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China: The Invention of Printing
From: The British Library
| By:
Frances Wood |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
By the time Gutenberg introduced printing to Europe in the mid-fifteenth century, the Chinese had been developing the process for nearly 1,000 years. Aided greatly by the growth of Buddhism, which viewed the duplication of texts as a sacred process, printing enjoyed tremendous expansion during the Song period (960-1279), when government intervention failed to control the production of nonreligious texts such as calendars, examination cribs, fiction, poetry and war epics. Frances Wood, a sinologist at the British Library, gives an overview of early Chinese printing and illustration, providing several examples of early works. |
 he history of illustration in China is almost the reverse of the European tradition, for printing--invented in China--began to dominate at a very early stage. The starting point for book illustration in the West lies with the magnificently illuminated manuscripts first produced in the fifth century, a tradition of richly decorated individual items that continued into the fifteenth century, when printing arrived in Europe. In China, the same period saw the invention of printing; its growth into a massive industry supplying the court and gentry with fine editions and the ordinary city population with cheap illustrated novels; and, finally, the last great innovation in Chinese printing, the development of fine colour printing from multiple woodblocks during the Ming period (1368-1644 CE). |
The world's first printed book
Just as in Europe, manuscript production in China did not die out immediately when printing was invented. In the ninth and tenth centuries, the two methods existed side by side, as can be seen in the great library discovered in the cave temples at Dunhuang on the Silk Road in the remote northwestern province of Gansu. The library included the world's first printed "book"--an illustrated Chinese translation of the Diamond sutra (868 CE)--and other illustrated printed items, together with thousands of manuscripts of Buddhist texts, some, like the illustrated Lotus sutra booklet, probably later than the Diamond sutra. |
Later, though printing supplied an enormous market and colour-printed albums largely supplanted more expensive one-off illustrated manuscripts, these continued to be produced for the court, for collectors and, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for the growing export market to Europe. Nevertheless, the history of Chinese illustration is very much the history of printing in China, and it begins with the Diamond sutra in 868, which is now in the British Library. |
The British Library Chinese collection dates back to the first year of the British Museum, 1753, when three Chinese books were acquired as part of the Sloane collection. Further items were added from the Harleian, Old Royal and Lansdowne collections, and, as British interests in the Far East expanded, residents abroad bequeathed collections. Five cases of Chinese books seized during the Opium War were donated by Queen Victoria in 1843. The most significant collection is that made by Stein of materials found in Dunhuang and other parts of Chinese Central Asia on his three expeditions (1900-16), a vast archive which included the Diamond sutra and other illustrated Buddhist items dating from the ninth and tenth centuries. The incorporation of the India Office Library into the British Library has brought in a small Chinese collection with some notable export paintings from the East India Company's factory in Canton. The collection continues to grow through purchase; among other items, the Qi sha tripitaka volume and the Ming Buddhist booklet were acquired in 1983 and a collection of operatic "New Year" prints in 1984. |
Buddhism and the advance of printing
It seems likely that Buddhism, which views the distribution of texts and the duplication of images as devout works, played a part in the Chinese invention of printing, which is by its nature an act of duplication. There were, however, other elements in Chinese culture which helped its development. From the Shang dynasty (c. 1700-1066 BCE), seals, or "chops," with personal names carved in them were used as stamps of authority, and during the Han period (206 BCE-220 CE) ink-rubbings were taken from stone inscriptions, inscriptions which had been carved as official and unalterable texts of, for example, the Confucian classics. These ink-rubbings (also made by Buddhists from stone-carved sutras from the mid-sixth century) produced multiple copies, but in a labour-intensive and painstaking manner that was more comparable with brass-rubbing than with printing. Ink-rubbings were made possible by the invention of paper in the early Han; paper is an essential prerequisite for printing, for it is cheap to produce in the quantities necessary for large printed editions. |
It is clear from the many thousands of paper manuscripts found at Dunhuang that paper was in widespread use by the fifth century, and, while the Diamond sutra was not printed until 868, it is obvious from its quality that printing must have been developed well before that date, though the fragile nature of paper means that surviving examples are hard to find. The Diamond sutra is a woodblock print, a printing method that is most suitable to the Chinese script (which is non-alphabetic and comprises tens of thousands of different characters) and that readily combines text and illustration, either on separate blocks (as in the Diamond sutra) or on the same block. |
Many of the earliest surviving prints and manuscripts are religious, mostly Buddhist. This may be accidental, for the enormous library at Dunhuang, which holds so many examples, was perfectly preserved by climate and by human neglect. These religious books do, however, illustrate the development of the Chinese book from a scroll, through the "sutra" (or concertina) binding, to the thread-bound book. |
The examples with half-page illustrations also demonstrate the growth of a very popular form, later to be used for fiction, where text and illustration are combined. This combination, which makes the whole easier to read and understand, may have developed because of the nature of the Chinese language. With its potentially enormous vocabulary, there must have been extremely varying degrees of literacy, ranging from the scholar who had mastered up to 10,000 characters and would consult dictionaries readily, to people who had learned enough for daily use--in accounting and bookkeeping, for example--but whose restricted vocabulary of only a couple of hundred words would exclude them from learned works. They might well, however, be able to read short illustrated works. |
Traditional themes
Though the earliest surviving examples of printing are religious, secular printing grew fast enough to cause government concern as early as 835 CE, when an edict prohibited the sale of block-printed unofficial calendars. During the Song period (960-1279) the government continued to try to control printing by restricting certain categories--calendars, almanacs, examination cribs (especially miniature versions which could be smuggled into examination halls) and local descriptions which might be used for espionage. Attempts were made to force publishers to submit all works for government inspection before publication. Private publishers, too, attempted to curb unlicensed copying by claiming "copyright" protection through government warrant; the first book with such a warrant was printed between 1190 and 1194. |
It is clear from these (eventually unsuccessful) attempts at control that publishing was a huge industry catering to a growing audience that ranged from scholars with epigraphical and poetic interests to ordinary people who wanted to read romantic fiction and blood-and-thunder historical epics. Illustrations were an integral part of many books, appearing in a variety of formats, from carefully produced and no doubt more expensive items with fine block prints placed at intervals between the text, to the cheaper, cruder books with small illustrations at the top of every page. The latter format was common during the Ming; later Qing editions of popular fiction commonly contained a series of illustrations of characters or scenes grouped together at the beginning of the text. |
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