clay movable type

That’s how they did it, type – setting with… clay movable types. When I first read about it, as how it was first done in China around 1000 years ago, I can’t totally imagine how this could be done! But the video explains every details clearly, they use a very fine clay, almost ceramics, to ensure the sharpness of the printed characters. Imagine the work load, having everything prepared for a typical set of 5000~6000 of commonly-used Chinese characters!

As I was watching the clip, I realize that clay movable type is a natural continuation of woodblock printing, since they used woodblock carving as mold to produce negative clay mold, then use this negative mold to produce the final positive types used for printing! That’s how it was done before the invention of metal movable types in Korea 2 centuries later. You can see in the clip, he was printing the very first pages of the Book of Poetry (Shih-ching)!