Printing Technology on the Silk Road

The Chinese invention of printing was one of the most important technological achievements of the pre-modern world. Woodblock printing, developed in China during the Tang dynasty, made possible the mass production of Buddhist sutras, almanacs, and government documents. The later invention of movable type, attributed to the alchemist Bi Sheng in the eleventh century, was an even more consequential innovation. The technology had a long history of transmission along the Silk Road, and the absence of a Gutenberg-style revolution in East Asia is one of the central questions in the comparative history of technology. The wider context of the technological exchanges that carried printing along the network is treated in the article on cultural exchange along the Silk Road, and the paper on which the printed material relied is described in the article on paper-making on the Silk Road.

The origins of Chinese woodblock printing are obscure, but the earliest surviving printed book, a Buddhist sutra known as the Diamond Sutra of 868 CE, is also among the most refined. The Diamond Sutra was discovered, along with tens of thousands of other manuscripts, in the Library Cave at Dunhuang in 1900. The technical sophistication of the Diamond Sutra implies that printing had been practised for at least a century before 868 — the piece is, in my view, the most under-appreciated single document in the history of the book, and the British Library’s scanned copy (Or.8210/P.2) is freely available online, which is a remarkable piece of access.

The principal early use of woodblock printing in China was religious. The Buddhist communities of the Tang period produced enormous numbers of printed sutras, both for use in the monasteries and for distribution as merit-making gifts. The Mogao Caves at Dunhuang contain printed dhāraṇī rolls, printed sutras, and the printed almanacs and calendars that were a regular feature of the Tang print industry. The government of the Tang also used printing for the publication of almanacs, for medical texts, and for some administrative documents. Paper, described in the article on paper-making on the Silk Road, was cheap enough in Tang China to be used for printed material. A point that is often missed: the Tang government’s principal printing was for almanacs and calendars, not for Buddhist texts, and the calendar-printing industry was, in tonnage terms, larger than the religious one.

Printing is, in many ways, the slowest of Silk Road technologies to move.

The moveable type of Bi Sheng

The invention of movable type is attributed to Bi Sheng, a smith and alchemist working in the Song capital of Kaifeng around 1040 CE. Bi Sheng’s type was made of fired clay, the individual characters cut separately and set into an iron frame. The frame was warmed to soften the binding compound, the type was arranged, the page was printed, and the type was then recovered for reuse. The description is technically specific — Bi Sheng knew that the type had to be slightly taller than the iron frame, and he used a sticky compound of resin, wax, and paper ash as the adhesive — and the fact that the technique is described in this much detail suggests it was, in fact, a working technology, not a paper proposal.

Bi Sheng’s invention is described in a single passage in the Dream Pool Essays (Mengxi Bitan) of the polymath Shen Kuo, written around 1088 CE. Movable type did not displace woodblock printing in East Asia. The Chinese script, with thousands of distinct characters, made the setting of movable type slow and expensive, and woodblock printing was embedded in the aesthetic of Chinese book production — popular accounts tend to overstate the failure of Bi Sheng’s invention, however. The technology worked, and was used continuously in East Asia; it simply did not replace woodblock for the bulk of Chinese-language printing, where the per-page economics of block-cutting were favourable. The reader who treats movable type as a failed Chinese experiment is, I think, missing the point: it succeeded in the niches where the per-page economics worked, and failed in the niches where they did not.

Printing in Korea, Japan, and the Uyghur world

Movable type was independently developed in Korea in the thirteenth century, where the Goryeo court produced a famous set of bronze type for the printing of the Buddhist canon. The Goryeo Tripitaka Koreana, completed in 1251, is one of the most important monuments of East Asian book culture (the wooden blocks, over 80,000 of them, are still stored at Haeinsa temple on Mount Kaya, where the dehumidification system has been working continuously since the thirteenth century). The Koreans also produced sets of movable type for the printing of official documents. Movable type was used in the Uyghur Khaganate, where the script, derived from the Sogdian tradition, lent itself well to character-by-character composition, and surviving fragments attest a flourishing but now poorly documented Uyghur printing industry.

The Uyghur Khaganate, which controlled the Mongolian steppe in the eighth and ninth centuries, developed a form of woodblock printing for Buddhist and Manichaean texts. The Uyghurs were in contact with both the Chinese and the Islamic worlds, and the Uyghur script was adapted for the printing of religious texts in several languages. The Uyghur tradition represents one of the few cases in which Chinese printing technology was transmitted westward to a non-Chinese society — but the transmission stopped at the Uyghur frontier. The standard “Silk Road” narrative assumes a continuous chain of technology transfer from China to Europe, and the printing case is, in fact, the cleanest counter-example to that chain. The European movable-type revolution was, on the evidence, an independent invention. The reader who wants the Silk Road to be the source of every modern technology will be frustrated here.

A personal note

The connection between Chinese woodblock printing and the European movable-type revolution is, as far as one can tell, a non-connection. The European invention was independent. The Silk Road carried the Chinese technology to Korea and Japan, where it had a flourishing life; it did not, in any documented way, carry it to Europe. The reader who wants the Silk Road to be the source of every modern technology will be disappointed here.

Further reading

• Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford, 2012). The single best modern overview.
• The relevant chapter of The Cambridge History of Inner Asia (Cambridge, multiple dates).
• One article from a recent issue of Central Asiatic Journal or Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (JESHO) for current scholarship.
• Susan Whitfield, ed., The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith (British Library, 2018) for the British Library’s own primary-source scholarship.

Related pages

See also Cultural exchange along the Silk Road, Paper-making on the Silk Road, and Buddhism on the Silk Road.