Paper, Printing and the Printing Press

Abstract

The Chinese used paper for two or three centuries before CE 105, when Cai Lun, director of imperial arsenals under Emperor He of the later Han dynasty (25-220), officially reported the `invention' of paper. The Chinese began the first printed newspaper, Jing Bao (originally Di Bao), in 713 under the Tang dynasty (618-907); and it continued until the collapse of the Manchu dynasty in 1911. In 868, Wang Jie printed the famous Diamond Sutra (Kumarajiva's Vajracchedika Prajna Paramita), the earliest printed book in existence. Xylography (block printing) was known in China for at least four centuries before 932, when Prime Minister Feng Dao supposedly `invented' it by directing the printing of the 11 Confucian classics filling 130 volumes - a task that took 20 years. Alchemist Bi Sheng experimented with movable type for eight years from 1041, four centuries before Gutenberg. In 1313, Wang Zheng traced the development of movable type in his Nong shu, a treatise on agriculture. Chinese also made typography a fine art and produced numerous books. Printing from movable type reached its highest development in Korea from 1403 onwards. If the invention of printing ushered in the second communication revolution, then the celebration of Gutenberg as the inventor of printing represents a distortion of human history by those trying to document a so-called European `exceptionalism' of the 15th century. The horizontally integrative macrohistory approach should set the record straight.