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Home , Fine paper, Papermaking, Woodblock printing, Writing material

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PRINTING AND PAPERMAKING Printing papermakers learned to add a solution to the and papermaking were two key Chinese inventions to suspend the . that created two different communications revolutions in the premodern world, one in Asia and the other in Stamps and Rubbings , 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 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 . 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 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 and place it onto the surface of the text- earliest known sample of paper found in to 49 or image-bearing stone stele or tablet. When the pa- BCE, over 150 years before ’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 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 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 for Chinese 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 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 from the bark of the ing demand in Chinese society for more . 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 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 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 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 , the publications for popular consumption prompted the Buddhist , which is dated 868 CE. Chinese government to censor, prohibit, or monopo- lize the printing of various materials, especially those The 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 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- 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 —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. When writing new books, Chinese writers skilled calligraphers and woodblock engravers who could draw upon a wider variety of books and chal- could set up shop anywhere and begin producing lenge old ideas. In his memoirs, the eleventh-century printed books on demand. Song scholar-scientist Shen Gua, made over 250 cita- tions to a wide variety of works that were available to The World’s First Print Culture him, sometimes using those works to support his con- The nature of the communications revolution clusions, at other times challenging his sources. When brought on by the development of inexpensive book he finished his memoirs in the 1080s, they were production is still debated. In China, wide access to a printed and sold to his peers and other aspiring mem- large number of texts whose cost was less than one bers of Song society. This highlights another impor- tenth that of books a few centuries earlier reinforced tant aspect of print culture: Not only could people now

8 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MODERN ASIA PRIVATIZATION—CHINA

compare and challenge older ideas, their own ideas war and internecine conflict (prolonged by repeated could be easily published and disseminated, adding to interventions by the Western powers), not to mention the intensity of public debate and discussion. The cre- resisting the Japanese invasion during World War II. ation of a larger and more critical reading public out- Any lingering goodwill toward the West and tolerance side the auspices of government agencies was a key of or interest in the Western economic perspective Chinese development of the eleventh century. completely dissipated. Convinced that a larger future armed conflict with Paul Forage the United States was imminent, private enterprises were eliminated, foreign commercial banks were ex- Further Reading pelled from the country, and agriculture was commu- Ho Peng Yoke. (1985) Li, Qi, and Shu: An Introduction to Sci- nized to produce the massive volumes of grain judged ence and Civilization in China. Seattle: University of Wash- necessary to see the country through the coming ington Press. struggle. The country converted completely to a So- Temple, Robert. (1986) The Genius of China: 3,000 Years of Science, Discovery, and Invention. New York: Simon & viet-style planned economy, which made it terribly Schuster. vulnerable to mismanagement at the top. Mao Zedong initiated the Great Leap Forward in 1958 to catch up to first the United Kingdom and eventually the United PRIVATIZATION—CHINA China has a long States in steel production, and over the ensuing few and rich history of private enterprise during the time years this manic pursuit combined with unfavorable of the dynasties. By the early part of the twentieth cen- dry weather led to a plunge in grain production and tury, however, Chinese private industry had become disruption in grain distribution. An estimated 20 to 35 foreign dominated. Most firms were small, with less million Chinese starved to death. For this debacle, than five hundred employees, and produced consumer Mao was isolated within the central leadership. Mao’s goods, such as , cigarettes, and flour, owing to countermove against his rivals took the form of the the exclusive concessions on manufactured and Cultural Revolution, which caused economic and processed goods ceded to the Western powers under technological stagnation from 1966 to 1976. military coercion. In short, the lion’s share of the fi- nancial benefit of Chinese private industry did not ac- The Reform Era crue to the Chinese themselves. The death of Mao and the demise of the surviving As for private agriculture, most peasants subsisted radical leftists within the central leadership in the late on tiny tracts of land (in the 1930s, 73 percent of peas- 1970s finally provided an opportunity for positive ants owned one hectare of land or less), and a rela- change. In 1978, the least productive households of a tively very small number of people owned large pieces commune in Anhui Province were given responsibil- of land (in the 1930s, 0.015 percent of rural residents ity by local authorities for their own incomes in the owned 66 hectares or more), which were parceled up hope that they would at least attain self-sufficiency. and leased to the landless. Here again, the Chinese ex- The dramatic gains in productivity prompted expan- perience of private ownership was not one of general sion of the experiment to the entire commune. To prosperity. avoid accountability, the central leadership officially banned the leasing of land for private use, but in prac- After the Chinese Communist victory in 1949, the tical terms it did nothing to curb the experiment. The new rulers did not immediately forsake private own- greater diffusion of the model to other communes pro- ership. Agricultural land was not organized into com- gressed rapidly, spreading largely spontaneously to en- munes but rather redistributed (in 1950 71.74 percent compass the entire country and to nearly totally of peasants owned more than one hectare). State- dismantle the commune system within five years. owned enterprises were quickly formed, accounting for 34.7 percent of gross value of industrial output While short of privatization, a nationwide system (GVIO) in 1949, but private firms continued to func- was established in which peasants enjoyed the right to tion, accounting for 55.8 percent of GVIO in 1949. long-term, renewable lease agreements with the state Therefore, in retrospect the outbreak of the Korean for the use of their land. Moreover, peasant families War in 1950 and the involvement of the United States could pass land tenure rights down to their children. and China as the two principal combatants was ex- The liberalization of prices and crop determination tremely detrimental to Chinese economic develop- progressed haltingly throughout the next two decades. ment. China had just emerged from a century of civil Nevertheless, the foundations of the privatization of

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MODERN ASIA 9