History of typography in East Asia Totally Explained

Everything about History Of Typography In East Asia totally explained

ť For the article on the development of printing in Europe, see History of western typography.The Chinese invention of paper and woodblock printing, at some point before creation of the Dharani Sutra were put together in Korea, producing the world's first print culture.

Woodblock printing was better suited to Chinese characters than movable type, which the Chinese also invented, but which didn't replace woodblock printing. In China and Korea, the use of woodblock printing on paper and movable type preceded their use in Europe by several centuries. Both methods were replaced in the second half of the 19th century by Western-style printing.

Woodblock printing

   Woodblock printing on paper, whereby individual sheets of paper were pressed into wooden blocks with the text and illustrations carved into them, was first recorded in Korean history, and the oldest surviving printed book to be documented, a copy of the Buddhist Dharani Sutra, was created sometime before the construction of the Shakyamuni Pagoda in 751 AD.
   As a method for printing patterns on cloth the earliest surviving examples from China date to before 220, and from Egypt to the 4th century. By the 12th and 13th centuries, many Chinese libraries contained tens of thousands of printed volumes.
The earliest woodblocks used for printing in Europe, in the fourteenth century, using exactly the same technique as Chinese woodblocks, lead some pioneering scholars of Asian subjects to hypothesize a connection: "the process of printing them must have been copied from ancient Chinese specimens, brought from that country by some early travelers, whose names have not been handed down to our times" (Robert Curzon, 1810-1873). Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China has a chapter that suggests that "European block printers must not only have seen Chinese samples, but perhaps had been taught by missionaries or others who had learned these un-European methods from Chinese printers during their residence in China."
But historians of the Western prints themselves see no need for such a direct and late connection. Rather, they assume that European woodcut appeared "spontaneously and presumably as a result of the use of paper as it had been observed that paper was better suited than rough-surfaced parchment for making the impressions from wood-reliefs".
   European woodblock printing shows a clear progression from patterns to images, both printed on cloth, then to images printed on paper, when it became widely available in Europe in about 1400. Text and images printed together only appear some sixty years later, after metal movable type

The Dharani Sutra of Korea

Traditionally, there have been two main printing techniques in Asia, those of woodblock printing and moveable type printing. In the woodblock technique, ink is applied to letters carved upon a wooden board, which is then pressed onto paper. With moveable type, the board is assembled using different lettertypes, according to the page being printed. Wooden printing was used in the East from the 8th century onwards, and moveable metal type came into use during the 12th century.
   Korea isn't only the inventor of moveable metal type, but is also home to the earliest example of woodblock printing. In October 1966, The Great Dharani Sutra of Undefiled Pure Radiance (often referred to simply as the Dharani Sutra), was discovered within the Shakyamuni Pagoda of Pulguksa Temple in Kyongju. Printed using twelve wooden boards, the scroll measures 8cm in width and 6.2m in length. Since it's believed that the Shakyamuni Pagoda was completed in AD 751, the print is therefore at least as old as the shrine in which it was stored.
   Before the discovery of the Dharani Sutra, the world’s oldest woodblock print was a copy of the Diamond Sutra, discovered by the British-Hungarian archaeologist Marc Aurel Stein at Dunhuang in China. This sutra was printed in AD 868, and so the Dharani Sutra discovered in Korea predates it by at least 117 years. The discovery of the Dharani Sutra caused much controversy amongst academics. Many found it difficult to believe that a woodblock print, which appeared to have been made earlier than the oldest surviving example in China, could have been produced in Korea and not within China itself. Up to this point, it had been assumed that China was the inventor of woodblock printing. However, efforts to ascertain the exact time and circumstances of the printing of the sutra continued, and in the end, various critical pieces of evidence confirmed that the Dharani Sutra had indeed been printed in Korea, and even earlier than AD 751.
   The Dharani Sutra features eight instances of four words that were in official use only during the years AD 690~704, and in complete disuse by AD 722. Furthermore, an inscription on the outer container of a sarira reliquary made in AD 706, discovered in a nearby temple site in Kyongju, states that the Dharani Sutra was enshrined at the same time as the reliquary. Expert analysis comparing this inscription with the letters of the Dharani Sutra revealed that they'd been written by the same person. These investigations established that the Dharani Sutra was printed in 706, when the sarira reliquary was enshrined within the Three-Storey Pagoda at the Hwangboksa Temple.
   The Dharani Sutra scroll is currently being kept at the Seoul National Museum. In a published study, a Japanese printing researcher remarked:
ť The letters are exceptionally beautiful in form. The writing of the Dharani Sutra text discovered at Million Pagoda is quite crude, but this text is written in a dignified script which has reached a greater level of refinement. I believe that by the time this Dharani Sutra was printed, the country’s woodblock technique was already at a considerably advanced stage. The thin paper, measuring 8cm in width, appears to be Hanji [traditionalhandmade Korean paper]. Even though the paper has been discolored, the ink is still very clear and distinct.

Already in the early 8th century, Korea’s printing techniques had made considerable progress. In his famous book The Discoverers, the prominent American historian and critic Daniel J. Boorstin singled out Korea as the “most developed nation in the field of printing.” The Tripitaka Koreana is notable as one of the most important milestones in the history of printing in the world.

Movable type

Movable type in China

The first known movable type system was invented in China around 1040 AD by Bi Sheng (990-1051). Bi Sheng's type was made of baked clay. As described by the Chinese scholar Shen Kuo (1031–1095):
ť When he wished to print, he took an iron frame and set it on the iron plate. In this he placed the types, set close together. When the frame was full, the whole made one solid block of type. He then placed it near the fire to warm it. When the paste [atthe back] was slightly melted, he took a smooth board and pressed it over the surface, so that the block of type became as even as a whetstone.

ť For each character there were several types, and for certain common characters there were twenty or more types each, in order to be prepared for the repetition of characters on the same page. When the characters were not in use he'd them arranged with paper labels, one label for each rhyme-group, and kept them in wooden cases.

However, Bi Sheng's fragile clay types were not practical for large-scale printing. Clay types also have the additional handicap of lacking adhesion to the ink.

Wooden movable type

Wooden movable type was developed by the late 13th century, pioneered by Wang Zhen, author of the Nong Shu (農書). Although the wooden type was more durable under the mechanical rigors of handling, repeated printing wore the character faces down, and the types could only be replaced by carving new pieces. This system was later enhanced by pressing wooden blocks into sand and casting metal types from the depression in copper, bronze, iron or tin. The set of wafer-like metal stamp types could be assembled to form pages, inked, and page impressions taken from rubbings on cloth or paper. Before the pioneer of bronze-type printing of China, Hua Sui in 1490 AD, Wang Zhen had experimented with metal type using tin, yet found it unsatisfactory due to its incompatibility with the inking process.
   A particular difficulty posed the logistical problems of handling the several thousand logographs whose command is required for full literacy in Chinese language. It was faster to carve one woodblock per page than to composit a page from so many different types. The credit for the first metal movable type may go to Choe Yun-ui of the Goryeo Dynasty in 1234.
   Examples of this metal type are on display in the Asian Reading Room of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The oldest extant movable metal print book is the Jikji, printed in Korea in 1377.
   The techniques for bronze casting, used at the time for making coins (as well as bells and statues) were adapted to making metal type. Unlike the metal punch system thought to be used by Gutenberg, the Koreans used a sand-casting method. The following description of the Korean font casting process was recorded by the Joseon dynasty scholar Song Hyon (15th c.):
ť At first, one cuts letters in beech wood. One fills a trough level with fine sandy [clay] of the reed-growing seashore. Wood-cut letters are pressed into the sand, then the impressions become negative and form letters [molds]. At this step, placing one trough together with another, one pours the molten bronze down into an opening. The fluid flows in, filling these negative molds, one by one becoming type. Lastly, one scrapes and files off the irregularities, and piles them up to be arranged. Among books printed with metal movable type, the oldest surviving books are from Korea, dated at least from 1377. However, Korea never witnessed a printing revolution comparable to Europe's:
ť Korean printing with movable metallic type developed mainly within the royal foundry of the Yi dynasty. Royalty kept a monopoly of this new technique and by royal mandate suppressed all non-official printing activities and any budding attempts at commercialization of printing. Thus, printing in early Korea served only the small, noble groups of the highly stratified society.

A potential solution to the linguistic and cultural bottleneck that held back movable type in Korea for two hundred years appeared in the early 15th century—a generation before Gutenberg would begin working on his own movable type invention in Europe—when King Sejong devised a simplified alphabet of 24 characters called Hangul for use by the common people, which could have made the typecasting and compositing process more feasible. But King Sejong's brilliant creation didn't receive the attention it deserved. Adoption of the new alphabet was stifled by the inertia of Korea's cultural elite, who were "appalled at the idea of losing Chinese, the badge of their elitism."
Separately invented in China, metal movable type was also pioneered by Hua Sui in 1490 AD, during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 AD).

Movable type in Japan

Though the Jesuits operated a Western movable type printing-press in Nagasaki, Japan, printing equipment brought back by Toyotomi Hideyoshi's army in 1593 from Korea had far greater influence on the development of the medium. Four years later, Tokugawa Ieyasu, even before becoming shogun, effected the creation of the first native movable type,

Movable type in other East Asian countries

Printing using movable type spread from China during the Mongol Empire; among other groups, the Uyghurs of Central Asia, whose script was adopted for the Mongol language, used movable type.. Despite these conjectures, there's no evidence that movable type from the East ever reached Europe.

Mechanical presses

Mechanical presses as used in European printing remained unknown in East Asia. Instead, printing remained an unmechanized, laborious process with pressing the back of the paper onto the inked block by manual "rubbing" with a hand tool., while in Japan, after an early but brief interlude in the 1590s, Gutenberg's printing press arrived in Nagasaki in 1848 on a Dutch ship.
Contrary to Gutenberg printing, which allowed printing on both sides of the paper from its very beginnings (although not simultaneously until very recent times), East Asian printing was done only on one side of the paper, because the need to rub the back of the paper when printing would have spoilt the first side when the second side was printed. Another reason was that, unlike in Europe where Gutenberg introduced more suitable oil-based ink, Asian printing remained confined to water-based inks which tended to soak through the paper.

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