The Historical Impact of Movable Type in China
Prior to the invention of movable type, "woodblock printing" was used in China to print an entire page of a specific text. This technique had been used for centuries, particularly for languages that relied on thousands of characters.
Movable type was invented in China by Bi Sheng during the Northern Song Dynasty. Bi Sheng used clay types, hardened by baking them in fire, to create the first movable type. However, these types were too fragile for large-scale printing. Wang Zhen, a government official, later improved the system by instead creating types out of more durable wood. This new method overcame many of the shortcomings of woodblock printing. Rather than manually carving an individual block to print a single page, movable type printing allowed for the quick assembly of a page of text. Furthermore, these new, more compact type fonts could be reused and stored.
Although Bi Sheng's invention is considered by some archaeologists to be the beginning of typography in China, it failed to become widely used at the time.
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