Printing in China

Woodblock printing is believed to have been invented in China in the 8th century.

While books were continuously printed in China in particularly significant volume from the mid-Ming Dynasty onwards, and widely circulated, China was overtaken by 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; this was around the same time that paper was introduced to the Islamic world from China, via the Silk Road. 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.

It was only in the 15th or 16th century that multi-color printing of secular materials, including popular publications, took off.

References

• Bonnie Smith et al. Crossroads and Cultures. Bedford/St. Martins (2012), 432-433.