Historical contribution
What Kuo contributed
Shen Kuo’s 11th-century account describes Bi Sheng making individual characters from baked clay, arranging them on an iron plate and using multiple formes to alternate between composition and printing. Wang Zhen later described wooden type and a rotating type table for sorting and retrieval. Korean printers developed bronze and other metal type traditions; the 1377 Jikji is the oldest surviving book printed with movable metal type, not.
Why it mattered
Makes printed pages locally revisable and character units reusable.
Connected topics
Where this fits in ITEM
Evidence
Sources and further reading
- Baegun hwasang chorok buljo jikji simche yojeol:
UNESCO Memory of the World
- Dream Pool Essays, movable type account translated in Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin, Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 5 Part 1:
Shen Kuo
- Jikji Memory of the World Prize and historical overview:
Jikji Memory of the World Prize and historical overview:
- Printing and movable type in East Asia: Movable type transformed the page from a durable carved object into a temporary arrangement of reusable signs. That improved correction and recombination, but only by creating a demanding inventory system. Every character had to exist in sufficient quantity, occupy a known location, maintain printing height and return home after use. East Asian history makes the topic analytically valuable because it defeats technological inevitability. Movable type did not automatically erase woodblocks, and its social consequences were not prewritten inside the invention. Script, genre, patronage, labour, run size, image requirements and reprint strategy determined the balance. The true system was therefore larger than the sort. It included repertoire design, storage, retrieval, composition, proofing, impression and distribution back into inventory. This is the first printing technology in the map whose central bottleneck resembles a database query: the page can be recomposed only when the system can find the signs it knows it owns
Columbia University Asia for Educators
- The Rise of Printing in Medieval East Asia:
Oxford Research Encyclopedia