 Hello and welcome, a very warm welcome to everybody who is here both physically and virtually online. My name is David Pearson. I'm the Chairman of the Selection Council of the Panitzi Foundation and I'm just so delighted to welcome you here to the 36th annual series of Panitzi lectures. It is just so great to be back. Last year was the very first time in the long history of the series that we had no lectures and we very much hope that we will never be in that dark place again. We can of course welcome the whole world this year through the wonders of modern technology and contemporary live streaming. So we do have a much larger audience tonight than is here physically present in the room and we are hugely grateful to Jonathan Hill, the New York Bookseller, for sponsoring the costs of that live streaming. So wherever you are tuning in from, as warm a welcome as to those of you who are in the room. A little bit of housekeeping that I've asked to pass on. Those of you who are watching online, you can submit questions during the event in the question box below the video and we will pick those up and we will have time for a few questions and answers at the end of the lecture and I will have an iPad which will show me the questions which have come in online and we will try and box and cocks between questions in the room and questions that are online. So we'll put all the questions to Cynthia at the end of the event and see how we go. You will find social media links below the video in case you want to continue the conversation on other platforms and you can find out more about the event, you can re-speak biographies and all of those kinds of things using the links that you'll find below the video for those of you who are live streaming. The Penicillectures were founded about 40 years ago by Mrs Catherine DeVas who was a long-time lover of both books and of the British Library and its very wonderful collections. They were named after one of the library's great heroes, Sir Anthony Penitzi, who served the British Museum for nearly 40 years and was its principal librarian in the 1850s and 60s. A moving force in creating the great cultural institution which we know today as the British Library. He created the library's catalogue, he built the famous round reading room over in Bloomsbury and he turned it into the biggest library in the world. The lectures build on his achievements by using the library's resources to advance knowledge and understanding in any field associated with the history of the book. We're always keen to draw in as wide an audience as possible to be excited and inspired by discovering more perhaps in unexpected ways about the history of books. Since 1985 that brief has been addressed by a distinguished series of scholars and it's the challenge and the privilege of the Penitzi selection committee to sustain that roster. We aim to cover book history with a global and not just a British or a European perspective as the library's collections do indeed embrace the world's documentary heritage. The Penitzi series hasn't turned its eyes to China since Glenn Dudbridge talked about the lost books of medieval China a little over 20 years ago. And given the huge achievements of book culture there for millennia, printing things long before Gutenberg was ever heard of on the European stage, it is high time we rectified that. So I'm delighted to be able to introduce Cynthia Brockhow as this year's speaker who is the Chen Family Professor of China Studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island and an internationally applauded expert on Chinese book history. Since taking her PhD from Harvard in 1984 she has taught at several American universities since settling at Brown in 2009. And right now she's enjoying a terms fellowship in Cambridge. Her books include studies of social change and moral order in late imperial China and of the book trade in the Qing and Republican periods. And she's currently working on various aspects of reading and book circulation in 19th century China. Her theme for us this week and next is spreading culture through the land, woodblock publishing and Chinese book culture in the early modern era. And for tonight's lecture she is going to talk about woodblock publishing in China's first age of print. I know that I am going to learn a lot from this and I am sure that you will enjoy it and appreciate it as much as I do. So it is a great pleasure to get me off the stage and hand it over to the person who is really meant to be here and to welcome Cynthia to give tonight's first lecture. Thank you. Thank you, David, for that very generous introduction. I'd also of course like to thank the Ponizzi Council for inviting me to give these lectures and sort of seeing them through in what has been a very difficult time. Also, thank you all for coming. We're still in the middle of difficult times and I very much appreciate having a live audience as well, of course, as a Zoom audience. Now, as David has mentioned, the series of lectures is titled spreading culture throughout the land, woodblock publishing and Chinese book culture in the early modern era. The early modern era in this case is the late 16th through the 18th centuries and spreading culture throughout the land is a reference to the impact that the great publishing boom of that period had on Chinese book culture. My own research focuses on this period, the late Ming and the Qing dynasties, when the spread of publishing geographically throughout China proper and socially downward to the lower levels of the literate population transformed the nature of Chinese book culture. I'm particularly interested in how the expansion of print made knowledge and information previously the preserve of the highly educated elite accessible to the common reader. But I am getting a little bit ahead of myself here. As the only second speaker to address Chinese or indeed East Asian printing and publishing since the inception of the panitzi lectures in 1985, I feel it important to contextualize my own specialized research within the much broader history of Chinese print. So this first lecture woodblock printing in China's first age of print is designed to provide some fundamental information very generally about pre-modern Chinese print technology and the look of Chinese books and about the early history of books from the 7th through the early 14th century. So I'm talking mostly today about the period before the early modern era. I'll treat first the nature of the print technology that is employed by the vast majority of Chinese publishers until the late 19th century and second the look of the pre-modern Chinese book and finally and quite summarily the early history of print in China and its impact during the first age of Chinese print. Most particularly during this first lecture, I hope to highlight both the technological innovations that shaped Chinese print culture and the sophistication of Chinese print products in this first stage in the very long history of Chinese print. So first of all to talk about the technologies of print in China. The Chinese developed a variety of different print technologies but one, in fact the first invented emerged as the dominant form of printing until the late 19th century. This was woodblock printing or xylography. To give you an abbreviated rather generic description of xylography as practiced in China, woodblocks for printing were made from hardwoods. Pear was particularly popular, so much so that one term for printing was dzaili to spoil pearwood. But jujubi, katalpa and other woods were also used. The blocks were cut to the size of a folio page and soaked, dried and planed in preparation for cutting. Then the manuscript to be printed was transcribed into the thin vertically lined paper by a professional scribe. The prepared block would be spread with a thin layer of paste and then the transcript placed written side down on the block and then pressed firmly over the block with a flat brush. After the paper had dried its upper layer was rubbed away so that the characters were clearly visible in reverse of course on the block. Using a set of cutting knives, chisels and gouges, a block cutter cut around the characters leaving them in relief on the block surface. Once the block was completely cut it was ready for printing. The printer dipped a round printing brush into a pan of water-based ink and applied it to the cut block. Then a sheet of paper was placed over the block and a long rubbing pad was brushed over the back of the paper so that the characters were clearly printed on the paper. The paper was peeled off and allowed to dry. This is a completed wood block and then here you see the man inking the block and then the printer putting the paper over the block and then rubbing the paper over the block with this brush. This gives you a sense of the physical setup of the printing process. This is a printing table and you see on the left side here the blocks would be fixed on one side of the table and then the paper clamped to another table and it would be stretched over the space between the two tables to make the print to make the impression and then the paper would be put down between the spaces between the two tables to dry. A skilled printer could produce between 1500 and 2000 sheets a day. A good block correctly cared for, blocks did have to be allowed to rest between printings, could produce 15,000 prints and after some touching up another 10,000 prints. Wood blocks could be reused over the course of centuries. Some surviving texts known as three dynasty editions were printed from blocks originally cut in the Song dynasty, repaired in the Yuan dynasty, the next dynasty and reused again in the Ming dynasty, the following dynasty. So we're talking about a period of several hundred years here. More typically wood blocks fell victim to poor care, warping humidity, splintering dryness or insects. Now this technology endured for 12 centuries since its invention probably in the 7th century until lithography and letterpress printing were introduced from the west in the 19th century. But it was not the only technology of print in China during this vast expanse of time. Centuries after wood block printing was invented in the mid 11th century. A nam named Abisheng described in contemporary texts as a commoner invented a method of printing with movable earthenware types. But this technology invented several centuries before Gutenberg was never widely employed. Much more common was wooden movable type. The first reliable record that we have of its use dates from the 14th century when Wang Zhen, a county magistrate, used wooden types fixed in a wooden matrix to print the local gazetteer of the county that he governed. And this is a modern sort of reproduction of the kinds of wooden movable types that Wang Zhen used. Wang is credited with developing an efficient method of organizing the character types for easy access. He had two large revolving tables, their circular tops divided into compartments where the characters could be placed according to their rhyme category or frequency of use. And this is an illustration from the book he writes describing his method of printing with wooden movable type. The use of wooden movable type never replaced xylography, wood block printing, for reasons we'll explore in a minute. But it came to be used with increasing frequency for certain types of projects over the course of the 16th through the 19th centuries. Metal, usually bronze, but also tin and lead movable type, developed first in Korea in the 14th century, came into use in China only in the late 15th century. It remained, however, a technology of the wealthy, either extremely wealthy private publishers, usually from mercantile backgrounds, who could afford to experiment with the technology or the imperial government, which could afford to support the creation of large fonts of metal types. So Chinese printers and publishers had one technology for textual reproduction available from roughly the 7th century on, and from the 11th century on an increasing number of other technologies to draw on in the form of movable type in different media. But by far the most widespread and popular technology was xylography, wood block printing. The earliest invented it not only endured to the late 19th century, but dominated publishing in Imperial China. Western book historians, fixated to some extent on movable type and Johannes Gutenberg, have until recently tended to ignore or worse question the value of Chinese printing precisely because of the centrality of wood block printing to Chinese book culture. In 1943, Douglas McMurtry, in the book The Story of Printing and Bookmaking, announced sweepingly. From the point of view of its effects on history, printing as it was done in China was sterile. Roughly 20 years later, S.H. Steinberg, in his 500 years of printing, dismissed wood block printing as suitable only for the production of, quote, cheap tracks for the half literate, is disreputable as any modern horror comics. But there are excellent reasons, first, why xylography was better suited than movable type as a technology of textual reproduction in China. Actually, for that matter, in East Asia. And second, why wood block printing has certain advantages over movable type that operate, frankly, no matter where one is printing. I want to explore these here, both as a means of combating the notion that xylography is somehow not real printing or perhaps a very primitive form of printing. And more importantly, to suggest ways in which this print technology shaped Chinese book culture. Xylography was better suited than movable type as a technology of textual reproduction in China because of the nature of the Chinese written language. Estimates of the total number of characters in Chinese vary quite widely. I will settle on the mid-range number of about 50,000 characters, which is the almost the number recorded in the foundational Kangxi character dictionary of 1710. Of course, even a highly educated person would not know that many characters, a knowledge of about 8,000 to 9,000 is generally accepted as a mark of high literacy. But this is still a staggering number of characters to have to cut for a single font, particularly since, of course, many of those characters would have to be produced in multiple copies. Remember that the font for Gutenberg's Bible was some 290 types. So just organizing such a huge font for use was also quite daunting. Type setting 2 would require highly literate workers. Printing by movable type was thus prohibitively expensive and unwieldy. Unsurprisingly, movable type was mainly used by publishers who could capitalise the creation of huge fonts, either the imperial government or very wealthy elite families. In contrast, woodblock printing, at least by the early modern period, did not require either a huge capital outlay or highly literate craftsmen. The cutting of blocks was the most costly step in the production process. However, by the 16th century, the middle of the Ming dynasty, it seems that wages for block cutters had declined to such a level that, as Kai Wing Chow and Joseph McDermott argue, publishing became a rather attractive investment, one that might not garner a great fortune but could assure a steady profit. In the early 19th century, the Protestant missionary William Milne, when reviewing the different methods that he might use to print his Chinese translation on the exposition of the epistle of Paul to the Ephesians, chose woodblock printing at one quarter the cost of metal movable type, finding it the most suitable to the Chinese language. Now, for aesthetic reasons as well, Chinese printers and readers were predisposed to prefer woodblock printing to movable type. Calligraphy is the highest of the arts in China occupying a status higher even than that of painting of which it is said to be the foundation. It was valued in particular as an expression of the calligrapher's distinctive personality and individual spirit, even as a reflection of moral character. Of course, it was much easier to reproduce the flowing often irregular strokes of calligraphy in xylography than in movable type. The inclusion of text in a special calligraphic style lent distinction to a printed book, heightening its value as a form of cultural capital. So it's not uncommon to see part of a book, most often the preface printed in a running or cursive calligraphy, proceeding a text that then is in a kind of standardized regular script. You see here on the right is the first page of the preface of a literary collection published in the late 16th century, and the left is the first page of the main text, which again as you can see is in this very standard regular calligraphic style. Beyond its specific suitability in regard to the Chinese language and Chinese aesthetics, woodblock printing had other I would call universal advantages. First, woodblocks could be stored and reused, allowing a publisher to adjust print runs to changes in market demand. As mentioned, a good set of properly cared for woodblocks could reduce a print run of 25,000 copies. But books were rarely, if ever, published in such quantities at a single go. Without the need to break down a font for new works, the publisher could afford to see how a book sold before publishing more copies. I've interviewed former woodblock publishers who confirmed this strategy. As late as the early 20th century, they were still publishing a very popular classical reading primer called the Three Character Classic, but would only print up about 100 copies at a time. Once those had sold out, they simply brought out the blocks from storage and printed up 100 more. Publishers might even advertise to potential customers the option of single copy on demand publishing. One not infrequently finds notices printed on the cover page of commercial publications announcing that should a reader want a copy, he, she, should visit the print shop at such and such an address and for the price of such and such, which usually depended on the quality of the paper that was chosen he, she could obtain a copy of the text. Thus, Chinese woodblock publishers were rescued from the challenge faced by European letterpress publishers of speculating about immediate sales and suffering financial losses from unsold inventory. Second, woodblocks made correction of errors and even in some cases revisions and additions to text relatively easy. An erroneous character or line could be gouged out and a replacement character or line simply glued in. This ease lent the woodblock printed text some flexibility. Some authors planned new additions of their works even before the first woodblock edition was out, was published. For example, the literatus Jang Chao deliberately included blank columns in the first edition of his collection of anecdotes so that later editions might incorporate comments from friends and colleagues. Adrian Johns has persuasively argued that movable type printing did not fix text. Woodblock printing even more than movable type provided opportunities for the correction, revision and alteration, whether for good or evil, of a text. Finally, the portability and simplicity of woodblock technology facilitated transmission. Chen Suen Shun, in his magisterial 1985 survey of Chinese paper making and printing, describes the tools required for block cutting, knives, chisels, a gouge, a scraper and a mallet. Cutters easily carried these tools on their person, no heavy machinery was required. Cutters learned their craft through apprenticeship to a master cutter and the term of apprenticeship was roughly three years. Literacy, although desirable, was not required because all the cutter was doing was cutting around the stamped image of the character on the block. As one of my informants breezely assured me, anyone, even women, could learn to cut blocks. As a result, although certain sites, the great cities of the Lower Yangza Delta region, an area in northern Fujian province and the imperial capital Beijing, all on the sort of eastern seaboard, were major publishing centres of the early modern period, over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, important block cutting and publishing operations were also established in the hinterland and the interior. Certainly the ease with which the technology could travel facilitated the establishment of new sites and the spread of print. The missionary W.H. Medhurst, observing Chinese woodblock printing in the early decades of the 19th century, very nicely summarises my argument. The whole apparatus of a printer in that country consists of his gravers, blocks and brushes, these he may shoulder and travel with from place to place, purchasing paper and lamp black as he needs them and borrowing a table anywhere he may throw off his additions by the hundred or the score as he is able to dispose of them. The low price of paper connected with the low price of labour enables the Chinese to furnish books to each other for next to nothing. In some, xylography remained the dominant technology of printing throughout the imperial period. The obvious reason for this was its suitability to printing in the Chinese language. But it also gave the printer flexibility in adjusting to market shifts and it facilitated because of the portability and relative simplicity of the technology, the spread of printing. Now I've given you a kind of hasty overview of how pre-modern Chinese texts were printed. Now I'd like to explain briefly what they looked like, how they were put together and how pages were formatted. Chinese books might be bound in a variety of different ways. The earliest form of binding in use well before the invention of printing was of course the scroll. This is a manuscript scroll, it's not a printed scroll. Concertina binding, also a pre-print development, was often used for religious texts in particular, hence its other name, sutra binding. By the 9th and 10th centuries, the increasing use of print and the need for works that could be easily referenced spurred the development of codex bindings. There were several different forms of codex binding, but by the 16th or 17th century, the thread or string binding, the xianduong, had come into common use. In this kind of binding, folio pages were folded in half with the printed side of the page facing out. The pages were then ordered and stacked and then bound together at the edges opposite the fold. Paper twists would be inserted through two holes that were pierced through the pile of folded pages near the edge of the book spine just to hold the pages together. And then four holes were pierced through the stack of pages and silk or cotton thread used to stab stitch covers of stiff paper onto the fascicle or the te. The codices created in this fashion are wonderfully flexible and a pleasure to use as they stay open to pages much more easily than stiffly bound Western books. They are also easier to repair, but they are more fragile, so are usually provided with a protective cover, a han, made of wood or a paper board covered with cloth, as you see in this illustration. These covers seem to have come in use around the 9th century. Books would be stored, as you see here, in their han, lying horizontally on shelves, and here you say the title of the book would actually be printed on the bottom there. If that didn't quite work out, you would insert a little paper slip into the book to identify its title. Now, to open a Chinese book at its first page, the spine of the book should be on the right. The first printed page would usually be the cover page. It typically listed the title, and here the title of this text is the Gynaecology of Master Fu, right down the middle of the page. Then, on the right, the author is identified. Fu Qing Zhu of Yang Chu gives his native place, as well as the name of the author. Then, very often, the date that the blocks were cut is written across the top, and here the date is 1890. Then, the publisher would be identified on the left, such and such a house or studio holds the blocks right here. The Shan Chong Tang is the name of the publisher, and that is the house that holds or owns the wood blocks. Depending on the nature of the publication, there might also be some sort of advertisement of the contents of the work, as in this popular encyclopedia published in the 18th century. It not only includes a crude illustration, but also a passage announcing that the text is one that is valued by all and completely without error, both very dubious propositions. Commercial publishers also often added a warning against pirating. Fang Keu, the unauthorized reprinting will be prosecuted. This was often stamped on the cover page, or more rarely, but much more colorfully. He who pirates this book will have a thief for a son and a whore for a daughter. Elegant works featured more restrained covered pages and might add the publication information on the back of the cover page in a separate callathon. Here is an example from the early 20th century. The title, again this is a literary collection of a very famous 18th century thinker. The title is printed in this archaic script, and then on the back of the cover page is the callathon giving you the information about when it was published. When it was published, and where it was published in the city of Chengdu, and then the name of the publisher, which is the school of filial righteousness of the Yen family. The remainder of the book usually contained the elements that we might find in western books. The main text surrounded by a range of different paratex, a preface or prefaces, a table of contents, notes to the reader, commentary, illustrations, postscripts, etc. Pages were usually formatted as you see here. The text of course was printed from right to left in vertical columns, enclosed in a frame with one or two border lines. The center of the page is very often marked by fish tails. You see one here, often there are two of them. And by what is called an elephant's trunk, which you see at the top there. These two elements, the center of the page, the center of the block, the heart of the block, are there to help the printer fold the page evenly. Here we see a slide of a printed book showing two leaves of two folio pages. You can see at the folded edge of each page at the very top is the title of the book, then the fish tail, then the title of the chapter, the page number, another fish tail, and here the elephant's trunk. One of the nicer features of well-produced texts may be their generous top margins, which leaves space for the reader to write notes. As you see in this text here, although sometimes the space, the heavenly head, was used to print additional commentary called eyebrow comments. Note this text is printed with interlinear commentary, these double rows of smaller characters which comment on the main text in larger characters. This was the most common way of printing commentary in pre-modern Chinese texts. I'd like now to turn to my third topic for today, the beginnings of print and the first great age of print in China. In providing this very sketchy overview, I hope to highlight the different forms and institutions of publishing that emerge between the 7th and 14th centuries. Here is just a list of the dynasties that I'm going to be alluding to. I've highlighted the Song Dynasty in its two parts, the northern and the southern Song, because I'll be spending most time talking about that particular period. Now the origins of woodblock printing in East Asia are quite mysterious. I cannot tell you when or where it was invented with any certainty. The scholarly consensus supports its use at least by the early Tong dynasty, most likely sometime in the course of the 7th century. But the first real material evidence we have for the use of woodblock printing dates from the following century. It is a Dorani or incantation sutra scroll printed between 704 and 751. It was discovered in 1966, sealed inside a stone stupa in the Buddhist temple Bogoksa in Southeast Korea. This is a replica of this Dorani scroll. There are textual references to printing in China beginning in the early 9th century. They usually take the form of official complaints about the illegal publication and sale of calendars and almanacs by commercial printers. But really decisive material evidence for Chinese printing comes only in 868 in the form of this magnificent scroll of the diamond sutra. You must be familiar with this. It's in the British Museum. This has a callathon that very clearly dates it on the 15th day of the 4th moon of the 9th year of Xian Tong, which is 868. Wang Jie reverently made this for blessings to his parents for universal distribution. Wang Jie, the donor, in order to honour and call down blessings on his deceased parents, pays to have this scroll cut and printed and distributed. I'll go back to looking at the scroll because it's much more interesting than the callathon. Discovered in Dunhuang, an ancient oasis site in northwest China, this is obviously a very sophisticated work displaying advanced cutting and printing technique. The superb craftsmanship of the diamond sutra allows the conclusion that the technology was not at all new in the 9th century, but had already been in use. At least the previous century in the 8th and more likely even the 7th century. All the solid evidence that we have for the earliest uses of print in China suggests that it was initially recognised as an efficient means of textual reproduction among two very different communities. The first was religious communities, Buddhist and Taoist monasteries and temples interested in spreading their beliefs, but also, and perhaps more importantly, in creating texts that had primarily a ritual purpose, like the incantation scroll discovered in Korea. That was not something that was meant to be read, it was buried in a stone stupa, so it has really just a ritual function. The second community is one of commercial publishers serving readers whose demand for popular secular works like calendars, almanacs, divination manuals, medical texts, etc. Was great enough to support a commercial publishing industry. Interestingly, it's not until the collapse of the Tang dynasty in 907, during a period of political disunion when China was divided into competing kingdoms, that the government seems to begin to recognise the value of printing as a means of controlling and standardising textual reproduction. This is a map of the so-called five dynasties period, actually there are more than five dynasties, but a period of disunion in China is divided into all of these different very short-lived states. Feng Dao, prime minister of one of the very brief dynasties of the day, in 932 initiated the printing of the government-approved versions of what had come by this time to be identified as the Confucian Classics, which up to this point had been presented in standardised form only engraved on stone steelies. So these before this great printing project were the way in which the government sort of presented the official standard version of the Confucian Classics engraved in stone. Here is just a rubbing from one of these steely that gives you a portion of the classic of songs, again one of the Confucian Classics. Printing the text was very much a long-term project, it was only finished over 20 years later in 953, when the Imperial Academy finally completed the whole 130 volumes. This project, again, is something of a turning point in Chinese printing history, in that it marks the entry of the government into the project of print. And the Song Dynasty, which reunified China in 960, you see here, the Song Dynasty in its two parts, the northern Song, and then as northern tribes sort of sweep down from the north and take north China becomes the southern Song in the early 12th century, the Song Dynasty embraced printing with great vigor as if to make up for lost time. The first emperors of the Song saw printing as a tool to advance their centralising policies and assert their authority to basically define what knowledge was. Early in the dynasty, for example, the state took as its responsibility the correction and standardisation of medical knowledge, quote, nurturing the people and civilising medical practice by reforming the shamanic healing methods that they believed were widely practiced in certain parts of the empire. To this end of sort of medical reform, the Imperial Court printed and distributed Materia Medica, works on pulse diagnosis, fevers caused by cold, acupuncture and moxibustion, and various collections of medical prescriptions including this very popular typing era prescriptions of Sage Lee Grace, which reproduced 16,832 different prescriptions. This is actually a UN dynasty edition of a text that was again originally printed much earlier in the northern Song. But it was in the area of education and classical scholarship that the state's centralising policies and standardising publication strategies had the greatest impact. Under the Song, the civil service examination system, which had for centuries been used as one of many tools for identifying men of talent for official service, was made the primary means of recruiting officials. Since success in the examinations depended on mastery of the 13 Confucian classics and the large body of commentary, histories, literary collections and reference aids necessary to the understanding of the classics, it was essential that the state ensure the publication and appropriate dissemination of correct editions of these texts. The Imperial Academy, or the Gordza dgyn, took on this task producing dgynben, or Academy editions of the classics and making the wood box of these editions available for reproduction by private publishers, of course for a fee. This is a picture of one of the Academy editions, again of a Confucian classic, refined language, a dictionary. The central government also commissioned the careful collation, copying, proofreading, cutting and printing of the 17 standard dynastic histories, a project that took almost 70 years to complete. But the central government was not the only official publisher. Provincial and local governments also participated in the effort to produce and disseminate good editions of important texts, both classical and contemporary. See, for example, this beautiful edition of the record of rights, another Confucian classic, which was published by an official in Fuzhou, Jiangxi province, in 1177. Or this record of reading the classic of poetry at the Du family school, published by another provincial office in 1182. And this, again, is a text that is about a Confucian classic, a commentary on the Confucian classic of the classic of songs or the classic of poetry. Not all works were editions of or commentaries on the classics. Here is a beautiful reprint edition of an important general history of China, comprehensive mirror for aid in governance by a prominent scholar official of the previous century, in other words, a Song dynasty official. This was also reprinted at a provincial office. So the government at all levels sponsored the publication of the texts, classics histories, rhyme dictionaries, encyclopedias, literary anthologies, et cetera, that supported the humanist scholarship at the heart of examination study and the education of officials. Now, as Susan Cherniac has demonstrated, this proliferation of printed scholarly works stimulated textual criticism and a more inquiring, even skeptical attitude towards ancient explanations of the classics. Emboldened by their ability to consult different editions and a wide range of newly available texts, scholars began to challenge some of the formerly revered judgments of earlier Han dynasty commentators. Early Song insistence on controlling publication of the classics may have served to some extent, as some have argued, to perpetuate cultural orthodoxies and enforce cultural and social uniformity. But Cherniac, correctly, I think, endows printing rather with, quote, several apparently contradictory functions, both perpetuating and transforming traditional orthodoxies, enforcing cultural conformity and strengthening conflicting regional identities and supporting government control over canonical texts while undermining that control. It can certainly be no accident that the Song witnessed a radical transformation in the understanding of Confucianism and the creation of a controversial new kind of Confucianism, Neo-Confucianism that eventually came to dominate education, moral philosophy, and to some degree, political thinking until the end of the imperial period. Now the imperial state was by no means the only actor in the rapid expansion of print culture, particularly during the last century and a half of Song rule by which time the authority of the state was considerably diminished. The examination system, the rise of textual criticism and the intellectual and political debates of the day stimulated both private or family publishing and commercial publishing at many different sites throughout the empire. For example, outline of events in the Eastern capital, so the political history of the early Song, was published privately in 1186 in Sichuan, quite distant from the Song capital. What is interesting about this work, in addition just to its beautiful calligraphy and its interesting contents, is the calliphone that appears at the end of the table of contents. It reads, printed and published by the House of Secretary Chang of Meishan, it has already registered with the authorities, reprinting is prohibited. This is one of the few pieces of evidence that survives to confirm that the Song state instituted a system of registration that gave it the authority to vet publication by non-officials, at the same time that it offered publishers at least the promise of state action against unauthorized reprinting, that is pirating of text. But the major centres of publication in the last centuries of the dynasty were sites of commercial publishing. The new capital city of Hangzhou, see here, and then another site, which is unfortunately not identified on this map in northern Fujian province, located sort of roughly here, were really the major sites of commercial publishing in the Song. According to Soren Edgren, Hangzhou, again the capital of the southern Song, boasted at least 18 commercial printing bookselling operations, many of whom specialized in specialized genres of text. The Chun family shop was noted for the production of bookstore editions of Tong and Song poetry. For example, this edition of the collected poetry of Miss Yu Xuan Ji of the Tong. The Wang family sutra shop produced Buddhist texts, obviously. While the Yin family house specialized in fiction and anecdotes. Only one publication survives from the print shop bookstore of Rong Liu Lang, an addition of a Taoist self-cultivation guide. But I mention it here to cite its lengthy callathon, which provides kind of nice little history of the print shop, makes its current location clear to potential customers, and just generally advertises the quality of the work. In the old days, located to the east of the Great Xianguo Temple in the eastern capital, that is Kaifeng, which was the previous capital, the capital of the northern Song dynasty, the Rong Liu Lang family, now provisionally dwelling to the east of South Street at the central market, has opened a shop to print and sell the classics and histories. Now we have taken the old capital edition of the master who embraces simplicity, collated it so that it does not contain even one mistaken character and printed it. All gentlemen who collect and appreciate books will be delighted to patronize the shop and view our fine books, and then the date 1152. But the largest commercial publishing site in Song was, again, distant from the capital in the relative backwater of Zhenyang, again in northern Fujian province. Zhenyang was home to roughly 50 commercial or private publishers in the Song. According to Lucille Jaugh, who has done quite a brilliant reconstruction of the Zhenyang book industry, many publishers began by printing textbooks for family schools, and they realized that they could actually make a profit printing these school texts and gradually sort of evolved into commercial concerns, continuing again to reproduce work supportive of examination study. The classics and their commentaries, the standard histories, encyclopedias of quotations useful in the writing of examination essays, as well as all sorts of literary collections. Most of the works that survive from this period of Zhenyang publishing are quite fine. See, for example, this explanation of the spring and autumn annals classic and the Gongyang commentary published in 1191 by one of the most prolific Zhenyang publishers, Yu Ren-Jung, manager of the Tower of Myriad Scrolls. And again, this is another Confucian classic, the spring and autumn annals. Or this fine edition of the Dynastic History of the Ladder Han, published by the Family School of another Zhenyang publisher, Huang Shan Fu. This is probably not a family school by this time. It's probably at this point become a commercial operation. Now, it is the fine calligraphy of these texts and the others that I have shown you that has earned the song the title of the Golden Age of Chinese printing. The calligraphy of Songtex was prized because of its adherence to famous calligraphic models, its diversity, and the superb craftsmanship of the scribes who wrote the manuscripts to be printed, and the highly skilled cutters who cut the characters. And I want to show you three pictures that I hope will help you see what I mean when I talk about the beautiful calligraphy of Song imprints. The page on the right, which is a Zhenyang publication. I think you can see that the vertical strokes of the characters are consistently thicker than the horizontal strokes. And you will note too that the horizontal strokes basically rise from left to right. And then very often end with a kind of downward hook, a very distinctive stroke. This particular style is supposedly derived from the calligraphy of the famous Tang Dynasty calligrapher. Yan Zhenqin, it's quite different from the calligraphy of the text on the left, a page from a Buddhist work published in 1145, which is supposedly in the style of another famous Tang calligrapher, O Yang Xuan. Here the characters are beautifully clear, with strokes that are even and stable at rest, as it were, lacking the upward sweep of those in the text on the right, but still I think quite beautiful. And then here is a leaf from an edition of a commentary on the classic of changes, yet another Confucian classic, in yet another style, the so-called slender gold style, so named for the thinness of its strokes and its great elegance. It is supposedly derived from the very refined calligraphy of the Song Emperor Huizong. And so it's for this reason that the Song is considered by many to be the high point of Chinese printing, because the calligraphy of the text is so striking and so graceful and so well cut. But from contemporary references, we know that commercial publishers also produced cheap imprints. Print shops, particularly in the village of Ma Sha in Zhenyang, became notorious for the publication of error-ridden editions of the classics, examination essays, collections, and other instructional texts. Dangerous because they could, and apparently did, mislead students studying for the examinations. The government repeatedly but ineffectually banned the publication and ownership of these works, which were said to emphasize false learning. Sadly, very few survive, but I can show you one leaf from one rare extant text. The new edition of the new handbook of the Old Man in the Moon for Weddings, which is a letter writing manual that told you how to write letters and invitations to weddings and so on. And this text substantiates the rumors about Ma Sha text. It's full of inaccuracies, cut to cram as many characters as possible on a page, and printed on woodblocks well past their prime. From abundant contemporary warnings about the dire consequences readers would face if they relied on these works, it seems safe to assume that they far outnumbered the higher end Zhenyang imprints and Hongzhou imprints that we treasure today. We have equally scanty evidence for the production of other kinds of popular texts that later became bestsellers in the commercial book market. A few editions of fictional works in mixed vernacular and classical Chinese, Plaintails or Pinghua, which appear to have grown out of oral storytelling traditions survived from the Song and Yuan. The Yu family publishers of Zhenyang produced several illustrated editions of historical plain tales in the early 14th century. For example, this newly published and completely illustrated Plaintail of King Wu's Conquest of the Zhou. These works employed the picture above text below format associated with Zhenyang publications. As you can see here, the picture supposedly depicts what the text below is describing. Here's another example of a plain tale that later evolved into one of those popular vernacular novels of early modern China. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Again, you can see that this too adopts the signature picture above text below format of the other plain tale. Such works would not have been valued by elite scholars who devoted their lives to textual criticism and classical scholarship. Yet again, it's reasonable to assume that along with the cheap Marsha editions of examination essays and a profusion of other popular texts, Almanach's calendars, Primera's Divination and other instructional manuals, these works constituted the bulk of the book trade in the Song and the Yuan. By the time of the Song Dynasty's conquest by the Mongols in 1279, the technological and structural foundations of a flourishing book culture had been firmly established. Woodblock printing, best suited to reproduction of texts in the Chinese language, also allowed early bookmakers to preserve something of the aesthetic and moral value of calligraphy. The simplicity and transportability of the technology facilitated its use by a variety of different institutions and individuals. By the end of the dynasty, the major players of Chinese print publishing history had emerged religious institutions, largely Buddhist and Taoist temples and monasteries, who very early recognized the value of print for both ritual practice and prosodolisation. Commercial publishers who seized the opportunities for profit to be found in the production of calendars, divination manuals, dictionaries, school texts and popular stories. The state which somewhat belatedly recognized how it might use and at least attempt to control the standardizing power of print and literati or elite families who, particularly with the strengthening of the examination system, saw the advantages of using print to promote the education of their own sons and lineage members. Thank you very much. Next time, the next two lectures, I will in fact be moving on into the early modern period, the Qing and talking to us about the second grade age of print in China. Thank you. Cynthia, thank you so much for such an informative and such a clear overview of the topic. I was right about learning a lot. We do have a little time for some questions if people would like to ask them. Cynthia, if you'd like to go and take a chair and I will take an appropriately socially distanced chair. People who are out there online should have the ability to ask questions and they will come up on my iPad and I can intersperse them with questions from the audience. That's the theory. However, question one is definitely from the audience. I was wondering if you could talk more about censorship and the role that publishers worked. Did they have to submit to censors before they published or did they just publish and see what they could get away with? Because you said the role of the state, sometimes they promised they could intervene but they were largely ineffectual. I was just wondering what the official process was and when that started. OK, our evidence from the song is very unfortunately, we don't have much evidence from the song, but it seems that there was a kind of pre-publication vetting that you were again, let's say in theory, you were supposed to present a manuscript that you wanted to print to the local official and get state approval for the publication and then in turn the state would promise, again probably not very effectively to protect, I don't want to say your copyright because we're not really talking about something that is like our concept of copyright, but protect your right to the blocks that you were printing. We don't know very much about how again, as I've hinted, how effective this system is. The state did obviously try to intervene with these cheap and supposedly ideologically dangerous texts that were so sloppy that they were misleading people but the fact that they issued something like 15 commands to cease printing, identifying in some cases specifically the Marsha printers suggests that again this wasn't particularly effectual, they had to keep repeating these orders. We do know that they tried very hard to prohibit the transmission, the kind of censorship of texts to peoples living outside of China's borders, particularly texts that had some sort of strategic importance. In the period I'm talking about, I think that's probably all I can say. Later in the early modern period there's much more to be said about censorship but perhaps I'll leave that for another session. Now the technology does work because I have a question from Joseph Bills in Cambridge to put to you. Thank you for your fascinating talk. I have a question about the process of creating a woodblock for printing. In an early modern Japanese publishing context, which used almost exactly the same process of woodblock book production, draft manuscripts would be created along the way that were checked and corrected by the writer and all the publisher. Did this happen too in China? And do any draft manuscript survive with such corrections? Also, do colophons ever credit the names of the copyist if such a role existed or the block cutter stroke printer? I think there's several questions nested together there. I'm probably not going to remember them all but I'll give them a try. Yes, usually what would happen is after, I mean again it depends on the quality of the publication and how scrupulous the publisher is, but once the block was cut, one copy would be printed off and that would be proofread. And at that point any corrections that had to be made would be made to the blocks by the process I explained. You know, gouge out the incorrect character and replace it with the correct one. Whether many of those examples of that actual process survive is something I simply don't know. The answer to that question. Scribes were usually not identified, although if you can remember way back on the earlier part of the talk, I showed you a picture of an early 20th century rather nicely printed literary collection. And there on the cover page you had next to the title the man who had done the calligraphy of the cover page and of the calliphon was identified. But that was very much because this was an elite and very expensive, almost a kind of vanity publication. So I don't think it was normal for the scribe to be identified unless again he was doing some kind of special calligraphy for a cover page. Interestingly, particularly in the Song and the Yuan, cutters were sometimes identified and you can find the names of some cutters actually printed in Song and Yuan and some actually later editions as well. This probably signifies to some extent that cutters were respected for their craft, but even more scholars think that what this means is it was a way of calculating wages. A cutter's name would be cut into the block and then printed in the text often with a number next to it which would indicate how many blocks that particular cutter had cut and it's on that basis that his wages would be calculated. Thank you. More than answered the question. Definitely. Miriam. Thank you. Absolutely splendid lecture. Thank you very much. In several of your beautiful slides you showed printing also with Elements Party in red. Did they have a special meaning and reason why they were in red? One question, the other question is what did they use as a pigment for that? Okay, I'm thinking back the text and all the notes written in the upper margin and actually throughout the text that would have been done with a brush. They were not printed, although I will be showing you next time some eyebrow comments that are printed and in colour. I mean that's for the next lecture but that happened to be written in. So somebody's making notes as they're reading. I don't know too much about pigments but I don't think too much generally is known about pigments. I believe that vermilion red could be very expensive because cinnabar was often one of the elements used to make red ink and again that was very, very expensive. Again I'm not quite sure in that particular example what the red ink was made of. Does that answer your question? Again absolutely fascinating lecture. I have a question about the retention of the wood blocks and I can imagine that in the more normal books where there are not that many leaves and that would be practical but for some of the multi volumes works that were being published that had 800 or 1000 folios in it were they also being retained at that level and what kind of space would it take up? Yeah they were being retained and would take up a lot of space. The way you should store wood blocks is rather like books, western books on a bookshelf you're supposed to line them up like this. You're supposed to leave a little space between them because if one of the blocks gets damp or something it doesn't travel down the line. But apparently they did store vast quantities of blocks in this way. I tried to find a slide that showed what stored blocks would look like and the only slide I could find that was at all clear was of the blocks to the Buddhist Tripitaka printed in Korea by wood block and Hain saw this temple in Korea. They survived today and visited it. It's room after room with these towering bookcases that are just filled with these wooden blocks. Now that's the Buddhist Tripitaka which is a huge publication but yes that is how they stored them. I have another question. A room for one more, one yes. That's fine. Again just my limited familiarity with Chinese printing by say the propaganda feed-a-press so Western printing of Chinese. The wood blocks are actually just individual strips that would then be locked into a form. Was that actually also that method also used in China itself? I'm sorry you're talking about moveable. So well each strip would be so a strip of type would be would be then locked into a form to form so it was still printing with wood but it wouldn't be the kind of wood block printing that we think of either then or even in the 15th century Western world. So it would be a series of vertical strips of wood. No these were individual, I've never heard of that kind of sort of moveable type printing in China it would be individual types and now they would be made in different ways. There were apparently two ways of making them. Wang Zhen, the 14th century figure that I mentioned he had his cutters carved them in a wood block as if he were going to do wood block printing and then cut them, you know, solve them into individual types. But then later in the Qing dynasty and I'll talk about this briefly in I think the last lecture they actually made the individual pieces of wood they cut them up first and then cut the characters into the separate types. But I've never heard of which does not mean it didn't happen but I've never heard of that. Okay, I think we should probably allow Cynthia to go home now and indeed all you good folks too. Thank you again everybody for coming both those of you here physically tonight and all of you online. I hope that all of you and maybe a few even more besides we'll be back here again on Thursday for lecture number two. So most of all, thank you again to Cynthia for such a wonderful introductory lecture. We do all look forward to the next one. So thank you very much.