---
title: "History of printing"
chunk: 8/16
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:00:12.806227+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== China ===
During the Ming and Qing dynasties, both wooden and metal movable types were quite common, but the preferred printing method remained woodblock. During the Qing dynasty, the printing house inside the Forbidden City used movable copper type to print the Gujin tushu jicheng. The metal fonts were melted down for coins at the start of the Qianlong Emperor's reign in 1735. Later another set of movable type was created to print the Siku quanshu, but the material chosen was wood rather than metal to cut down on costs. In one case an entire set of wooden type numbering 250,000 pieces was used only for printing the emperor's rare book collection, and then used for firewood. Despite official patronage of movable type prints, the Forbidden City's printing house never used it for more than 10 percent of all printed materials while 90 percent of printed books used the older woodblock technology. Woodblocks remained the dominant printing method in China until the introduction of lithography in the late 19th century.

==== Korea ====
Metal movable type received most use among the East Asian countries in Korea where it was most widespread, but it still never replaced woodblock printing. The promulgation of hangul 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. Although Sejong introduced Hangeul, an alphabetic system, in the 15th century, Hangeul only replaced hanja in the 20th century. 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.

==== Japan ====
In Japan the first Western style movable type printing-press was brought to Japan by Tenshō embassy in 1590, and was first printed in Kazusa, Nagasaki in 1591. However, western printing-press were discontinued after the ban on Christianity in 1614. The moveable type printing-press seized from Korea by Toyotomi Hideyoshi's forces in 1593 was also in use at the same time as the printing press from Europe. An edition of the Confucian Analects was printed in 1598, using a Korean moveable type printing press, at the order of Emperor Go-Yōzei.
Tokugawa Ieyasu established a printing school at Enko-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.

The great pioneers in applying movable type printing press to the creation of artistic books, and in preceding mass production for general consumption, were Honami 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 converting emaki (handscrolls) to printed books, and reproducing them for wider consumption. These books, now known as Kōetsu Books, Suminokura Books, or Saga Books (嵯峨本, Saga-bon), 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. For aesthetic reasons, the typeface of the Saga-bon, like that of traditional handwritten books, adopted the renmen-tai (連綿体), 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 four semi-cursive and cursive kanji or hiragana characters. In one book, 2,100 characters were created, but 16% of them were used only once.
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. After the 1640s, movable type printing declined, and books were mass-produced by conventional woodblock printing during most of the Edo period. It was after the 1870s, during the Meiji period, when Japan opened the country to the West and began to modernize, that this technique was used again.