# WOODBLOCK PRINTING
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were not entirely devoted to the depiction of divinities and pictorial symbols. Illustrations of popular tales, the opera and historical events were often designed to inspire good behaviour. As a wonderfully simple means of communication, it became an educational and propaganda media.
Chinese folk prints became known to the world only in the twentieth century. However, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a large number of Chinese block-printed fancy paper, together with other decorative art works, were exported to Europe. The fancy papers, chiefly featuring flower and bird motifs, provided much inspiration for decorative art in Europe. Their influence was not as significant as that of the figure prints of Japanese Ukiyo-e which had so impressed nineteenth-century painters in France. But we can still find European upholstery fabric and wallpaper bearing Chinese symbolic motifs. As most of the Chinese folk prints were either used for burning or pasting on the walls, they were printed on low-cost thin and fragile paper, and since, after a few months of being pasted on walls or doors they faded and tore, very few of them have lasted to the present day. Not until the twentieth century did these woodblock-printed folk prints become a collector's item.
The processes of woodblock printing
The process of woodblock printing was actually not a simple one. A writing or design was carved on a block of wood. Ink was applied to this, paper placed over it and the back of the paper rubbed by a hand press made of a piece of wood wrapped with rags and covered with fibre from palm tree or bamboo sheath. Finger tip, nail or hand were also used as press by the printer of Ten Bamboo Studio to produce colour shading of the picture or detail of the prints. Chop printing method was also used in some of the folk paper printing.
The designers, carvers and printers cooperated in a division of labour to complete a book or print. Usually a text was written by a good calligrapher, or a picture was drawn by an artist, on semi-transparent paper. Flour paste was then smeared over the face of the block. The paper with the text or picture drawn on it was placed face down on the block and then the lines of the characters or picture showing through the back of the paper were cut into the wood. The carver was an important link in the printing process, perhaps not less important than the painter or writer. Many blocks