Printing and Publishing in East Asia through circa 1600: An Extremely Brief Survey

Introduction

The history of book culture and printing in East Asia shows how different cultures that used the same manuscript and print techniques to produce many of the same books in the same language (Chinese) developed distinctive book cultures. This essay focuses on China and compares its book culture with those of Korea and Japan, from the inception of woodblock printing around the late seventh century until about 1600. Other peoples were also heavily influenced throughout history by Chinese culture in East Asia and Inner Asia, such as the Mongols, Khitans, Tanguts, and Uighurs. We should note, however, that some of the peoples in this vast area adopted and modified the Chinese writing system, even if their languages were very different from Chinese. They also used printing technologies from China—both woodblock and movable type, often within a century of the development of a writing system for their own languages. The history of the uses of printing technologies and their adoption and adaptation in different cultures therefore helps us understand the nature of technologies in general.

China

Printing can be described as a method by which texts and images prepared on a master form are transferred by being impressed onto a receiving surface. Printing is thus an extremely ancient process that ranges from the cylindrical seals of the fourth millennium BCE used in Mesopotamia to a wide variety of later methods that could produce a three- or two-dimensional impression using inks, dyes, or pigments. Both the master form, prepared in relief or intaglio, and the receiving surface could be made from a variety of materials. The printed text or image could then be used for different purposes—to record information, to disseminate information, to assert authority, to indicate confidentiality, to convey religious or talismanic power, etc. Printing therefore is not synonymous with publishing, or the broadcasting of information.

Woodblock Printing (Xylography)

The idea for block printing develops easily from using seals to make impressions, a practice known in China as early as the Shang period (ca. 1500–1050 BCE). The earliest extant seals, dating from the late Zhou Dynasty (ca. 1050–256 BCE), were made of stone, earthenware, metals, horn, etc., and could be used to make impressions on clay, silk, and other surfaces.¹ Most of these seals were used to authenticate the identity and authority of an individual or organization, but some from the first or second century CE also served religious and magical purposes. Textual accounts suggest seals were used to protect occupants of tombs, and we also have records about the apotropaic use of seals carved from peachwood from the first century CE, and descriptions of Daoist seals from the fourth century. Buddhist texts, such as one from the fifth century, describe “devil-subduing seals” as well as impressions of the Buddha’s image for devotional purposes. Moreover, the impressions were not necessarily made on silk or paper but on soft clay, sand, or even human skin.² A different application of block printing in China was its use in dyeing textiles, for which we have brass blocks from the second century BCE and one anecdotal account describing a dye-resist method using woodblocks in the eighth century CE.³ Scholars have suggested that these different methods of making impressions on a variety of surfaces may have led to the development of block printing on paper. Equally important for multiple replication of text and image by printing is the availability of a pliant, absorbent surface that could be cheaply produced—paper. Although the earliest extant paper dates to the first or second century BCE,⁴ historical tradition credits a Han Dynasty official named Cai Lun in the second century CE with developing high-quality paper suitable for writing and painting. Although the method of block printing may easily have been inspired by earlier technologies that applied ink or dye on a given material, xylography differed sufficiently from these other processes that it may not have been immediately obvious as a means of replicating text and image on paper for the purpose of making multiple...