“... for printing hundreds or thousands of copies, it was marvelously quick"
Shen Kuo, Dream Pool Essays (1088)
In 1041, in the best traditions of China's inventive and technologically vibrant Song Dynasty (960-1280 C.E.), an alchemist named Bi Sheng shaped a series of reusable, moistened clay tablets, inscribed an individual Chinese character upon the surface of each one, fired them to harden and make them permanent, and in the process invented movable type. Printers then took the characters and laid them within an iron frame coated with a mix of resin, turpentine, wax, and paper ash, arranging the characters to reflect what was to become the printed page.
Unlike the Western alphabet that requires the generation and arrangement of only twenty-six characters, Bi Sheng worked in a language with over 5,000 distinct characters. Many of these needed several pieces of type to complete, and all of them required the making of multiple copies. The copies were wrapped in paper and stored within wooden framed cases when not in use, ordered according to the first syllable of their pronunciation. Like Johannes Gutenberg hundreds of years later, Bi Sheng failed to receive recognition for his invention until long after his death, despite his efforts being recorded by the great Chinese scientist Shen Kuo in his series of Dream Pool Essays.
The multiplicity of Chinese characters and symbols was one reason for the failure of Bi Sheng's invention to impact significantly upon Chinese society, in contrast to Gutenberg's press in fifteenth-century Europe. Another problem was that clay tablets were manifestly unsuitable for large-scale printing and were not at all durable. The limitations of clay led eventually to the invention in Korea of metal movable type, which accelerated the spread of printing in Asia in the early thirteenth century.
