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.
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The Rise of Printing in Medieval East Asia, c. 700–1500
Valerie Hansen
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Copyright, Publishing, and Knowledge Economy in Modern China
Fei-Hsien Wang
As a major form of intellectual property, copyright is a person’s right over their original literary and artistic works. Based on the idea or principle that the creators own what they created as property, copyright laws grant the author an exclusive right to use their creations. How was this doctrine, which emerged from the complex dynamics of commerce, lawmaking, and knowledge production in Western Europe, introduced and developed in China, a society with its own long and sophisticated book culture and legal tradition? Books and written texts occupied a centrality in imperial Chinese culture. As printed books became more commercialized in the late Ming dynasty, a printing block–centered literary ownership emerged and was practiced by cultural entrepreneurs. Since the mid-19th century, Western knowledge, technologies, and Westernization political reforms shook this late-imperial book production tradition and Confucian classic–centered epistemological order. Modern (and Western) copyright was introduced and popularized in the late Qing dynasty as a progressive alien doctrine to modernize China and as a new tool against piracy. Two Japanese kanji phrases—banquan/hanken版權 (right to the printing blocks) and zhuzuoquan/chosakuken著作權 (author’s right)—were borrowed as the Chinese translation of the term “copyright,” with the former more widely used than the latter. Multiple systems and understandings of banquan/copyright developed in the first half of the 20th century. Despite the modern and universal rhetoric used in these systems, they were influenced by late-imperial norms and customs in practices. Their effectiveness was also limited by the political uncertainties at the time and the capacities of institutions that executed them. When the publishing sector was reconfigured after 1949, these systems and the concept of copyright faded out in Maoist China. After the economic reform in the 1980s, China reintegrated into the international copyright system, but piracy also returned as an acute issue for its knowledge economy. This article only discusses copyright and piracy in China’s publishing world, not in film, other audiovisual recordings, and digital products; the copyright development and struggles of these modern mechanical forms of cultural (re)productions deserve a separate discussion.
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Manchu Language
Mårten Söderblom Saarela
The Manchu language was the language of state in the Qing empire, which ruled China and large parts of Inner Asia from 1644 to 1911. For much of its history, it was used by communities in which Chinese was also spoken and written, but Manchu is a Tungusic language that is unrelated to Chinese. Its implementation in China and maintenance as the administrative language of core elements of the Qing imperial bureaucracy prompted the development of a Manchu education system and a tradition of bilingual Manchu-Chinese language pedagogy.
Long before upwardly mobile individuals in China from the late 19th century onward committed to the study of the languages of the industrialized West and Japan, numerous Chinese-speaking servants of the Qing throne applied themselves to the study of Manchu. Over time, not only a voluminous government archive accrued in Manchu but also a literature in several genres that consisted largely of translations from Chinese.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, Manchu ceased to be a vernacular language in many areas where it had been previously spoken. It remained in use longest on parts of the imperial periphery, even beyond the fall of the Qing empire itself. Both as an administrative language and as a vernacular, Manchu survived into the tumultuous new century. Over time, however, it was supplanted by Chinese in most places. Yet dialects of Manchu remain spoken by small communities as of the early 21st century.
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Print Culture and the Circulation of Knowledge in Imperial China, 8th–17th Centuries
Lucille Chia
Print culture in imperial China spans over twelve hundred years, from the late 7th century ce to the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. During this long period, mechanical reproduction of texts and image meant primarily woodblock printing (xylography), and, to a lesser extent, typography, using movable types made of wood, metal, and ceramics. Xylography was first used for religious purposes, such as prayer sheets and scriptures, but by the late 8th century, nonreligious imprints for daily use were produced. Only in the mid-10th century, however, did the state and the literati elite begin to produce and disseminate many nonreligious works in print. Thus, the dramatic growth in the number and diversity of imprints produced by government, private, religious, and commercial publishers took off in the Song Dynasty (960–1279), due in great part to the state’s efforts to compile and publish many works. One may argue, however, that not until the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) would print culture be sufficiently widespread to be in ascendance, as evidenced by the great variety of works, the evolving page designs, and the changing attitudes of readers toward imprints. By the mid Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), printing had spread throughout the country into remote regions and throughout all levels of society. Changes in publishing culture from the 19th century onward were spurred by the adoption of new print technologies from the West, such as lithography and movable-type letterpress, which allowed for faster publication of far greater press runs, even as the traditional printing technologies continued to be used. Finally, it is important to note that a thriving manuscript culture continued to coexist with print until at least the late 19th century. The parting of the ways between print and manuscript became lasting only with the dominance of modern print technologies in the 20th century.
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Maps of the World in Early Modern Japan
Radu Leca
Since the world in its entirety cannot be grasped through direct experience, world maps are mental constructs that serve as a radiography of a given culture’s attitudes towards its environment. Early modern Japan offers an intriguing study case for the assimilation of a variety of world map typologies in terms of pre-existing traditions of thought. Rather than topography, these maps stress topological connections between “myriad countries” and therefore embody the various mental maps of cultural agents in Japan. The maps’ materiality and embeddedness in social networks reveal connections to other areas of visual and intellectual culture of the period.
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Sayyid Ahmad Khan
David Lelyveld
The lifetime of Sayyid Ahmad Khan (“Sir Syed”) (1817–1898) spans profound transformations introduced to India and the wider world by the twin forces industrial capitalism and British imperialism. Sayyid Ahmad’s intellectual responses to a changing world and his leadership in the establishment of educational institutions, voluntary associations, and a broad public sphere all played a significant role in defining what it means to be Muslim, especially in India and what would become Pakistan but also in wider cosmopolitan and global networks.
The development, compromises, and contradictions of Sayyid Ahmad’s ideas and projects over time track the challenges he faced. If these efforts pointed the way to some sort of modernity, it was rooted in the Indo-Persian and Islamic formation of his early years and developed by selectively adopting bits and pieces of European ideologies, technologies, practices, and organizational arrangements. He has been claimed or condemned by advocates and opponents of a wide range of ideological and political tendencies under circumstances that he would barely have recognized in his own time: nationalism, democracy, women’s equality, and religious and literary modernism. At different points in his career one may find mysticism, scriptural literalism, and daring rationalism with respect to religious texts; charters for Muslim “separatism” and calls for Hindu-Muslim unity; demands for autonomy and political representation and opposition to it; bold critiques of British rulers; and proclamations of “loyalty” to the colonial state. A major figure in the advancement of the Urdu language, he later argued for the superiority of English, of which he himself had little, for the purposes of education and administration. Most of all, he helped establish an intellectual and institutional framework for contemporaries and future generations to debate and pursue collective goals based on religion, language, social status, or class interest.