Clay Movable-Type Printing

Timeline

1. c. 1041–1048Printing workshop in Hubei, Northern Song · HubeiBi Sheng carved characters in clay, fired them hard, densely arranged the type on an iron frame, inked and pressed paper to print, and could disassemble and reuse individual characters, breaking the one-block-one-book limitation of woodblock printing and pioneering movable-type printing worldwide.
2. 1086–1093Bianjing, Northern Song · BianjingIn volume 28 of Dream Pool Essays, Shen Kuo detailed the full process of Bi Sheng's clay movable type—carving, typesetting, printing, and disassembly—and noted the advantage of movable-type printing being 'extremely swift,' becoming the core documentary source for later research on movable type.
3. 1321–1330Printing centers such as Hangzhou and Jianyang in the Yuan dynasty · FujianThe Yuan dynasty printing industry flourished with woodblock still dominant; clay and wooden movable type continued to be used for official books, genealogies, and local gazetteers—works with limited print runs requiring frequent re-typesetting—forming, together with banknote printing, the landscape of Yuan printing technology.
4. 1313–1322Jiangzhe Province, Yuan dynasty · ZhejiangWang Zhen wrote the Agricultural Treatise, created wooden movable type, and designed a rotating typesetting table; his 'Method of Making Movable Type for Printing' systematically summarized clay and wooden movable-type techniques, marking movable type's theoretical consolidation and technical improvement in the Yuan dynasty.