“... good wood block printing rests upon the perfection of drawing and painting, of color and line."
Hiroshi Yoshida, Japanese Woodblock Printing (1939)
Woodblock printing first appeared in China during the Tang Dynasty in the ninth century and was initially used in the production of textiles and Buddhist texts and amulets. A text or image was transferred to a thin layer of paper that was then glued face down onto a wooden surface using rice paste. The lines would then be cut out by the block maker. Only those portions of a page or pattern to be inked were left untouched, on the block's surface, with the remainder carved away along the grain using a fist knife known as a quan dao. Dense hardwoods such as birch, pear, or jujube were used because they withstood moisture and insects yet their regular, fine grains lent themselves to easy engraving and printing. Once a block was completed, the ink was rubbed onto the surface of the raised lines, and a skilled artisan could produce 1,000 or more sheets a day, thus ushering in the era of mass- produced books and manuscripts.
The world's oldest extant woodblock-printed book that carries the date of its production is the Diamond Sutra, an Indian Buddhist Sanskrit text originally dating to 400, and later translated into Chinese and block- printed in ink on paper by an artisan, Wang Jie, on May 11, 868. It was discovered in a sealed cave in northwestern China by the archeologist Sir Marc Aurel Stein in 1907 However, it is by no means the oldest example of block printing. The degree of technical perfection in the Diamond Sutra suggests that the practice of woodblock printing had been long established by the time of its production.
Woodblock printing continued to be popular in East Asia well into the nineteenth century.
