Chinese Gazettes on the Margins of Book History: Movable Type, Wax Stereotypes, and Vernacular Techniques in Late Imperial China

While books typically dominate in the field of print and publishing history, what happens when we redirect our attention towards ephemeral texts? Employing a widely dispersed material source base, this article focuses on Chinese gazettes: daily publications that recorded official communications and state activities at the provincial and imperial levels during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). Gazettes, rarely studied under the auspices of book history and existing on the periphery of xylographic book publishing, offer important revelations about the geography, economics, and procedures of print and scribal publishing in late imperial China. Their producers employed a diverse range of rarely recognized techniques including movable typography, wax stereotype printing, slat printing, and other adaptations. Like other non-book ephemera, publishing practices for gazettes were determined locally in vernacular contexts, and not dictated by the imperial state. Attention to ephemeral texts brings less recognized print techniques to the fore, challenging assumptions previously formed from the perspectives of book collecting and bibliographical studies. As digitization and cataloguing efforts reveal non-book texts preserved in private, library, and archival collections, continued attention to the material record is needed.

One early spring morning in 1860, a group of compositors squatted outside a gazette publisher’s southern Beijing premises and hunted for wooden types to fill their printing frames.¹ Once arranged, imprints would be taken from the frames onto coarse, unbleached bamboo paper. The results were just readable. Within the tightly packed columns of crude carved characters, common characters were blurred and rarer terms often replaced by substitutes. In ten-page sets, the pages were folded into slim, yellow-covered pamphlets fixed with twists of paper. Outward from this shop on Iron Stork Hutong, hawkers delivered and sold the gazettes throughout the city. The next day, upon receipt of a fresh sheath of official texts from the palace’s Grand Secretariat (Neige), the process would begin anew.

Locating Ephemeral Texts in Chinese Publishing History

A rapid and localized cycle of production and distribution characterized the publication of serial texts like gazettes in late imperial China (roughly 1500 to 1900). The dynamics of their publication—like the broader category of ephemeral texts—have not yet received serious study. Scholarly neglect of ephemeral texts results both from the predominance of the library- or collector-catalogued book as a research subject and from the perception that the source base for studying ephemeral materials is limited. But in sheer bulk, non-book printed items were more numerous than books. They comprised texts—like gazettes, broadsides, contracts, examination lists, and lottery tickets—but also non-textual imprints, such as illustrations and printed forms. What’s more, ephemeral texts are plentifully found in library, archival, and museum collections throughout East Asia, Europe, and the United States. That said, they require careful sleuthing to locate, not only because of library practices but also because owners may have bound together shorter texts or discarded them after recopying, erasing the material traces of their origins.²

Amid a steady stream of research activity on Chinese print and publishing in the past three decades, not many have addressed non-book publishing.³ A conference on “Non-book Publishing” held at the University of Illinois in 2014 examined “Experiences of Print in Everyday Life in Imperial China,” with contributions on official, popular, religious, and commercial forms of non-book printing.⁴ Existing studies, often assembled by collectors, underscore the social utility of ephemeral publications for non-elites. Given the emphasis on daily use in society, legal, administrative, and commercial documents—particularly contracts, advertisements, and packaging materials—have been areas of interest.⁵ Whereas studies of ephemeral texts in English history highlight how printers supported themselves by “jobbing” quick imprints, studies in China have addressed both handwritten and printed material. Recently, for instance, Zhenzhen Lu has dissected the Beijing scribal publishing industry through a close study of manuscript songbook editions.⁶

Because they incorporate both widespread standards and locally defined vernacular techniques for publishing and distribution, gazettes published in the Qing dynasty (1644 to 1911) are an ideal entry point for the study of ephemeral texts that can be used to revise touchpoints of publishing history in late imperial China. Gazettes—daily publications that recorded official writings and state activities at the provincial and imperial levels—were informational texts that existed on the periphery of xylographic book publishing. Though best known as “the Peking Gazette” in English-language scholarship, in material terms, there was no single Peking Gazette. Referred to in Chinese as dibao 邸報, dichao 邸抄, and jingbao 京報, among other names, gazettes changed in terms of production, appearance, audience, and circulation throughout the late imperial period, and they often existed in multiple formats simultaneously. Today, thousands of Qing dynasty gazettes survive in library and archival collections around the world. These editions, together with archival materials and historical readers’ references to reading gazettes, provide the raw material for an “object history” that stresses the diversity of practices employed in non-book publishing.

Like other ephemeral texts, gazettes were not considered collectible objects. Private libraries and book collectors omitted notice of gazettes in their connoisseurship or in self-authored catalogs. Most readers did not retain personal libraries of gazettes but rather recopied their contents as needed,

Figure 1.

Chinese Gazettes, Cover Page, and Table of Contents

Note: The cover motif of the official is occasionally found on late nineteenth century Beijing gazettes. The official’s placard reads Zhi ri gao sheng 指日高陞 (“As the sun rises”), referring to wishes for a swift promotion in office. The table of contents page is dated November 20, 1873 (TZ 12/10/01). It includes the publisher’s information, date, and brief handwritten summaries of the edicts and memorials included in the issue.

Image Sources: Collection of the National Palace Museum, © The British Library Board, Peking Gazette Collection.

then lent out, repurposed, or disposed of the ephemeral pamphlets. Gazettes and other ephemeral texts are rarely included in rare book catalogues published by modern libraries, even when they are found in the institution’s holdings. Three recent efforts in China have resulted in the facsimile reproduction of thousands of gazettes.⁷ Outside China, most existing library collections have their origins in foreign-led collecting projects, such as those initiated by missionaries or diplomats. My own research has further identified more than 30,000 gazette issues in libraries and archives in fourteen countries, concentrating in China and the United Kingdom.⁸ Nearly all surviving artifacts hail from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Despite the relevance of gazettes to the history of politics and media in late imperial China, past scholarship has not pursued inquiry of this rich material record. The neglect of the surviving record has led to problems in the interpretation of evidence. The large numbers of surviving gazettes from the late nineteenth century attest to an expansion of the production scale and reading audience over time. But despite this, would-be press innovators and cultural critics in the early twentieth century had a vested interest in depicting gazettes as static and censored court mouthpieces with limited audiences.⁹ Because the history of journalism in China was initiated in the same generation by some of the same critics, this field has undervalued the role of gazettes, leading to broader neglect in print history.¹⁰

The Materiality of Texts and Vernacular Techniques

This study of gazettes through their material traces is part of a larger turn toward acknowledging the materiality of communications in history, rather than idealizing or abstracting historical communications as immaterial processes. This methodological turn emphasizes how physical infrastructure and material surfaces both enhance and limit possibilities for the exchange of texts and information. From this perspective, it is impossible to understand a text without recognizing its material housing. In print history and beyond, scholars have also begun to incorporate ephemeral materials into their research.¹¹ The result is a field less constrained by the practices and preferences of historical elites and more cognizant of social, material, and technical variations across genres, time, and space.

In their publication of gazettes, publishers undertook vernacular techniques that varied according to local knowledge, material constraints, and contexts. Local variations resulted from everyday use and necessity, not elite-led experiments. Furthermore, place-specific publishing techniques (such as slat printing in South China) often recurred across multiple genres in a given locale but were rarely found elsewhere. The use of the term “vernacular” further emphasizes that despite the obvious relationship between gazette publishing and state affairs, publishing practices were not prescribed by any central authority. Because gazette publishing took place almost exclusively in provincial administrative centers, these practices remained locally defined rather than geographically widespread. Even the use of wooden movable-type technology, which was quite standardized by the late Qing, was highly dependent on the local market for political news in Beijing, and it did not feature so prominently in other urban centers. In marketing and distribution, gazettes resemble other ephemeral texts, not the practices of commercial, private, or institutional book publishing.

Gazettes and Movable-Type Printing

Gazettes included a regular format of three standard parts: a court circular, which listed palace duty assignments, audiences, and the emperor’s visits to various shrines and ritual sites; edicts and rescripts, a set of proclamations, commands, and decisions issued by or on behalf of the monarch; and memorials, reports authored by high-level territorial and capital officials. From time to time, gazettes also published personnel lists and recent curricula for the civil service examinations. Their contents were phrased using the circumscribed vocabulary of the bureaucracy, distinct from literary or vernacular styles. Predictable format and vocabulary helped inspired the use of movable type printing from the seventeenth century onward.

Commercially-managed gazette publishing began prior to the advent of the Qing dynasty and seems to have included woodblock, manuscript, and movable type printing.¹² We have some evidence that “short editions” (xiaobao 小報), usually manuscript copies, were available earlier than the formal “long editions” (changben 長本), and that “long editions” tended to be more authoritative. Other notes from the seventeenth century indicates that gazette publishers were located in both Beijing and Nanjing, the primary and secondary capitals of the Ming dynasty (1368 to 1644). Except as reproduced in other volumes, no gazettes have survived from the Ming dynasty. For the Qing dynasty, although reading notes from readers in various locations have been identified, our surviving source base of editions is limited to those published in Beijing, Canton, Suzhou, and a few other provincial seats.

A well-known note by the seventeenth-century scholar Gu Yanwu (1613–1682) indicates that movable-type printing was in use by gazette publishers in Beijing as early as 1638, and most surviving examples of printed gazettes exhibit signs of movable-type techniques.¹³ Premodern typography had been pioneered by literati in experimental projects during the Song and Ming dynasties but achieved its greatest practical utility in the second half of the late Qing dynasty.¹⁴ While early instances of the use of movable type indulged the printer’s interests in using materials like wood, metal, and ceramic, later publishers used wooden movable type in more specific applications. For genres like genealogy and gazette printing, each of which featured predictable vocabularies and small print runs, movable-type printing made sense.¹⁵ In both genres, the use of movable type increased in scale in the nineteenth century despite the introduction of nascent European printing techniques such as lithography to Chinese cities (particularly Shanghai), perhaps testifying to increasing consumer interest in these genres.¹⁶

The economics of publishing was very different in movable-type printing from those in woodblock printing. In both areas, paper, ink, carving materials, and labor constituted significant expenses. However, in many woodblock projects, a financial sponsor (not the printer) owned the blocks and the rights to future imprints and revisions. In the case of movable type, the printers themselves possessed the equipment for publishing a variety of texts, although most printers specialized in a particular genre. By comparison to woodblock projects, where the print run was technically limitless, movable type projects were produced in smaller print runs.¹⁷ Movable-type publishing avoided the higher initial costs and storage requirements of xylography, but carved type required more constant upkeep and renewal.

Besides the suitability of the contents of gazettes for movable type, environmental constraints may have motivated the adoption of typographic publishing in the northern capital. By comparison with the south, the capital region possessed limited natural resources relevant to print and publishing, such as hardwood timber forests. Supervisors of the palace printing enterprise complained about shortfalls of necessary hardwoods for quality xylographic projects.¹⁸ Movable type, which did not require woods to be as hard nor large boards, could help ameliorate this constraint. In labor profile, too, Beijing was different from the generations of skilled printers found in southern print centers. Rather than natives, gazette printers and movable type technicians were likely transplants from other areas—initially the Yangtze Delta area, and later Shandong.¹⁹

No records survive regarding the operations of gazette printers in Beijing or elsewhere. Further challenging the inquiry is the fact that movable-type techniques did not leave behind a physical archive in the form of carved printing blocks. However, close study of the material record suggests that gazette publishing practices were shaped by local constraints and by the requirements of rapid circulation. These texts could only be reproduced by reconstructing the printing process anew in each printing location or recopying them in a different format. These local reinventions resulted in variations in production steps and therefore in appearance, quality, and material heft. To better understand these dynamics, we should define a model for “print in circulation.”

Print in Circulation

In studying both Chinese and Western information history, modern scholars have urged us to move past definitions that frame individual texts as singular artifacts and to consider, rather, the creation and use of texts as material objects and in social context. Understanding gazettes—state-affiliated serial publications republished while in circulation—requires us to adapt existing models. Perhaps the best known model, the “communications circuit,” developed by historian Robert Darnton, emphasizes transformation through multiple formats. Darnton posited that a core piece of information could transform as it made its way between different social groups. The format of transmission—a song, a news story, a satirical novel—attached contextual elements that both shaped audience understandings and shifted the shared meaning of the initial piece of information.²⁰ Though influential, Darnton’s model is focused on the transmission of social information and does not center books as material objects nor accommodate state texts.²¹ More recently, in his study of Chinese local gazetteers, historian Joseph Dennis proposed to study not individual editions but the “life cycle” of texts within the genre. All gazetteers were drafted in manuscript form and could evolve into printed, altered, or expanded versions during their life cycle.²² Dennis’s model is valuable for refuting the simplistic division of editions into “manuscript” or “printed.” But its emphasis on local gazetteers implies that all change and repackaging occurred in a single geographical location over years rather than in broad circulation over days and weeks.

The production and circulation of gazettes and other circulating state texts followed a branching pattern (See Figure 2), distinct from either the accretive “life cycle” of local histories or the transformational cycle in the “communications circuit.” This visual model is intended to highlight the fact the texts were republished in circulation at a second layer of “reprint sites” distinct from their “initial publication site.” At either stage, publishing could take place in print or manuscript formats, and print formats included both woodblock and movable-type printing. Since most circulating state texts were time-dependent, this was a rapid process. Gazettes, for instance, were often immediately reprinted in provincial capitals upon receipt from Beijing. Official broadsides (tenghuang 謄黃 and gaoshi 告示) also followed this quick pace. Books sent from Beijing to provincial sites, on the other hand, could take much longer to be reprinted on the local level. The state—whether Beijing, provincial governments, or local officials—often contracted with the commercial realm to ensure the republication and distribution of texts. Printers were rarely government employees, but official personnel often distributed texts between initial and reprint sites and circulated copies to recipients. In each case, both state regulations and readers’ expectations ensured that the contents of gazettes remained consistent as they were republished. Circulating state texts therefore moved in a less freewheeling manner than Darnton’s Parisian example of social texts.

Figure 2.

Production and Dissemination of Serial Texts

Source: Author sketch.

Having outlined the general model for publishing serial texts, we can refine it for gazettes (See Figure 3). The initial publication site was Beijing, where the imperial court authored edicts and rescripts and acted as a clearing-house and sanctioning agent for memorials authored by imperial officials. In all cases, the original source material for gazettes were manuscript excerpts of government documents distributed for publication. Only the court could approve items for publication in gazettes. Approved items were designated for copying in the Grand Secretariat, the main clerical institution of the Qing court. There, a group of clerical censors known as the supervising secretaries of the Six Sections oversaw the transcription of approved materials by copyists. Many copyists were employees of gazette publishers (Baofang 報房). Some gazette publishers recopied these as scribal editions; others printed them. They sold and rented gazettes as individual issues, or readers could subscribe for a longer period.

From there, capital publishers shipped gazettes to provincial capitals under the supervision of the capital communications liaisons (zhujing titang 駐 京提塘, tasked with relaying communications from the capital to the provinces).²³ In these secondary publication sites, the gazettes were reproduced, employing the labor, material resources, and technologies of that region. Provincial editions could thus appear as manuscript or in print, regardless of the format of the specimen received from Beijing. Distribution in the provincial seat operated much as in the capital but on a smaller scale, with some copies offered to consumers, and others provided to provincial liaisons, who were charged with bringing documents from the provincial capital to district seats. County-level officials were the final layer of frequent readers, although some rural residents—particularly academy students, literate elites, and retirees from official service—also obtained gazettes regularly. Although frequently sent out from provincial centers, gazettes do not appear to have been reproduced at the prefectural or county level.²⁴

Outside the purview of the model, it is also important to trace the transit and survival of texts into libraries and other collections—a criticism that Darnton has himself acknowledged for the communications circuit model.²⁵ Some literati and statesmen (such as Gu Yanwu, mentioned above), were noted collectors of gazettes. There does not appear to have been a unified system for archiving gazettes in the Qing state, but the staff of dynastic history and official biography projects consulted gazettes as sources. Later, foreign states, particularly the British Empire, were more systematic in collecting and studying gazettes. Outside large collections, owners sometimes jotted down sections of gazettes into diaries and other records; these transcripts could even be included in private histories and pamphlets. Quotations from gazettes also made their way into official memorials drafted by bureaucrats—if these memorials were later published in gazettes, then the recycled quotation might appear once again.²⁶

Figure 3.

Production and Dissemination of Gazettes

Source: Author sketch.

An important distinction between the branching model developed here and those created by Dennis and Darnton is that, whereas the latter two stress the meaningful transformation of content, here the content remained relatively fixed, from the submission of a document to the palace, through release to copyists, publication, distribution, and republication. Such fidelity led early Shanghai press historian Roswell Britton to comment, “In all the range of elegance and size and cost of their various editions, the Peking Gazettes in point of content varied only in degree of abridgement.”²⁷ When it has been possible to compare between gazette editions, or between published and archival versions of official documents, alterations appear quite limited. Most substantive abridgment, such as condensing the chain of communications involved in a particular case, occurred at the Six Sections and was not carried out by printers.²⁸ Although printers sometimes published items on different schedules or neglected to include a document, they adhered to the substance of the texts they were given.²⁹ The most common text-level emendations were substitutions or the slight rephrasing of individual characters. Even readers copied complete quotations without intermixing commentary.

And yet, what if we turn to “all the range of elegance and size” that Britton dismisses? Even as the content of gazettes remained static, it was repackaged in varying media. Recopying, reprinting, and republication took place in distinct local contexts, from the gazette printers of Beijing to the local publishers who took in administrative business at provincial seats. By and large, the state maintained no fixed standards of production for the gazette trade, as long as publishers committed to reproducing the content as received and disclosing only approved documents. It was left open to individual purveyors to adopt the technological, labor, material, and formatting strategies that worked best. This meant that gazette purveyors in Canton, for instance, could assemble a print or manuscript product using production strategies different from those employed in Beijing. In what follows, therefore, we examine the processes of gazette publication in circulation.

Four Ways to Publish Gazettes

Gazette printing was not static over time or across the empire. Here, case studies document four sets of vernacular techniques within the history of gazette publishing: first, the use of wax stereotyping by the Gongshen Tang gazette publisher in late eighteenth-century Beijing; second, the use of slat printing in gazettes and other ephemeral genres in nineteenth-century South China; third, variations of scribal and print publishing in other provincial centers; and finally, commercially minded variations on movable-type printing and gazette packaging used in nineteenth-century Beijing. These cases cover the majority of surviving gazettes up to the last decade of the nineteenth century. The fact that gazette publishers adopted distinct techniques in different locations lays bare the decentralized nature of the gazette trade. These differences in local practice had material consequences. Distinctions in publishing practices, many undertaken as a result of resource exigencies or differences in labor experience, resulted in editions that looked different from place to place and over time.

Gongshen Tang Gazettes

Beginning around 1760, a new gazette publisher was established in Beijing called the Gongshen Tang 公慎堂.³⁰ The Gongshen Tang would be the only officially-supervised producer of gazettes before the last years of the Qing dynasty. Its creation resulted from the court’s dismay over decades of inconsistent work with local commercial gazette publishers. Problems had emerged at several levels. Stemming from reports that unsanctioned documents had been inserted into gazettes, communications liaisons and gazette publishers shared a reputation as profit-hungry and unscrupulous. Outside Beijing, communications liaisons were blamed for failing to maintain adequate supplies or transport networks, resulting in delivery delays and gazette shortages. Part of the problem was that each of the sixteen official “communications liaisons” had too much autonomy as he solicited gazettes for the civil and military personnel in his jurisdiction. The court solution, therefore, forced the liaisons to work together (hence the term Gongshen, or “joint supervision”) in managing gazette publishing and distribution. The establishment of the Gongshen Tang also apparently signaled the erstwhile closure of commercial gazette publishers in Beijing. The Gongshen Tang was not a government institution, however. The liaisons hired staff from outside official ranks, from managers down to printers and messengers.

Practitioners for the Gongshen Tang worked inventively to stabilize shaky movable types and rapidly produce stereotype imprints.³¹ Beginning with basic characteristics, most issues are three pages folded folio pages, with page numbers placed in the center margins of the fold—that is, on the far right or far left edge of each leaf (see Figure 4 below).³² Gongshen Tang gazettes are preserved without issue covers, and we do not know how they were packaged or bound together. Each issue begins with the date (here Qianlong 35/11/03 [December 19, 1770]) and the name of the publisher underneath (quite blurry in this example). Next, the heading “Imperial Emanations” (lunyin 綸音) indicates which of the Six Boards was on duty, the items on the emperor’s ritual calendar, and audiences scheduled. Oral rescripts offered in response to presented memorials are also recorded in this section. The next section comprises imperial edicts and rescripts, which could be as short as one line or as lengthy as several pages. In some issues, there is a separate section for the topics and questions of different levels of the civil service examinations. The final section comprised memorials submitted by officials. In some issues, an “appointment register” (fenfa dan 分 發單). Folded into the gazettes, these registers are printed on paper shorter and wider than the standard gazette folios. The name of the publisher is also included on the title line for these registers, suggesting that appointment registers could also be distributed and sold on their own.

Figure 4.

Gongshen Tang Gazette

Final page of Qianlong 35/11/02 and first page of Qianlong 35/11/03 (December 19–20, 1770).

Image courtesy of the East Asian Library and the Gest Collection, Princeton University Library.

Limited archival evidence in the form of passing descriptions of the publisher’s work in state documents helps reconstruct the printing process. One early nineteenth-century official source described the Gongshen Tang’s printing equipment as “printing blocks and containers,” indicating that imprint surfaces were not large woodblocks but collections of character-sized types stored in categorized vessels.³³ A few years later, a Gongshen Tang manager faced interrogation regarding a leaked rumor. His testimony sheds light on the equipment, personnel, and processes for printing gazettes. According to the manager, Shao Yucheng, compositors for the Gongshen Tang assembled movable types within wooden frames: “We use movable type, arranging them in blocks and then making an impression, after which they are distributed to each location.”³⁴ Gongshen Tang stored its wooden fonts in categorized cabinets and used hardwood forms to arrange type in the page format prior to printing. Most likely, by laying the fonts in well-structured frames, the printers sought to improve the stability of the print surface.³⁵

The use of a wooden frame for setting type makes Gongshen Tang gazettes appear quite similar to xylographic imprints. Block-printed books were folded at the block-heart (banxin 版心) located at the center of the wooden printing block. In this center margin (thus located at the far edge of the folded page) the work’s title, sub-headings, and page numbers could often be found. In the Gongshen Tang imprints, these margins feature the gazette’s title (Tizou Shijian) on top and a single fishtail (dan yuwei 單魚尾) placeholder (marked in Figure 4).³⁶ There are no subheadings, but there are page numbers. Like block-printed books, Gongshen Tang gazettes have consistent proportions, with between fourteen and sixteen columns of twenty-one or twenty-two full-size characters (twenty-two characters in cases where a line is elevated, as in the figure). There were also half-size characters used for notes, as in the notation regarding the timing of a ritual sacrifice marked in Figure 4. The consistent proportions of the page and appearance of the block-heart both indicate similarities to block-printing methods. In contrast to the narrow pamphlet shape of later printed gazettes, these gazettes were in fact even wider than the average printed book, leaving the possibility that readers folded the wide pages in half for convenience.³⁷ Like most later gazettes, Gongshen Tang gazettes were printed on “bamboo paper” (zhu zhi 竹紙). This paper was made from unbleached bamboo fibers, yielding a yellowish appearance.³⁸ Imprints made from unbleached bamboo paper were cheaper than books printed on whiter, smoother, and more finely composed surfaces. Remnants of papermaker’s stamps on the surface of a few pages indicate that these gazettes were printed on locally purchased paper.³⁹

The printed page holds additional clues to the printing process. On the page level, the use of movable type is obvious in the presence of the “shadow” of ink outlining the square type-block around individual characters. The use of a hardwood frame is suggested by marks on the top and bottom of the page and by the fairly straight columns of text. Looking at the Gongshen Tang imprints held at the National Library of China, scholar Ai Junchuan identified the reuse of a single type (for the common character zhi 旨) across three issues printed in the Jiaqing reign (1796–1820). Ai also found evidence for the use of movable type in the comparative degradation of characters for the regnal year, used in many consecutive editions, as compared to those for the individual dates. ⁴⁰ Many Gongshen Tang editions also show traces of column divides, especially in unused places of the page (see bottom of left-hand page, Figure 4). Blank areas on the page appear not as a single unused surface but rather as a set of column blanks arranged side by side.

Figure 5.

Gongshen Tang Gazette with Print Defects

Final page of Qianlong 42/07/04 and first page of Qianlong 42/07/05 (August 6 and 7, 1777). Note diagonal crack and resulting print defects on the right-hand page. There is also a small horizontal crack across the characters 不 and 故 in the bottom right of the page. But also note the clarity of the printing, including complex characters like 謄, 懲, and 㩀, as well as the effort to imitate brushstrokes in the character 七 (all circled).

Image courtesy of the East Asian Library and the Gest Collection, Princeton University Library.

Evidence of printing errors and the degradation of the block surface can be used to profile woodblock and movable type imprints. Woodblock printing required carving two facing pages into a single block of wood. After the woodblock was used many times, horizontal cracks appeared, breaking the surface of the text. These cracks are used to identify the reuse of wood-blocks across editions. As for movable type editions, the main criteria are the presence of individual characters that are flipped, upside down, or out of line with the column of text. Neither horizontal cracks nor flipped characters are found in the sets of the Gongshen Tang gazettes that I reviewed. Character columns are straight and consistent, not wobbly. Since we know that the Gongshen Tang used movable type, practitioners likely placed types into column frames rather than printing from an unstable surface.⁴¹ A late eighteenth century gazette (Figure 5) offers the most intriguing clues. Here, the print surface was evidently disrupted while the imprint was being taken. Marked in the figure, characters in a diagonal line from the middle-left to the top-middle of the page are broken by a crack. This was clearly a defect in the imprint process, not a subsequent tear in the paper, because in the left-most columns, further evidence of the accidental shift in the impression surface are found. Several characters have double impressions shifted across the page according to the diagonal crack. This defect resulted from the accidental movement of the inked surface while making a print impression.

The imprint quality of Gongshen Tang gazettes is poor in comparison to palace editions or even cheap book editions from the same period. Although we lack information on the Gongshen Tang’s resources, we know that hardwoods for printing were relatively rare in North China, and skilled block-carvers were also in high demand. In these texts, the characters are carved in thick and crude lines, with numerous simplifications and variants. Moreover, they are blurred in appearance, almost as if water had flooded the page. Gongshen Tang may have used a softer wood, for example pine or poplar, rather than high-quality woods like pear or jujube used for more durable and expensive productions. However, inferior wood alone cannot explain the blurry, smudged quality of the printed character. Wooden movable type imprints are typically inconsistent in the darkness of impression, which is not the case here. Given the uniform appearance of colors and imprint on Gongshen Tang gazettes, the smudged appearance likely resulted from other elements of the printing process.

The best hypothesis to explain the distinctive smudging of the Gong-shen Tang gazettes is the combination of movable type composition with a form of stereotype printing. This process is not well known in the history of the Chinese book but was evidently used as early as the Song dynasty.⁴² Although we have little evidence of its use in North China, it is known to have been used as a vernacular printing technique in South China. ⁴³ Wax printing was guided by local exigencies, not standard practice. In it, printers employed the intermediate medium of wax as an interface between ink and block. A uniform layer of wax (sometimes mixed with resin) was applied upon a woodblock or a small strip of wood. Then, the characters were quickly carved in the wax and allowed to harden. Provided no water reached the print surface, the printer could then apply ink and print four or five hundred copies, with a somewhat blurry appearance.⁴⁴ Besides gazettes, wax printing was used to produce provincial gazettes, broadsides, and announcements. The messy appearance sometimes led observers to compare the imprint quality to characters carved on dried tofu (doufu gan 豆腐乾).⁴⁵

The Gongshen Tang may have been able to experiment with stereotype printing thanks to the arrival of southern laborers in Beijing. A 1735 memorial speculated that “not more than four hundred” competent character carvers (ke zi jiang 刻字匠) resided in the capital, and more than half of these were already employed by various palace offices.⁴⁶ Thirty-five years later, as the court embarked on the massive Imperial Four Treasuries (Siku Quanshu 四庫全書) project to compile a library of all worthy texts in the empire, a large number of southern skilled block-carvers and printers arrived in Beijing, perhaps to print the collection’s descriptive catalog.⁴⁷ The presence of this labor force in the capital may have provided the resources to deploy new methods for rapid periodical publishing, including wax printing techniques more common in South China.

There is some debate over the Gongshen Tang print process. Zhang Xiumin, one of the foremost scholars of print in China, first argued that the Gongshen Tang used wax printing.⁴⁸ Since his time, some print scholars have argued against this theory. Ai Junchuan, for instance, raised doubts about the accuracy of the primary source accounts that Zhang used to support his claim.⁴⁹ Zhao Chunying, meanwhile, attempted to replicate the wax-printing process described in a Western missionary account from South China. Zhao was able to print characters with sharp and clear lines. The consistency of the impression was poor when she used water-based ink and improved when using oil-based ink. With the oil-based ink, “shoulder” impressions of the column edges were also left behind on the imprint. The wax-covered wooden columns could be easily reused if they were heated to soften the wax surface before applying pressure to remove the extruded characters.⁵⁰ Zhao’s experiment raises questions but also lends credence to the argument for the use of wax.

Leaving aside the question of stereotype techniques, the limited lexicon employed in the texts of Gongshen Tang gazettes made movable typography a practical solution for setting text. Moreover, given that gazettes were composed of official documents, published daily in the capital, and then recomposed and reissued in provincial locations, there was no need to retain woodblock archives. A single issue of the Gongshen Tang gazette from July 23, 1770 (Qianlong 35/06/02) contained 1,373 full-size characters but only 495 unique characters. This was a higher proportion of repeated characters than found in literary texts. Moreover, the patterns of use were predictable. Some of the most frequently used characters were standard elements of administrative language such as zou 奏 (memorial, memorialize, 22 uses); chen 臣 (official, 20 uses); and bu 部 (administrative board, 18 uses). Others were grammatically frequent such as gai 該 and zhi 之 (both dependent clauses, 14 and 13 uses, respectively), or numbers. A lengthy memorial in this issue concerned the failure of several dikes on the Yongding River near Beijing. The printer substituted a variant type (隄) for the final use of the less-common character ti 堤 (dike) in the issue. As seen in Table 1 below, each use of the standard character for ti is unique, with some showing more wear than others. Assuming printers maintained a suitable number of types to print all characters in a single issue, perhaps eight types were kept for less common characters, with more than two dozen kept for the most common characters.⁵¹

Table 1.

Instances of “Dike” (ti) in a Gongshen Tang Gazette Issue

The low quality of Gongshen Tang materials and imprints indicates, finally, that regardless of relationship to the state, the Gongshen Tang needed to minimize costs and maximize print efficiency. Using nineteenth-century sources, Martin Heijdra has developed a comparative cost analysis to demonstrate that wooden typography could be economical in cases of small print runs and limited type founts.⁵² Heijdra’s example indicates that a 500-page book with 171,000 total characters using 20,000 types each of full and half-size could be printed a bit more cheaply with wooden type, given a small print run of 100 imprints. At larger print runs, this method became impractical. The Gongshen Tang likely printed only around 200 issues per day at most, with each issue including no more than 1,500 full-size characters and 100 half-size characters. If the wooden types wore out after 5,000 impressions, as assumed by Heijdra, then the most frequent types needed to be re-carved every month or so, whereas re-carving rarer characters could be spaced out. Although the Gongshen Tang and other movable type printers needed to employ type-carvers, this work was less skilled than block-carvers working on xylographic imprints, because they carved only individual types rather than full pages of text in different calligraphic styles. Besides this labor cost, the routine cost for paper, composition, and printing for daily imprints would be quite low. Thus, movable-type printing for gazettes would be even more economical than for books with low print runs.

Movable type fonts suffered degradation over time and publishers needed to have type founts re-carved. Although the format of Gongshen Tang gazettes did not change much during the outlet’s tenure, the quality of character carving evolved. Although we might expect an increase in quality over time, the opposite is true. The earliest examples have the highest quality character carving. In these, the carved characters resemble low-quality woodblock printing. Character strokes have variable widths imitating brushstrokes. Even complex characters with large numbers of strokes are clearly visible. Examples from later in the Qianlong period exhibited some degradation. The surviving nineteenth-century specimens (all dating to 1801, or Jiaqing 6) use a lower quality type set. These cruder characters are carved with jerky strokes and little variation in stroke width or curvature.

The gazettes published by the Gongshen Tang were thus the products of a negotiation between material limitations, official expectations, and vernacular print practices on the periphery of mainstream book publishing. State expectations provided the formation, order of information, and expectations for content. Material constraints necessitated the use of lower-quality materials and the recruitment of southern craftsmen. These craftsmen brought to Beijing vernacular print practices for typography and stereotype printing that offered efficient solutions to these requirements and constraints. Although scholars continue to debate the methods by which Gongshen Tang were printed, their use of movable type is not contested. The material record further suggests the use of further unknown techniques, such as stereotype printing. Whereas stereotype printing seems to have ceased in Beijing after the Gongshen Tang era, its use may have continued in other provincial centers.⁵³

Local Editions

Capital gazettes were also reproduced in print and scribal editions in provincial capitals. This occurred in a two-stage process. At a regular pace, gazettes were delivered to officials in provincial capitals. These officials allowed local printers (often based adjacent to the provincial yamen) to re-copy and print the gazettes for distribution in the locale.⁵⁴ This reproduction circuit was both expansive and fast-paced. Nineteenth-century missionary sinologist Samuel Wells Williams asserted that “In the provinces thousands of persons find employment by copying and abridging the Gazette for readers who cannot afford to purchase the complete edition.”⁵⁵ Writing in the early twentieth century, Shanghai journalist Roswell Britton estimated, “In the early part of the 19th century, there may have been some tens of thousands of daily copies of the Peking Gazettes, including all editions printed by various publishers at the capital and reprinted in other large cities.”⁵⁶ Most publishers did not include identifying information or brand marks on their productions. A small but significant number of gazettes held in library collections are local editions, mostly from Canton (Guangzhou) and Suzhou.⁵⁷

Standard manuscript editions were known to be longer and more comprehensive than print copies and more legible by comparison with both print and the hand copies described below. They were also more expensive.⁵⁸ Other handwritten gazettes obtained in Canton and Beijing were purchased from scribal copying shops (See Figure 6). These were products of what scholar of early modern England Harold Love calls “entrepreneurial publication”—the recopying of manuscripts for sale. In these interactions, the consumer brought a borrowed gazette to the scribal copyist, who recopied the text for a fee. A set of gazette copies from 1850s Beijing, for instance, includes the name of the Renmeihe copy-shop (Renmeihe ji 仁美和記).⁵⁹ In Canton, British agents frequently purchased copied scribal editions, especially prior to 1850. Though eventually repackaged into longer pamphlets by clerical staff, each daily issue is copied in different handwriting.⁶⁰ A few sets of Canton scribal copies carry the stamps of commercial papermakers.⁶¹ The presence of papermaker’s stamps on Canton publications is unsurprising, given that Canton was part of a far-reaching maritime trade in paper.⁶² Single-issue reprints could also be obtained.⁶³

Publishing took place under different conditions in provincial cities from those in Beijing. In addition to gazettes, publishers took on various jobs for the state and other customers. Besides the formal gazettes, quick manuscript jottings of imperial edicts called Shangyu were sold. Some purveyors used special printed form paper for their gazettes. These forms often had red column lines, with printed titles in red at the center margin. Titles include Neige Jingchao for manuscript editions in early nineteenth-century Canton, as well as Jingbao for later print editions. Because it took time for editions to be delivered from Beijing and then republished, the publishers included issue numbers on the front cover. Whereas dates were included in the table of contents on the first interior page, notations such as “one hundred and thirty-sixth issue from the capital” were placed on the exterior cover, sometimes written by hand (see Figure 8 below).⁶⁴ Finally, the use of wax stereotype printing seems to have persisted after its use lapsed in Beijing, at least in Canton.⁶⁵ This may be due to the technology’s continued employment in the printing of provincial circulars, discussed in the next section.

Figure 6.

Canton Manuscript Edition

© The British Library Board. Add. Ms. 14333.

Figure 7.

Page from Canton Imprint Edition

Note: This gazette is dated August 21, 1841 (Daoguang 21/07/05) and is one of the Canton editions attributed to the Gongshen Tang. Note the variable wear on individual characters. The circled character wu 伍 is flipped upside down in the upper right-hand of the page.

© The British Library Board. Peking Gazette Collection.

Provincial printers followed different and varying conventions for printing gazettes, diverging from the earlier standards set by the Gongshen Tang in Beijing. Notably, provincial printers generally did not include any identifying information on their gazettes. In the mid-nineteenth century, a Canton publisher “borrowed” the name of the Gongshen Tang to reissue gazettes (See Figure 7 below).⁶⁶ Like earlier Gongshen Tang editions, these seem to have been printed with movable type placed in wooden forms, since markings from the column framework remain. However, columns are wobblier than the earlier imprints, and inconsistency in the imprint is largely on a

Figure 8.

Cover and Interior Page from a Suzhou “Square Edition” (fangben)

© The British Library Board. Peking Gazette Collection.
Note: This Suzhou edition is printed on whiter paper than its Beijing counterparts. Printed on the cover (left-hand image) are the title Jingbao and the issue number (one hundred and thirty-six). The dates covered by the issue (Xianfeng 05/09/23–24 [November 2–3, 1855]) have been added by hand. On an interior page (right-hand image), we see heavy frame marks around the printed page, including the center margin with single fishtail. Some additional remnants of column lines from the print process also remain.

character basis rather than across the entire page. Further, rather than a short pamphlet of wide pages, the Canton imprints are in longer pamphlets on narrow pages, with at most eight columns of up to eighteen (typically sixteen) characters each.⁶⁷ The center margin does not bear the Tizou Shijian title but instead reads 報 (“gazette” or “reports”), and page numbers are included. In addition, their internal divisions are somewhat different, divided into 綸音 (“imperial emanations”) and 報 (“reports”). Also, unlike earlier Gongshen Tang imprints, they sometimes include the names of memorialists in full.

In general, the appearance of provincial reissues was far more variable than capital imprints. Suzhou’s “square editions” (fangben 方本) editions (see Figure 8), preserved in the British Library collection, have a different appearance from either Canton or Beijing editions. Like Canton imprints, these smaller volumes include issue numbers on the exterior cover. Some are on red-lined paper with the phrase “capital communications liaison’s office” (zhujing tangwu 駐京塘務) printed in the center margin. This likely indicates that they were based on the version of the gazette distributed by official channels—and not those distributed privately or sold commercially. Others have a frame and center margin printed in black, but the space for a title is blacked out above a single fishtail. Each page has nine columns of text usually bearing twenty-two characters each (thus, up to 198 characters per page). Column traces are also found in blank areas. By comparison with Gongshen Tang editions, shoulder marks around individual characters are less perceptible. Also, the density of ink varies across individual characters (rather than smudged across the page). This suggests that, whereas provincial gazette printers continued to employ typography, they dispensed with (or never employed) wax transfer printing.

Even though few examples of local editions can be identified, these constituted an important trade in Qing China. So far as they retained a consistent text, local purveyors were free to adopt different standards for the appearance of their products.⁶⁸ Local reissues necessarily lagged behind capital editions in publication date, but they could be customized to a purchaser’s needs. Standardized manuscript editions were handsome pieces meant to be held in a personal library, whereas reprints and quick hand-copies were intended more as quick references, likely to be disposed of or recycled for other purposes.⁶⁹

Wax and Slat Printing in Canton’s Provincial Gazettes

The use of a distinctive style of “slat printing” by publishers of ephemera in south China (centering on the city of Canton) deserves further attention. For this, provincial news genres are our best surviving record. Compared to capital gazettes, our knowledge of provincial news is less comprehensive but growing. Distinct from local reissues of the capital gazettes, these were publications pertaining to the business of the province’s chief officials. At least two types of provincial gazette were published (See Figure 9, below). The first, the “provincial circular” (dufu xian yuan men chao 督撫憲轅門抄),

Figure 9.

Provincial Circular and Provincial Intelligencer

Note: The circular is from Guangzhou, and is dated Daoguang 10/10/09 (November 23, 1830).

Image Sources: Circular: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Cod.sin. 68, p.801, urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb00080349-3; intelligencer: The National Archives, Kew. FO 931/209.

Image reproduced with permission.

contained a succinct list of details of the daily business and communications of the governor or governor-general.⁷⁰ The “provincial intelligencer,” (sheng tan 省探 or bing bao 稟報) on the other hand, contained short articles, typically memorials or proclamations authored by the provincial officials, but also on occasion authored by others, such as a proclamation by local gentry in the southern city of Fuzhou protesting British occupation of an area temple in 1850.⁷¹

The provincial circular substantiated the goings-on of the highest provincial official and show him to have been in daily contact through written correspondence and personal meetings with an array of officials and local elites.⁷² All surviving examples of provincial circulars are printed. Circulars were periodicals printed upon a single thin piece of paper, folded laterally into the proportions of the local edition of the capital gazette and inserted within. The title was stamped in red ink, in a rectangular format on the first page of the folded pamphlet.

When folded into local reissues of capital gazettes, provincial circulars bore later dates and referred to more recent events. We can use them to understand how long it took local reissues of capital gazettes to be published. In a set of Canton manuscript reissues obtained in the 1820s, the dates of enclosed provincial circulars are forty to eighty days later than the dates of the capital gazettes.⁷³ Given that the contents of provincial circulars refer to local business transpiring day by day (for instance, a list of the provincial governor’s appointments for the next day), it seems clear that they were continuously available. The date upon a provincial circular therefore corresponds to the date that a given local reissue of the capital gazette became available in Canton. It took approximately two months for capital gazettes to be delivered and republished in manuscript or print in Canton.

In 1820, William Milne, a missionary printer for the London Missionary Society, described the use of wax and slat printing for local periodicals:

. . . 蠟板 Lǎh-pan [la ban], i.e. “wax plates,” and consists in spreading a coat of wax on a wooden frame, after which, with a graving tool, they cut the characters thereon . . . The printers employed at Malacca say that when an urgent affair occurs, a number of workmen are called in, and a small slip of wood, with space for one, two, or more lines, is given to each, which they cut with great expedition, and when all is finished, join together by small wooden pins; by this means a page, or a sheet is got up very speedily, like an Extra Gazette in an English printing office.

Milne attested that neither he, nor his colleagues, had seen such a process in use.⁷⁴ Other contemporaries also asserted that provincial circulars were printed with wax. Milne assessed that the combination of low-quality wooden movable type and wax impressions made these circulars “scarcely legible.”⁷⁵

The physical characteristics of South China’s provincial gazettes from this era match the characteristics described by Milne’s Malacca informants. A collection of Guangzhou provincial gazettes sent by French missionaries from Shanghai to Paris in the 1820s is held in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The single sheet of paper used for provincial gazettes was so thin that horizontal laid lines and vertical chain lines from the papermaking process are clearly evident (see the provincial circular in Figure 9, above).⁷⁶ The width of this sheet varied with the day’s contents, from just a few columns to more than forty.⁷⁷ The variable width of the sheet suggests the use of a method like that described by Milne, in which slats of wood are attached to create a block, rather than fitting types into a defined form. Some provincial gazettes have remnants of column markers, perhaps corresponding to the edges of columns on which type was laid, or to the wooden slats that would have been joined together for printing.

Testimonies like Milne’s suggest that printers also produced non-official texts with slat printing and wax techniques. Canton’s urban printers sold lottery tickets and broadsheets that contained stories and tales described for a popular audience. These were locally called xinwen zhi (literally, “news paper”).⁷⁸ These connections between genres appear distinctive to South China. By comparison, in Beijing, gazette publishers tended to concentrate solely on a single genre, perhaps due to the expanded scale of the market for state news in the capital city.

Capital Gazettes in the Nineteenth Century

Capital gazettes produced during the last sixty years of the Qing dynasty are the most recognizable exemplars of the “Peking Gazette.” Late Qing Beijing gazettes were products of a specific commercial publishing milieu, with about a dozen firms in operation simultaneously. Known as the “Peking Gazette” by Westerners, they bore distinctive yellow covers and a slim profile: “a pamphlet stitched in a dingy yellow wrapper . . . some seven inches in length by four in width.”⁷⁹ This new material housing maximized portability, while also offering publishers the opportunity to customize issue covers. Late Qing capital gazettes furthermore showcase a drive for quick publication, with crude and dense typography and the use of custom types. Publishers furthermore sought make individual pamphlets recyclable as objects for loan, sale, and resale.

An 1873 article on the Peking Gazette by Rutherford Alcock, one-time British Minister in China, described not only its ubiquity in Beijing but also its means of production:

If the visitor at Peking extend his researches into the Chinese city, and ever penetrate into one of the narrow side streets near Lieu-li-chang [Liulichang 琉璃廠], the Paternoster-Row of the capital, he may pass the door of one of the offices whence the printed copies are issued . . . On entering the shop, cases of wooden-cut characters may be seen ranged against the wall, and sorted according to the number of strokes in each. Some of frequent occurrence together are arranged as double characters, such as “Imperial edict,” Mandarin titles, the official title of the reign, &c.⁸⁰

In this description of a gazette printer’s environs, the arrangement of type into cabinets, sorted according to the number of strokes in the character, marks a continuity in usage from the eighteenth century. But there were new innovations too. What Alcock called “double characters” were types containing a two-character phrase rather than a single character. These borrowed from a common practice in genealogy printing, where types included set phrases for numbered generations within a lineage. In gazettes, combined types were used for standard bureaucratic phrases (such as shangyu, “imperial edict”). Some combined types were set in the space of a single ordinary character, whereas others appear full size. In using these, gazette printers went a step beyond sorting their types into frequently and infrequently used categories, in order to further streamline the printing process.

Attesting to the increased commercialization of the gazette industry, late Qing gazettes typically bear the name of the publisher on their covers, and some publishers even put out stamped cover illustrations attesting to the gazette’s connections to official life. The names of many publishers include the character ju 聚 (“assembled”), a shorthand reference to movable type.⁸¹ The gazette industry in Beijing remained fragmented throughout the nineteenth century. Among the dozen or more firms operating simultaneously by the late nineteenth century, no single firm appeared to dominate. The economics of gazette printing perhaps necessitated the small size of firms, since movable type printing was only profitable in small print runs. Therefore, whereas multiple firms apparently shared responsibility for obtaining gazette copy from the palace, they each produced limited print runs of a few hundred copies.

In contrast to their predecessors, late Qing gazettes often appear surprisingly messy. For the most part, they lack column lines, page numbers, center margins, or any of the structuring frames that both marked earlier gazettes as relatives of the book publishing process and which improved their legibility. In contrast, the text of late Qing gazettes is packed closely onto the tall, narrow page (each page had seven columns, with usually twenty-two characters per column). The characters sit unevenly in the column line. Rather than starting a new line for each entry, a single blank space often sufficed. As in provincial circulars, publishers often folded out the narrow page to accommodate a lengthy text. Compared to earlier imprints, column lines and the shoulders of individual types are rarely apparent. However, gazette printers continued to use movable type. Late Qing editions are the most likely of all surviving sources to include individual types that are flipped or mislaid, suggesting a less skilled labor force.

Issue covers and packaging also offer evidence of commercial adaptations in the late nineteenth-century capital. Daily issue covers, uniformly found on post-1850 capital gazettes, allowed purveyors to distribute and sell gazettes on a day-to-day basis (by contrast, their absence in Gongshen Tang editions suggests distribution in longer units). Individual purveyors included their names on both the issue cover and on the first interior page. This may have helped street-level distributors sort products, or ensured recognition were the issue cover separated from the text. Indeed, the slim pamphlets were held together by twists of paper and were not formally bound with thread. However, some purveyors offered the option of repackaging a year’s series of gazettes in a thread-bound volume with bone clasps.⁸² This practice suggests that publishers remained in contact with subscribers, and that some subscribers chose to repackage the three hundred-odd gazettes that they received each year into more lasting books.

Before the fall of the dynasty, some Beijing gazette publishers pivoted to new technologies, and other firms also emerged to produce gazettes using new techniques, including metal movable type and lithography.⁸³ These new-style gazettes were more likely to be sold in monthly pamphlets than by daily issue, a shift that may have signaled changing business models. They sometimes sported advertisements for local businesses or the printer’s other wares on the cover (see Figure 10). The Wenmao Studio, a metal movable type print shop, printed gazettes on the back sides of unsold or other recycled papers.⁸⁴ Even in their new guise, gazettes remained humble print products. And some Beijing printers kept going with their existing labor force and carved types as long as possible, perhaps accepting the degradation of their product as a necessary side-effect.⁸⁵

Figure 10.

Cover of 1903 Gazette, with Advertisement for Lottery Tickets

Image Source: National Library of Australia, nla.obj-47035802.

In the late nineteenth century, the attention paid to political news was on the rise, and consumers had a growing number of choices of where to read their news. Nearly every new-style newspaper founded in Chinese cities included transcripts of the court gazette, in more compact and legible formats than the traditional pamphlets. Newspapers like Shanghai’s Shenbao expended column space in assuring readers that they published complete runs of the court gazette, and with telegraph access to Beijing in the 1880s and after, gazettes could be republished by newspapers much more quickly than in previous years.⁸⁶ Besides this, political pressure to establish a more centralized government gazette under state supervision grew in the dynasty’s last decade. In the waning years of the Qing dynasty, and in the Republican era, it no longer seemed desirable to employ imperfect vernacular techniques for government publications when modern Western alternatives were now practicable.⁸⁷ With the end of the commercial gazette trade, the use of wooden movable types lapsed.

Conclusion

As Roswell Britton noted nearly a century ago, each of the hundreds of gazettes sent, copied, and printed across the Qing empire each day retained largely the same textual contents. But their physical appearance could be surprisingly variable. In material terms, it would be a mistake, therefore, to conceive of a single “Peking Gazette.” Looking under the surface of the text, we find a section of the premodern publishing industry in China that operated at odds with our expectations. By and large, these printers were in urban centers of administrative business, not based in the resource-rich regions that have been the location for previous studies. Rather than following uniform standards for xylographic or typographic printing, gazette printers adapted printing practices according to their desired product, material constraints, and economic conditions. The techniques they employed were vernacular: locally defined and guided by practical constraints, not by elite tradition or state mandate.

When we consider the sizeable surviving record of gazettes (and the much more expansive corpus once in circulation)—we can conclude that movable type printing was among the most prevalent and widely dispersed publishing practices in late imperial China. Commercial printers in Beijing and in provincial centers used carved wooden movable types to print and reprint gazettes. They employed relatively low-skilled labor for carving and composition, and they sold cheap products at a rapid pace. Several forms of geographically specific variation can be identified. In Canton, site of an active paper trade, manuscript copies were more widely available than in other locations and were made on an individual basis for clients. Southern printers also adapted the use of wax stereotype and slat printing for both capital and provincial gazettes—technologies also employed in the publication of broadsides and other street-level ephemera. The transit of southern labor to Beijing in the late eighteenth century may have contributed to the more extensive and refined use of wax stereotype printing by Beijing’s Gongshen Tang. Whereas slat printing prized efficiency, wax stereotyping helped reduce wear upon valuable wooden types. Later, gazette printers in Suzhou and Beijing continued their use of wooden movable type but in different proportions and on paper of varying characteristics according to local supply. The last generation of gazette printing saw new forms of commercialization, with branding and advertisements added to the covers of these state texts.

As demonstrated in this article, a dedicated focus on materiality is necessary to draw out the hidden histories of gazettes and other ephemeral texts in circulation in late imperial China. Material texts—not archival documents or descriptive accounts—enable us to reconstruct how gazettes were printed and distributed. Rather than identical patterns of reproduction, a range of different technologies were employed when texts sent between the capital and the provinces were reproduced. Divergent print techniques emerged in urban centers in response to local needs. The result is a dispersed geography of ephemeral print and practitioners with loci in administrative centers. From gazettes, we have the opportunity to turn to other ephemeral texts. Were contracts, marriage documents, licenses, and other daily-use documents produced by dedicated staff in urban centers? Was their production similarly responsive to exigencies? Where else might techniques like wax stereotyping and slat printing be found?

As for gazettes, close visual observation allows us to tentatively reconstruct some elements of the printing process, but more intensive study will be necessary to examine the most basic material components—paper and ink. Digital tools of the present era may make possible the study of these ephemeral texts of the past. Specialized laboratory work can identify the composition of paper and ink and lend further clues to an obscure publication process. A sizeable proportion of gazettes in the British Library collection were, during my trips to inspect them, falling apart. Pages crumbled and stuck together in thick cakes. They were brittle and ripped easily. For those able to go further into the material record—to investigate the traces of paper and ink that suggest processes of papermaking, printing, copying, and distribution—these spaces of decomposition may be the key.