Woodblock printing is believed to have been invented in China in the 8th century.
While books were continuously printed in China from the mid-Ming Dynasty onwards, in great volume, and widely circulated, China's publishing was overtaken by that of Japan from the 17th century onwards, in both the number of distinct titles being published annually, and in the technical skill and innovation of Japanese print designers and publishers (see Publishing and Printing).
Origins
It is believed that woodblock printing was first developed in China in the 8th century, being transmitted to Japan within the same century. The earliest extant example of Chinese woodblock printing is a handscroll copy of the Diamond Sutra today held by the British Library and dated to 868.
In the 9th century, printing was already a bustling industry in China; religious texts such as Buddhist sutras dominated, but a variety of gazetteers and almanacs, and collections of poetry were also published in significant numbers.
Song Dynasty
Beginning in the 970s, the Song Dynasty Imperial court organized the establishment of government workshops dedicated to the production of dictionaries, encyclopedias, official histories, literary anthologies, and copies of the Confucian classics. One particularly notable project was the publication of an official and complete copy of the Buddhist canon, 1,076 volumes in total, completed in 983; the project completed over the course of a twelve-year period, involved the production of 130,000 woodblocks.
Moveable type was developed in China in the 11th century, but never caught on, largely it is said due to the vast number of different characters for which one would need to maintain type blocks.
From that time until sometime in the 12th century, publishing in China was dominated by the Court. Government workshops produced books of laws, statutes and procedures; literary anthologies, classics and histories; and works on astronomy, natural history, and medicine, donating the works to state-sponsored schools, or selling them through private booksellers. In the 12th century, the volume of publications produced by private publishers, and by private academies, surpassed that of the government. Private publishers published a great variety of relatively inexpensive, and popularly available, works aimed at helping students prepare for the civil examinations, ranging from copies of the classics to essays by famous scholars, dictionaries, writing manuals, and cheat sheets called "kerchief albums," which could be snuck into the exams themselves. Other works published commercially at this time included works of fiction, poetry and essays, as well as works on medicine and divination.
It was only in the 15th or 16th century that multi-color printing of secular materials, including popular publications, took off.
Spread of Technology
Woodblock printing spread to Japan in the 8th century, only shortly after it took off in China, and numerous examples of the hyakumantô darani, small woodblock-printed scrolls produced by the Japanese Imperial Court in 764-770, remain extant.
Paper, first invented in China, was first introduced to the Islamic world around the same time, via the Silk Road. Printing was introduced to the Muslim world in the same manner, in or around the 11th century, but Islam rejected the mechanical reproduction of sacred texts; the Quran and other holy texts continued to be produced by hand, and the printing press began to be used in the Arab world only in the 18th century.
Meanwhile, in Western Europe, Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz developed a printing press method in the 1440s that scholars believe was invented independently of Chinese techniques.
References
- Bonnie Smith et al. Crossroads and Cultures. Bedford/St. Martins (2012), 432-433.