Chapter 10 Section 2 Movable Type Printing in the Yuan Dynasty
In the Yuan Dynasty, movable type printing continued to be developed and innovated. In addition to clay movable type, tin movable type and wooden movable type were invented.
In the early years of the Yuan Dynasty, there was a man named Yang Gu who used movable type to print several books.Yuan Dynasty scholar Yao Sui (named Mu'an, 1238-1313 A.D.) wrote a collection of poems and essays "Mu'an Collection", saying that Kublai Khan's counselor Yao Shu "taught his disciple Yang Gu to be Shen with the "Xiao Xiao" before it spread widely. The so-called "Shen's trapping board" here refers to the clay movable type imitated according to Shen Kuo's records, and the time is about 1241 to 1250 AD.The books he printed include the children's education textbook "Primary School" edited by Zhu Xi and others, the collection of speeches of several philosophers in the Northern Song Dynasty "Jinsilu", and "Donglai Jingshi Lun" written by Lu Zuqian (known as Mr. Donglai) in the Southern Song Dynasty. "Said" and so on, and let these books "scatter in all directions".These books are also the earliest movable type books in our country, but unfortunately they have not been handed down, but they show that Yang Gu has once again practiced Bi Sheng's great invention, but 200 years later than Bi Sheng invented clay movable type.
At about the same time, an unknown inventor may have considered that tin has a low melting point and is suitable for casting movable type with a mold, so he invented tin movable type.According to the book "Making Movable Type Printing Calligraphy" written by Wang Zhen, a famous scientist in the Yuan Dynasty: "In modern times, tin is used to make characters, and iron bars are run through them to make lines, embedded in helmets, and to print books. But the above The typefaces are difficult to use ink, and the printing rate is too high, so they cannot be used for a long time." This means that at the end of the Song Dynasty and the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty, some people had cast tin movable type from the type mold; There may be small holes cast on the character body), lined up in the type plate, and then separated by lines with boundary bars, and the book can be printed.It's just that because there was no good ink at that time, the printing was often bad, so it failed to become popular.However, it is the earliest tin movable type in our country, and it is almost one or two hundred years earlier than the European Gutenberg who used metal movable type to print books.It is a pity that Wang Zhen did not leave any record of the inventor's name and life story about the inventor of movable tin type. Today, he knows nothing except to express his admiration to this unknown inventor.
Shortly after tin movable type was invented, people in the Yuan Dynasty created wooden movable type. Its founder was Wang Zhen, who was the first to record tin movable type.
Wang Zhen, a scientist, has made significant contributions to agricultural science, machinery manufacturing and printing technology.He served as a county magistrate for two terms. He lived a frugal life. He saved his salary to build schools, roads and bridges. He also taught farmers to plant fields, trees, mulberry and cotton. He is a local official who is very popular with the people for doing things that benefit the people.
In 1295 AD, Wang Zhen became the magistrate of Jingde County, Anhui Province, and began to write his immortal masterpiece.In order to publish this book, he asked craftsmen to engrave more than 30,000 wooden movable type according to his own design, and it took two years. This is the first pair of wooden movable type in my country.Before that, according to Shen Kuo, Bi Sheng once wanted to use wood as movable type material according to the method of woodblock printing, but the wood would swell when it was touched with water, and the layout was easy to be uneven; The medicine sticks together and is not easy to remove, so the glue is used to make movable type, and the plan to make wooden movable type has not been realized.
Wang Zhen made wooden movable type, which greatly improved movable type printing.His method of making movable type is: first prepare a whole wooden board, paste the paper full of characters on it upside down, and then carve carefully.After the characters are engraved, the individual characters are sawed off one by one with a small fine saw, and then trimmed with a knife so that the size of the wooden movable type is the same.In this way, the work of making wooden movable type is completed.
When typesetting, first make a square wooden tray, put wooden movable type in rows, and use bamboo slices as boundaries to clamp the characters.After a page is filled, small bamboo pieces are used to level it, and wooden wedges are used to plug it tightly to keep the movable type immobile.
In 1298 A.D., Wang Zhen tried to print the "Jingde County Chronicle" edited by himself with wooden movable type. The book has more than 60,000 characters, and 100 copies were printed in less than a month. The speed is fast and the quality is good. This is seen in The first wooden movable type printed book recorded in our country is also the oldest movable typed book in the local chronicles of our country. Unfortunately, it was completely lost during the Wanli period of the Ming Dynasty (1573-1619 A.D.).
In 1300 A.D., Wang Zhen was transferred to Yongfeng County, Jiangxi Province as a county magistrate. He also brought his set of wooden movable type printing tools with him, planning to print his "Agricultural Book" there. Unexpectedly, the traditional The "Nong Shu" was printed out with the original engraving method, and the set of wooden movable type he brought had to be stored, and was never used to print books. Later, the whereabouts of this set of wooden movable type is unknown.
Another major contribution of Wang Zhen is the creation of a rotatable typesetting plate (or called a typesetting frame), which is a turntable similar to a round tabletop. The diameter of the plate is about seven feet, and the height of the axis is about three feet.The tray is divided into many grids with bamboo strips. The grids are numbered according to the order of poetry and rhyme.Commonly used characters and miscellaneous characters are arranged in the same another big roulette.Two roulettes can arrange more than 30,000 characters.When typesetting, one person looks at the article and calls out the number of characters; the other person sits between the two roulettes and turns the left and right roulettes to easily take out the required movable type.In this way, typesetting workers do not have to walk around, which greatly saves manpower and time, which is a great advancement in typesetting technology.
After the successful trial printing of wooden movable type, Wang Zhen summed up the experience of movable type printing and wrote an article "Calligraphy of Making Movable Type Printing", which described the writing rhyme, engraving, sawing, repairing, wheel making, taking characters, and storing characters. , printing and a whole set of procedures, and attach it to the back of the "Nong Shu".This is the earliest article that systematically describes movable type printing, and it is an important document for studying the printing history of our country. It has been translated into several languages and spread abroad.
Although the wooden movable type created by Wang Zhen has long been lost, hundreds of wooden movable type of the Yuan Dynasty were found in the Thousand Buddha Caves in Dunhuang, Gansu. Movable type.It is a pity that most of these wooden movable types were stolen by Pelliot of France in the early 20th century. Currently, there are only five left, which are displayed in the Beijing History Museum. .
More than 20 years after Wang Zhen invented wooden movable type, there was Ma Chengde, a state official in Fenghua, Zhejiang. The library, etc., is also a magistrate who is considerate of his subordinates and benefits the people.During this period, he also carved 100,000 movable types, and printed 20 volumes of "University Yanyi" and other books in 1322.Although the record does not mention what material this pair of movable type is made of, it is generally believed to be wooden movable type, so this is another record of printing a book with wooden movable type after Wang Zhen.However, this book has long been lost, but the printing of the above two people proves that wooden movable type was not only popular in southern Anhui in the early Yuan Dynasty, but also popular in eastern Zhejiang.
Today people talk about the wooden movable type printed copies of the Yuan Dynasty, and most of them think that they no longer exist in the world.However, in recent years, some domestic scholars, based on the research on the fragments of the "Da Fang Guang Fo Hua Yan Jing" written in Xixia, believe that it is a wooden movable type printed copy carved in Hangzhou in the early Yuan Dynasty.If this is the case, the "Hua Yan Jing" in Xixia script has become the only earliest wooden movable type printed copy in existence.
After the Yuan Dynasty, wooden movable type continued to be popular, but tin movable type was replaced by other metal movable type.
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