the book had declined by about 90 percent by the end of the 16th century. As a result, literacy increased. In 1488, the Korean Choe Bu observed during his trip to China that "even village children, ferrymen, and sailors" could read, although this applied mainly to the south while northern China remained largely illiterate. Manuscripts also gained new cultural value as imprints became more common, and were even preferred by elite scholars and collectors. The age of printing gave the act of copying by hand a new dimension of cultural reverence. Those who considered themselves real scholars and true connoisseurs of the book did not consider imprints to be real books. Under the elitist attitudes of the time, "printed books were for those who did not truly care about books".
Central Asia and Iran Printing started appearing further west after its invention in China. The Uyghurs used wooden movable type by the 12th-13th centuries. In 1908, more than a thousand pieces of Uyghur type made of wood, engraved in Sogdian script, were discovered in Dunhuang. To date no manuscripts or fragments using Uyghur movable type have been identified, but traces of ink on the movable type have been found, confirming their use. The Uyghurs also made use of woodblock printing by the 14th century. Printed texts discovered in Turfan dating to around 1300 contained multiple languages such as Sogdian, Sanskrit, Uyghur, and Chinese. Some of them had titles and page numbers in Chinese which suggests that they were produced by Chinese craftsmen. Fragments of Buddhist texts were printed in both Uyghur and Chinese while bearing a red Chinese seal. A Mongolian calendar dated to 1324 with printed Uyghur text was discovered in Turfan. It is speculated that printing was spread further west by Uyghurs under the Mongol Empire. A large number of Uyghurs were recruited by the Mongol army and Uyghur culture played an important role in the empire. After the Mongols incorporated Persia under their dominion, woodblock printing was used there for paper money, which was based on the exact same model as Chinese paper money. Even the Chinese name for it (chao) was adopted by the Persians. Paper money was printed in Tabriz in 1294 to alleviate the shortage of coinage but the markets refused to accept the new currency and the khan was forced to abandon it. Between 1301 and 1311, Rashid al-Din Hamadani, the prime minister of Ghazan, wrote the Jami' al-tawarikh, which described the process of Chinese woodblock printing. Abu Sulayman Banakati repeated the same description in another work dated 1317. A print was discovered in an excavation at the port of El Qoseir where Chinese wares were also discovered.
Islamic world
From 900 to 1444, the Islamic world employed a block printing method known as ṭarsh. Originally utilizing wooden blocks, the practice evolved to include carved lead and tin matrices by the 1200s. It is disputed whether or not this technique originated from Chinese printing. According to some historians, such as Thomas Frances Carter, J. Karabacek, Adolf Grohmann, and Tsuen-Hsuin Tsien, they are likely connected to printing in Central Asia and China. Their appearance suggests that they were printed using the same brush and pad process used by the Chinese rather than by pressure. Carter compares their religious nature in similarity to the early Buddhist prints of China. The theory of Chinese origin for these fragments is disputed by Richard W. Bulliet. According to Bulliet, some of the Arabic prints are too rough to have been based on the same method used by the Chinese. They did not have a major impact the same way that other known Chinese products such as Tang pottery did. Thousands of imitation pieces of Tang pottery were created in the Middle East because of how rare and valuable genuine Tang pieces were. The Arabic print fragments evidently did not share the same prestige or quality as Chinese prints and were likely circulated among lower class society. The technique's appearance in 10th century Muslim Spain marked Europe's first known exposure to block printing. State authorities occasionally adopted the method for practical and administrative purposes, such as stamping 11th century Fatimid tax receipts, printing 13th century Almohad imperial decrees and stamping 14th century commercial goods at the Almería warehouse.
The craft's most widespread and best-documented application, however, was the mass production of protective amulets and talismans. These narrow strips, typically about 18 × 7 cm, were designed to be rolled up and worn around the neck. They commonly featured Qur'anic verses, religious invocations, magical symbols and numerological elements. Production was largely carried out by itinerant street magicians and tricksters known as the Banū Sāsān or Ghurabāʾ, who deliberately kept the process secret. By presenting printed amulets as individually handwritten, they maintained the illusion of personal craftsmanship for their often illiterate clients. This culture of secrecy likely contributed to the technique's limited broader adoption. Roughly one hundred examples survive today. Many are more elaborate than contemporary handwritten versions, displaying refined Arabic calligraphy and, in some cases, Hebrew, Syriac, or Coptic scripts. Printers sometimes used colored inks (red, yellow, green), and multiple blocks could be used for different decorative elements, scripts, and even for different textual themes, customizing pieces depending on the need of the client. The technical sophistication of the craft is evident in the range of lettering sizes, which could measure from a large 3 cm down to a minuscule 1 mm in height.
A much more monumental application appears in printed Hajj certificates, which make up the second major category of surviving artifacts. Produced in Damascus beginning around 1210, they reached peak popularity in the second quarter of the 13th century, when only printed versions were issued. These large documents (ranging from 112 × 23.5 cm to monumental pieces over 210 × 50 cm) integrated text, decorative borders, and detailed illustrations of Hajj rites and sacred sites, all printed with woodblocks.Larger certificates required multiple blocks for their illustrations. They exhibit a superior quality and visual harmony as compared to handmade certificates, and were commissioned by high ranking figures, including Ayyubid royalty. Production quality later waned under the Mamluks, and the certificates disappeared by the 14th century. The last known example of the tarsh is an ornate 124.6 cm talisman printed between 1436 and 1444 – the longest surviving specimen. Shortly afterward, block printing vanished from the Islamic world for reasons that remain unclear. By the time the technique was rediscovered in the late 19th century, it had been entirely forgotten. Some scholars suggest that Egyptian Ghurabāʾ (Romani groups) migrating to Central Europe in the early 15th century may have contributed to the transmission of block-printing knowledge to the West.
Europe
Woodblock printing was used for textile patterns in Europe by the mid-14th century and for images on sheets by the end of the century. Block prints were produced in southern Germany and Venice and across central Europe between 1400 and 1450. They were all religious in nature and most of them are undated, but they are believed to have been produced in the late 14th and early 15th centuries. They were printed as outlines and filled in with color manually by hand or stencil. Block books appeared in Germany c. 1400. There is no conclusive evidence that Chinese printing technology spread to Europe. However, a number of authors have advanced theories in favor of a Chinese origin for European printing based on early references and circumstantial evidence. Tsien suggests that woodblock printing may have spread from China to Europe due to communications during the Mongol Empire era and based on similarities between blockprints in both areas. Tsien suggests that European missionaries to China during the 14th century could have borrowed the practice of creating prints to be colored manually later on, which had been prevalent in China for a long time with Buddhist prints. The block books of Europe were produced using methods and materials similar to those in China and sometimes in ways contrary to prevailing European norms: European wood blocks were cut parallel with the grain in the same way as the Chinese method rather than the prevailing European practice of cutting across the grain, water-based ink was used rather than oil-based ink, only one side of the paper was printed rather than both, and rubbing rather than pressure was employed to leave the print. Robert Curzon, 14th Baron Zouche (1810–1873) said that European and Chinese block books were so similar in every way that they must have originated in China. The question of whether printing originated in Europe or China was raised in the early 16th century by the Portuguese poet Garcia de Resende (1470–1536). Paolo Giovio (1483–1552), an Italian historian who had come into possession of several Chinese books and maps through João de Barros (1496–1570), claimed that printing was invented in China and spread to Europe through Russia. Juan González de Mendoza (1545–1618) made similar claims about printing coming from China through Russia but also added another route through Arabia by sea and that it influenced Johannes Gutenberg. Several other authors throughout the 16th century repeated such statements. Joseph P. McDermott disputes the theory of Chinese printing being transmitted to Europe and emphasizes the lack of evidence. Although the Mongols planned to use printed paper currency in Persia, the scheme failed shortly thereafter. No books were printed in Persia before the 19th century and Chinese prints apparently made little impact on the region. There are no surviving printed playing cards from the Middle East while pre-1450 printed cards from medieval Europe contained no text. Although some elite Europeans were aware of printed paper money by the late 13th century, the earliest evidence that Europeans were aware of Chinese book printing only appeared in the early 16th century. McDermott argues that modern comparisons of techniques used in European and Chinese block books are ahistorical and that rather than direct transmission of technique, similarities between them were just as likely the result of convergent evolution. More recently, Kristina Richardson has advanced the suggestion that woodblock printing may have reached Europe through the migrations of Egyptian Romani people. In Egypt, woodblock printing was largely practiced by a Romani community known as the Ghurabāʾ, while multiple sources attest to the movement of Egyptian Romani populations into Bavaria and Bohemia at the opening of the fifteenth century. Further support lies in formal parallels: both ṭarsh prints and early European woodcuts emphasize religious imagery, are typically printed on one side only, and employ a similar palette of red, brown, yellow, and green.
Movable type (1041)
Movable type is the system of printing and typography using individual pieces of type.
Ceramic movable type Movable type was invented in the Northern Song dynasty around the year 1041 by the commoner Bi Sheng. Bi Sheng's movable type was fired in porcelain. After his death, ceramic movable type may have spread to the Tangut kingdom of Western Xia, where a Buddhist text known as the Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra was found in modern Wuwei, Gansu, dating to the reign of Emperor Renzong of Western Xia (r. 1125-1193). The text features traits that have been identified as hallmarks of clay movable type such as the hollowness of the character strokes and deformed and broken strokes. The ceramic movable-type also passed onto Bi Sheng's descendants. The next mention of movable type occurred in 1193 when a Southern Song chief counselor, Zhou Bida (周必大), attributed the movable-type method of printing to Shen Kuo. However Shen Kuo did not invent the movable type but credited it to Bi Sheng in his Dream Pool Essays. Zhou used clay movable type to print his Yutang zaji (Jade hall notes), composed of 28 sections in 7,000 characters. The ceramic movable type was also mentioned by Kublai Khan's councilor Yao Shu, who convinced his pupil Yang Gu to print language primers using this method. The ceramic type did not hold the water-based Chinese calligraphic ink well, and had the additional disadvantage of the size of the type sometimes changing during the baking process, resulting in uneven matching of the type, and preventing it from becoming popular.
Wooden movable type Bi Sheng also developed wooden movable type, but it was abandoned in favor of ceramic types due to the presence of wood grains and the unevenness of the wooden type after being soaked in ink. However wooden movable type had evidently reached the Tangut Western Xia to the west by the 12th century. There, the Tanguts printed the Auspicious Tantra of All-Reaching Union, a 449-page text considered to be the earliest extant example of a text printed using the wooden movable type. The Auspicious Tantra texts were found in the ruins of the Baisigou Square Pagoda in the Helan Mountains, Ningxia. They feature traits of movable type texts such as identical length bar lines, some characters printed upside down, different shades of ink, and interlaced lines. Another Tangut text known as the Avatamsaka Sutra contains descriptions of the merits of wooden movable type such as a "vow to carve individual characters", "those engaged in typesetting are virtuous", and "those engaged in carving characters and printing are intelligent and can expect to have their wishes fulfilled". The text shows traits of movable type such as correcting mistakes by directly overlaying incorrect characters with the correct ones. Twelve Tangut titles printed in movable type survive to this day. The Uyghurs too seem to have used wooden movable type although it is unknown where they got the technology. In 1908, more than a thousand pieces of Uyghur type made of wood, engraved in Sogdian script, were discovered in Dunhuang. They are believed to date to the 12th century when the Uyghurs also made use of woodblock printing. To date no manuscripts or fragments of Uyghur movable type have been found. Wang Zhen, who lived in the Yuan dynasty, also described the wooden movable type in his Book of Agriculture (Nongshu 農書) of 1313.
Now, however, there is another method [beyond earthenware type] that is both more exact and more convenient. A compositor's form is made of wood, strips of bamboo are used to mark the lines and a block is engraved with characters. The block is then cut into squares with a small fine saw till each character forms a separate piece. These separate characters are finished off with a knife on all four sides, and compared and tested till they are exactly the same height and size. Then the types are placed in the columns [of the form] and bamboo strips which have been prepared are pressed in between them. After the types have all been set in the form, the spaces are filled in with wooden plugs, so that the type is perfectly firm and will not move. When the type is absolutely firm, the ink is smeared on and printing begins. Wang Zhen used two rotating circular tables as trays for laying out his type. The first table was separated into 24 trays in which each movable type was categorized based on a number corresponding with a rhyming pattern. The second table contained miscellaneous characters. Using more than 30,000 wooden movable types, Wang Zhen printed a hundred copies of his county gazetteer, Records of Jingde County (Jingde xianzhi 旌德縣志), a text containing more than 60,000 characters. Wooden movable type printing became relatively common during the Ming dynasty and became widespread during the Qing dynasty.
Metal movable type
Metal movable type appeared in the late Song and Yuan dynasties. Bronze movable types were used to print banknotes and official documents by both the Song and Jin. In the Jin dynasty, copper-block prints were slotted with two square holes for embedding bronze movable type characters, each selected from 1000 different characters, such that each printed paper money had a different combination of markers. A copper block printed paper banknote dated between 1215 and 1216 in the collection of Luo Zhenyu's Pictorial Paper Money of the Four Dynasties, 1914, shows two special characters: one called Ziliao, the other called Zihao, for the purpose of preventing counterfeit. Over the Ziliao there is a small character (輶) printed with movable copper type, while over the Zihao there is an empty square hole; apparently the associated copper metal type was lost. Another sample of Song dynasty money of the same period in the collection of Shanghai Museum has two empty square holes above Ziliao as well as Zihou, due to the loss of two copper movable types. In 1234, cast metal movable type was used in Goryeo (Korea) to print the 50-volume Prescribed Texts for Rites of the Past and Present, compiled by Ch'oe Yun-ŭi, but no copies survived to the present. Ch'oe Yun-ŭi built on an earlier Chinese method of creating