The History of Printing

Printing is one of the four great inventions of ancient China.

It began with engraved printing in the Sui Dynasty, and was developed and perfected by Bisheng at the time of Emperor Renzong of the Song Dynasty, giving rise to movable-type printing, which was spread to Europe by the Mongols, and that is why Bisheng was called by later generations as the originator of printing.

The printing press in China was the forerunner of modern human civilization, creating the conditions for the widespread dissemination and exchange of knowledge.

Before the invention of printing, the spread of culture depended mainly on hand-copied books.

Hand-copying is time-consuming and laborious, and it is easy to copy mistakes and omissions.

Both hindered the development of culture and brought undue loss to the spread of culture.

Seals and stone carvings provided direct empirical insights into printing, and the method of inking on stone tablets with paper directly pointed the way to engraved printing.

The Chinese printing press, through its two stages of development, engraving and movable type, gave a gift to the development of mankind.

Stamps existed in the pre-Qin era, usually with only a few characters, indicating name, official position or organization.

The seals were engraved in reverse form, with the difference between yin and yang.

Before the paper did not appear, official documents or letters are written on the letter, written, tied with a rope, in the ligature at the sticky mud seal knot, the seal will be stamped on the mud, known as the mud seal, mud seal is printed on the mud, which was a means of confidentiality.

After the emergence of paper, the mud seal evolved into a paper seal, in several pieces of official paper seams or official paper bag seal.

It is recorded that in the Northern Qi Dynasty (550 ~ 577 AD), some people used for official paper sealing seal made very large, very much like a small engraved plate.

In the Northern Song Dynasty, between the first and eighth years of the Qingli reign of Emperor Renzong, between 1041 and 1048 AD, a common laborer named Bi Sheng invented movable type printing.

Shen Kuo was more than a decade younger than Bi Sheng, a contemporary, and the ceramic movable type made by Bi Sheng was later owned by Shen Kuo's nephew, so the account of Bi Sheng's invention of movable type printing in Shen Kuo's Mengxi Bianzhan (The Talks of Dreams and Stories) is informative and credible.

However, some Europeans used to attribute the invention of movable type printing to Gutenberg.

Gutenberg was a West German.

He invented lead typesetting around 1440-1448 AD, a full 400 years after Bisson's invention of ceramic typesetting.

Printing with movable type is one of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind, and a major contribution of China to world culture.

Like any invention, Bisheng's invention of movable type printing had its social needs, material basis and technical conditions.

As Chinese society progressed into the Northern Song Dynasty, there was a need to disseminate information rapidly and in large quantities due to economic development, commercial prosperity, and the flourishing of culture.

The art of printing with movable type arose as a solution to the problems posed by this social need.

The printing press had to use paper and ink.

China invented paper and two types of ink, oil smoke and pine smoke, as early as the Han Dynasty.

The invention of paper and ink laid the material foundation for the birth of movable type printing.

Since the Warring States period, the Qin and Han Dynasties, methods of reproducing texts and pictures, such as seals and topographic tablets, have provided the technical conditions for the invention of movable type printing.

As the name suggests, the word "print" in printing contains the meaning of both sealing and printing; and the word "brush" is the name of the process of inking a tablet.

From the naming of the printing press has revealed that it is related to the seal, topography of the blood relationship.

The seal and the tablet are the two sources of movable type printing.

As early as the 4th century BC, during the Warring States period, private seals were already popular.

At that time, they were called "seals".

Qin Shi Huang destroyed the six countries, Chu and the jade, chiseled state seal, "seal" word has been monopolized by the feudal emperors.

The emperor's seal only to be called seal, the general people's seal can only be called seal called chapter.

The Han dynasty seals prevailed.

At the beginning of the seals were mostly concave Yin, used for sealing clay, and then the popularity of paper, sealing clay gradually lost its usefulness, watermarks instead, raised Yang more up.

The seal created a method of obtaining positive characters from negatively inscribed characters, and the yang seal provided a technique for reproducing positively inscribed characters from negatively inscribed yang characters.

The area of a seal was originally small and could only accommodate a few characters such as a name or an official title.

During the Eastern Jin Dynasty, Taoism emerged.

One school of Taoism focused on runic records.

They engraved runes with longer texts on mahogany date wood, thus enlarging the area of the seal.

According to Ge Hong's book "Holding Park Zi" from the Jin Dynasty, the Taoists had a copy engraved with 120 characters.

It is clear that it was already possible to copy a short text with a stamp.

This was actually the forerunner of engraving.

Tabletops are another source of printing.

Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty "dismissed the hundred schools and honored the Confucians".

But at that time, the Confucian canon was based on the oral teaching of the teacher, the student transcription.

Therefore, it was inevitable that different teachers would teach the same texts differently.

In the fourth year of Emperor Xi Ping's reign (175 AD), a stone was set up to inscribe all the important Confucian classics as a standard for correcting the scriptures.

In order to dispense with the labor of transcribing the scriptures from the stone carvings, around the 4th century AD, the method of topography was invented.

The method of topping a tablet is simple.

Put a tough thin paper soaked in wet on the monument, and then covered with an absorbent thick paper, with a brush tap, to paper into the monument engraved on the concave points until, and then remove the outside of the thick paper, with cotton wool or wadding beat, dipped in ink, gently and evenly to the thin paper on the brush beat, and so thin paper dry after uncovering, is the iconography of the white characters in black.

This method of topography is the same as that of printing, but the difference is that the text of the tablet is concave, and the text of the printing is convex.

The text on the stele is written in negative.

Tablet topping provided the copying technique to obtain the orthographic writing from the negative orthography.

Later, the text on the stone tablets was engraved on wooden boards, which were then used for topography.

Du Fu, a great poet of the Tang Dynasty, said in his poem, "The monument of hills was burned by wildfire, and the date wood was fat and distorted".

This is not far from the engraved plate printing.

In the Tang Dynasty, the two methods of sealing and topography gradually developed and merged, resulting in the emergence of engraved tablets.

On December 10, 825, the poet Yuan Zhen wrote a preface to Bai Juyi's "Changqing Collection," saying that people in Yangzhou and Yuezhou were "copying and molding" Bai Juyi's and his own poems and selling them on the streets or exchanging them for tea and wine.

"MOLE" means to publish.

This is the earliest record of engraved tablets in extant literature.

In 836 A.D., Emperor Wenzong of the Tang Dynasty, based on a report from Fengjuku, the Dongchuan provincial governor, ordered a ban on private calendar plates in all provinces.

In his report, Feng Ju said, "Every year, before the Central Committee of the Tiantai had even petitioned for the promulgation of a new calendar, privately printed calendars were already flying all over the world.

"It can be seen that at that time the folk engaged in engraved plate printing industry is a lot of people.

In 1900, there was a volume of the Diamond Sutra printed on engraved boards in a collection found in the Thousand Buddha Cave in Dunhuang County, Gansu Province, and at the end of the volume, there was a line that read, "On the 15th day of the 4th month of the 9th year of the reign of Xiantong, Wang Jie made it for the second parent.

The ninth year of Hantong was 868 AD.

This is the earliest print found in the world with an exact date.

The book is in the form of a roll, about 1 ft 6 ft long, made of seven printed sheets glued together.

At the top is a title painting of Siddhartha Gautama speaking in the Garden of Only Trees for Solitude.

The rest of the print is the full text of the Diamond Sutra.

The volume is very beautiful, the carving of the knife is delicate, simple and heavy, indicating that the printing technology has reached a fairly sophisticated degree.

With the printing varieties and the number of dramatic growth, each print a book to be carved back to the board, the cost of manpower and material resources is considerable.

Thus, the people proposed to seek a simpler, more economical printing technology.

To the late Tang Dynasty, there has been a continuous repetition of printing with a single Buddha's elephant seal thousand Buddha's elephant hand scroll.

In the past, the British, French, German, Japanese and other countries of the archaeological team in Xinjiang, China has found a large number of these thousand Buddha image hand scrolls.

The British Museum has one such hand scroll, which is 17 feet long, or about 5.18 meters, with 468 Buddha images printed on it.

In addition, during the process of carving the board, it is difficult to avoid carving the wrong words.

It's too bad and wasteful to scrap a board if you carve a wrong word.

Clever craftsmen came up with a remedy, which is to use a chisel to dig out the wrong words, and then use a piece of the same size of wood to carve a good word to make up.

All these provide experience, reference for the invention of movable type printing.

From this, we can see that although movable type printing is Bisheng's personal invention, it does contain the wisdom of many laborers in previous dynasties.

The invention of printing since the invention of paper, with the development of economic and cultural development, reading more people up, the need for books has also greatly increased.

In the early years of the Jin Dynasty, there were 29,995 volumes of books in the government.

During the North and South Dynasties, Emperor Yuan of Liang had more than 70,000 volumes of books in Jiangling, and there were 370,000 volumes of books in the Jiazhe Hall of Sui Dynasty, which was the highest collection of books recorded in China's ancient national libraries.

In addition to the official collection of books, the private collection of books is also growing.

For example, Guo Tai of the Jin Dynasty had 5,000 volumes of books; when Zhang Hua moved his house, he used thirty cars just to carry the books.

Before the invention of printing, only the government and rich people like Guo Tai and Zhang Hua could have such a large collection of books, and it was not easy for the general public to get one or two books, because books were all hand-copied at that time.

To copy so many manuscripts, how much manpower must be spent? If this situation does not change, how can we meet the needs of society? It is often the case in history that a scientific invention, as long as there is an urgent need for it in the society, and at the same time there are the material conditions to produce it, then it will be quite ready to appear.

Such was the case with the advent of engraving.

Before the advent of engraving, seals and tablets were widely used in society.

There are two kinds of seals, yang and yin, and the characters engraved in yang are protruding, while the characters engraved in yin are concave.

"If you use a yangwen seal, when printed on paper it is black characters on a white background, which is very eye-catching.

But seals are generally small, and the number of words printed is after all limited.

Carved monument generally use the negative, top out of the black background, white characters, not eye-catching.

And the process of topography is more complicated, used to print books is not convenient.

However, there is a big advantage of topography, that is, the area of the tablet is relatively large, you can topography many words at a time.

If the cut-off complementary to the shortcomings of the respective characteristics of the top stone and seal combined? The situation is certainly different.

China's working people, inspired by the two methods of tabletops and seals, invented engraving.

The method of engraved printing is like this: saw the wood into a board, write the words to be printed on thin paper, reverse paste on the board, and then according to the strokes of each word, with a knife, one stroke carved into the Yangwen, so that the strokes of each word protruding on the board.

After the board is carved, the book can be printed.

When printing the book, first use a brush dipped in ink, in the carved board brush, and then, from the paper on the board, and take a clean brush in the back of the paper gently brush, take the paper down, a page of the book is printed.

After a page by page printed, bound into a book, a book will be successful.

This method of printing, is carved on the board and then printed, so we call it "engraved printing".

When was engraving invented in China? Historians have not yet agreed on this question, but most people believe that it was invented during the Tang Dynasty.

At the end of the Sui and early Tang dynasties, due to the large-scale peasant revolts, promoting the development of social production, cultural undertakings also followed the prosperity of the objectively generated the urgent need for engraving and printing.

According to the Ming Dynasty, Shao Jingbang's book "Hongjian Lu" recorded that the empress of Emperor Tang Taizong, Changsun, collected stories of typical women in feudal society.

She wrote a book called "Women's Rules".

When Empress Changsun died in the 10th year of the Zhenguan reign, someone in the palace sent the book to Emperor Tang Taizong.

When he saw it, he ordered it to be printed by engraving.

The 10th year of Zhenguan was 636 AD.

The Women's Rules may have been printed in this year, or a little later.

This is the earliest engraving mentioned in our literature.

From this source to analyze.

It is possible that at that time the folk had already started to use engraved printing to print books, so Tang Taizong thought of printing out the Women's Rules.

The invention of engraved printing must have been earlier than the publication of the Women's Rules.

By the ninth century, it was quite common in China to print books with engraved plates.

The poet Bai Juyi of the Tang dynasty compiled the poems he wrote into a collection of poems - Bai's Changqing Collection on December 10th of the fourth year of the Changqing period (January 2, 8255 A.D.), and Bai Juyi's friend, Yuan Zhen, wrote a preface to Bai's Changqing Collection, which said that at that time people Bai Juyi's poems

In the past, people called the carving of stone "mold le", to the Tang Dynasty, also known as the carving plate "mold le".

Here, the word "mold" is the meaning of engraving.

There is also a record in the Old Book of Tang that in December of the ninth year of the Daho era (835 AD), Emperor Wenzong of the Tang Dynasty ordered that all places should not privately print calendars with engraved plates.

How did this happen? According to some other ancient books the situation was like this: at that time the people of Jiannan, the two Chuan and Huainan Dao.

All of them printed calendars with engraved plates and sold them on the street.

Every year, before the Siantai, who was in charge of calendars, requested the issuance of new calendars, the new calendars printed by the common people were already everywhere.

The promulgation of the calendar was the prerogative of the feudal emperors, and in order to maintain the prestige of the court, Feng Su, the Dongchuan governor, requested a ban on the private publication of calendars.

The calendar is related to agricultural production, farmers need it very much, how can an order ban it? Although the Tang Emperor issued this order, the private printing of the calendar is still popular everywhere.

That is, in the same area, the folk printing calendar is more than one.

When Huang Chao revolted, Emperor Xizong fled to Sichuan in a panic.

The emperor also fled, and of course there was no one to manage the ban on printing calendars.

So the people of Jiangdong made their own calendars and sold them.

In the first year of Emperor Xizong's reign (881 A.D.), two people printed calendars that differed by one day in terms of the size of the month and the size of the month, and there was a dispute.

A magistrate knew about it and said, "We are all doing business as peers, so what does it matter if we differ by one day and half a day?" How can the calendars differ by one day?

This incident tells us that in Jiangdong alone, there are at least two or more printing calendars.

Liu Bi, who fled to Sichuan with Emperor Xizong, also said in the preface to his Family Tradition that he saw many books on yin and yang, miscellany, and dream divination in the bookstore in Chengdu.

Most of these books were engraved and printed.

It can be seen that the printing industry in Chengdu at that time was more developed, not only the printing of calendars, but also other kinds of books.

The Tang Dynasty engraved and printed books, now preserved only a Xian Tong nine years of engraving and printing of the Diamond Sutra.

The ninth year of Hantong was eight hundred and sixty-eight years ago, which is more than a thousand years ago.

This thousand years ago, how to save the printed materials? There is a story here.

There is a mountain in the southeast of Dunhuang, Gansu Province, and as early as the Jin Dynasty, some Buddhists opened caves, carved Buddha statues, and built temples here.

The caves keep increasing, the Buddha statue also followed the increase, people will call this place "Thousand Buddha Cave".

In 1900, while repairing the cave, a Wang Taoist priest inadvertently discovered a closed dark room, opened it and saw that it was filled with bundles of paper scrolls, a considerable number of which were books copied in the Tang Dynasty, and one was the Diamond Sutra engraved and printed in the Tang Dynasty.

This Vajra Sutra is about one zhang six feet long and one foot high, and is a roll made of seven printed sheets glued together.

At the beginning of the volume there is a painting of Shakyamuni speaking to his disciples in a mythological and vivid manner, followed by the full text of the Vajra Sutra.

Volume without a line of text, indicating that it is the ninth year of the Xian Tong engraved and printed.

This book is the earliest surviving engraved book in the world.

The drawings are also engraved on a full plate, perhaps the earliest prints in the world.

By the time of the Five Dynasties, there was a feudal bureaucrat named Feng Dao.

He was a despicable *** guy who was a big official in four of the five short dynasties.

When he saw that the people of Jiangsu and Sichuan were selling printed books of all kinds, with no Confucian classics alone, he suggested to the emperor in the third year of Changxing in the Later Tang Dynasty that the Confucian classics be engraved and printed.

At that time *** printing nine kinds of scriptures, through four dynasties, until the latter Zhou Guangshun three years, has spent twenty-two years, before all carved.

Because of the impact of this engraving is relatively large, and later there are people who think that printing was invented by Feng Dao in the Five Dynasties, which is of course wrong.

By the time of the Song Dynasty, the printing industry is more developed, everywhere in the country are engraved books.

In the early years of the Northern Song Dynasty, Chengdu printed the Da Zang Jing (The Great Collection of Sutras), with 130,000 engraved plates; and in the Northern Song Dynasty, the central educational institution of the *** - the Imperial College of the State Council, printed books on history and history, with more than 100,000 engraved plates.

From these two figures, you can see the scale of the printing industry at that time.

Song dynasty engraved plate printing books, now know there are more than seven hundred kinds, and the font neat and simple, beautiful and generous, and later has been diagnosed for our people.

Song dynasty engraved plate printing, generally more with wooden plate engraving, but there are also people with copper plate engraving.

Shanghai Museum collection of the Northern Song Dynasty "Jinan Liu family Kung Fu needle store" printing ads used in the copper plate, it can be seen at that time also mastered the technology of engraving copper plate.

When it comes to printing books, engraving is indeed a great creation.

A kind of book, only carving a wooden plate, you can print a lot of parts, than to write by hand I do not know how many times faster.

But with this method, the printing of a book will have to carve a board, the cost of labor is still a lot of books can not be printed quickly, a large number of books, some books have a lot of words, and often have to be carved for many years in order to carve a good, in the event that the book is printed once and never reprinted, then, carve a good board will be completely useless.

What can be done to improve it?

By the middle of the eleventh century (between the Qingli years of Emperor Renzong of the Song Dynasty), there was an inventor in China called Bi Sheng, who finally invented an even more advanced printing method - movable type printing - which greatly improved the printing technology in China.

Bi Sheng used cement to make a long four-square column, carved a single character on one side, and then burned it hard with fire.

When the book is printed, the first to prepare a good piece of iron plate, iron plate on top of the rosin and wax and other things, iron plate surrounded by an iron frame, in the iron frame densely filled with living words, full of an iron frame for a version, and then baked with fire under the iron plate, so that the rosin and wax and so on melting.

In addition, a flat plate is used to press on the top of the lined-up movable type to flatten the word, and a movable type plate is lined up.

It is the same as an engraved plate, and can be printed by applying ink to the characters.

In order to improve efficiency, he prepared two iron plates, and organized two people to work at the same time, one plate printing, the other plate typesetting; and when the first plate is finished printing, the second plate is already ready.

The two iron plates alternated with each other, and printed very quickly.

Bi Sheng to each single word are carved several; commonly used words carved more than 20 encountered no preparation of cold and remote characters, the temporary carving, with a fire into a, very convenient.

After printing, put the iron plate on the fire again, so that the rosin and wax melting, and so on, to remove the living word, the next time can be used.

This is the earliest invention of movable type printing.

This kind of adhesive clay movable type, called clay movable type, Bisheng invented the method of printing books two compared with today's, although it is very primitive, but the three main steps of movable-type printing technology, a manufacture of movable type, typesetting and printing, are already available.

Therefore, Bi Sheng's contribution to printing is very remarkable.

Shen Kuo, a famous scientist in the Northern Song Dynasty, wrote about Bisheng's invention of movable type printing in his book, Mengxi Bianan (梦溪笔谈).

After Bi Sheng's invention of movable type printing, the Korean people began to print books using methods such as clay movable type, and later wood movable type.

In the 13th century, they first invented copper movable type printing.

The use of copper movable type in China was a little later than in Korea.

The Korean people also created lead and iron movable type.

However, the person who really utilized the oil printing technique to print documents was Gestetena, a Hungarian living in England.

Around 1881, he used wax-coated fiber paper as a stencil, and used an iron pen to engrave the information to be printed on it. Where the iron pen was engraved and written on, microscopic holes appeared in the fibers, and then brushed the ink on the plate, and pushed it firmly with a roller to push it, so that it would pass through the waxed plate and adhere to the paper underneath.

Inventor Thomas Edison also studied perforated printing in the early 20th century, and he paired the iron pen with a motor, which he controlled to make the iron pen carve into the paper and make an oleograph plate.

Although this method was not widely emphasized at that time, and could not be put into practice, but its principle has inspired future generations.

In 1888, Gestetner used a typewriter instead of an iron pen, and he unloaded the ribbon on the typewriter so that the words were typed directly onto waxed paper, where they left traces.

Removing the waxed paper, laying it on the paper, applying ink and embossing it was a success.

More than 10 years later, the Austrian Klabo invented the rotary mimeograph, which made mimeographs much faster.

Gravure printing - intaglio printing was produced around the middle of the 15th century, the principle is to make the printing plate of the graphic below the blank part, the layout structure is similar to the ancient topography in China, only the inking part is exactly the opposite of the topography.

As a result of this printing method printed out of the finished product surface ink slightly raised, easy to identify, difficult to imitate, so more for the printing of banknotes, stamps and other securities.

Gravure printing plate can be divided into engraved intaglio, etched intaglio and photographic intaglio.

Engraved copper intaglio printing is an Italian invention of Phineas Chou Lai, 1477, there have been people with this method of printing maps.

To the early 19th century, Europe began to use this method of reproduction of famous paintings, printing securities, so that intaglio printing gradually developed a unique printing method.

Modern offset and photogravure printing: the offset plate has a lipophilic drawing line, which can adsorb ink; the non-drawing line part of the wet roller supplying moisture is not attached to the ink.

The ink attached to the plate is used to print on a roll of gummed cloth, which is then transferred to the paper.

This is called offset printing.

In photogravure printing, there are corroded holes in the copper to make lines, and the volume of the holes determines the intensity of the lines.

The cylinder is first coated with ink, and then scraped with a squeegee, leaving only the ink in the hollows, and when pressed through the ink in the hollows is printed on the paper.

Letterpress - letterpress printing is the graphic part of the printing is higher than the blank part of the printing, printing, the graphic part of the ink, and then overlay the paper, pressurized, the ink is transferred from the printing plate to the paper.

Under the influence of the Chinese invention of engraving and movable type, in 1445 AD, the German Johann Gutenberg made lead movable type and wooden printing machinery.

At that time, China and Korea had already appeared in the lead movable type, but summer Tengbao not only use lead, tin, antimony to make movable type, but also made molds for casting the word, so the production of movable type is more delicate, the use of tools and methods of operation is also very advanced, he also created a pressure printing press and the development of a special fat ink for printing.

As a result of Gutenberg's inventions, he became the universally recognized founder of modern printing, and he created a set of printing methods that were used until the 19th century.

After Gutenberg created the letterpress, Western Europe, there are also people are still constantly working to improve printing technology, has created and perfected the paper type lead plate, rubber letterpress and other replica plate production process, to improve the quality of letterpress prints, the amount of prints and printing speed.

Lithography - lithography can be divided into lithographic plates, offset plates and corrugated plates according to the different materials.

They *** with the same characteristics are: printed graphics and non-printed blanks in a plane, with the eye looks like there is no difference between high and low.

Printing, the use of oil and water mutual exclusion principle, so that the graphic part of the oil hydrophilic and ink discharge, through the extrusion of the transfer to the surface of the substrate.

Lithography was invented around 1778 by the Czechoslovakian Sunnerfeld.

When he was printing sheet music, he found that the microporous surface of the lithographic plate coated with grease could adsorb the ink, while the ungreased part could not adsorb the ink because of its water retention properties.

Based on this phenomenon, he discovered the principle that oil and water resist each other, and thus invented lithography, and had authored a book called "Lithography" which was circulated all over the world.

Offset printing is another lithographic technique developed on the basis of lithography.

In 1817, Sonnenfeld replaced the bulky lithographic plates with thin zinc plates, and adopted the circular press cylinder printing method, which solved the shortcomings of lithographic technology that was not easy to register.

In 1905, the Americans Rupert and Sunnerfeld's lithographic press with a rubber cylinder, making the graphics on the plate through the rubber cylinder and then transferred to the paper surface, the plate and paper does not produce direct contact between the creation of an indirect lithographic printing method.

The collotype is also a lithographic printing method, which was invented by the Frenchman Hellebaut in 1869.

Because they all use frosted glass as plate material, so it is also called glass plate printing method.

This method of printing can utilize photography to make plates, and can most accurately print celebrity paintings and calligraphy, inscriptions, works of art, and antique books.

As lithography, especially offset printing method compared with other types of printing methods with low production costs, simple processes, wear and tear, fast, wide range of characteristics, coupled with new light sources, new photographic materials, precision photographic equipment and the gradual scientific plate and printing quality continues to improve, making the printing method to obtain continuous development, thus becoming the mainstream of today's printing industry. The mainstream of today's printing industry.