Woodblock printing orblock printing is a technique forprinting text,images or patterns used widely throughout East Asia and originating inChina in antiquity as a method ofprinting on textiles and later onpaper. Each page or image is created by carving a wooden block to leave only some areas and lines at the original level; it is these that are inked and show in the print, in arelief printing process. Carving the blocks is skilled and laborious work, but a large number of impressions can then be printed.
As amethod of printing on cloth, the earliest surviving examples from China date to before 220 AD. Woodblock printing existed inTang China by the 7th century AD and remained the most common East Asian method of printing books and other texts, as well as images, until the 19th century.Ukiyo-e is the best-known type ofJapanese woodblock art print. Most European uses of the technique for printing images on paper are covered by the art termwoodcut, except for theblock books produced mainly in the 15th century.
According to theBook of Southern Qi, in the 480s, a man named Gong Xuanyi (龔玄宜) styled himself Gong the Sage and "said that a supernatural being had given him a 'jade seal jade block writing,' which did not require a brush: one blew on the paper and characters formed."[1] He then used his powers to mystify a local governor. Eventually he was dealt with by the governor's successor, who presumably executed Gong.[2] Timothy Hugh Barrett postulates that Gong's magical jade block was actually a printing device, and Gong was one of the first, if not the first printer. The semi-mythical record of him therefore describes his usage of the printing process to deliberately bewilder onlookers and create an image of mysticism around himself.[3] However, woodblock print flower patterns applied to silk in three colours have been found dated from theHan dynasty (before AD 220).[4]
Inscribed seals made of metal or stone, especially jade, and inscribed stone tablets probably provided inspiration for the invention of printing. Copies of classical texts on tablets were erected in a public place inLuoyang during theHan dynasty for scholars and students to copy. TheSuishu jingjizhi, the blibography of the official history of theSui dynasty, includes several ink-squeeze rubbings, believed to have led to the early duplication of texts that inspired printing. A stone inscription cut in reverse dating from the first half of the 6th century implies that it may have been a large printing block.[5]
The rise of printing was greatly influenced byMahayana Buddhism. According to Mahayana beliefs, religious texts hold intrinsic value for carrying the Buddha's word and act as talismanic objects containing sacred power capable of warding off evil spirits. By copying and preserving these texts, Buddhists could accrue personal merit. As a consequence the idea of printing and its advantages in replicating texts quickly became apparent to Buddhists, who by the 7th century, were using woodblocks to create apotropaic documents. These Buddhist texts were printed specifically as ritual items and were not widely circulated or meant for public consumption. Instead they were buried in consecrated ground. The earliest extant example of this type of printed matter is a fragment of a dhāraṇī (Buddhist spell) miniature scroll written in Sanskrit unearthed in a tomb inXi'an. It is called theGreat spell of unsullied pure light (Wugou jingguang da tuoluoni jing 無垢淨光大陀羅尼經) and was printed using woodblock during the Tang dynasty,c. 650–670 AD.[6] A similar piece, theSaddharma pundarika sutra, was also discovered and dated to 690 to 699.[7]
This coincides with the reign ofWu Zetian, under which theLonger Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtra, which advocates the practice of printing apotropaic and merit making texts and images, was translated by Chinese monks.[6] The oldest extant evidence of woodblock prints created for the purpose of reading are portions of theLotus Sutra discovered atTurpan in 1906. They have been dated to the reign of Wu Zetian using character form recognition.[6] The oldest text containing a specific date of printing was discovered in theMogao Caves ofDunhuang in 1907 byAurel Stein. This copy of theDiamond Sutra is 14 feet long and contains acolophon at the inner end, which reads: "Reverently [caused to be] made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents on the 13th of the 4th moon of the 9th year of Xiantong [i.e. 11 May, AD 868 ]". It is considered the world's oldest securely dated woodblock scroll.[6] The Diamond sutra was closely followed by the earliest extant printed almanac, theQianfu sinian lishu (乾符四年曆書), dated to 877.[6]
Evidence of woodblock printing appeared in Korea and Japan soon afterward.The Great Dharani Sutra (Korean:무구정광대다라니경/無垢淨光大陀羅尼經,romanized: Muggujeonggwang Daedaranigyeong) was discovered atBulguksa, South Korea in 1966 and dated between 704 and 751 in the era ofLater Silla. The document is printed on a 8 cm × 630 cm (3.1 in × 248.0 in)mulberry paper scroll.[8] A dhāraṇī sutra was printed in Japan around AD 770. One million copies of the sutra, along with other prayers, were ordered to be produced byEmpress Shōtoku. As each copy was then stored in a tiny wooden pagoda, the copies are together known as theHyakumantō Darani (百万塔陀羅尼, "1,000,000 towers/pagodas Darani").[6][9]
Woodblock printing spread acrossEurasia by 1000 AD and could be found in theByzantine Empire. However printing onto cloth only became common in Europe by 1300. "In the 13th century the Chinese technique of blockprinting was transmitted to Europe",[10] soon after paper became available in Europe.
From 932 to 955 theTwelve Classics and an assortment of other texts were printed. During theSong dynasty, the Directorate of education and other agencies used these block print disseminate their standardized versions of theClassics. Other disseminated works include theHistories, philosophical works, encyclopedias, collections, and books on medicine and the art of war.[6]
In 971 work began on the completeTripiṭaka Buddhist Canon (Kaibao zangshu 開寶藏書) inChengdu. It took 10 years to finish the 130,000 blocks needed to print the text. The finished product, theSichuan edition of theKaibao Canon, also known as theKaibao Tripitaka, was printed in 983.[6]
Prior to the introduction of printing, the size of private collections in China had already seen an increase since the invention of paper. Fan Ping (215–84) had in his collection 7,000 rolls (juan), or a few hundred titles. Two centuries later, Zhang Mian owned 10,000juan,Shen Yue (441–513) 20,000juan, andXiao Tong and his cousin Xiao Mai both had collections of 30,000juan.Emperor Yuan of Liang (508–555) was said to have had a collection of 80,000juan. The combined total of all known private book collectors prior to the Song dynasty number around 200, with the Tang alone accounting for 60 of them.[11]
Following the maturation of woodblock printing, official, commercial, and private publishing businesses emerged while the size and number of collections grew exponentially. The Song dynasty alone accounts for some 700 known private collections, more than triple the number of all the preceding centuries combined. Private libraries of 10–20,000juan became commonplace while six individuals owned collections of over 30,000juan. The earliest extant private Song library catalogue lists 1,937 titles in 24,501juan. Zhou Mi's collection numbered 42,000juan, Chen Zhensun's collection lists 3,096 titles in 51,180juan, andYe Mengde (1077–1148) as well as one other individual owned libraries of 6,000 titles in 100,000juan. The majority of which were secular in nature. Texts contained material such as medicinal instruction or came in the form of aleishu (類書), a type of encyclopedic reference book used to helpexamination candidates.[6][11]
Imperial establishments such as the Three Institutes: Zhaowen Institute, History Institute, and Jixian Institute also followed suit. At the start of the dynasty the Three Institutes' holdings numbered 13,000juan, by the year 1023 39,142juan, by 1068 47,588juan, and by 1127 73,877juan. The Three Institutes were one of several imperial libraries, with eight other major palace libraries, not including imperial academies.[12] According to Weng Tongwen, by the 11th century, central government offices were saving tenfold by substituting earlier manuscripts with printed versions.[13] The impact of woodblock printing on Song society is illustrated in the following exchange betweenEmperor Zhenzong and Xing Bing in the year 1005:
The emperor went to the Directorate of Education to inspect the Publications Office. He asked Xing Bing how many woodblocks were kept there. Bing replied, "At the start of our dynasty, there were fewer than four thousand. Today, there are more than one hundred thousand. The classics and histories, together with standard commentaries, are all fully represented. When I was young and devoted myself to learning, there were only one or two scholars in every hundred who possessed copies of all the classics and commentaries. There was no way to copy so many works. Today, printed editions of these works are abundant, and officials and commoners alike have them in their homes. Scholars are fortunate indeed to have been born in such an era as ours![14]
In 1076, the 39 year oldSu Shi remarked upon the unforeseen effect an abundance of books had on examination candidates:
I can recall meeting older scholars, long ago, who said that when they were young they had a hard time getting their hands on a copy ofShiji orHan shu. If they were lucky enough to get one, they thought nothing of copying the entire text out by hand, so they could recite it day and night. In recent years merchants engrave and print all manner of books belonging to the hundred schools, and produce ten thousand pages a day. With books so readily available, you would think that students' writing and scholarship would be many times better than what they were in earlier generations. Yet, to the contrary, young men and examination candidates leave their books tied shut and never look at them, preferring to amuse themselves with baseless chatter. Why is this?[15]
Woodblock printing also changed the shape and structure of books. Scrolls were gradually replaced by concertina binding (經摺裝) from the Tang period onward. The advantage was that it was now possible to flip to a reference without unfolding the entire document. The next development known as whirlwind binding (xuanfeng zhuang 旋風裝) was to secure the first and last leaves to a single large sheet, so that the book could be opened like an accordion.[16]
Around the year 1000, butterfly binding was developed. Woodblock prints allowed two mirror images to be easily replicated on a single sheet. Thus two pages were printed on a sheet, which was then folded inwards. The sheets were then pasted together at the fold to make acodex with alternate openings of printed and blank pairs of pages. In the 14th century the folding was reversed outwards to give continuous printed pages, each backed by a blank hidden page. Later the sewn bindings were preferred rather than pasted bindings.[17] Only relatively small volumes (juan 卷) were bound up, and several of these would be enclosed in a cover called atao, with wooden boards at front and back, and loops and pegs to close up the book when not in use. For example, one complete Tripitaka had over 6,400juan in 595tao.[18]
Despite the productive effect of woodblock printing, historian Endymion Wilkinson notes that it never supplanted handwritten manuscripts. Indeed, manuscripts remained dominant until the very end of Imperial China:
As a result of block-printing technology, it became easier and cheaper to produce multiple copies of books quickly. By the eleventh century, the price of books had fallen by about one tenth what they had been before and as a result they were more widely disseminated. Nevertheless, even in the fifteenth century most books in major libraries were still in manuscript, not in print. Almost to the end of the empire it remained cheaper to pay a copyist than to buy a printed book. Seven hundred and fifty years after the first imperially sponsored printed works in the Northern Song, the greatest book project of the eighteenth century, theComplete Library of the Four Treasuries (四庫全書), was produced as a manuscript, not as a printed collection. About 4 percent of it was printed in movable type in 1773, but it was hand-carved movable wooden type. Indeed, the entire collection was only printed for the first time in the 1980s. Access to books, especially large works, such as theHistories, remained difficult right into the twentieth century.[19]
— Endymion Wilkinson
Not only did manuscripts remain competitive with imprints,[20] they were evenpreferred by elite scholars and collectors. The age of printing gave the act of copying by hand a new dimension of cultural reverence. Those who considered themselves real scholars and true connoisseurs of the book did not consider imprints to be real books. Under the elitist attitudes of the time, "printed books were for those who did not truly care about books".[21]
However, copyists and manuscripts only continued to remain competitive with printed editions by dramatically reducing their price. According to theMing dynasty authorHu Yinglin, "if no printed edition were available on the market, the hand-copied manuscript of a book would cost ten times as much as the printed work",[22] and also, "once a printed edition appeared, the transcribed copy could no longer be sold and would be discarded".[22] The result is that despite the mutual co-existence of hand-copied manuscripts and printed texts, the cost of the book had declined by about 90 percent by the end of the 16th century.[22] As a result, literacy increased. In 1488, theKoreanChoe Bu observed during his trip to China that "even village children, ferrymen, and sailors" could read, although this applied mainly to the south, while northern China remained largely illiterate.[23]
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In modern times, Chinese printing continued the tradition begun in medieval times. Black-and-white woodcuts were generally replaced by colored ones, achieved by printing successive runs with different inks.
Between the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century, three—and five—color prints appeared. The oldest surviving print is theTen Bamboo Studio Manual of Calligraphy and Paintings (1644) byHu Zhengyan, of which there are several copies in various museums and collections. It is still commonly reproduced in China today and its images are very popular: it includes landscapes, flowers, animals, reproductions of jades, bronzes, porcelain and other objects.[24]
Another outstanding series is the collection of twenty-nineKaempfer Prints (British Museum, London), brought in 1693 by a German physician from China to Europe, which includes flowers, fruits, birds, insects and ornamental motifs reminiscent of the style ofKangxi ceramics. Equally famous is the compilationManual of the Mustard Seed Garden, published in two parts between 1679 and 1701.
It was initiated by the scholar and landscape painter Wáng Gài and expanded and prefaced by the art criticLi Yu and the landscape painter Wáng Niè. It was noted for the quality of its polychrome and drawings, which influencedQing painting.[25]
In 989Seongjong of Goryeo sent the monk Yeoga to request from the Song a copy of the complete Buddhist canon. The request was granted in 991 when Seongjong's official Han Eongong visited the Song court.[26] In 1011,Hyeonjong of Goryeo issued the carving of their own set of the Buddhist canon, which would come to be known as theGoryeo Daejanggyeong. The project was suspended in 1031 after Heyongjong's death, but work resumed again in 1046 afterMunjong's accession to the throne. The completed work, amounting to some 6,000 volumes, was finished in 1087. Unfortunately the original set of woodblocks was destroyed in a conflagration during theMongol invasion of 1232. KingGojong ordered another set to be created and work began in 1237, this time only taking 12 years to complete. In 1248 the completeGoryeo Daejanggyeong numbered 81,258 printing blocks, 52,330,152 characters, 1496 titles, and 6568 volumes. Due to the stringent editing process that went into theGoryeo Daejanggyeong and its surprisingly enduring nature, having survived completely intact over 760 years, it is considered the most accurate of Buddhist canons written inClassical Chinese as well as a standard edition for East Asian Buddhist scholarship.[27]
In theKamakura period from the 12th century to the 13th century, many books were printed and published by woodblock printing at Buddhist temples inKyoto andKamakura.[28]
The mass production of woodblock prints in theEdo period was due to the high literacy rate of Japanese people. The literacy rate of the Japanese by 1800 was almost 100% for thesamurai class and 50% to 60% for thechōnin andnōmin (farmer) class due to the spread of private schoolsterakoya. There were more than 600 rental bookstores inEdo, and people lent woodblock-printed illustrated books of various genres. The content of these books varied widely, including travel guides, gardening books, cookbooks,kibyōshi (satirical novels),sharebon (books on urban culture),kokkeibon (comical books),ninjōbon (romance novel),yomihon,kusazōshi, art books, play scripts for the kabuki andjōruri (puppet) theatre, etc. The best-selling books of this period wereKōshoku Ichidai Otoko (Life of an Amorous Man) byIhara Saikaku,Nansō Satomi Hakkenden byTakizawa Bakin, andTōkaidōchū Hizakurige byJippensha Ikku, and these books were reprinted many times.[28][29][30][31]
From the 17th century to the 19th century,ukiyo-e depicting secular subjects became very popular among the common people and were mass-produced.ukiyo-e is based onkabuki actors,sumo wrestlers, beautiful women, landscapes of sightseeing spots, historical tales, and so on, andHokusai andHiroshige are the most famous artists. In the 18th century,Suzuki Harunobu established the technique of multicolor woodblock printing callednishiki-e and greatly developed Japanese woodblock printing culture such asukiyo-e.Ukiyo-e influenced EuropeanJaponisme andImpressionism. In the early 20th century,shin-hanga that fused the tradition ofukiyo-e with the techniques of Western paintings became popular, and the works ofHasui Kawase andHiroshi Yoshida gained international popularity.[28][29][32][33]
A few specimen of wood block printing, possibly calledtarsh inArabic,[34] have been excavated from a 10th-century context inArabic Egypt. They were mostly used for prayers and amulets. The technique may have spread from China or been an independent invention,[35] but had very little impact and virtually disappeared at the end of the 14th century.[36] In India the main importance of the technique has always been as a method of printing textiles, which has been a large industry since at least the 10th century.[37] Nowadays wooden block printing is commonly used for creating beautiful textiles, such as block print saree, kurta, curtains, kurtis, dress, shirts, cotton sarees.[38]
Block books, where both text and images are cut on a single block for a whole page, appeared in Europe in the mid-15th century. As they were almost always undated, and without statement of printer or place of printing, determining their dates of printing has been an extremely difficult task.Allan H. Stevenson, by comparing the watermarks in the paper used in block books with watermarks in dated documents, concluded that the "heyday" of block books was the 1460s, but that at least one dated from about 1451.[39][40] Block books printed in the 1470s were often of cheaper quality, as a cheaper alternative to books printed byprinting press.[41] Block books continued to be printed sporadically up through the end of the 15th century.[39]
The method was also used extensively for printingplaying cards.[42]
Ceramic andwooden movable type were invented in theNorthern Song dynasty around the year 1041 by the commonerBi Sheng. Metal movable type also appeared in theSouthern Song dynasty. The earliest extant book printed using movable type is theAuspicious Tantra of All-Reaching Union, printed inWestern Xia c. 1139–1193. Metal movable type was used in the Song,Jin, andYuan dynasties for printing banknotes. The invention of movable type did not have an immediate effect on woodblock printing and it never supplanted it inEast Asia.
Only during the Ming and Qing dynasties did wooden and metal movable types see any considerable use, but the preferred method remained woodblock. Usage of movable type in China never exceeded 10 percent of all printed materials while 90 percent of printed books used the older woodblock technology. In one case an entire set of wooden type numbering 250,000 pieces was used for firewood.[16] Woodblocks remained the dominant printing method in China until the introduction oflithography in the late 19th century.[43]
Traditionally it has been assumed that the prevalence of woodblock printing in East Asia as a result of Chinese characters led to the stagnation of printing culture and enterprise in that region. S. H. Steinberg describes woodblock printing in hisFive Hundred Years of Printing as having "outlived their usefulness" and their printed material as "cheap tracts for the half-literate, [...] which anyway had to be very brief because of the laborious process of cutting the letters".[44] John Man'sThe Gutenberg Revolution makes a similar case: "wood-blocks were even more demanding than manuscript pages to make, and they wore out and broke, and then you had to carve another one – a whole page at a time".[44]
Commentaries on printing in China from the 1990s on, which cite contemporary European observers with first-hand knowledge, complicate the traditional narrative. T. H. Barrett points out that only Europeans who had never seen Chinese woodblock printing in action tended to dismiss it, perhaps due to the almost instantaneous arrival of both xylography and movable type in Europe. The early Jesuit missionaries of late-16th-century China, for instance, had a similar distaste for wood-based printing for very different reasons. These Jesuits found that "the cheapness and omnipresence of printing in China made the prevailing wood-based technology extremely disturbing, even dangerous".[45]Matteo Ricci made note of "the exceedingly large numbers of books in circulation here and the ridiculously low prices at which they are sold".[46] Two hundred years later the Englishman John Barrow, by way of theMacartney mission to Qing China, also remarked with some amazement that the printing industry was "as free as in England, and the profession of printing open to everyone".[45] The commercial success and profitability of woodblock printing was attested to by one British observer at the end of the nineteenth century, who noted that even before the arrival of western printing methods, the price of books and printed materials inChina had already reached an astoundingly low price compared to what could be found in his home country. Of this, he said:
We have an extensive penny literature at home, but theEnglish cottager cannot buy anything like the amount of printed matter for his penny that theChinaman can for even less. A penny Prayer-book, admittedly sold at a loss, cannot compete in mass of matter with many of the books to be bought for a fewcash in China. When it is considered, too, that a block has been laboriously cut for each leaf, the cheapness of the result is only accounted for by the wideness of sale.[47]
Other modern scholars such as Endymion Wilkinson hold a more conservative and skeptical view. While Wilkinson does not deny "China's dominance in book production from the fourth to the fifteenth century," he also insists that arguments for the Chinese advantage "should not be extended either forwards or backwards in time."[48]
European book production began to catch up with China after the introduction of the mechanical printing press in the mid fifteenth century. Reliable figures of the number of imprints of each edition are as hard to find in Europe as they are in China, but one result of the spread of printing in Europe was that public and private libraries were able to build up their collections and for the first time in over a thousand years they began to match and then overtake the largest libraries in China.[48]
— Endymion Wilkinson
During the 16th and 17th centuries, printmaking enjoyed great popularity, especially in the illustration of books such as Buddhist texts, poems, novels, biographies, medical treatises, music, etc. The major center of production was initially in Kien-ngan (Fujian) and, from the 17th century, in Sin-ngan (Anhui) andNanjing (Jiangsu). On the other hand, in the 18th century, the industry began to decline, with stereotyped images. This coincided with the arrival of European missionaries who introduced Western engraving techniques. The JesuitMatteo Ripa edited in 1714–1715 a series of poems by Emperor Kangxi, which he illustrated with landscapes of the imperial summer residence atJehol. During the reign of EmperorQianlong the one hundred and four maps of the Chinese Empire made by Jesuit missionaries were printed, as well as illustrations of his military victories, which he commissioned in Paris from the engraverCharles-Nicolas Cochin (Conquests of the Emperor of China, 1767–1773). The emperor himself commissioned the Jesuits to instruct Chinese artisans in the intaglio technique, but they did not obtain good results. Already in the 19th century, the growing xenophobia against Europeans was progressively relegating the use of engraving in China.[49]
In the 20th century, the genre was revived by the writer Lou Siun, who founded a woodcut school inShanghai in 1930. Influenced by contemporary Russian engraving, this school dealt especially with popular, agricultural and military subjects for propaganda purposes, as is evident in the work of P'an Jeng and Huang Yong-yu.[50]
In 1234, cast metal movable type was used inGoryeo (Korea) to print the 50-volumePrescribed Texts for Rites of the Past and Present, compiled byCh'oe Yun-ŭi, but no copies survived to the present.[51] The oldest extant book printed with movable metal type is theJikji of 1377.[52] This form of metal movable type was described by the French scholar Henri-Jean Martin as "extremely similar to Gutenberg's".[53]
Movable type never replaced woodblock printing in Korea. Indeed, even the promulgation ofHangeul was done through woodblock prints. The general assumption is that movable type did not replace block printing in places that used Chinese characters due to the expense of producing more than 200,000 individual pieces of type. Even woodblock printing was not as cost productive as simply paying a copyist to write out a book by hand if there was no intention of producing more than a few copies. AlthoughSejong the Great introduced Hangeul, an alphabetic system, in the 15th century, Hangeul only replacedHanja in the 20th century.[54] And unlike China, the movable type system was kept mainly within the confines of a highly stratified elite Korean society:
Korean printing with movable metallic type developed mainly within the royal foundry of the Yi dynasty. Royalty kept a monopoly of this new technique and by royal mandate suppressed all non-official printing activities and any budding attempts at commercialization of printing. Thus, printing in early Korea served only the small, noble groups of the highly stratified society.[55]
— Sohn Pow-Key
Western stylemovable typeprinting-press was brought to Japan byTenshō embassy in 1590, and was first printed inKazusa, Nagasaki in 1591. However, western printing-press were discontinued after the ban on Christianity in 1614.[28][56] The moveable type printing-press seized from Korea byToyotomi Hideyoshi's forces in 1593 was also in use at the same time as the printing press from Europe. An edition of theConfucianAnalects was printed in 1598, using a Korean moveable type printing press, at the order ofEmperor Go-Yōzei.[28][57]
Tokugawa Ieyasu established a printing school atEnko-ji in Kyoto and started publishing books using domestic wooden movable type printing-press instead of metal from 1599. Ieyasu supervised the production of 100,000 types, which were used to print many political and historical books. In 1605, books using domestic copper movable type printing-press began to be published, but copper type did not become mainstream after Ieyasu died in 1616.[28]
The great pioneers in applying movable type printing press to the creation of artistic books, and in preceding mass production for general consumption, wereHonami Kōetsu and Suminokura Soan. At their studio in Saga, Kyoto, the pair created a number of woodblock versions of the Japanese classics, both text and images, essentially convertingemaki (handscrolls) to printed books, and reproducing them for wider consumption. These books, now known as Kōetsu Books, Suminokura Books, or Saga Books, are considered the first and finest printed reproductions of many of these classic tales; the Saga Book of the Tales of Ise (Ise monogatari), printed in 1608, is especially renowned. Saga Books were printed on expensive paper, and used various embellishments, being printed specifically for a small circle of literary connoisseurs.[58] For aesthetic reasons, thetypeface of theSaga-bon, like that of traditional handwritten books, adopted therenmen-tai (ja), in which several characters are written in succession with smooth brush strokes. As a result, a single typeface was sometimes created by combining two to foursemi-cursive andcursivekanji orhiragana characters. In one book, 2,100 characters were created, but 16% of them were used only once.[59][60][61]
Despite the appeal of moveable type, however, craftsmen soon decided that the semi-cursive and cursive script style of Japanese writings was better reproduced using woodblocks. By 1640 woodblocks were once again used for nearly all purposes.[62] After the 1640s, movable type printing declined, and books were mass-produced by conventional woodblock printing during most of theEdo period. It was after the 1870s, during theMeiji period, when Japan opened the country to the West and began to modernize, that this technique was used again.[28][63]
In countries using Arabic scripts, works, especially theQur'an were printed from blocks or bylithography in the 19th century, as the links between the characters require compromises when movable type is used which were considered inappropriate for sacred texts.[64]
Around the mid-1400s,block-books, woodcut books with both text and images, usually carved in the same block, emerged as a cheaper alternative to manuscripts and books printed withmovable type. These were all short heavily illustrated works, the bestsellers of the day, repeated in many different block-book versions: theArs moriendi and theBiblia pauperum were the most common. There is still some controversy among scholars as to whether their introduction preceded or, the majority view, followed the introduction of movable type, with the range of estimated dates being between about 1440–1460.[41]
Jia xie is a method for dyeing textiles (usually silk) using wood blocks invented in the 5th–6th centuries in China. An upper and a lower block are made, with carved out compartments opening to the back, fitted with plugs. The cloth, usually folded a number of times, is inserted and clamped between the two blocks. By unplugging the different compartments and filling them with dyes of different colours, a multi-coloured pattern can be printed over quite a large area of folded cloth. The method is not strictly printing however, as the pattern is not caused by pressure against the block.[4]
The earliest woodblock printing known is in colour—Chinesesilk from theHan dynasty printed in three colours.[4]
Colour is very common in Asian woodblock printing on paper; inChina the first known example is a Diamond sutra of 1341, printed in black and red at the Zifu Temple in modern-day Hubei province. The earliest dated book printed in more than 2 colours isChengshi moyuan (Chinese:程氏墨苑), a book on ink-cakes printed in 1606 and the technique reached its height in books on art published in the first half of the 17th century. Notable examples are theHu Zhengyan'sTreatise on the Paintings and Writings of the Ten Bamboo Studio of 1633,[65] and theMustard Seed Garden Painting Manual published in 1679 and 1701.[66]
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In late Ming/early Qing China, cost for copying 20 to 30 pages was around .02 to .03 tael, which worked out to something like 0.005 tael per hundred characters, while a carver was typically paid 0.02 to 0.03 tael per hundred characters carved, and could carve 100 to 150 characters a day.
