Chapter 12 Section 4 Movable Type Printing in the Qing Dynasty

In Qing Dynasty movable type printing, in addition to using clay, wood, tin, copper, lead and other movable types, magnetic movable type was also invented. The magnetic movable type invented in the Qing Dynasty is the famous "Taishan magnetic plate", also known as "Zhenhezhai magnetic plate".Its inventor was Xu Zhiding, a native of Tai'an, Shandong who once served as a county magistrate. In 1718, he added a layer of magnetic glaze to the clay movable type and fired it into a magnetic movable type. In 1719, "Zhouyi Shuolue" (Figure 19) written by Zhang Erqi, a Shandong Confucian scholar at that time, and "Hao'an Gossip" written by the author's experience in reading Confucian classics were printed.Due to the shackles of the feudal society, it was not possible to print in large quantities at that time, nor did it receive due attention and preservation, and the printed copies had long since been lost. In 1961, Jinan Secondhand Bookstore bought "Hao'an Gossip".Coincidentally, "Hao'an Gossip" is divided into one and two volumes, which are bound into two volumes. The first volume was originally collected by Shandong Wang Xiantang (modern archaeologist and bibliographer) in 1932, because the second volume was missing. , I personally asked Lu Dahuang, who was fond of collecting local documents at that time, to assist in the visit. After a month, I found it in Zhangqiu, Shandong. The two volumes were exactly the same in terms of paper color and binding. They reunited quickly, which can be called a good story in the history of book collection.What a coincidence, in the same year that "Hao'an Gossip" was discovered, "Zhouyi Shuolue" was also discovered in Beijing, and these two precious rare books were returned to the National Library of China almost at the same time.The discovery of the second book provided valuable material materials for the study of my country's printing history. Since then, my country has printed books with magnetic movable type.The advantage of magnetic movable type is that it has a hard texture and is not affected by cold, heat and humidity. It is a great advancement in movable type printing technology.

In the Qing Dynasty, there were two people who used movable clay type printing. The first is Li Yao from Suzhou, who printed in Hangzhou in 1830 A.D. the "Southern Xinjiang Yishi Kanben" which he supplemented. A lot of anti-Qing historical materials.Inside the cover of the book is the seal script of "imitation of clay printing method of Song Dynasty".Two years later, he printed his own "Four Kinds of Gold and Stone Cases for Schooling". In his preface, he said that he printed it with a self-made "imitation Song Dynasty clay plate". .Both books are in the collection of the Beijing Library. The paper is white and black, and the cloth typesetting is very fresh. It can be called a sister book printed by Li Yaoni movable type.The printing technology of these two books is not only the practice and inheritance of clay movable type technology in the Song Dynasty, but also left real objects for later generations, so it is particularly precious.

The other is Zhai Jinsheng from Shuidong Village, 80 miles southwest of Jingxian County, Anhui Province.In 1844, he printed his collection of poems "Clay Tablet Trial Printing First Compilation". Zhai Jinsheng was born in a "scholarly family", but he is not a scholar, nor is he a high-ranking official, but a poor scholar who has tried and failed.He makes a living by teaching. He is good at poetry and painting, and he is also good at calligraphy. He is a man of many talents.Although his family was not rich, he was very enthusiastic about printing.In order to solve the difficulty of ordinary poor scholars in borrowing books and the distress of wanting to carve rare books but lack of strength, he imitated Bi Sheng's method to make clay movable type.It took him and his whole family 30 years, almost all their resources and all their energy, to make more than 100,000 imitation Song style clay movable types, which are divided into five types: large, medium, small, second small, and smallest. The large font, which claims to be "Mud Juzhen Edition", contains the meaning of gathering treasures.When he was seventy years old, he and his son, grandson, nephew, nephew, son-in-law, grandson, students, etc., worked together and worked together, and finally successfully printed his poetry collection and realized his wish.In the book, there are five poems of "Five-character Quatrains Compiled from My Own Writing Fu". Although there is no moving pen in it, it tells the hard journey of engraving, typesetting, writing, editing, and printing in the past 30 years. The transcript is as follows:

He spends his whole life raising movable type and half his life working as a carving insect.Don't wait for the achievement of the text, first prepare the words.Most of the old songs are scattered and lost, and the new works are less deliberate.Knowing that the urn will eventually be restored, it will be compiled today.The geese lined up in ranks, and the words were safe. After that, he printed 400 volumes of his friend Huang Juezi's poetry anthology "Xianping Bookstore Poetry Records First Collection".When he was 82 years old, he asked his grandson to print "Shuidong Zhai Family Genealogy".These printed copies and Zhai Jinsheng's clay type have been discovered continuously in recent years.The calligraphy and painting of the printed version are clear and square, the printing work is exquisite, and the ranks are neat, which is not inferior to the wooden movable type printing. The authenticity of movable type records.In the past, some Chinese and foreign scholars believed that movable clay type would break when touched and could not print books. This wrong view will naturally be destroyed with the discovery of printing books with clay movable type.

How are Zhai Jinsheng's movable clay type made?Recently, there is a new saying.The Institute of the History of Natural Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences collected in the Shuidong area a number of incised orthographic clay characters with a body larger than the characters, and the commonly used characters such as "ye", "yi", "qi", and "yi".The ink-colored orthographic characters can be printed only when the clay movable type is engraved in reverse, so what is the use of this kind of inscribed orthographic characters?After research, it is believed that this is the mother model for making Yangwen reverse lettering.It turns out that the method of making clay movable type, or commonly used characters, is not to directly engrave positive characters on clay blocks, but to first make the mother pattern of positive characters with negative patterns, and then burn them with fire to make them hard. Thin and thick clay with moderate dryness and humidity is filled into the mother form. After the characters are dry, they are taken out to become Yangwen reverse characters. After a little modification, a character is made.This principle is very similar to the current use of molds to cast lead type.If Zhai Jinsheng's movable clay type was really made in this way, then Bi Sheng's invention of clay movable type printing was not really inherited and developed until the Qing Dynasty.

Zhai Jinsheng, the only teacher in the history of Chinese printing who is also a writer and a printing worker, in order to "commemorate the unemployed, repair the incomplete editions, and not let the ancient books be confused", regardless of the difficulty of "the family is empty, the house is empty", and "picking flowers" The spirit of brewing honey, collecting armpits into fur” has been dedicated to making movable type for decades. His tireless creative spirit, perseverance and lofty ideal of dedicating himself to the printing industry are worthy of our admiration. .Huang Juezi praised him in his "Xianping Bookstore Wenlu": "You have traveled thousands of miles to seek talents, spared no time to do your best, expanded the secrets of treasures in the Song Dynasty, and followed our dynasty's collection of treasures. If there is a record of benefit, it will be an immortal hero."This passage affirms Zhai Jinsheng's achievements in printing and shows Huang Juezi's respect for this old friend.

In addition, Changzhou and Wuxi in Jiangsu and Yihuang in Jiangxi have also printed books with movable clay type.Changzhou’s clay movable type printing, when typesetting, first fills a layer of mud in the type plate, and then arranges the clay movable type on it, and waits for the mud to firmly fix the clay movable type, and then it can be printed. It is said that the printed book , the quality is so good that people from all over the country come to Changzhou to print books. Throughout the history of clay movable type, which was invented by Bi Sheng in the 1140s in the Northern Song Dynasty and Zhai Jinsheng used clay movable type to print books in the 1840s, it lasted intermittently for 800 years. It has made indelible achievements in the printing history of our country.

Wood movable type printing in the Qing Dynasty was more popular than that in the Ming Dynasty, regardless of whether it was government, private or private. First of all, in the tenth year of Yongzheng (1732 A.D.), the Ministry of Internal Affairs already used wooden movable type to typeprint the decrees of Zhu Zhu. The Chinese were printed with ink, and the verdict was printed with Zhu.In the Qianlong period, the Qing government used wooden movable type to print books on a large scale.It turns out that when Emperor Qianlong was editing the large series "Siku Quanshu", he ordered to engrave a large number of lost ancient books compiled from the Ming Dynasty "Yongle Dadian". , considering that printing such a large number of books, if engraving with engraving blocks will consume a lot of manpower, financial resources, and time, it is recommended to use wooden movable type printing instead.In his memorial to Emperor Qianlong in 1773, he said that engraving a copy of Sima Qian's "Historical Records" would cost more than 1,400 taels of silver; And with this wooden movable type, any book can be printed, which saves money and is convenient.After reading it, Emperor Qianlong immediately approved "very good, handle it like this".In this way, the jujube wood movable type began to be carved in the Wuying Hall in the imperial palace, and it was completed in the second year, with a total of 2,535 million movable type carved.134 kinds of books have been printed successively, with a total of more than 2300 volumes. This is the largest book printing with wooden movable type in the history of our country.Emperor Qianlong thought that the name of the movable type version was not elegant, so he changed it to "Juzhen version". Therefore, these books printed with movable type are called "Wuyingdian Juzhen Edition Series".Later, Jin Jian summed up the experience of printing this time and wrote the book "Wu Ying Dian Ju Treasure Edition Program", which is not long but rich in pictures and texts, and can be called a monograph on printing technology.The book has more than 7,000 characters and is divided into 16 chapters. It has detailed and specific records on a set of operating techniques from making wood, engraving to typesetting, proofreading, printing, etc., and illustrates them one by one with drawings.From here we know that the engraving of "Wuyingdian Juzhen Edition Series" has a clear division of labor, strict procedures, and a very sophisticated and comprehensive printing process, which has improved and developed compared with Wang Zhen's "Moveable Wood Type Printing Calligraphy".For example, when making wooden movable type, Wang Zhen’s method is to engrave characters on a whole board first, and then saw the characters one by one when the board is full; while Jin Jian’s method is to make individual wooden pieces of uniform size first. , and then put every 10 pieces of wood on a grooved wooden bed, plug it up and down with a deadbolt, and engrave characters like engraving a full board.Secondly, on the lines of the layout, Wang Zhen’s method is to arrange the characters first, and then use thin bamboo slices to separate the lines to make the lines; while the method of Jin Jian is to first use the pear wood block to carve 18 lines of grids. , there is a plate heart in the middle (the blank space in the middle of the page of ancient books, also known as "book mouth" or "plate mouth"), which is called "overlay". Print text, so that the entire line of text is neatly printed in the middle of the line, and the printed text and line are straight and clear.Third, when typesetting, Wang Zhen used a rotating typesetting plate, which was rotated when taking characters, so that characters could be identified with characters; Jin Jian used “character cabinets”, and there were 12 character cabinets in total, according to the order of Zi, Chou , Yin, Mao and other 12 earthly branch names, and put all the movable type in 12 large-character cabinets, each cabinet has 200 drawers, each drawer is divided into eight grids, and each grid stores four wooden movable type types. A certain part, a certain character and the number of pictures are marked on it. When picking a character, you can know which cabinet and drawer it is in according to the radical of the word and the number of pictures. If you are familiar with the method, you can raise your hand to pick it up.The word selection is in charge of a special person, and the typesetting worker only needs to call out what word he wants, and the word picker can pick it out for him.This method is based on people's words. It is said that "inspection is cheap and settlement is quick".These improvements all show that my country's movable type printing has taken a big step forward.In the Jiaqing period (AD 1796-1820), eight kinds of books were printed with this set of wooden movable type, but the various titles of these eight kinds of books were different from the "Juzhenban Series of Wuyingdian", so they were called Juzhenban booklet.In this way, a total of 142 kinds of books were printed in this pair of wooden movable type, which was presided over by Jin Jian.Since then, this pair of precious wooden movable type has been stored in the Hall of Martial Arts for a long time, and it was not fully utilized, and was finally burned by the guards on duty. It is a pity.

As a result of the Qing government's leadership and the publication of the "Wu Ying Dian Ju Treasure Edition Program", government offices, academies and official bookstores all over the country followed suit, making wooden movable type printing almost all over the inland provinces.In addition, there are also many privately printed books with wooden movable type. The first publication of the world-famous book was printed with wooden movable type by Gao E’s friend Cheng Weiyuan in the name of Cuiwen Bookstore in 1791 AD. "Cheng Jia Ben".After the publication of the book, due to the large demand and unable to meet the needs of the society, it was revised and published again in the second year, which is known as "Cheng Yi's version".The well-known historiographical masterpiece compiled by Li Tao of the Southern Song Dynasty, and the chronological history book of the Northern Song Dynasty "Continued Zizhi Tongjian Changbian" 520 volumes were printed by the bibliophile Zhang Jinwu in 1819, and the fonts are quite neat.Most of the series "Xue Hai Lei Bian" has 431 kinds and 810 volumes. It was typefaced by the Chao family in Lu'an County, Anhui Province in 1831. Most of the ancient books compiled in this book are rare books with high academic value.After the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement, there was a county magistrate in Guangdong who carved 360,000 wooden movable type, and the engraving was also very exquisite. The number exceeded the wooden movable type of Wuying Temple by about 1/3, which can be said to have created a new record in the number of wooden movable type in my country. Unfortunately, he Neither the printed book nor his name has been handed down.

There are also some commercial bookstores that also use wooden movable type to print books. For example, Juzhentang in Beijing in the late Qing Dynasty printed a large number of popular novels and Guci.The Suzhou Bookstore in the south also reprinted the "Lost Collection Series" edited by the Japanese Lin Heng. "Sword Song" means "Xu Fuxing's books were not burned, and hundreds of lost books still exist today", so it is named "Yu Cun Series". This is a very valuable book for studying the history of cultural exchanges between China and Japan.Some people in Shanghai also opened a bookstore at the same time, printing books with wooden movable type and selling books at the same time.In short, many provinces in the south and Hebei, Henan, Shandong in the north, and Shaanxi-Gansu in the northwest have wooden movable type printing.

There are about 2,000 kinds of wooden movable type printed copies of the Qing Dynasty that are circulating now, covering a wide range of contents, among which there are more collections of poems and essays of past dynasties and popular literature.However, the number of prints of a book is only a few, dozens, or at most 100.The largest number of printed books is genealogy, which is also called genealogy, which records the lineage of a surname and the deeds of important people.It began in the Song Dynasty and prevailed in the Qing Dynasty.At that time, there were "geneagraphers" who specialized in typesetting family trees in Jiangsu and Zhejiang. After the autumn harvest, they took up the burden of movable type, and a group of five or 10 people went from town to town to print family trees. They can finish printing a family tree, so they regard printing as a sideline business, and make money by printing books during the slack season.The business may be quite prosperous, and the number of prints will not be small. Today, the Beijing Library alone has collected more than 500 family trees of wooden movable type in the Qing Dynasty.Some people also specialize in engraving wooden movable type, which is used for pawning, selling or as gifts to relatives and friends. The wooden movable type is regarded as a commodity and widely circulated, which shows the prevalence of wooden movable type in the Qing Dynasty. The Qing Dynasty also used wooden movable type to print newspapers. In addition to the "Chaobao" (also known as Dichao, Beijing News, and Gechao) printed by the Qing government, Kang Youwei, the leader of the Reformation School, also printed "Chinese and Foreign Jiwen" with wooden movable type, every other day. , along with the "Chao Bao" attached to the princes and ministers, it published political news, propagandized the reform, and played a certain role in promoting the development of the reform movement.As for the privately-run "Beijing News" that appeared after the middle of the Ming Dynasty, after the Qing Dynasty entered the customs, there were more than 10 in Beijing, all of which were printed with wooden movable type or clay movable type. The word "Beijing News" overprinted in red was used as the masthead, with a total circulation of more than 10,000 copies.Because yellow paper is often used as the cover, it is called "Yellow Paper Beijing News".It was not until the Qing government was overthrown in 1911 that the "Beijing News" ceased publication, and the history of ancient Chinese newspapers came to an end. The Qing Dynasty also had tin movable type. According to an American record, there was a bookseller surnamed Tang in Foshan Town, Guangdong Province, who used clay molds to cast tin movable type in 1850 AD.At that time, Foshan Town had a well-developed industry and commerce, and a thriving publishing industry. It was one of the famous publishing centers in the Qing Dynasty.The books published here sell well, not only in the mainland, but also in Southeast Asian countries. This aroused the interest of a bookseller surnamed Tang. He invested more than 10,000 yuan and cast three sets of tin movable type with different fonts: one is flat type. , a pair of long fonts and large characters, and a pair of long fonts and small characters used as small notes on the text, a total of 250,000.The font is beautiful and generous, not only achieved success in model making, casting and typesetting, but also solved the technical problem that Chinese ink is not easily absorbed by metal movable type. In 1852 AD, he published the "Tong Kao of Documents" written by Ma Duanlin, a historian of the Yuan Dynasty, on ancient laws and regulations. This is the first printed tin movable type in the world's printing history.It is a pity that this bookseller and printer, who occupies an important position in the history of tin movable type printing in our country, did not print his name on the book. Later generations only know his surname Tang.The pair of tin movable type he cast was used by the Tiandi Society in 1854 to cause bullets to attack the Qing army.Since then, there have been few literature records about tin movable type. Copper movable type printing in the Qing Dynasty was greatly influenced by the Ming Dynasty.From the very beginning, the Qing government produced a large number of copper movable type in the court, about 253,500 copper characters, and the number of characters is different.In the last years of Kangxi, it was used to print the astronomical book "Ephemeris Kaoyuan", the mathematics book "The Essence of Mathematics", and the music book "Lv Lu Zhengyi".But the most famous Neifu copper movable type printing is the "Imperial Collection of Ancient and Modern Books".This book was compiled by Chen Menglei and others during the Kangxi period.Chen Menglei was a well-known scholar in the early Qing Dynasty. He was knowledgeable and knowledgeable. He spent more than 20 years compiling the first draft of "Book Compilation" by "checking with his eyes and hands, morning and evening". The copying was not completed until 1706 A.D., and another volume of catalog and general examples was written, which was submitted to Emperor Kangxi for review, and Emperor Kangxi bestowed the name "The Collection of Ancient and Modern Books".In order to commend Chen Menglei's talent, Emperor Kangxi specially bestowed a couplet of "high pines and luxuriant leaves, old cranes and new feathers" as a compliment.However, before the book was printed, Emperor Kangxi passed away, and a throne struggle broke out in the Qing court, and the fourth son of the emperor, Yinzhen (that is, Emperor Yongzheng), won the throne.Chen Menglei was also implicated and punished because he had been the teacher of the third son of the emperor, Prince Cheng Yinzhi. He was exiled to the Northeast for the crime of "showing off and committing many crimes". He was 72 years old this year.After Yongzheng ascended the throne, the Secretary of the Household Department, painter Jiang Tingxi and others were specially appointed to re-edit, edit, add, delete, and edit "The Collection of Ancient and Modern Books".It is an all-encompassing and huge encyclopedia with 64 volumes in print.Each book has 10,000 volumes, divided into six series, 32 classics, and 6109 volumes. Each volume includes general examinations, general remarks, charts, biographies, art and literature, sentence construction, chronicles, miscellaneous records, and external volumes.Each book has about 160 million characters, divided into 5020 volumes and packed into 522 letters.It took only three years for such a great book to be printed, which is amazingly short.The book classifies ancient and modern knowledge into categories, from astronomy, geography, animals and plants to social systems, economy, history, and various utensils and foreign conditions. , reference books with rich pictures and texts, and most of the original texts recorded are whole paragraphs, whole articles, and whole parts, and the sources are indicated one by one, which is convenient for checking, so it is highly praised by Chinese and foreign scholars.It is much more extensive and detailed than the "Encyclopedia Britannica" at the same time, "Taiping Yulan" and "Cefu Yuangui" in the Song Dynasty of our country.Needham, the author of the famous "History of Science and Technology in China", once said with enthusiasm: "The largest encyclopedia we often consult is "Book Integration"... This is an extremely precious gift." Foreign scholars are using "Books In the process of "Integrated", reference books were specially compiled for easy reference. For example, the Ministry of Education of Japan compiled the "Category of Integrated Ancient and Modern Books", and Gilles of the United Kingdom compiled "Integrated Index of Ancient and Modern Books" and "Ancient and Modern Books" compiled by Waber. Book Integration Fangyu Compilation Index", etc., it can be seen that this book has a great influence abroad.The book is typefaced in two large and small fonts, the main text in large characters, and the notes in small characters. The font is correct and beautiful, and it is printed on Hehua paper.But now it is difficult to find a complete original. This copper movable type printing project is the largest project in the history of copper movable type printing, which shows that the development of copper movable type printing technology has reached its peak so far. This pair of court copper movable type, no other books were printed later, it was shelved in the copper font library of the Wuying Hall. Due to the theft of the officials in charge, the copper movable type gradually decreased. In order to cover up their crimes, they took advantage of the shortage of coins in Beijing. In 1744, all the remaining precious copper characters were melted down and cast into copper coins. At that time, some private houses and bookstores also used copper movable type to print books.The "Chuili Pavilion" in Changshu, Jiangsu Province printed a copy of "Wen Yuan Ying Hua Lu Fu Xuan" in 1686. This is the earliest known copper movable type printing in the Qing Dynasty. It is 40 years earlier than "Ancient and Modern Book Integration". It is printed in italics, and the printing is quite precise.Manchurian General Wu Long'a also made copper characters, and quoted "Sheng Yu Guang Xun" in Taiwan in the twelfth year of Jiaqing (AD 1807). The content of this book is old, but "the calligraphy and painting are exquisite".In addition, the Xu family in Changzhou printed the Xu family tree in 1858, which is the only copper-printed copy of the family tree.Two officials in Hangzhou also printed seven kinds of poems and essays and military works series "Secretary of Water and Land Offensive and Defensive Strategy" with copper movable type, and there are still four kinds in the library of Peking University.The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom also engaged in copper movable type printing.But the most famous one is Lin Chunqi from Fuzhou. From 1825 to 1846, he spent 21 years and spent more than 200,000 taels of silver to carve more than 400,000 large and small copper characters. It is rare in the history of metal type to be made in Asia.This engraved copper character was named "Futian Shuhai" because Lin Chunqi's native place was Longtian, Fuqing County. It was written in block letters and neatly engraved. It was used to print the series of phonology books written by Gu Yanwu, a scholar in the early Qing Dynasty "Five Books of Music", but now there are only two kinds of "Yin Lun" and "Shiben Yin".Also printed "Military Chinese Medicine Prescriptions" for medical use during the march.He also wrote an "Preface to Copper Plates", which described the reasons and processes of his making copper movable type, which is an important document about engraving metal movable type. The popularity and exquisiteness of copper movable type in the Qing Dynasty surpassed that of the Ming Dynasty, but there were not as many printed copies as in the Ming Dynasty.There are not many copper movable type printed copies handed down from the Qing Dynasty to the present. There were also movable lead type in the Qing Dynasty. In 1834, Wei Song's "One is the beginning of the century" said: "Today, copper and lead are used as movable type." It can be seen that from the Ming Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty, some people in our country have been using lead as movable type. After the Opium War, Western type printing gradually became popular in my country. Types cast by the West replaced all kinds of movable types in my country and became the mainstream of modern printing.

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