The Rise of Printing in Medieval East Asia, c. 700–1500
The Rise of Printing in Medieval East Asia, c. 700–1500
- Valerie HansenValerie HansenYale University
Summary
Before 700 ce, East Asians copied texts by hand. Then, sometime after the year 700 ce, people in Korea, Japan, and China began to reproduce texts written in Chinese characters in a new way, using woodblock printing. The earliest surviving examples are Buddhist spells called dhāraṇī. One example found at Bulguksa Monastery, South Korea, dates to between 704 and 751; thousands of other examples were printed between 764 and 770 in Kyōto, Japan.
In 1907, the Hungarian-British explorer and scholar Aurel Stein visited a cave in the northwest Chinese oasis of Dunhuang and obtained a copy of the Diamond Sutra, the world’s earliest intact surviving printed book (9th century ce). The Diamond Sutra was printed using woodblock printing, a technology that evolved and led to the first large-scale printing projects in the 900s, and evolved during the Golden Age of Chinese printingin the Song dynasty (960-1276).
In the 1040s, the official and polymath Shen Kuo described the invention of movable type printing but noted that it did not catch on immediately. In 1298 the Chinese scholar Wang Zhen (after 1290–1333) used movable type to print a large run of a gazetteer, and the government printed paper money with movable type. Still, woodblock printing remained the primary technology for printing books between 700 and 1500. The first descriptions of Chinese printing from outsiders, including Marco Polo and Rashid al-Din, date to the late 1200s and early 1300s.
Chinese printing declined dramatically between 1330 and 1368, in the closing years of the Yuan dynasty (1260–1368). The reduced output of printed books persisted until the 1500s, when the Chinese printing industry recovered. Gaining ground slowly after that, movable type fully displaced woodblock printing only in the 19th century.
Keywords
Subjects
- China
- Japan
- Korea
- Print Culture/History of the Book
- Science and Technology