Material Texts

This chapter deals with the forms in which Chinese texts reached neighbouring societies and were reproduced there. Thanks to the spread of paper-making technology, the materials with which to make manuscripts were plentiful, and in fact manuscripts continued to form an important part of book production even after the advent of print. The earliest kind of printing was xylography (woodblock printing), which was probably first put to use in China in the seventh century and rapidly spread to Korea, Japan, and elsewhere. In the eleventh century typography (movable type printing) was invented in China, but it was not put to much use there: rather, it was in the Tangut empire and Korea that typography, under the auspices of the state, came to be used extensively for book production. Typography also reached Japan and Vietnam, but had only a limited impact and in both societies xylography remained dominant.