Character-carving Skills

The skill of carving characters emerged very early. The oldest inscriptions were made on oracle bones such as animal bones and shells. Inscriptions on bronze ware flourished from the Shang Dynasty to the Western Zhou Dynasty (16th century-771BC). Chinese characters were inscribed in clay molds before casting.

Carving characters on stones came even earlier. Symbol carvings on surfaces of cliffs have been traced back to extremely ancient times. The classics in great-seal script and small-seal script were all carved on stones. The Xipi ng Stone Inscriptions of the Eastern Han (25-220) involved carving the Confucian classics in the clerical script onto 46 stone tables, totaling around 200,000 characters.

Engraved Block Printing

With the inventions of paper and ink, the stamper, an early form of engraved block printing, gradually became popular during the Jin Dynasty (265-420). Block printing first appeared in the Tang Dynasty (618-907). The text was first written on a piece of thin paper, and then glued face down onto a wooden plate. The characters were carved out to make a wood-block printing plate, which was used to print the text. Wood-block printing took a long time as a new block had to be carved for every page in a book.

At the beginning, the engraved block printing possibly was only popular among ordinary people. The printed books included Confucian classics, Buddhist scriptures, dictionaries, and mathematics as well other kinds. The technique was advanced very fast. By the year 1000, paged books in the modern style had replaced scrolls.

The printing industry really developed in the Song Dynasty (960-1279) when publishing became a new trade in China. During the early Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127), the Buddhist Tripitaka (Canon) was printed in Chengdu of Southwest China's Sichuan Province from 130,000 engraved blocks. The Imperial Academy made more than 100,000 engraved blocks to print sutra (Buddhist literature) and history books. There are about 700 extant Song block-printed books, neatly engraved and exquisitely printed, that are considered rare books in China.