Chinese Wooden Movable Type Printing

Timeline

1. 1040Around Bianjing, Northern Song · HenanBi Sheng made type from clay paste, hardened it by firing, and assembled it into forms; Shen Kuo recorded that the principle could be extended to wooden movable type. Compared with carving entire blocks, the cost of swapping and resetting type was significantly lower.
2. 1100–1279Bookshops of Lin'an (Hangzhou) · ZhejiangAfter the capital moved south, bookshops in Hangzhou, Jianyang, and elsewhere flourished; wooden movable type and woodblock printing were used side by side to collate and print Confucian classics and medical encyclopedias.
3. 1271–1368Dadu and Jiangnan printing workshops · ChinaThe Yuan continued the wooden movable type tradition, and Wang Zhen's Book of Agriculture systematically recorded type-making and typesetting techniques; exchange with Western Regions woodblock printing technology drove the differentiation of East Asian movable type lineages.
4. 1391–1400Prefectures of Jiangnan · JiangsuFrom the late Hongwu through the Jianwen and Yongle periods, wooden movable type was widely used in princely press printing and local gazetteer compilation, becoming one of the main low-cost, multi-edition printing technologies of the early Ming.