Bi Sheng and the Invention of Movable Type Printing (c. 1040)

Bi Sheng was a Chinese craftsman of the Northern Song dynasty who invented printing with movable type in the 1040s, about four centuries before Johannes Gutenberg in Europe. He made individual characters from baked clay, set them in an iron frame and printed pages from them, then broke up the frame to reuse the type. Almost everything known about him comes from a single passage by the scholar Shen Kuo, but that passage records one of the most important inventions in the history of communication.

Printing before Bi Sheng

By the 11th century China had several centuries of printing behind it. Woodblock printing, in which a whole page of text was carved in reverse on a wooden block, had developed by the 7th or 8th century and was widespread under the late Tang. The Diamond Sutra of 868, found at Dunhuang, is the oldest surviving dated printed book.

Under the Song dynasty, founded in 960, printing expanded rapidly. The government printed the Confucian classics, histories, medical works and the Buddhist canon, while private and commercial printers served a growing class of scholars preparing for the civil service examinations. Every new book, however, required carving thousands of blocks, one for each page or pair of pages. A system of reusable characters promised to save much of that labour.

Shen Kuo’s account

The only contemporary description of Bi Sheng’s invention appears in the Dream Pool Essays (Mengxi bitan), a collection of notes on science, technology and history completed by the official and polymath Shen Kuo around 1088. Shen states that during the Qingli reign (1041–1048) a commoner, Bi Sheng, invented movable type. The term he uses, buyi, literally “cloth clothing”, means someone without official rank.

Shen Kuo was well placed to know. He explains that after Bi Sheng’s death his type passed to members of Shen’s own family, who kept it. His account is detailed, practical and consistent, which is why historians accept it, even though no other Song source describes Bi Sheng and none of his type survives. The Dream Pool Essays are also famous for the first clear description of the magnetic needle compass.

Shen Kuo himself (1031–1095) was an imperial official who served in finance, diplomacy, frontier defence and the astronomical bureau, and he took an unusual interest in the work of artisans. His notes record techniques of metallurgy, medicine, mapmaking and engineering that official histories ignored. Without his curiosity about an obscure craftsman, Bi Sheng’s name would almost certainly have been lost.

How the clay type worked

Bi Sheng carved each character on a small piece of sticky clay, with the face of the character about as thin as the rim of a coin. The pieces were then hardened by fire, turning them into small ceramic blocks.

To print, he took an iron plate and covered it with a mixture of pine resin, wax and paper ash. An iron frame was placed on the plate and filled tightly with type, arranged in lines to form a page. The plate was warmed over a fire until the mixture softened, and a flat board was pressed on the type so that every character’s face lay perfectly level. When the mixture cooled, the type was locked in place and could be inked and printed like a woodblock.

After printing, the plate was warmed again, the adhesive softened and the type could be brushed off and sorted for reuse. Bi Sheng kept two iron plates working in turn: while one was printing, the other was being set, so production never stopped.

Organising thousands of characters

Chinese writing posed a challenge that alphabetic scripts do not. Instead of a few dozen letters, a printer needed thousands of different characters. Bi Sheng made multiple copies of each one, and more than twenty copies of very common characters, such as grammatical particles, which might appear many times on a page. Rare characters that were not in stock could be carved on the spot and baked quickly in a straw fire.

The type was stored in wooden cases, arranged by rhyme group and labelled with paper tags, a system that matched the way Chinese dictionaries and scholars organised characters. Shen Kuo notes that wood was unsuitable for type because its grain was uneven and it absorbed moisture, making the surface uneven, and because wooden type stuck to the adhesive.

Shen also gives a clear assessment of the method’s economics. For two or three copies it was not efficient, he wrote, but for printing hundreds or thousands of copies it was extremely fast.

Movable type after Bi Sheng

The idea survived its inventor. The earliest surviving books printed with movable type come from the Tangut state of Western Xia in the 12th and 13th centuries, including Buddhist texts printed with clay and wooden type. One of the best known, a Tangut Buddhist tantra discovered at a pagoda in Ningxia in 1991, is regarded as one of the earliest surviving books printed with wooden movable type.

Around 1297–1298, the official Wang Zhen had more than 60,000 wooden characters carved while serving as a magistrate in Anhui, and used them to print a local gazetteer. In his Treatise on Agriculture, published in 1313, he described his method in detail, including revolving tables that allowed compositors to sit while reaching the characters they needed. Wooden type in the Uyghur script, dated to around 1300, was found at Dunhuang in the early 20th century.

In Korea, the Goryeo kingdom pioneered cast metal type in the 13th century. A ritual text, the Prescribed Ritual Texts of the Past and Present, is recorded as printed with metal type in 1234, and the Buddhist anthology known as Jikji, printed in 1377, is the oldest surviving book made with metal movable type. The Joseon dynasty set up a royal type foundry in 1403 and cast many fonts; under King Sejong, who also promulgated the hangul alphabet in 1446, Korean printers improved the casting and setting of type so that pages could be printed faster and more evenly. In China, bronze type was used by printing families in Wuxi from the late 15th century, and the Qing court produced the vast encyclopedia Gujin tushu jicheng in 1726 with copper type and later a large font of wooden type for the Wuying Palace editions.

Why woodblock still dominated

Despite these achievements, most Chinese books continued to be printed from woodblocks until the 19th century. A complete font of movable type needed tens of thousands of pieces, which were costly to make, store and sort. Skilled block carvers were relatively cheap, blocks could be kept for reprints, and a printer could produce a few copies at a time as demand arose.

Movable type made most sense for large single editions, government projects and publications such as genealogies, where a family needed a set number of copies once. In the late imperial period movable type found a lasting niche in the printing of clan genealogies, which were updated every generation and printed in small runs by travelling printers who carried their own wooden fonts from village to village. Small presses also used it for collected works and local histories. This pattern helps explain why the technique was invented early in East Asia but did not bring the sudden change in book production that followed Gutenberg in Europe.

Myths and facts

Myth: clay type cannot really work. Some modern writers doubted whether baked clay type could print well. In 1844, however, Zhai Jinsheng of Anhui printed books with clay type he had made himself, and modern experiments have also produced usable clay type, supporting Shen Kuo’s description.

Myth: Bi Sheng’s tomb has been found. A tombstone discovered in Yingshan county, Hubei, in 1990 has been proposed as that of Bi Sheng. Some Chinese scholars accept the identification, but others question whether it refers to the same man, so it remains debated.

Fact: Gutenberg’s invention was very likely independent. Johannes Gutenberg developed metal type cast in a hand mould, oil-based ink and a press in Mainz in the mid-15th century, and no documented line of transmission from China or Korea to him has been established. The two inventions answered similar needs in very different writing systems.

Timeline

• 868: The Diamond Sutra, the oldest surviving dated printed book, is produced in Tang China.
• 1041–1048: During the Qingli reign, Bi Sheng invents clay movable type.
• c. 1088: Shen Kuo describes Bi Sheng’s method in the Dream Pool Essays.
• 12th–13th centuries: Books are printed with movable type in the Tangut Western Xia state.
• 1234: A Korean ritual text is recorded as printed with metal type.
• c. 1297–1298: Wang Zhen has more than 60,000 wooden characters carved and prints a gazetteer.
• 1377: Jikji is printed with metal type in Goryeo Korea.
• c. 1440–1450: Johannes Gutenberg develops his printing system in Mainz.

Why it matters

Bi Sheng’s clay type was the first known solution to the problem of printing from reusable, separate characters, the principle behind almost all printing until the digital age. His invention shows how much of the technology of the medieval world originated in Song China, and his story, preserved by a single careful observer, reminds us how fragile the record of ordinary inventors can be. The later history of Gutenberg’s printing press is one chapter of a story that began in East Asia.