History of printing industry

The Invention, Development and Dissemination of Printing

Printing was invented by China and played an important role in the spread and development of human culture.

This invention shines with the wisdom of our working people.

Conditions for the emergence of printing

Before the invention of printing, the spread of culture mainly depended on handwritten books.

However, copying word by word is really troublesome.

To make a hundred copies of a book, you have to copy it a hundred times.

If you come across a big book, you have to copy it for years or even longer.

There may be mistakes and omissions in copying, which will bring undue losses to the spread of culture.

On the other hand, with the development of social economy and culture, more and more people need to learn, and the speed of copying books is slow and the number is not much, which can not meet people's cultural requirements.

This puts forward objective requirements for the invention of printing.

The long-term use of seals and stone carvings has provided direct experience and enlightenment to printing.

Seal is a method to obtain block letters by using reverse engraving characters, but seals generally have fewer words.

Stone carving is an extension of seal.

The ten-sided stone drum of Qin State is the earliest stone carving that can be seen now.

Later, some people even carved the whole book on a stone as a "reading book" for ancient scholars.

In the Jin Dynasty in the 4th century A.D., the method of inking stone tablets with paper was invented.

Spread the tough tissue paper soaked in advance on the stone tablet and pat it gently to make the paper penetrate into the gap of the stone tablet.

When the paper is dry, brush the ink on the paper, and then take it off, which becomes a rubbing with white characters on a black background.

This is a copy method to obtain orthographic characters from orthographic characters.

Block printing was invented in this situation.

The invention of block printing

According to Sui Shu and History of the North, block printing was probably invented in the Sui Dynasty, with a history of 1300 years.

Generally, the plates used for engraving printing are dates and pears suitable for engraving.

The method is to write the words on thin and transparent paper, stick them face down on the board, and carve them with a knife; Then add ink to the engraving, cover the paper on the engraving, wipe it gently and evenly with a brush, and remove it, and the text will be transferred to the paper to become orthography.

Block printing has long been closely related to people's production and life.

The earliest printed books are mostly agricultural books, calendars, medical books, copybooks and so on.

After the first year of Baoying in Tang Daizong (AD 762), copybooks and medical books printed by merchants were sold in Dongshi, the commercial center of Chang 'an.

More than 20 years later, a kind of "printed paper" appeared in the folk market as a voucher for businessmen to trade and pay taxes.

In the preface written by Yuan Zhen (779-83 1) for Bai Juyi's poems in the fourth year of Changqing in Tang Muzong (AD 824), it was said that some people exchanged printed copies of Bai Juyi's poems for wine and tea, which shows that the application of block printing at that time had been extended to poems that people liked.

Calendar is a necessity for farmers to engage in farming. Because of the extensive demand, around nine years ago, Tang Wenzong (AD 835) printed calendars in Sichuan and northern Jiangsu, and sold them in the market.

Su Feng, our envoy of the times in Dongchuan, thought that the calendars printed by the people were "all over the world" because they had not been promulgated by Sitiantai, so he wrote to the emperor to ban them.

These records preserved in the literature show that block printing has been quite popular among the people at least at this time.

Although the rulers of the Tang dynasty ordered the ban on folk lettering, they could not ban it.

Chao Huang (? -884) led the peasant uprising, which led to the collapse of the Tang regime, and more books were printed by the people.

Sichuan was the main book engraving center at that time.

Shortly after the invention of block printing, Buddhism used it to carve a large number of Buddhist classics, Buddha statues and religious paintings.

According to records, Xuanzang, a monk in the Tang Dynasty, used a lot of paper to print Buddha statues every year.

At present, the earliest printed matter found is 1966, the woodcut "The Sutra of Pure and Bright Da Rani" unearthed from the site of Sakyamuni Buddha Pagoda in Gyeongju, the ancient capital of South Korea. Tomishan was translated and printed in Chang 'an from the second year of Wuze to the fourth year of Chang 'an (AD 69 1 to 704), and was later introduced to Silla.

In the tenth year of Tianbao of Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty (AD 75 1 year), Saga Pagoda was built in Silla Buddhist Temple, which was hidden in the golden bronze pagoda.

There are also Dalagni classics discovered by Japan and South Korea, which were engraved in Dali, Tang Daizong in the fifth year (AD 770). It may have been engraved in Japan after studying in China and printing.

/kloc-in 0/900, a beautifully printed Diamond Sutra was found in Qianboiling Cave, Dunhuang, Gansu, with the words "April 15th, 9th year of Xian Tong" written at the end.

In the ninth year of Tang Xiantong, AD 868.

This is the earliest and most complete woodcut print found in China.

The Diamond Sutra is in the form of paper, about 10 feet long, and consists of seven printed sheets of paper.

The first title page is a picture of Sakyamuni's view of the lonely garden in the tree, and the rest are the full text of the Diamond Sutra.

This volume of printed matter is exquisitely carved, skilled in knife work, concise and dignified in graphics and text, and the printed ink color is also thick, symmetrical and clear. Obviously, the printing and engraving technology at that time had reached a high level of proficiency.

During the Five Dynasties, feudal cultural institutions carved ancient books on a large scale, and folk engraving was also very popular.

In addition to Kaifeng, western Gansu, eastern Shandong, Nanjing, Fujian and other places also began to carve books, with Sichuan and Zhejiang carving the most books.

In the Song Dynasty, woodblock printing was more developed and the technology was more perfect.

Jiang Hui, a famous sculptor, is an outstanding representative among the ten thousand skilled sculptors in Qian Qian.

At that time, the quality of books carved in Hangzhou, Fujian and Sichuan was relatively high.

The Song Dynasty not only carved many books, but also carved beautifully.

Song edition is a very precious edition.

In the fourth year of Song Taizu Kaibao (AD 97 1 year), all the Tripitaka Scriptures were engraved and printed in Chengdu, which is the earliest and most important book in the printing history. It lasted 12 years, with a total of 1076 volumes and 5048 volumes, with as many as130,000 pieces of engraving.

It can be seen that the engraving printing technology at that time has developed to a very high level.

After the Song Dynasty, copperplate prints appeared.

Copper plates are generally used to print banknotes, because copper plates can print pictures with thin lines and complex patterns, which are difficult to imitate after printing.

The most outstanding achievement of block printing in the later development is the unique color overprint.

Color registration printing is a complex and highly accurate technology.

For example, to print red and black, first take a plate and accurately engrave the words that need to be printed black in the appropriate place; In addition, take a plate of exactly the same size and accurately engrave the words that need to be printed in red in the appropriate place.

Every edition is not a full text.

When printing, first print a color on the printing plate; Then cover this paper on another printing plate, so that the frame matches each other completely and accurately, and then print another color, and a two-color registration printing is completed.

If you are not careful when printing, the two plates don't match, or the characters on the two plates are not accurately positioned when carving, then the two-color characters will be uneven and unreadable after printing.

If you want to set multiple colors, you can do this, but the more colors you set, the more troublesome it is to print, which requires extremely skilled technology.

This kind of overprinted book in various colors is really bright and beautiful if printed on white paper! This overprinter method was invented in the Yuan Dynasty in the14th century at the latest.

The Yuan Dynasty Zhongxing Road (now Jiangling, Hubei Province) block-printed Notes on Diamond Sutra was overprinted in Zhu Mo, which is the earliest existing overprint.

However, it was not until the Ming Dynasty at the end of16th century that this method became widely popular.

During the Wanli period of the Ming Dynasty, Min Qiji, Shan Zhaoming, Ling Ruxiang, Ling Mengchu and Ling Ying Elementary School were all famous artists who were good at this kind of printing.

In the Qing dynasty, this technology also got corresponding development.

This color matching technology is combined with printmaking technology to produce gorgeous color matching printed matter.

Ten bamboo paintings and notes in the late Ming Dynasty are good examples.

A print presents all kinds of colors, light and shade, yin and yang to the back, all nuanced.

Some ancient prints are really artistic treasures.

The Birth and Development of Movable Type Printing

Block printing is much more convenient than manual copying, and hundreds or thousands of copies can be printed at a time.

But carving is still very labor-intensive. It takes years to carve a page and a big book. After the carving is completed, the plates must be stored in the house; At the same time, if you want to publish other works, you have to carve them from scratch.

Manpower, material resources and time are not economical.

In the Song Dynasty, Bi Sheng (? -105 1) lived in the heyday of block printing, and he pioneered movable type printing in the world through long-term personal practice.

This method saves the cost of engraving books, shortens the time of publishing books, is economical and convenient, and is a great revolution with far-reaching influence in the history of printing.

The basic principle of the popular movable type printing is exactly the same as that of the movable type printing method originally invented by Bi Sheng.

This invention of Bi Sheng left the most reliable record in the 18th volume of Meng Qian Bi Tan written by Shen Kuo, a famous scientist in the Song Dynasty.

During the Qing Dynasty in Song Renzong (A.D. 104 1 to 1048), Bi Sheng carved characters, a word and a seal with clay, and then burned them hard.

First, prepare an iron plate with rosin, wax, paper ash, etc. I'm going. There are iron shelves around the iron plate, and there are many words written on the iron shelves. The whole hob is a plate. Heat on the fire, the medicine will melt, and flatten the words with a flat plate.

In order to improve efficiency, two iron plates are used, one for printing and the other for typesetting. After printing this edition, the second edition will be fine, so it will be printed quickly if it is used alternately.

Each word has several marks, and the most commonly used words are more, in case there is repetition on one board.

As for the remote words that were not prepared, they were temporarily engraved and burned immediately.

According to Bi Sheng's experiment, it is not easy to print three or five copies. If you print hundreds or thousands of copies, it will be soon.

According to the clay sculpture characters recorded in Meng Qian Bi Tan, Zhai Jinsheng, a teacher in Jingxian County, Anhui Province, spent many years making100000 hard clay sculpture characters.

He used his clay type to print books such as "The First Edition of Clay Printing Trial Printing".

In recent years, several kinds of books printed in clay tablets have been found in Beijing Library.

All these prove the authenticity of Bi Sheng's clay book in Meng Qian Bi Tan.

Bi Sheng also tried to make wooden movable type, but he found that the texture density of wood was different, it was elastic after being dipped in water, and it was uneven when it was published. In addition, it is easy to stick medicine and it is not convenient to take it off, so he has to use clay as movable type.

In the Yuan Dynasty, agronomist Wang Zhen invented wooden movable type, and also invented wheeled typesetting rack, which improved typesetting efficiency with simple machinery.

His method of making wooden movable type and his printing experience are elaborated in detail in his book "Agricultural Books".

Wang Zhen's method of creating wooden movable type is to select available characters from official rhymes and write them with rhymes.

In addition, commonly used words such as "Zhi", "Hu", "Zhe", "Ye" and numbers also belong to the same category.

Stick the words on the blackboard and carve them.

The words are slightly separated. After carving, use a small saw with fine teeth to cut off the words one by one to form a square.

Then take a knife and trim it around, so that each movable type meets the standard and the size is the same.

When printing, put the movable type into the wooden helmet board, cut the bamboo pieces and clip them up.

When the words are full, plug them with small wooden blocks, put a fence on the right and tie them with wooden pegs to prevent them from shaking again.

If there is unevenness, pad the font with a small bamboo piece to make it smooth.

Then brush and print.

Use a brown brush to brush ink vertically along the border, not horizontally, and the same is true when printing.

The storage type is made of light wood, which is similar to a round table top, with a diameter of about seven feet and a shaft height of about three feet.

The roulette wheel is covered with a round bamboo frame, and movable type is placed in it according to rhyme.

Each rhyme is numbered in turn.

At the same time, prepare two roulette wheels, one for selecting available words and the other for selecting common words.

There are also two pamphlets in which movable type is registered in numerical order on the roulette wheel.

In typesetting, one person calls the number from the book and the other person sits between two roulette wheels. According to the called number, he took the movable type from the roulette wheel and put it in the helmet disc.

Because the roulette wheel can rotate freely, the word picker can "push the word left and right" as long as he sits in the middle.

Wang Zhen himself said, "It is difficult to find people through people, but it is easy to find people through words.

The method of this wheel is to sit effortlessly, the number of words can be taken, and it can also be spread out in rhyme, which is also convenient for both.

In the second year of Yuan Chengzong Dade (A.D. 1298), he tried to print a 60,000-word Jingde County Chronicle in this way. It was printed into 100 copies in less than a month, with fast printing speed and good quality.

His typesetting and printing methods are also a great innovation in the history of printing.

After Wang Zhen, wooden movable type printing has become popular in China.

It was more popular in Ming and Qing dynasties.

In the thirty-eighth year of Qianlong in Qing Dynasty (AD 1773), the Qing Dynasty * * used jujube wood to carve more than 253,500 kinds of movable type, and successively printed "Wuyingdian Juzhen Edition Series" 138 kinds, accounting for more than 2,300 copies.

This is the largest printing of wooden movable type books in the history of China.

Another development of movable type printing is the use of metal materials to make movable type.

Wang Zhen also mentioned that some people used tin as movable type in modern times, which should be regarded as the earliest metal movable type in the world.

However, because tin is not easily affected by ink and printing often fails, it has not been popularized.

By the reign of Emperor Xiaozhong Hongzhi in the Ming Dynasty (A.D. 1488 to 1505), copper movable type was officially popular in Wuxi, Suzhou, Nanjing and other places in Jiangsu.

Printing books with copper movable type in China, the biggest project is to print the encyclopedia of the Qing Dynasty, integrating ancient and modern books.

The spread of printing

China is the birthplace of printing, and printing in many countries in the world is developed under the direct or indirect influence of printing in China.

The printed books of the Tang Dynasty spread to Japan, and in the late 8th century, the Japanese wooden board Dalagni Classic was completed.

About 12 century or earlier, block printing spread to Egypt.

/kloc-In the 3rd century, Europeans came to China through Persia, which is today's Iran.

Persia was already familiar with China's printing technology and used it to print paper money.

Persia actually became a transit point for China's printing to spread westward at that time.

At the end of14th century, cards, icons and Latin textbooks for students appeared in Europe.

The earliest wooden movable type printing in China spread to Korea and Japan in the14th century.

On the basis of absorbing the experience of wooden movable type in China, the clever Korean people first carried forward and created bronze movable type, which contributed to the development of printing in the world.

/kloc-After the 5th century, Korean copper movable type printing had an impact on printing in China.

The wooden movable type printing in Yuan Dynasty also spread among the minorities in China.

* * * Er people, according to the phonetic characteristics of * * * Er characters, make words, not letters.

This may be the earliest movable type in the world phonetic alphabet.

Later, movable type printing in China spread to Persia and Egypt through Xinjiang, and was introduced to Europe.

Around A.D. 1450, German Gutenberg (about 1394- 1468) was influenced by Chinese movable type printing, and made European phonetic type for printing books with alloys of lead, tin and antimony.

After printing spread to Europe, it changed the situation that only monks could study and receive higher education, and provided important material conditions for the rapid development of science in Europe after the long night of the Middle Ages and the emergence of the Renaissance Movement.

In a letter to Engels from 1863 1 28, Marx believed that the invention of printing, gunpowder and compass was "a necessary prerequisite for bourgeois development".

This shows how important the invention of printing is.