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THE DEVELOPMENT OF PRINTING IN CHINA and its effects on the renaissance under the Sung dynasty (960-1279) A lecture delivered on 3 September, 1962
L. CARRINGTON GOODRICH,* PH.D.
The art of printing took a long time to develop. It came into being when the demand was urgent for multiple copies, and when the Chinese had both the essential materials and the technical processes. This seems to have happened some time after the year A.D. 700.
Let us consider first the demand. It came in all circles where reading was essential. The Buddhists at this time were extremely active in their work of propaganda. For example, in 581 the emperor Kao-tsu4 of the Sui ordered the copying of Buddhist texts at state expense; this involved 46 collections in 132,086 rolls. In Taoist circles there was need for large numbers of charms to ward off evils. The Confucians, again coming into their own with the re-introduction of the system of civil service examinations, needed hundreds of thousands of text books for students, and copies of the Confucian canon for the scholar class. We read that at the capital alone, for instance, the emperor Yang (605-616) ordered the making of fifty duplicate sets of the imperial library. This involved the copying of 3,127 works in 36,708 rolls.
Let us consider next the main ingredients and technical processes. The first were ink and paper. We know now that red ink was known to the Chinese at least by the 13th century B.C. (A) and black ink about the same time. For writing surfaces the Chinese experimented with wood, bamboo, silk, and harder materials. Then at the end of the 1st century A.D. paper came into being. At this time the dynastic history drily relates: "Silk was too expensive and bamboo too heavy." In 1931 the Swedish member of the Sino-Swedish Expedition in Central Asia, Folke Bergman, discovered some paper in a lonely site called Chü-yen
* Dr. Goodrich is Professor Emeritus of Chinese at Columbia University. He is well known as the author of A Short History of the Chinese People, and for his revised edition of T. F. Carter's The Invention of Printing in China and its Spread Westward.