History of Printing
An overview of the Chinese history of printing, including basic facts and how it spread to the Western world.
The start of the great invention
The Invention of the printing press is considered to be the fourth greatest invention from China (behind paper, compass, and gunpowder), and also one of the world greatest. People always say "smart people create, geniuses steal," and the printing press was a perfect tool to do so.
It all started in the 4th or 7th century, when the first printing press appeared in the Tang Dynasty (618 - 907). In the beginning it was simple, Chinese people used a thin piece of paper glued on the surface of a piece of wood. Then people carved characters on the wood based on the piece of paper. Back then, the printing block's only purposed was to reproduce religious texts and charms.
The famous scroll created by this method of printing was the "Diamond Sutra." This scroll is considered to be the world's oldest surviving printed book, which was produced around the year 868. It was a Buddhist text translated from Indian (Sanskrit) into Chinese that was discovered at Duhuang Cave along the Silk Road in the year 1907.
One drawback of the woodblock is the amount of time it took to prepare one and it became useless after the work was done. Plus, if anyone made a small mistake on the woodblock, then he had to start all over again.
Movable printing...
To eliminate these problems, a man in the Song Dynasty (960 - 1279) named Bi Cheng created moveable type printing. He achieved this by carving individual characters on a piece of clay. Then he hardened the clay characters with fire. Next, the clay pieces were glued onto an iron plate, which made up a printed page. Once it was done, the pieces could be detached and stored for future use.
Definitely, this was a great idea but not a very effective one for the Chinese culture due to the fact that the Chinese alphabet consisted of over a couple of thousand individual characters. Nonetheless, the technology was spread throughout Asia which included Korea, Japan, Vietnam, etc.
As for Western society, the printing press was developed by a famous German man named Johann Gutenberg, which I think everybody knows quite well. The reason I say the Western world owed Johann Gutenberg and not the Chinese because history has stated he came up with the idea after he woke up one night. Some argue that the Chinese method travelled on the Silk Road to the West and it may have unconsciously influenced Gutenberg's thinking. Nonetheless, we cannot deny the fact that he made printing mainstream in the West.
In 1440, Gutenberg invented movable letters with metal. It was a great success because it could be easily combined with the simpler alphabet system in the West.
Thank you for being with me today. This is one of the shortest articles that I ever wrote for the website. I hope that you enjoyed it and have all the basic information that you need. If you have any questions you can contact me. From where I am and wherever you are, have a wonderful and peaceful night with your family.
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