library the portraits of four Chinese emperors of a dynasty which began a. d. 618, and ended during the ninth century, and also some fac-similes of the imperial writings, which were made by the same process.[1] Sir John Francis Davis, for many years British Minister to China, and author of two valuable books on that country, places the invention of block-printing in China in the tenth century of the Christian era. He attributes the discovery of the art to Foong-Taou, the Chinese minister of state, who had been greatly hindered in the discharge of his duties by his inability to procure exact copies of his writings. After many trials and failures, he dampened a written sheet of paper, and pressed it on a smooth surface of wood until he had produced a fair transfer. He then cut away every part of the surface that did not show the transferred lines, and thus produced a block in relief. The lines in relief were next brushed with ink; a sheet of paper was laid on the block, and impression was applied. The result was, a true fac-simile of his writing, and the birth of block-printing.
There was another Chinese method, which, paradoxical as it may seem, was a combination of xylography and typography. It was invented a. d. 1041, by an ingenious Chinese blacksmith, named Pi-Ching, whose process is thus described by Davis. The inventor first made a thick paste of porcelain clay, and moulded or cut it in little oblong cubes of proper size. On these cubes he carved the Chinese characters that were most frequently used, thereby making movable types. The next process was to bake them in an oven until they were hardened. But the types so made were irregular as to height and as to body. In printers' phrase, they would not stand together: some would be larger than the standard, others would be too high to paper, and all would be crooked. This difficulty could be remedied only by fixing the types firmly on a surface or bed-plate of unequal elevation. This surface was formed by pouring a melted mixture of wax, lime and
- ↑ Didot, Essai sur la typographie, p. 563.
