eighteenth century, was the first author who furnished Europeans with a description of Chinese printing. He quotes the following extract from a Chinese book, supposed to have been written in the reign of the emperor Wu-Wong, who was living 1120 B. C. "As the stone me (Chinese for blacking), which is used to blacken the engraved characters, can never become white, so a heart blackened by vices will always retain its blackness."[1] This is an allusion to some primitive method of blackening incised characters, for the purpose of making them more legible. It is a method which is still observed in the inscriptions on memorial stones in churches and graveyards. But it is an allusion to engraving and blackening only. There is no mention of printing ink, and no suggestion of printing. Du Halde quoted it only to show the antiquity of engraving, yet it has been used by many authors as a warrant for the assertion that printing was practised in China eleven hundred years before the Christian era. If we could accept this statement, we should have to believe that printing was invented in China but a few years after the siege of Troy, before Rome was founded, before Homer wrote and Solomon reigned. Du Halde's words do not warrant this statement. He says, with due caution, "In printing, it seemeth that China ought to have the precedence of other nations, for, according to their books, the Chinese have made use of this art for sixteen hundred years," or since the first century.
The practice of blackening characters was not printing, but it may have led to its development. Du Halde says that the Chinese printed not only on wood blocks, but on tables of "stone of a proper and particular kind." The writing or design to be printed, while it was still wet with ink, was transferred by pressure from the paper upon which it was written to the smooth surface of a slab of stone. When the
- ↑ This method is still in use in many parts of the East Indies. A dried leaf is written on with a pointed steel which scratches the smooth surface. A bit of charcoal is then rubbed over the leaf; the places scratched are filled with atoms of charcoal, which make the writing as legible as it would have been if written with fluid ink.
