From clay type to global print: China’s movable-type legacy
Print Edition
AT the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, hundreds of dancers moved in and out of square boxes topped with Chinese characters, forming and dissolving words in perfect rhythm.
The striking image symbolized one of ancient China’s four great inventions — movable-type printing, a technology that fundamentally changed how knowledge is recorded and shared.
Long before printing presses reshaped Europe, China had already transformed the written word. The journey began with woodblock printing during the Sui (AD 581-618) and Tang (AD 618-907) dynasties, when entire pages were carved onto wooden boards and pressed onto paper. The results were elegant and durable, but the process was slow and costly. A single carved mistake meant scrapping an entire block, and each board could serve only one text.
It was this limitation that inspired a quiet but radical breakthrough. During the Qingli period (1041-1048) of the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127), craftsman Bi Sheng abandoned the idea of carving whole pages and instead carved individual characters. Each character could be reused, rearranged and combined freely — a shift that gave birth to movable-type printing.
Bi’s achievement, however, attracted little attention during his lifetime, and his name nearly vanished from history. It was the renowned scientist and statesman Shen Kuo that recognized the significance of the invention and preserved it for posterity. In his encyclopedic “Mengxi Bitan,” or “Dream Pool Essays,” Shen recorded Bi’s technique in detail.
According to Shen, Bi molded individual characters from clay, carved them in reverse, and fired them until hard. The characters were arranged on an iron plate coated with a mixture of pine resin, wax and paper ash. When heated, the mixture fixed the characters in place, forming a solid printing plate.
Ink was brushed onto the raised characters, paper laid over the surface, and impressions pressed out. After printing, the plate could be reheated, allowing the characters to be removed and reused.
Shen went further, testing the technology himself.
He experimented with wooden movable type but rejected it, noting that wood warped when wet and tended to stick to adhesives. Fired clay, he concluded, was far more reliable.
As literacy expanded and the publishing industry flourished, especially during the Song Dynasty (960-1279), demand for faster and cheaper printing grew. Movable type gradually found wider use, particularly in the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368). One of its most important innovators was Wang Zhen, an agricultural scientist and mechanical designer.
In his “Nong Shu,” or “Book of Agriculture,” Wang described a sophisticated system using wooden movable type arranged on two large revolving wheels, each about 7 chi — roughly 2.3 meters — in diameter. One wheel organized characters by rhyme, while the other held commonly used characters. Each rhyme category was marked with numerical symbols, making characters easier to locate.
During typesetting, one person read aloud from the manuscript while another sat between the wheels, rotating them to swiftly select the needed characters. The system greatly improved efficiency.
The Ming and Qing dynasties saw further experimentation with movable type made from wood, ceramic and metal. As trade and cultural exchanges expanded, movable-type printing spread beyond China to Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and eventually westward through Central Asia and the Islamic world.
By the 15th century, the idea reached Europe, where Johannes Gutenberg in Germany combined metal type, oil-based ink and mechanical presses to ignite Europe’s own printing revolution. Although the technologies evolved differently, the underlying concept — reusable individual characters — had its roots in China.
Archeological discoveries have since provided tangible proof of China’s early mastery of movable type. In 1965, a Buddhist scripture discovered in a pagoda in Wenzhou, east China’s Zhejiang Province, was identified as a movable-type print dating from the Northern Song Dynasty, offering the earliest historical evidence of Bi’s technology.
A Western Xia (1038-1227) wooden movable-type Buddhist text unearthed in 1991 at a pagoda site in northwest China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region is recognized as the world’s earliest surviving wooden movable-type print. Consisting of nine volumes and nearly 100,000 characters, it is now classified among China’s most protected cultural relics.
While many movable-type traditions faded with time, one living lineage remains. In Dongyuan Village of Rui’an, Zhejiang Province, wooden movable-type printing is still practiced today. It is the only such tradition in China to survive in continuous use.
Local genealogical records trace the craft back to the Yuan Dynasty, when Wang Famao applied movable type to the use of clan genealogies. The technique was passed down through generations. In the Ming Dynasty, Wang’s descendants migrated from Fujian to Zhejiang. In 1736, the craft took root in Dongyuan and continues into the present day.
Yet the future of this ancient craft remains fragile. Data given by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) showed that only 11 masters over the age of 50 still command the complete set of techniques.
Recognizing its cultural value and vulnerability, China listed wooden movable-type printing as a national intangible cultural heritage in 2008. Two years later, UNESCO inscribed it on the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding.
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