The Invention of Printing in China and Europe

The ability to put information and ideas on paper and to circulate them widely in multiple identical copies has been credited in the West with the rise of Humanism, the Protestant Reformation, the modern state, and the Scientific Revolution. In truth, the message preceded the machinery: It was a preexisting desire to rule more effectively, to shape and control the world around one, that brought the printing press into existence in both China and Europe. Before there was printing, there were rulers, religious leaders, and merchants eager to disperse their laws, scriptures, and wares more widely and efficiently among their subjects, followers, and customers.

To create the needed skilled agents and bureaucrats, leaders of state, church, and business cooperated in the sponsorship of schools and education, which spurred the growth of reading and writing among the middle and upper urban classes. Literacy in turn fueled the desire for easily accessible and reliable information. Literacy came more slowly to the lower social classes, as authorities feared too much knowledge in the hands of the uneducated or poorly educated would only fan the fires of discontent. To the many who remained illiterate after the invention of printing, information was conveyed carefully in oral and pictorial form. Printed official statements were designed to be read to as well as read by people, and religious leaders put images and pictures in the hands of simple folk, hoping to content them with saints and charms.

Resources and Technology: Paper and Ink

Among the indispensable materials of the print revolution were sizable supplies of durable, inexpensive paper and a reliable ink. As early as the Shang period (1766-1122 b.c.e.) a water-based soot and gum ink was used across Asia. (Europe would not have such an ink until the early Middle Ages.) Also in the Shang period, official seals and stamps used to authenticate documents were made by carving bronze, jade, ivory, gold, and stone in a reverse direction (that is, in a mirror form, to prevent the print from appearing backwards). Similar seals appeared in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, but only for religious use, not for the affairs of daily secular life. Later, more easily carved clay or wax seals reproduced characters on silk or bamboo surfaces.

Silk in the East and parchment in the West had been early, but very expensive, print media. Bamboo and wood were cheaper, but neither was suited to large scale printing.

A step forward occurred in the second century b.c.e., when the Chinese invented a crude paper from hemp fibers, which was used only for wrappings. Three centuries later (105 c.e.), an imperial eunuch named Ts`ia Lun combined tree bark, hemp, rags, and old fish nets into a superior paper on which one could reliably write. A better blend of mulberry bark, fish nets, and natural fibers became the standard paper mixture. By the Tang period (618-907), high-quality paper manufacturing had become a major industry.

In the eighth century the improved Chinese recipe began to make its way west, after Chinese prisoners taught their Arab captors how to make paper. By the ninth century Samarkand in Russian Turkestan had become the leading supplier of paper in the East. A century later Baghdad and Damascus shipped fine paper to Egypt and Europe. Italy became a major Western manufacturer in the thirteenth century followed by Nuremberg, Germany, in the late fourteenth.

Early Printing Techniques

By the seventh century c.e., multiple copies of the Confucian Scriptures were made by taking paper rubbings from stone and metal engravings, a direct prelude to block printing. At this time in the West, the arts of engraving, and particularly of coin-casting (by hammering hot alloy on an anvil that bore a carved design), took the first steps toward printing with movable type.

The invention of printing occurred much earlier in the East than in the West. The Chinese invented "block printing" (that is, printing with carved wooden blocks) in the eighth century, almost six hundred years before the technique appeared in Europe (1395). The Chinese also far outpaced the West in printing with "movable type" (that is, with individual characters or letters that could be arranged by hand to make a page) - a technique invented by Pi Scheng in the 1040s, four hundred years before Johann Gutenberg set up the first Western press in Mainz, Germany (around 1450).

Block printing used hard wood (preferably from pear or jujube trees), whose surface was glazed with a filler (glue, wax, or clay). A paper copy of what one wanted to duplicate (be it a drawn image, a written sentence, or both) was placed face down on a wet glaze covering the block and the characters cut into it. The process accommodated any artistic style, while allowing text and illustration to coexist harmoniously on a page. Once carved, the block was inked and mild pressure applied, allowing a great many copies to be made before it wore out.

The first movable type was ceramic. The printer set each character or piece in an iron form and arranged them on an iron backing plate filled with heated resin and wax, which, when cooled, created a tight page. After the print run was finished, the plate was heated again to melt the wax and free the type for new settings. Ceramic and later metal type were fragile and left uneven impressions, and metal type was expensive as well and did not hold water-based Chinese inks.

Carved wooden type did not have these problems and therefore became the preferred tool. Set in a wooden frame and tightened with wooden wedges, the readied page was inked face up and an impression made, just as in printing with carved wooden blocks. Cutting a complete set of type or font required much time and effort because of the complexity and enormity of Chinese script. To do the latter justice, a busy press required 10,000 individual characters, and that number could increase several-fold, depending on the project.

Printing Comes of Age

In 952, after a quarter century of preparation, a standardized Chinese text, unblemished by any scribal errors, was printed for the first time on a large scale. That text, the Confucian Classics, was an epochal event in the history of printing. The main reading of the elite, these famous scrolls became the basis of the entry exam for a government office. In awakening people to the power of printing, the Confucian Classics may be compared to the publication of Gutenberg's Latin Bible.

The Sung period (960-1278) saw the first sustained flowering of block printing. Still today among the Chinese the phrase "Sung style" connotes high quality. Three monumental publications stand out: the Standard Histories of previous Chinese dynasties, serially appearing between 994 and 1063; the Buddhist Scriptures in scrolls up to sixty feet and longer, requiring 130,000 carved wooden blocks (971-983); and the Taoist Scriptures (early eleventh century). For the literate, but not necessarily highly educated, numerous how-to books on medical, botanical, and agricultural topics became available. Printed paper money also appeared for the first time in copper-poor Szechwan during the Sung.

There is no certain evidence that printing was a complete gift of the Far East to the West. Although some scholars believe that Chinese block printing accompanied playing cards through the Islamic world and into Europe, the actual connecting links have not yet been demonstrated. So while there was a definite "paper trail" from East to West, Europe appears to have developed its own inks and invented its own block and movable type printing presses independently.

Indeed in East and West, different writing systems would favor distinct forms of printing: In China, carved wood blocks suited an ideographic script that required a seemingly boundless number of characters. Each ideograph, or character, expressed a complete concept. In contrast, European writing was based on a very small phonetic alphabet. Each letter could express meaning only when connected to other letters, forming words. For such a system, movable metal type worked far better than carved wood blocks. So while China mastered movable type printing earlier than the West, the enormous number of characters required by the Chinese language made movable type impractical.

Ironically, the simpler machinery of block printing did greater justice to China's more intricate and complex script, while Europe's far simpler script required the more complex machinery of movable type. Today, the Chinese still face the problem of storing and retrieving their rich language in digitized form, "the space-age equivalent of movable type." In telecommunications, they prefer faxes, "the modern-day equivalent of the block print."

Society and Printing

In neither East nor West do the availability of essential material resources (wood, ink, and paper) and the development of new technologies sufficiently explain the advent of printing. Cultural and emotional factors played an equally large role. In China, the religious and moral demands of Buddhists, Taoists, and Confucians lay behind the invention of block printing. For Buddhists, copying and disseminating their sacred writings had always been a traditional path to salvation. Taoists wanted to hang protective charms or seals around their necks, printed sacred messages blessed by their priests that were up to four inches wide. These were apparently the first block prints. Confucianists, too, lobbied for standardized printed copies of their texts, which they had for centuries duplicated by crude rubbings from stone-carved originals.

In Europe, the major religious orders (Augustinians, Dominicans, and Franciscans) and popular lay religious movements (Waldensians, Lollards, and Hussites) joined with Humanists to promote the printing of standardized, orthodox editions of the Bible and other religious writings. As the numbers of literate laity steadily grew, the demand for cheap, practical reading material (calendars, newssheets, and how-to pamphlets) also rapidly increased. By 1500, fifty years after Gutenberg's invention, two hundred printing presses operated throughout Europe, sixty of them in German cities. And just as in China, the large print runs of the new presses tended to be religious or moral subjects in the early years: Latin Bibles and religious books, indulgences and Protestant pamphlets, along with decorated playing cards often bearing moral messages.

With the printing press came the first copyright laws. Knowledge had previously been considered to be "free." The great majority of medieval scholars and writers were clergy, who lived by church or other patronage and whose knowledge was deemed a gift of God to be shared freely with all. After the printing press, however, a new sense of intellectual property emerged. In Europe, primitive protective laws took the form of a ruler's "privilege" by which a ruler pledged to punish the pirating of a particular work within his or her realm over a limited period of time. Such measures had clear limits: More than half of the books published during the first century of print in the West were pirated editions, a situation that would not change significantly until the eighteenth century.

Government censorship laws also ran apace with the growth of printing. The clergy of Cologne, Germany, issued the first prohibition of heretical books in 1479. In 1485 the Church banned the works of the heretics John Wycliffe and John Huss Europe-wide, and two years later the pope promulgated the first bull against any and all books "harmful to the faith." In 1521 Emperor Charles V banned Martin Luther's works throughout the Holy Roman Empire, along with their author. In 1527 the first publisher was hanged for printing a banned book of Luther's. And in 1559 the pope established the Index of Forbidden Books, which still exists.

Printing stimulated numerous new ancillary trades. In addition to the proliferation of bookstores and the rise of traveling booksellers, who carried flyers from town to town promoting particular works, there were new speciality stationery shops, ink and inkstone stores, bookshelf and reading-table makers, and businesses manufacturing brushes and other printing tools. The new print industry also brought social and economic upheaval to city and countryside when, like modern corporations relocating factories to underdeveloped countries, it went in search of cheaper labor by moving presses out of guild-dominated cities and into the freer marketplace of the countryside.

For society's authorities, the new numbers of literate citizens and subjects made changes and reforms both easier and more difficult. As a tool of propaganda, the printing press remained a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it gave authorities the means to propagandize more effectively than ever. On the other hand, the new literate public found itself in an unprecedented position to recognize deceit, challenge tradition, and expose injustice.