Chapter 9 Section 1 Movable Type Printing in the Song Dynasty
After the invention of woodblock printing, people used wooden boards as raw materials, which saved money.Hundreds or thousands of copies can be printed out of one book edition, which is much easier than copying word by word by hand.Its invention and promotion have indeed played a great role in promoting the popularization and development of culture.But woodblock printing still has its flaws.First, every page of a book needs to be engraved, and every time a book is printed, a plate needs to be engraved, which consumes a lot of manpower and material resources.Second, it often takes several years or even decades to complete a large book; it is obviously a great waste if it is printed once and not printed again, and the loss will be even greater if it is abandoned halfway due to unavoidable accidents.Third, book blocks take up a lot of space, and it is not easy to preserve them.In response to these shortcomings, our ancestors continued to study and strive to improve, and finally invented movable type printing, which is more advanced than woodblock printing.
The principle of movable type printing is the same as that of engraving printing: it is to make raised reverse characters first, then brush them with ink and print them on paper.The difference is that woodblock printing uses a whole block of books, while movable type printing uses individual characters.When printing a book, first arrange the required words into a plate, and then it can be printed; after printing, the book plate is disassembled into individual words for the next printing.In this way, a set of movable type can be typeset again and again according to different manuscripts, and many different books can be printed out, which not only saves money and labor, but also prints quickly, which greatly improves the efficiency of book printing.This kind of movable type printing was first invented by our ancestors, and its inventor was Bi Sheng in the Song Dynasty of our country.
Bi Sheng was born in the middle of the Northern Song Dynasty, that is, in the 11th century AD. We know too little about his life and deeds.Shen Kuo (AD 1031-1095), a famous scientist at the same time, once wrote "Mengxi Bi Tan", which is a book about the scientific achievements of ancient my country written in the style of notes, and there is a record about Bi Sheng , other than this, no other material can be found.When later generations mentioned Bi Sheng's deeds, they all copied or extracted Shen Kuo's original text. "Mengxi Bi Tan" says that he is a "commoner", that is to say, he is an ordinary commoner who has never been an official, but it is impossible to know what kind of ordinary commoner he is.Because Shen Kuo mentioned an "old blacksmith Bi Sheng" elsewhere in the book, some people thought it was Bi Sheng, so they speculated that he was an ironworker.But judging from the age, it seems impossible to be the same person.Some people also say that he was an engraving worker, which is also speculation and lacks documentary evidence.The movie "Bi Sheng" said that he opened Bi's movable type printing shop in Hangzhou, which is also fictional and not credible.There is no way to check Bi Sheng's native place. Some people say that he is from Sichuan; some people speculate that Bi Sheng may also be from Hangzhou because Shen Kuo is from Hangzhou. These are not well-founded.Before the discovery of new materials, the date of birth and death, place of birth and occupation of Bi Sheng had to be doubted.
The only deed of Bi Sheng that we know now is that he invented movable type printing during the reign of Renzong Qingli in the Northern Song Dynasty, that is, from 1041 to 1048 AD. This incident is recorded in "Mengxi Bi Tan".
According to Shen Kuo's records, Bi Sheng's invention of movable type printing can be divided into three main steps.The first is to make movable type.He used a kind of fine clay (mastic) to make small clay blocks as thin as copper coins, engraved a word on each block like a stamp, and burned it on the fire to become a hard movable type. .Several characters are engraved for each character. For commonly used characters such as "zhi", "hu", "zhe" and "ye", more than 20 characters are engraved for each character, in case a word appears repeatedly during typesetting.These movable types are the basic tools of movable type printing.Second is typography.Prepare an iron plate first, spread a layer of turpentine, wax and paper ash on it, and then use iron to make an iron fan (iron frame) the size of a book.When printing a book, put the iron form on the iron plate first, and arrange the required movable type in the form according to the manuscript. After the page is full, put the iron plate on the fire to bake it to melt the turpentine and wax for a while, and then Press it with a flat plate to make the surface flat.When the pine resin and wax solidify, the movable type will be firmly glued to the plate, and the typesetting procedure will be completed.The last step is to apply ink and print on the plate.If you want to speed up the printing, you can replace it with two iron plates, one for printing and one for typesetting. After the previous one is printed, the latter is ready.In this way, they can be used alternately, which can save time and improve printing efficiency.After printing, put the iron plate on the fire and bake it. After the pine resin and wax melt, the movable type can be removed for the next use.In this process, the three main steps of printing——making movable type, typesetting, and printing—have been fully prepared.Therefore, although Bi Sheng's invention is primitive and simple, its basic principle is exactly the same as that of the current printing method of movable type.It can be seen from this that Bi Sheng is a very scientific and creative person. His invention is a major contribution to the development of human culture, which is 400 years earlier than Gutenberg's invention of movable lead type in Europe.
It is a pity that it is difficult to check what books Bi Sheng printed with this set of clay movable type at that time.According to legend, Miao Quansun (AD 1844-1919), an edition bibliographer in the late Qing Dynasty, once said that the book "Emperor Learning" written by Fan Zuyu (AD 1041-1098) in the Northern Song Dynasty has been handed down from the Song Dynasty. The deeds of the virtuous emperors of Fuxi's family down to Song Shenzong's dynasties are intended to promote the ancestors' virtues and ancestral laws, and enlighten the future sages. It is a book about Zizhi.At that time, the Song Dynasty was just as Fan Zhongyan said in "Yueyang Tower" that "the government is well-organized and the people are harmonious, and all wastes are prosperous." Therefore, it is also necessary for current affairs to print this book as soon as possible with movable type; The mouth, so people believe it is true, this book is now in the library of Chongqing. In 1978, domestic edition experts gathered in Chengdu to jointly identify the book. They all agreed that it was definitely not a Song Dynasty clay-type print, but a reprinted version of the Qing Dynasty movable-type print. In this way, the only so-called Song Dynasty clay movable type print remains unreliable.In the past, it was said that Wei Yingwu's collection of poems and proses in the Tang Dynasty "Wei Suzhou Collection" (named because Wei was the governor of Suzhou) was handed down in clay movable type in the Song Dynasty. This is also a misunderstanding. In fact, it is a movable type printed in the Ming Dynasty.After Bi Sheng, his movable type printing was not widely used for quite a long time, mainly because in the feudal society, the inventions and creations of the working people would not be valued by the rulers. Bi Sheng's name is not even willing to be recorded in history, let alone expect the feudal government to support this invention.At the same time, although the demand for books in the feudal era was gradually increasing, it was very limited after all. Every time a book was printed, the number of copies was often very small, and the superiority of movable type printing could not be fully demonstrated.As Shen Kuo said: "If you only print two or three copies, it is not easy, but if you print hundreds of thousands of copies, it will be extremely fast." This shows that the number of printings at one time is too small, which affects the promotion and application of movable type printing.Secondly, there are also technical reasons. The movable clay type is easy to be damaged, not durable, and not easy to ink.For these reasons movable type did not spread widely.Others say that Bi Sheng passed away within a few years after inventing movable clay type, so it was too late to introduce his new invention to his peers. However, this is just conjecture.
After Bi Sheng's death, the movable type he created fell into the hands of Shen Kuo's nephews and was treasured as an "antique". In this way, the world's first clay movable type has been unknown since then.However, Bi Sheng's invention is really a great technological revolution in the history of printing. This technology was not forgotten because of Bi Sheng's death, but was inherited by future generations to continue to develop it.
More than 50 years after Bi Sheng invented clay movable type, that is, in the second year of Chongning in the Northern Song Dynasty (AD 1103), Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province published Buddhist scriptures printed with movable type.Unearthed here are the fragmented pages of "Buddha Talking and Viewing the Buddha Sutra of Infinite Life" and the fragmented pages of "The Origin of Writing Sutras" from the same source.The latter is written "May of the second year of Chongning". It has the same paper quality and similar color as the former, so archaeologists conclude that the Buddhist scriptures are also from the same year.Wenzhou has a well-developed porcelain firing industry and has the material and technical conditions for firing clay movable type. Therefore, archaeologists assert that this fragment of Buddhist scriptures unearthed in Wenzhou should be a real witness to the record about clay movable type printing in "Mengxi Bi Tan".If this theory is true, this is the earliest printed clay type that has been seen so far, and it is also the first printed clay type in the world.
Later, in the Southern Song Dynasty, Zhou Bida (AD 1126-1204), who was a prime minister, imitated Bi Sheng's method and printed his own book with clay movable type in 1193.In his letter to his friends, he said that he recently used Shen Kuo's method (actually Bi Sheng's method) to "use clay and copper plates to transfer and imprint them, and today they become "Miscellaneous Notes of Yutang".This can be said to be the most credible clay type printed copy of the Song Dynasty, but unfortunately the original printed copy has long been lost.
After the Song Dynasty, clay movable type printing continued to be used and achieved success.
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