PRINTING AND PAPERMAKING PRINTING AND PAPERMAKING Printing papermakers learned to add a starch solution to the and papermaking were two key Chinese inventions pulp to suspend the fibers. that created two different communications revolutions in the premodern world, one in Asia and the other in Stamps and Rubbings Europe, by permitting the rapid transmission of in- Having produced an inexpensive, light medium on formation and ideas. which to write, the Chinese next searched for a way to mass-produce text and images, primarily for reli- The Invention of Paper gious reasons. In the eighth century, devout Buddhists The invention of paper is attributed to a court of- sought to spread their religion by producing thousands ficial of the Han dynasty. In 105 CE, the eunuch Cai of copies of the Buddha’s word and image. One early Lun (d. 121) presented the Han emperor with a new technique was to produce a stamp with an image writing material. With the rise of the first Chinese em- carved in relief on its surface. Once inked with a com- pire (the Qin dynasty, 221–206 BCE) came a rise in the bination of black soot and oil, the stamp could be imperial bureaucracy and an increasingly urgent need pressed onto a sheet of paper, sparing the patron the for new writing materials and methods of record keep- cost of reproducing the image by hand. This technique ing. The earliest Chinese records (sixteenth–eleventh was fine for relatively small images but larger and more centuries BCE) were etched on tortoise shells and an- complex images and texts were much more difficult. imal bones. Later, these cumbersome materials were Another technique frequently used by government gradually replaced with wooden tablets and strips of artisans was making rubbings from stone stele. bamboo. Though less costly, imperial record keeping Though not as fast as stamping, rubbings could be generated hundreds of pounds of records on these ma- taken from large surfaces with complex engravings. To terials. Though the inventor of paper remains anony- make a rubbing, the artisan would take a moist sheet mous, Chinese archaeologists in 1957 dated the of fine paper and place it onto the surface of the text- earliest known sample of paper found in China to 49 or image-bearing stone stele or tablet. When the pa- BCE, over 150 years before Cai Lun’s presentation. per adhered to the surface of the stele, the artisan care- This early sample of paper shares basic features of fully pressed some of the moist paper into the crevices manufacture with today’s machine-made paper. Early of the stele or tablet with a pad. Then the artisan would papermakers macerated old rope ends, rags, and fish- take another pad, this time inked with water and black ing nets in water to free the component vegetable soot, and pad the ink onto the surface paper. The pad fibers, then sifted the solution with a screen to form would not touch the paper the artisan had pressed into thin sheets of matted fibers. They could leave the wet the engraving. When the paper was dry, the artisan sheets to dry on the screen or place them on another would peel the inked sheet off the stone, revealing a drying surface. What distinguishes paper formed this copy of the engraving in white on a black background. way from the papyrus of the ancient Egyptians is this The rubbing technique is still valued for its precision process of separating and reforming vegetable fibers and aesthetic quality, and it is used to duplicate im- into a single sheet (papyrus, by comparison, is simply ages of fine calligraphy for Chinese art collectors. pithed and flattened to create a writing surface). Once By the eighth century, all the prerequisites for print- dry, the fibers in paper form chemical bonds and cre- ing were in place. With stamps and rubbings, artisans ate a strong but light writing surface. knew how to take prints from both relief and engraved By the fourth century, paper had replaced wood and images. Stamps could replicate small images quickly, bamboo strips as the writing material of choice, and and rubbings could reproduce large, detailed images, al- by the sixth century, Chinese papermakers had learned beit slowly. Neither method could satisfy the increas- how to extract vegetable fiber from the bark of the ing demand in Chinese society for more books. mulberry tree, one of the best sources of paper fiber. Buddhists, Taoists, and Confucians all sought to pro- Mulberry bark is still favored by fine papermakers in duce more copies of their canonical texts for a increas- China, Korea, and Japan today because of its strength ingly literate public. Sometime in the eighth century, and beauty. an artisan thought of combining the advantages of stamps and rubbings by making woodblock prints. In papermaking, the longer the length of the fibers, the stronger the paper. As a result, much of the sub- sequent history of papermaking in Asia has been the Woodblock Printing development of techniques that preserve fiber length. Xylography, or woodblock printing, is both a simple To ensure the even distribution of the paper fibers, and sophisticated technique for printing, unrivaled un- ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MODERN ASIA 7 PRINTING AND PAPERMAKING til the advent of machine printing presses in the nine- the education and examination system as a vehicle for teenth century. Three skilled artisans are needed to pre- recruiting talent from a much wider portion of the pare a page of text for xylographic printing. First, a population than had been previously possible. This calligrapher writes the text to be printed on a thin sheet correlation between printing and the examination sys- of paper, using black ink. Next, a woodcarver takes tem is supported by the fact that those areas in China the sheet of paper and turns it over, pasting the face that produced 84 percent of the successful examina- of the sheet onto a foot-long block of fruit wood. tion candidates also produced 90 percent of China’s Once the sheet has dried onto the block, the carver can printed books. see the characters in reverse through the back of the While there was a dramatic reduction in the cost paper. The carver then carefully cuts into the wood and removes white background, leaving the characters in re- of books in China, there was also an explosion of print- lief. Once the remaining paper is rubbed off, the block ing for profit. By the eleventh century, xylographic is ready for printing. A printmaker inks the block with printing was already a mature technology, and had cre- an ink pad, inking only the raised characters, then lays ated the world’s first print culture in China. New lit- a thin sheet of paper on top. The printmaker presses erary genres emerged, such as storybooks, aimed at a the sheet of paper onto the characters to take an im- popular as well as an elite audience. Popular shanshu, pression. A skilled printmaker can make two or three or "morality books," were also aimed at the newly cre- impressions a minute this way. This technique was used ated mass audience. The sheer volume and variety of to make the world’s earliest extant printed book, the publications for popular consumption prompted the Buddhist Diamond Sutra, which is dated 868 CE. Chinese government to censor, prohibit, or monopo- lize the printing of various materials, especially those The printing press was not invented in China be- works, like the dynastic histories, which could be a cause the xylographic process has no use for it. The source of intelligence if exported. However, the fact critical technical requirement for Chinese printing is that these prohibitions were repeatedly issued indi- strong, thin paper, already perfected with the devel- cates that the government had very little real impact opment of strong mulberry papers in the sixth cen- on the commercial trade. Printing technology was well tury. By the twelfth century, Europeans learned to established even among the seminomadic empires to make paper from the Arabs, who had captured some the north. The Chinese government found it neces- Chinese papermakers in a battle at Samarqand five sary to establish strict prohibitions on the import of centuries earlier. European papers however, are much books from these rival states. thicker, especially papers made from macerated cot- ton rags. European printmakers needed a great deal The expansion of critical scholarship based on the more pressure to take a relief impression with these easy circulation of the printed word is another im- thick papers and required massive presses. Another im- portant feature of print culture. Not only were more portant difference between European and Chinese people reading books in the eleventh century, the so- printmaking is the composition of the printing sur- cial elites who were already literate were reading more face. In Asia, a single woodblock was the preferred books and comparing a greater diversity of ideas. medium because the aesthetics and complexity of Chi- While we might expect the Chinese imperial library nese characters can be easily captured by a skilled cal- to have a large collection, by the twelfth century gov- ligrapher. Some Chinese printers experimented with ernment holdings were rivaled by private libraries movable type—tiny relief blocks of each character— sometimes containing more than a million volumes. but the capital investment required to produce and Easy access to books allowed writers and scholars maintain the thousands of tiny blocks of type needed to compare ideas and generate new ones with greater for Chinese printing was greater than the cost of a few facility.