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* Early book paper
Reference: Sections also adalpted from: Institute of Paper Science and Technology - Atlanta, GA With Great Appreciation
Above: Stone roller grinding fermented and boiled bamboo for papermaking. Papermaking Spreads Throughout Asia Taught by Chinese papermakers, Tibetans began to make their own paper as a replacement for their traditional writing materials. The shape of Tibetan paper books still reflects the long, narrow format of the original palm-leaf books. Chinese papermakers also spread their craft into Central Asia and Persia, from which it was later introduced into India by traders. The first recorded use of paper in Samarkand dates from a battle in Turkestan, where skilled Chinese artisans were taken prisoner and forced to make paper for their captors. The oldest known piece of paper was made in Shangsi Province in China around 49 BC. Concurrently sheepskin was replacing papyrus in the Roman world. Paper is made by spreading out a slurry of organic fibers and draining off the water. Paper is a kind of felt made of overlapping fibers. At first the Chinese made paper from hemp. They used it for wrapping and decoration—not for writing. They had already been wrapping themselves in felt clothing for quite some time. By AD 500, the Chinese had experimented with rattan and mulberry and had finally settled on bamboo paper. And they not only wrote on their paper. They printed on it as well. Of course printing is, in the broadest sense, older than coal. Stamps, brands, royal seals—even imprints of fossils on limestone—are, after all, forms of block printing. At first, the Chinese carved images into a stone or wood block. Then they laid paper on it and ran ink over the paper. It was a lot like our present-day stone rubbing. By the 8th century, the Chinese had gone to conventional block printing, and they were using it on a grand scale. They printed whole scrolls. Before AD 1000, Chinese Buddhists printed their complete books of doctrine, the Tripitaka,. That took 130,000 blocks of wood and 12 years to finish. Then, in AD 1045, a printer named Pi-Sheng did almost what Gutenberg would do 400 years later. He made separate characters of clay. He embedded the characters, face up, in a shallow tray lined with warm wax. He laid a board across them and pressed it down 'til all the characters were at exactly the same level. When the wax cooled he used his letter tray to print whole pages. The hardest part of Pi-Sheng's process was the huge number of characters his typesetters had to pick up and set. The Chinese had no simple 26-letter alphabet. Still, his printing went into use. It was in use when Europeans learned about Chinese paper-making and began making their own fine paper from rag fibers just before 1200. It was in use while Europe took up block printing in the 13th century. Finally, in the mid-1400s, Gutenberg recreated movable type. When he did, he used durable metal letters that fit together with a jeweler's precision. Printing was now an art with the capacity to bring learning to the masses, not just to a royal court. At the same time, this was a 400-year-old technology -- poised at long last to turn the world upon its ear. By the 2nd century A.D. the Chinese had developed and put into fairly widespread use the art of printing texts. Like most inventions, it was not entirely new, because the printing of designs and pictures on textiles had preceded the printing of words in China by at least a century. Two important influences that favored the development of printing by the Chinese were their invention of paper in A.D. 105 and the spread of the Buddhist religion in China. The common writing materials of the ancient Western world, papyrus and vellum, were not suited to printing. Papyrus is too fragile to be used as a printing surface, and vellum, a thin tissue taken from inside the hides of newly skinned animals, is an expensive material. Paper, on the other hand, is relatively strong and inexpensive. The Buddhist practice of making many copies of prayers and sacred texts encouraged mechanical means of reproduction. The earliest surviving examples of Chinese printing, produced before A.D. 200, were printed from letters and pictures cut in relief on wood blocks. In 972, the Tripitaka, the sacred Buddhist scriptures, all 130,000 pages, was printed entirely from wood blocks. A Chinese inventor of this period progressed beyond wood blocks to the concept of printing entirely from movable type, that is, from individual characters arranged in sequence as in present-day printing. Because the Chinese language requires between 2000 and 40,000 separate characters, however, movable type did not seem practical to the early Chinese, and the invention was abandoned. Movable type made from molds was invented separately by the Koreans in the 14th century, but they also found it less practical than the traditional block printing. The ancient preferred method of making printed books is quite ingenious. The text is written in ink, with a brush made of very fine hair, on a sheet of paper which is inverted and pasted on a wooden tablet. When the paper has become thoroughly dry, its surface is scraped off quickly and with great skill, until nothing but a fine tissue bearing the characters remains on the wooden tablet. Then, with a steel graver, the workman cuts away the surface following the outlines of the characters until these alone stand out in low relief. From such a block a skilled printer can make copies with incredible speed, turning out as many as fifteen hundred copies in a single day. Chinese printers are so skilled in engraving these blocks, that no more time is consumed in making one of them than would be required by a western printer in setting up a form of movable type and making the necessary corrections. This scheme of engraving wooden blocks is well adapted for the large and complex nature of the Chinese characters, but would not lend itself very aptly to European type which could hardly be engraved upon wood because of its small dimensions. Their method of printing has one decided advantage, namely, that once these full-page printing blocks are made, they can be preserved and used for making changes in the text as often as one wishes. Additions and subtractions can also be made as the tablets can be readily patched. Again, with this method, the printer and the author are not obliged to produce here and now an excessively large edition of a book, but are able to print a book in smaller or larger lots sufficient to meet the demand at the time. An additional advantage of this method of Chinese printing, is that unskilled labor, even young children, can strike off copies of books rapidly with only a few minutes of instruction and practice. In truth, the whole method is so simple that one is tempted to try it for himself after once having watched the process. The simplicity of Chinese block printing is what accounts for the exceedingly large numbers of books in circulation and the ridiculously low prices at which they were sold. Such facts as these would scarcely be believed by one who had not witnessed them. There was another odd method of reproducing reliefs which had been cut into marble or wood, An epitaph, for example, or a picture set out in low relief on marble or on wood, was covered with a piece of moist paper which in turn was overlayed with several pieces of cloth. Then the entire surface was beaten with a small mallet until all the lineaments of the relief were impressed upon the paper. When the paper dried, ink or some other coloring substance was applied with a light touch, after which only the impression of the relief stood out on the original whiteness of the paper. Papercutting is a traditional folk art in China with a long history and unique style. Paper, the main material of papercuts, is one of the four great inventions of ancient China . As early as the Western Han Dynasty (206 B.C. - A.D. 25), China began to make paper, the inventor of which was Cai Lun who lived more than 3,000 years ago. Prior to the invention of paper people used thin sheets of other materials to make ornamental engraving. Examples can be found in many historical records. An engraved leather sheet unearthed in 1966 from Tomb No. 1 in Wang-shan in Jiangling , Hubei Province, is believed to be left from the Warring States Period (476-221 B.C.). Carved on the leather sheet are successive geometric figures and patterns formed by many dense circles and triangles. These engraved objects are not papercuts, but their engraving technique and art style can be said to be the predecessor of the art of papercutting. The earliest patterns cut out of paper so far found in China are the ones of the Northern Dynasties Period (A.D. 386-581), examples of which are five circular papercuts unearthed from a place near Flaming Mountain in Turpan, Xinjiang. Among these are two papercuts of pairs of monkeys and pairs of horses. Examples of regional Chinese papercutting:
”Suplus Every Year”
“Dancing Dragon”
"Mother & Son Deer"
Earliest Printed Book China 868 CE Scripts and Literacy in Some Chinese Dynasties or Republics
Chinese Printing Jesuits who served at the Chinese Court of Wing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gave us much information about early Chinese printing and publishing. A Jesuit Chinese court official, Mateo Ricci, gives us an understanding of Chinese printing methods, as they existed at the end of the sixteenth century, which were far in advance of Western Techniques: The art of printing was practiced in China at a date somewhat earlier than that assigned to the beginning to printing in Europe , which was about 1405. It is quite certain that the Chinese knew the art of printing at least five centuries ago, and some of them assert that printing was known to their people before the beginning of the Christian era, about 50 BCE Their method of printing differs widely from that employed in Europe, and our method would be quite impracticable for them because of the exceedingly large number of Chinese characters and symbols, At present they cut their charcters in a reverse position and in a simplified form, on a comparatively' small tablet made for the most part from the wood of the pear tree or the apple tree, although at times the wood of the jujube tree is also used for this purpose. Their method of making printed books is quite ingenious. The text is written in ink, with a brush made of very fine hair, on a sheet of paper which is inverted and pasted on a wooden tablet. When the paper has become thoroughly dry, its surface is scraped off quickly and with great skill, until nothing but a fine tissue bearing the characters remains on the wooden tablet. Then, with a steel graver, the workman cuts away the surface following the outlines of the characters until these alone stand out in low relief. From such a block a skilled printer can make copies with incredible speed, turning out as many as fifteen hundred copies in a single day. Chinese printers are so skilled in engraving these blocks, that no more time is consumed in making one of them than would be required by one of our printers in setting up a form of type and making the necessary corrections. This scheme of engraving wooden blocks is well adapted for the large and complex nature of the Chinese characters, but I do nor. think it would lend itself very aptly to our European type which could hardly be engraved upon wood because of its small dimensions. Their method of printing has one decided advantage, namely, that once these tablets are made, they can be preserved and used for making changes in the text as often as one wishes. Additions and subtractions can also be made as the tablets can be readily patched. Again, with this method, the printer and the author are not obliged to produce herc and now an excessively large edition of a book, but are able to print a book in smaller or larger lots sufficient to meet the demand at the time, We have derived great benefit from this method of Chinese printing, as v e employ the domestic help in our homes to strike off copies of the books on religious and scientific subjects which we translate into Chinese from the languages in which they were written originally, In truth, the whole method is so simple that one is tempted to try it for himself after once having watched the process. The simplicity of Chinese printing is what accounts for the exceedingly large numbers of books in circulation here and the ridiculously low prices at which they are sold. Such facts as these would scarcely be believed by one who had not witnessed them. They have another odd method of reproducing reliefs which have been cut into marble or wood, An epitaph, for example, or a picture set out in low relief on marble or on wood, is covered with a piece of moist paper which in turn is overlayed with several pieces of cloth. Then the entire surface is beaten with a small mallet until all the lineaments of the relief are impressed upon the paper. When the. paper dries, ink or some other coloring substance is applied with a light touch, after which only the impression of the relief stands out on the original whiteness of the paper. This method cannot be employed when the relief is shallow; or trade in delicate lines. Publishing In China As we know, moveable type was invented in Asian civilization well before its discovery in the West. Moveable type in terra cotta was used in China since the eleventh century. Beginning in the thirteenth century Korean texts were printed using metal characters, while in China wooden characters were used in the same century. In China as in Japan (where moveable type was introduced in the last decade of the sixteenth century, simultaneously by the Jesuits and by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, after his military campaigns in Korea), use of type remained limited, sporadic, and reserved for certain genres of works. In China, it was essentially restricted to official texts, the Classics, and, beginning in 1638, the Beijing Gazette ; in Japan, it was limited to the "old editions in moveable type" ( kokatsujiban ), that is to say, the three hundred or so typographic works, classical and religious, published between 1593 and 1643, and, beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, to the scholarly and private works which constituted the "modern editions in moveable wooden type" (kinsei mokukatsujiban). Having invented moveable type, for the most part the East did not use it. However, in China , but also in Korea as well as Japan , there has existed for at least a thousand years a print culture which both had a broad foundation and was widely diffused. It depended on an original technique, used in the West beginning only in the second half of the fourteenth century: the production of block-printed books. Between the first dated book (a commentary on the Shiji of 1057), and the earliest editions made in the mid-nineteenth century with "Western mechanized printing techniques" in Guangzhou and Shanghai the Chinese utilized the technique of printing texts from engraved wooden blocks. For too long, Western historians have judged this manner of reproduction of texts and book publication against the standard of Gutenberg's invention, as if the latter was necessarily superior. A better knowledge of books and publishing in China and Japan will make one wary of such ethnocentrism. Wood engraving has its own advantages. For one thing, it is better adapted than typography to languages such as Chinese which are made up of a large number of written characters, or, as is the case with Japanese, of several scripts. For another, wood engraving maintains a strong link between manuscript writing and publishing, since the engraved blocks derive from calligraphic models. Finally, due to the durability of the woodblocks, which allow several thousand copies of the same title to be printed, restrikes are convenient and the run of the edition can easily be adjusted to market demand. While Gutenberg's invention was of fundamental importance, it was not the only technique capable of assuring the widescale dissemination of printed texts. The two forms of printing—based upon engraved woodblocks or typesetting—have certain traits in common in their economic and social dimensions. The logic which dictated the establishment of printing and publication in the Jianyang region during the Song and Yuan, and of that in Sibao during the late Ming and Qing, leads us back to the fundamental data frequently cited in the West for understanding the mapping of printing workshops: the proximity of raw materials, access to various book markets, and the strength of family traditions. The business and familial strategies of the Zous and Mas families of Sibao, whose activities reached their height between the decade of the 1730s and the mid-nineteenth century, are very similar to those that were put into play in almost the same period by a number of families from the mountain regions of western Europe. In the East as in the West, they engaged in book peddling, opening bookstores in the marketplaces, and developing a publishing industry. Such a linking of functions, distributed among family members according to their age, allowed the establishment of commercial enterprises based on sharing of information, of markets, and of resources. The fundamentally family nature of publishing activity allowed the setting up of effective kinship alliances to limit competition between businessmen from the same lineage. They decided, by means of an unwritten commercial regulatory code, to share the titles to be published, to exchange or sell among themselves the woodblocks that were already carved, and to coordinate the hiring of engravers necessary for the production of new books. Though the precise details are not known, it seems that paying the specialized engravers who carved the blocks used for printing made up in China the most important part of the overall cost of an edition (just as the purchase of paper posed the heaviest burden in the West, amounting to nearly half of the investment necessary for an edition). Engraving was, in fact, the only task which, in contrast to the printing, assembling, or binding, could not be assumed by the work of family members, and which, therefore, required the hiring of qualified professionals who had a specific competence and who were bitterly sought after by competing publishers. Chinese printing workshops mobilized a rather substantial workforce: in the Song and Yuan, as in the Ming and Qing, there were frequently businesses which employed between ten and fifteen workers in the material production of the books they published. However, these workers were often family labor, made up of women and children who were not salaried. This represents the first big difference from Western printing, where compositers and pressmen were journeymen paid by the master-printer. Another difference stems from the different types of publishing enterprises. In the West it was not unknown for various institutions--political, administrative, or religious--to have their own printing workshops. But their production, while often prestigious, assumed little importance in comparison with the editions coming out of the private publishing houses. The Chinese situation was different. From the Song to the Ming, printing was shared among several publishers: the palace workshop (jingchang), provincial and local administrations, Buddhist monasteries, private academies, and family schools, along with commercial enterprises. The importance of the connections existing between publishing and schools cannot be overemphasized. On the one hand, a respectable number of presses were located within family schools; in Jianyang during the Song, a fifth of workshops were associated with such schools ( jiashu ). On the other hand, in 1369 the Hongwu emperor ordered that a school be established in each prefecture, sub-prefecture, and county. From the end of the century, they were endowed with libraries which acquired as many imperial editions (the jingben, guanshu, or yuzhi shu editions of the Confucian classics, Buddhist and Daoist canonical texts, and didactic works) as they did titles printed by commercial publishers. Hongwu did not institute this nationwide system of state Confucian schools for the purpose of receiving imperial editions, nonetheless the relationship between the scholarly libraries and publishing activity both state and private, was strong. At their height between 1330 and 1540 they were an important market for published works, and in the West, beginning with France, it was not until the nineteenth century that there was established an equally dense network of school libraries. Beyond even the book market constituted by the schools, the Chinese situation witnessed a strong dependence of publishing activity in its connection with the examination system which allowed entrance into the imperial administration. On the one hand, the examination candidates formed an important clientele for the printers who, from the beginning of the sixteenth century, marketed commentaries and useful models for preparation for the examinations. On the other hand, publishing careers were often embraced by the individuals who failed in their attempt to obtain an official position. For an entire population of "frustrated intellectuals," who were disappointed in their social aspirations by defeat in the examinations, printing constituted a possible alternative. Publishing was ranked just after scholarship in the Confucian professional hierarchy. It allowed the participation of the publishers in literary networks, and therefore assured them a social status closer to the "gentry" than to commerce. [Western societies have also known, at different times in their history, in the 1640s or in the last decades of the eighteenth century, a similar situation in which the excessive number of literate people failed to find an agreeable posting in the governmental bureaucracy, and instead, had to find refuge in a career other than that which they desired. In the seventeenth century, they were often employed, not without resentment and bitterness, in the modest field of elementary teaching or in the lowest ranks of the ecclesiastical order. At the end of the eighteenth century, they turned to the field of law, swelling in this way the population of lawyers without cases, and to jobs in publishing--more often, however, as journalists, pamphleteers, and compilers than as publishers per se. There were few European literati who, unlike their Chinese counterparts, could, in the book trade, achieve the position of landlords, local notables, and philanthropists, as did the Zous and the Mas of Sibao. ] The total number of imperial editions (required reading for all who would essay the civil service examinations) totalled about one thousand in the Ming period. The library of an average prefectural school would have to contain two to three thousand books—a fact which obliged it to supplement its holdings with purchases from commercial publishers. In effect, imperial edict subsidized these commercial publishers. Publishing was seen as much as a menace as a benefit in China as in the West. Discourses on written culture reveal three dominant obsessions. First is concern over loss. From this perspective, the collection of ancient texts, the printed publication of manuscripts, and the establishment of libraries are all efforts to preserve the written patrimony. Annotated editions and commentaries on the Classics and the Four Books of the Song period, the publication programs of the Hongwu and Yongle emperors, the multiplication of libraries, not only in the schools, but also in monasteries, academies, and the homes of private individuals, attest clearly in China to the desire to safegard and transmit the texts fundamental to the tradition. But this transmission is always menaced by corruption. The obsession over the possible perversion of the body of canonical texts stems from two reasons. On the one hand, the world of publishing is, in essence, a world of commercial competition, necessary profits, and manual operations. It is therefore full of practices and values which are not those of learning: for example plagiarism, pirated editions, forgeries, and alterations. On the other hand, with the proliferation of widely diffused commentaries, the authority of official interpretations is called into question. Corruption is then not merely material, tied to the publication of faulty or truncated versions of texts; it resides as well in the possibility granted the reader to diverge from the lessons of tradition and thus to pervert the fixed meaning inherited from the Classics. The multiplication of printed books carries another fear as well—that of excess. The abundance of texts put into circulation requires sorting and selection, classification and order. One of the major techniques for achieving this, in the East as in the West, is the compilation which gathers in a single volume citations, examples, and information. During the Renaissance in the West, this intellectual practice took the form of the commonplace books in which readers or publishers arranged, under diverse headings, extracts from texts which they had read or collated. In China, the leishu (topically arranged compilations of passages from a number of sources) played an identical role. They constituted, along with other instruments such as library catalogs, scholarly handbooks, and encyclopedias, one of the major devices designed to control the worrisome proliferation of the written culture. To these "new readers" of classical texts, publishers offered new commentaries whose orthodoxy could appear suspect. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, for example, the Board of Rites attempted to subject to strict censorship any commentary on the Four Books whose interpretations drew upon Buddhist or Daoist texts. Authors and publishers thereafter had to rely on roundabout means in order to circumvent the proscription. They took refuge behind references to the authorized commentaries, or even condemned heterodox interpretations, but, in citing them, presented them to their readers. Such a strategy of of writing and publishing, putting into circulation the very texts judged as suspect by the authorities under the cover of condemning them, and relying upon the competent reader to supply a more subtle interpretation, cannot but recall the practice of reading by Jewish communities in the West during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In effect, it was often through an indirect reading of Christian condemnations stigmatizing their beliefs and rituals that they were able to reconstitute a corpus, albeit mutilated and with gaps, of the texts of their religious tradition. Reading "in the negative," deciphering texts of censorship in order to find in them what they seek to suppress, has constituted a defensive practice for all readers under a dominant order which forces them to keep a distance from works which should not be read. A further characteristic of reading habits in sixteenth and seventeenth century China, is the confusion between history and fiction, between scholarly works and recreational novels, between the real past and the imagined past. In Renaissance Europe there was, likewise, a similar uncertainty which effaced in reading (at least that by less informed readers) the distinctions between genres. One thinks, for example, of the denunciations of the dangers of fiction, which could always be understood as descriptions of the real world, which run through Christian and Platonic discourse and the administrative decisions of Golden Age Spain . In China , the kaozheng movement, which sought to study texts by means of the techniques of textual criticism, philology, and historical research, was rooted in the two-fold goal of separating original texts from forged ones, and of distinguishing without ambiguity differences between genres. But reading is not necessarily subjected to such discipline. Reading is always an inventive appropriation. This appropriation is certainly limited by the abilities, codes, and resources of the community which practices it, but readers are, at the same time, always capable of ignoring, sidestepping, or subverting the rules and apparatus designed to subjugate readings, to control interpretations, and to fix meanings. It is this dialectic between control and invention, constrained freedoms and transgressed constraints, which can illuminate the techniques of book production and the strategies of publishers. Importantly, it can also bring us insights into the manners of reading. The practices of reading aloud, for others or for oneself; the different types of "performance" of texts; the relationship between private reading and reading in public space; the intellectual techniques invested in the the practices of reading and writing: these are all critical to the formation of free thought.
Scripts and Literacy in Some Chinese Dynasties or Republics
The Development of the Jianyang BookTrade, Song—Yuan The Chinese have printed their books for over eleven centuries, but little is known about the people involved in the book trade. So far, most of what is known about Chinese books comes from detailed examination of extant imprints and from the annotated bibliographies compiled by many generations of scholars. This knowledge, however, relates mainly to the biblio-graphical aspects of the book and concerns publications by various government offices, high quality private editions, and religious works such as the Buddhist Tripitaka and the Daoist Canon, which do not adequately reflect the broad and varied tastes and needs of the many different kinds of readers in Chinese society. Rather, to understand the reading habits and literacy of different social groups, we must consider the activities and products of profit-minded commercial printers, who had to respond to and even anticipate quickly the many demands of their customers. The commercial publishers of Jianyang in northern Fujian (Minbei) occupy a conspicuous if not highly respectable position in the history of Chinese books. The Jianyang area, already noted for its flourishing paper industry, rapidly became one of the most important centers of the book trade in the country as printing burgeoned during the Song. From the start, Jianyang publishers had the reputation (not fully deserved) of producing shoddy editions on cheap paper with blurred impressions, which nevertheless sold throughout China and other East Asian countries, especially Japan and Korea. These works included the Classics, dictionaries, histories, geographies, medical texts, encyclopedias, school primers, collections of anecdotes, poetry anthologies, historical novels, and drama, and were produced for over five hundred years, from the Song to the early Qing. The broad cultural, historical, and geographical scope of the Jianyang book trade suggests that findings from this study may be significant for understanding the history of the book in imperial China in general. During the initial two hundred fifty years or so of the Song and the Yuan, some of the highest-quality Jianyang books were printed, and a number of the commercial practices further developed in the Ming were already quite evident. Ironically, because Chinese books began to be printed about seven centuries before European books, the earlier part of the story for China is harder to study. This is not only because many relevant materials no longer exist, but also because by the Song, when commercial printing took off, the tremendous changes that the printed text generated did not catch the attention of contemporaries in the same ways as they did in Europe for the two centuries or so after Gutenberg. Thus, while Song literati were quite aware of the power of print to replicate, disseminate, and transform texts, they were most likely to comment on the last and to complain about the abuses of print, if they mentioned the subject at all. In addition, the economic and technical aspects of printing were held by most scholars to be beneath their notice. This silence by the group most likely to leave behind written records has deprived us in large measure of one potentially valuable source. The and of later men who commented on Jianyang books, on the book trade in general, or on the Minbei area, constitute the most diverse sources. On practical details of the book trade, such as book prices, sizes of printings, and how the books were sold, these texts are all too silent. Although numerous Jianyang imprints recorded as editors and collators men who lived or served as officials in the area, such activities are almost never mentioned in the men's own writings. The notable exception was Zhu Xi, who described his own printing activities to supplement his meager income and to promote his ideas. Much more often, one finds a writer deploring the low quality and ubiquity of Jianyang books. From various wenji (collected writings of the printers' contemporaries) we can also learn about the literati's changing attitudes toward the printed text through different periods. Typical is the well-known remark of Ye Mengde in the late Northern Song that "Many Sichuan and Fujian books are printed from blocks of soft wood, so that they can be easily produced and quickly sold, and are not well made. Fujian books are sold all over, just because they are produced with so little effort." For example, the litany of complaints by Song scholars about how the greater availability of books through printing has led to superficial reading and understanding of texts is gradually replaced in the Yuan and the Ming by a more favorable assessment of the benefits of the printed text. The Beginnings of the Jianyang Printing Industry Several factors facilitated the growth of Jianyang into a major printing center during the Song. The area certainly had most of the natural resources necessary for producing block-printed books. The heavily forested mountains provided wood necessary for making the woodblocks, including pear ( li ) and catalpa ( zi ) woods, while pine trees growing in the region were burnt to provide the soot for making ink. Moreover, paper was made from bamboo that grew in great abundance in the mountains. Of the different types of paper made, one well-known Jianyang product used for printing was called book paper ( shuji zhi ), or (jade) knot (( yu ) kou zhi ). It is also quite likely that the book printing industry was preceded and later accompanied by an equally thriving industry printing items for common use, such as calendars, almanacs, religious charms, and funeral money. That the evidence for this other printing industry is scantier than for book printing should not be taken as proof that it did not exist. For instance, a similar situation obtained in Sichuan, but one of the very few hints we have is of a ban in 835 recorded in the Song encyclopedia Cefu yuangui on privately (and thus illegally) printed calendars which were being issued before the official calendar. In China the printing of scholarly books was a relatively late application of a technology already being used for a variety of religious literature and everyday ephemera. In the case of Jianyang, the book trade's rapid take-off in the Song had to do with a number of factors specific to the region as well. During the Song, Minbei was a remote mountainous area, but far from isolated. It had been the first area of Fujian that saw Han settlers from the north, as far back as the Eastern Han, but sustained migration into the area began only in the Tang and continued through the Northern Song. From the start the region's orientation was inland, across the Wuyi Mountains toward Jiangnan and beyond, at least as much as, or more than toward the sea. Before the rise of the Fujian maritime trade, the Minbei area's overland and water routes were the main conduits of trade between the Fujian coast and inland, and they remained important even after the economic development of coastal Fujian . The Minjiang River and its main northern branch, the Jianxi, connected Fuzhou with northern Fujian . Within the Minbei area, numerous small tributaries of the Jianxi formed an elaborate network of waterways. The chief mountain route through Fengshui guan led to Hekou in Jiangxi, whence a northeasterly route led to Hangzhou, while a northwesterly route went on to Poyang Lake and eventually back east to Nanjing, or alternatively, down the Gan River through Jiangxi and finally to Guangdong. Being relatively small items, books were probably transported along the same routes as bulk Minbei exports, such as lumber, paper, and rice. Throughout most of its early history, into the Northern Song, the Minbei area was ruled by various military leaders who were members of powerful local clans. In the Northern Song, at least some of the clans were building a power base through education and official success. We do not know enough about Minbei society during this period to say whether the local magnates belonged to the same families that began producing scholars and officials in significant numbers in the Song, but records do show that there were tensions between local military leaders and officials appointed by the central government. The former continued to be influential in the Southern Song, sometimes siding with government officials and sometimes with rebels and smugglers who thrived in the Fujian-Jiangxi-Zhejiang border area. The frequent unrest and high degree of local autonomy contributed to the court's view that Minbei was a difficult region to govern. The Buddhist monasteries constituted another influential force in the Minbei area. They were among the largest landowners, and probably had the largest share of the tea estates next to the government. Whatever its economic power, however, Buddhism in Fujian seems not to have been noted for its intellectual contributions and this may have been particularly true in the Minbei area. Certainly, if the known Jianyang imprints serve as any indication, the monasteries were little or not at all involved in the publishing business. Two of the Song dynasty Tripitakas were printed in Fujian when the Jianyang book trade was already in full swing, but they were both printed in Fuzhou. On the other hand, it is possible that the monasteries were involved in printing short sutras and religious pictures and that this more ephemeral literature was distributed through a very different network than the books printed in Jianyang. Northern Fujian, then, was something of a cultural and political backwater until the eleventh century, when men from the region began succeeding spectacularly in the government examinations: in numbers of jinshi , Jianzhou ranked first in the empire with 809 during the Northern Song, and continued to do well in the Southern Song. This rather sudden success may perhaps be attributed partly to the influx of families from the north who had official connections to the central government. Of these degree holders and other Minbei natives with official careers whose family background can be traced, several features are quite common. The genealogies of these men invariably claim the family's descent from an ancestor who was a high civil or military official, came to the area during the late Tang or Five Dynasties Period, and decided to settle there to avoid the political turmoil in the north, from where they came. Most also claimed to have come from Shaanxi or Henan, and some also recorded in the genealogies that the ancestor or some of his immediate descendants lived in Jiangxi before crossing the mountains to Fujian. Whatever the truth of these claims, it is clear that by the Southern Song these men increasingly sought to assert the legitimacy of their leadership in the area through government service, or in the case of noted thinkers like Zhu Xi and his students, intellectual prominence on a national scale. This in turn required success in the government examination system and therefore a heavy investment in education. By about 1080, each county in Jianzhou had at least one government school, and many family schools were established as well, with some wealthy families boasting more than one. By the time Zhu Xi and his students made the area a Neo-Confucian stronghold in the late twelfth century, the Jianyang area had reached a cultural (and economic) level it has yet to re-attain. From this perspective, the development of the printing industry in Jianyang seems a natural part of a larger story. Its exact course of development was heavily influenced by the great importance placed on education and success in government examinations by the local elite: during the Song, and to a lesser extent during the Yuan, the Classics and Histories constituted a significant portion of the titles published in Jianyang. That most Jianyang books were produced by family schools and/or commercial printers also reflects the government's relative lack of interest in publishing in Minbei during this time. This was in contrast to the publishing activities of local and regional governments in areas such as Liangzhe Circuit and Jiangnan west Circuit, and even other parts of Fujian , particularly Fuzhou . The reason probably had to do with the widespread opinion that Jianyang imprints were shoddily produced. This unfavorable view apparently extended to the bamboo paper produced in the region as well. During the Song, districts called upon to supply the government's enormous paper needs for books, proclamations, paper money, etc., included Huizhou in Anhui, Tanzhou in Hunan, Nanchang in Jiangxi, and Jinhua and Shaoxing in Zhejiang. These places were considered to produce paper satisfying government specifications, while the bamboo paper of Minbei did not. In turn, however, this absence of official attention, together with the largely ineffectual attempts at controlling what was printed, meant that the Jianyang book trade developed in relative freedom and generally in accordance with the increasingly varied demands of its customers. Jianyang Printers, Song-yuan About one fifth of the printers in the Song were apparently operating under the auspices of a family school ( jiashu ). There is no certain way to know whether the books they produced were for the use of the school alone or were also sold to outsiders. But given that approximately four thousand candidates in the early Southern Song, and ten thousand by 1186 were taking the triennial prefectural examination in Jianning, substantially more than that number would have been potential customers for these books. It would not have taken much consideration to see the benefits of commercializing the printing activities of a school. In addition, some of the printers not explicitly labeled jiashu may also have functioned (partly) as such, or at least have begun life as as such. This practice continued into the Yuan. For example, one of the best known Jianyang printers at the time, Yu Zhian of Qinyou tang in a number of his imprints would state both "Printed by Qinyou tang" and also "Printed by Yu Zhian at the Family School ." Thus it would not be unreasonable to suggest that a significant part of the printing business in Jianyang began as printshops for family schools. Even after turning into commercial concerns, the printers continued to produce many of the same kinds of books—the Classics and Four Books with their commentaries, histories, medical works, and literary collections. A large and reliable local market helped develop the Jianyang book trade until it was ready to expand further afield. How rapidly this expansion occurred is difficult to chart precisely, but seems to have taken three quarters of a century or less: the earliest dated Jianyang imprint is a commentary for the Shiji from 1057, and before the end of the Northern Song, Ye Mengde had registered his complaint about Fujian books. A survey of the books produced by various Jianyang printers in the Song shows little difference between those who were jiashu printers and those who were not. Still, it is interesting to note the virtual disappearance of printers labelled as jiashu in the Yuan, by which time the Jianyang long-distance book trade was well established. The disappearance of jiashu in the Yuan seems obvious because of the abolition of the civil service examination, and even after its restoration in 1313, quotas for Chinese were tiny. It is also noteworthy that several of the printshops begun in the Yuan continued for over 200 years, including several of the best-known printer families: Liu, Yang, and Yu. Furthermore, in some cases, evidence from the genealogies and the printers' notes in their books show that descendants of a printer would continue the business under a different name. For example, the Xiong family's Weisheng tang, which produced medical works in the Yuan, evolved into the more famous Zhongde tang under Xiong Zongli and his successors during the Ming. Jianyang printing was a family industry as well as a family business. At least some of the blockcarvers belonged to the same families as the printers. For example, in a recent name index of Song and Yuan blockcarvers, of the twenty-two or so blockcarvers surnamed Liu, Yu, or Xiong who can be shown to have worked on imprints from the Minbei area, six can be tentatively found in their respective genealogies. Moreover, there is evidence that the work of actually printing pages off the woodblocks may have been assigned to women and even children. In this way, labor costs could be kept competitively low. Taking this together with the locally produced cheap paper and ink that went into making them, Jianyang imprints were said be among the cheapest in the country. There is very little information on the size of such family operations and no reason to assume that there was a typical scale of operation. One sliver of information from the Liu genealogy concerns the Liu shi Rixin sangui tang, which had sixteen persons working on the physical production of the books in addition to another sixteen involved in collating and proofreading. The Rixin tang, as one of the most well-known and prolific print shops, was probably quite large compared to many of the other Jianyang printers, for most of whom we have only a few known imprints. What of the printers themselves—those whom we know by the names of their printing establishments? None was well-known on the national or even regional level. Only three claimed to have had official degrees or served in office. Indeed, most of them are not even mentioned in the local histories, and only about fourteen show up in the genealogies examined. This figure is approximate because some of the printers' names as they appear in the imprints (colophons, prefaces, etc.) cannot be found in the genealogies. Rather, recent investigators have managed convincingly to identify a printer with a name in the genealogy by a bit of detective work usually involving the names of the print shop, the father's or grandfather's name, relevant dates, and references in prefaces and contemporary writings. Moreover, when the printers are mentioned in the genealogies, it is almost always without reference to their printing activities, unless one of the works they printed and/or compiled was the genealogy itself. The evidence suggests that the printers tended to come from the less prominent branches of the descent group. The following brief summary of the publishing activities among Liu men illustrates this pattern, which also occurred in the Yu and Xiong descent groups. According to the two extant editions of genealogies for branches of descent groups surnamed Liu in the Jianning area, seven of the ten commercial printers claimed descent from one ancestor, Liu Ao, while prominent Liu men of the Song and Yuan, such as Liu Zihui, one of Zhu Xi's teachers, considered as their ancestor one younger brother of Liu Ao; and Liu Yue, a Zhu Xi disciple and nationally prominent Daoxue scholar, and his great-grandson and encyclopedist, Liu Yingli, claimed as their ancestor another of Liu Ao's younger brothers. Since only two Liu genealogies have been discovered, we can only guess at the comparative economic, political, and academic success of each branch of the descent group. Evidence, mainly from genealogical records and local histories, suggests that Liu men certainly con-tributed to the overall success of the Minbei region in producing jinshi, with the most spectacular story being that of the branch to which Liu Yue belonged, which boasted at least three jinshi for each of three consecutive generations in the Southern Song. By contrast, the recorded number of degree and office holders from the Liu Ao branch of the family were noticeably fewer than from the other two branches. There was one definite and two other possible jinshi from the branch to which the known printers belonged. More useful than a mere tally of degree and office holders, however, is a brief examination of the printing activities of a few of these men and their close relatives. Liu Chongzhi was a student of Zhu Xi and the son of Liu Zhongji, brother of Liu Li, and nephew of Liu Zhongli, all three of whom were printers. The high quality of their four extant imprints bespeak both the wealth and willingness to produce such work. Three were large works: Xin Tang shu, Hou Han shu, and the 150- juan literary anthology Huangchao wenjian. The fourth work, a collection of the prose of the Northern Song poet Huang Tingjian revered by Neo-Confucianists, reflects the family's affiliation with Zhu Xi. Liu Junzuo, who founded the Cuiyan jingshe during the Yuan, was the great-great-grandson of another printer. According to the genealogy, he received a jinshi degree and served as an official in Nan'en Circuit ( Guangdong ). It is uncertain whether he served under the Song or the Yuan government or both, but based on his preface (1301) to the edition of the genealogy he revised, Liu Junzuo probably was one of a number of Minbei men who retired from public life when the Yuan conquered south China. In the preface, he notes that each time the genealogy was revised, it was printed and a copy given to each branch of the fang. But the blocks were destroyed in 1276 when Yuan troops first invaded the region, so he assumed the task of producing a new edition. It is possible that his printing activities were spurred by his work on the genealogy. Two of Liu Junzuo's publications were of the Classics, both with Zhu Xi's commentaries. The first, Cheng-Zhu er xiansheng Zhouyi zhuanyi is dated 1314, a year after Zhu Xi's commentaries were declared the official ones for the civil service examination. The second work, Shiji zhuan, printed in 1327, is an elaborate production including a whole series of old prefaces, a map, a table of personages in the Book of Odes, a bibliography, and new sub-commentaries. Editorial credit is given to Hu Yigui (Hu Tingfang), a well-known Neo-Confucian scholar of the Yuan who collaborated with Xiong He and Liu Yingli in their teaching and writing activities at the Hongyuan Academy in the Wuyi Mountains. The number of Jianyang men engaged in some part of the publishing industry can be seen as part of a very important social phenomenon that was widespread by the Southern Song, namely, an "oversupply" of educated men compared to the the number of those passing the government examinations and holding official positions. In Jianning Prefecture, this certainly seems to have been the case, an ironic though not surprising result of the great success in examination by men from this area throughout the Song. These men certainly deemed themselves sufficiently well-educated to print and publish a variety of scholarly works for sale. It was necessary to claim scholarly competence since their work was not merely the mechanical reproduction of a worthy text but also involved the intellectually demanding tasks of acquiring reliable exemplars, collating them, and producing a new edition cleansed of mistakes while retaining textual variants for the judgement of their readers. Such intentions were expressed by them or for them in the books' prefaces and postfaces, or more brashly and succinctly in printers' notes. The high quality of many extant Jianyang imprints from the Song and some from the Yuan would support the printers' claim to erudition. On the other hand, the tiny kerchief albums, the whole corpus of examination-related literature, and the popular works that were increasingly printed in the Yuan argue the sound business sense of at least some of the same printers. Whether Jianyang men opted out of the long and highly uncertain path to official success, or simply never succeeded despite repeated attempts, working in some capacity in the publishing industry, whether as author, editor, proof-reader, or printer, became a viable means of earning a living using their years of education. It is possible that certain branches of various descent groups chose to specialize in printing, while keeping up efforts at examination success. This may explain, for example, why the greatest number of printers surnamed Liu came from one branch of the descent group. For the Song and Yuan, the evidence is inconclusive. For example, as we noted above, information for the Liu printers suggests that their branch of the family shared the emphasis on scholarship and academic success of their more prominent relatives. It is noteworthy, however, that for the Liu, Yu, and Xiong families, almost all of the Ming printers who can be identified directly or indirectly in their genealogies are descended from printers of the Song and Yuan. This suggests that the practice of some branch(es) of a descent group choosing to specialize in the book trade with a secondary emphasis on scholarship evolved over time. Moreover, developments by the Yuan suggest a widening gap between scholarly and business concerns in the Jianyang printing industry. First, there was a distinct difference between the carefully collated works, often produced by private academies under the supervision of well-known scholars like Xiong He and Liu Yingli, and the far greater number of lower quality commercial imprints. Second, these latter publications included, in addition to the usual scholarly texts, an ever-increasing outpouring of popular works, such as collections of medical prescriptions, household manuals, and illustrated historical fiction, which could appeal to a broader audience ranging from highly educated literati to semi-literate shopkeepers, townsmen, and non-Han readers with a limited mastery of Chinese. Indeed, this diversification in their repertoire was probably essential for the commercial publishers' survival in the Yuan, and would be a prominent characteristic of the Jianyang book trade in the Ming. Jianyang Imprints, Song-yuan Classics The quality of Jianyang imprints of the Classics in the Song ranged from excellent, comparable to the best editions published by the Directorate of Education or by some regional government offices in the Song, to cheap, poorly printed editions, including the tiny "kerchief" copies that candidates smuggled into the examination hall. There are few extant copies of this last type, since their very purpose rendered them quite perishable, and they would not have been of interest to book collectors. Nevertheless, judging from the remarks made by writers of the time and from the ineffectual complaints of government officials, production of this last type was a booming industry. The inability of the government to control the circulation of commercial imprints is also clear from the memorials of the Directorate of Education in 1198 complaining that model examination essays from Jianyang were incorporat-ing passages from the works of the Daoxue school, which had been banned in 1195. Needless to say, the Jianyang publishers were profiting from the increased demand for these works as a result of the ban. The wonder is that it took three years for them to do so, or at least three years for the complaint to be memorialized. While cheap commercial editions all too often suffered from slipshod editing and bad printing, they (as well as the superior editions) also incorporated features that more fully utilized the capabilities of the printed text. For example, innovations for the convenience of the reader, such as combining the main text with different annotations, glossaries of pronunciation and meaning of difficult words, punctuated text, information rearranged in tabular form or translated into illustrations, were all introduced or popularized by Jianyang printers. In considering such commercial editions, we see some of the deeper objections held by many scholars of the time, who did not see printing as an unalloyed improvement in transmitting and broadcasting knowledge. Some of their discontent with commercial editions had less to do with the quality of the books than with their perception of the function of books. In the traditional way of learning the Classics and the Four Books, students began from early childhood to recite them out loud and memorize them. Comprehending the layers of meaning of these works was a gradual lifetime process, only part of which was the reading (and punctuating) of the written page. Thus, to many scholars, the new features offered in commercial editions, as well as simply the easier availability of the works, seemed to make learning too facile and shallow and discouraged full comprehension of a text. Even more objectionable, of course, was the careless way that annotations and commentaries chock full of mistakes were attached to the main text, or the contents sloppily abridged. To many exasperated scholars, these were the trademarks of Mashaben. The trend to make texts convenient for readers, however, continued to grow in the Yuan. For Jianyang imprints in the Classics category in general, one obvious change from the Song to the Yuan is the increase from 24.9 percent of the total imprints to 37.6 percent. This increase is due partly to the greater number of imprints of or concerning the Four Books and, even more, to the dramatic growth in the number of philological works printed in the later period. It can be argued that works on the Classics and Four Books were written or compiled by scholars with little interest in taking the examinations or serving the Yuan government, but rather with the desire to preserve and propagate Chinese learning in a particularly bleak period for such studies. Certainly, there is sufficient evidence of Song loyalism and an inclination toward Confucian eremetism among Yuan literati, with the latter supported by an interpretation of self-cultivation based on Daoxue ideas easy to embrace in that time, particularly by men in the Jianyang area, one of the strongholds of Neo-Confucianism. This argument, however, would not explain the demand for their works as demonstrated by the number of commercial editions printed. The restoration of the government examinations has to account in part for the publication of these works. The growth in the number of works related to the Four Books in the Yuan reflected their greater emphasis (over the Classics) in the government examinations, and also their advocacy by adherents of the Daoxue school, including personal disciples of Zhu Xi and some of his close friends, who perpetuated their teachings into the Yuan. Of the fifteen known Jianyang imprints of the Four Books, ten are definitely dated after 1313, when the Yuan government conferred official recognition on Zhu Xi's commentaries on these texts. (The precise dates for the other five are unclear.) Actually, a similar situation prevails for the Classics and commentaries: of the forty-nine known Jianyang imprints, only two are dated before 1313, while thirty-three are dated after that date, suggesting that, by the Yuan, the habit of studying the Classics in connection with the civil service examination was a habit too deeply ingrained among Chinese literati to be broken, even when confronted with tiny examination quotas that promised so little chance of official success. Another reason why production of commercial imprints of the Classics and Four Books continued to be important in the Yuan has to do with the particular kinds of works produced. For example, books classified as qimeng —primers—or more descriptively, texts to open the eyes of the ignorant, figure more prominently among Jianyang imprints of the Yuan than the Song (and would be found in great profusion among those of the Ming). There is at least one primer each for the Book of Changes, the Book of Poetry, the Book of Rites, and the Spring and Autumn Annals, and two for the Four Books among Jianyang publications of the Yuan. Such a trend suggests the increasing willingness of scholars to write and publishers to produce basic introductions to the Classics, used probably not just for teaching young children but also for older readers lacking the benefit of a classical education from early childhood. The popularity of philological works among Jianyang printers in the Yuan demonstrates that while such works were considered important tools for studying the Classics, they were also useful general references for reading all kinds of other works and for writing, including versification, from composing a couplet to a short poem or dramatic songs in a play. These activities do not seem to have abated and some, such as play-writing, may even have had more practioners in the Yuan, not all of them necessarily highly educated. Another overall change from the Song to the Yuan was the relatively fewer superior editions of all kinds of work in the later period. The impression from surveying the extant imprints from both periods is that, in general, the page layout for Yuan editions was more cramped, squeezing more of the main text and even more of the smaller character commentary and annotation into each column of a page. Texts of many different kinds of works were now easily available to be reprinted more cheaply if also more badly. But this general devaluation of imprints may have led to a larger market in that customers who otherwise would not have bought a book would do so now, given the chance to buy an inexpensive edition of a prestigious work, either for reading or for display. History During the Song, among Jianyang imprints in the History category, about half were dynastic histories. Furthermore, eleven of the twenty were definitely printed by family schools ( jiashu ). At first, it may seem puzzling for Jianyang publishers to produce so many dynastic histories, since they were substantial works that were not absolutely necessary for the civil service examination. The explanation has to do with the role of the jiashu printers, who consistently put out the best Jianyang publications—usually well-collated and printed—because they possessed both the financial and intellectual resources for such publication efforts. Thus, they were able to re-collate texts based on Directorate and other government editions and participate in the popular Song scholarly activity of trying to produce an error-free text. Non-government printers often had greater opportunity for such work and could even invite readers to write to the printer with any errors they may find. During the Yuan, as the number of jiashu printers in Jianyang decreased drastically, so did the number of dynastic histories printed.There was, however, a slight increase in the number of annalistic histories and related works. But it is noteworthy that while there was only one Jianyang edition of Sima Guang's Zizhi tongjian, there were four works explaining it (xiangjie), and for the single edition of Zhu Xi's Zizhi tongjian gangmu, there were three xiangjie. This preference of commercial printers to put out shorter explanations of the original work was to become even more pronounced in the Ming. Of the geographical works, two (one Song, one Yuan) were editions of the Fangyu shenglan by Zhu Mu, a Jianyang native. The Song edition of 1267 was published by his son, who knew enough to have a note from the Fujian Fiscal Intendant placed at the front of the book forbidding Masha Shufang from reprinting it. It is unclear how effective this ruling was. In any case, sometime during the Yuan, the well-known Liu family Rixin tang printed a "newly edited" version. Medical Works The medical books printed in Jianyang show some obvious common characteristics for the Song and Yuan. First, 5 of the 10 works from the Song, and 16 of the 19 in the Yuan are collections of prescriptions ( fangshu ), all of them re-prints of well known works, including the Taiping huimin hejiju fang (Prescriptions of the Bureau of People's Welfare Pharmacies), compiled under imperial auspices (1107-1110). This work must have been enormously popular—it was printed in at least five different editions in Jianyang alone during the Yuan. Two other books from the Song and two from the Yuan are pharmaceutical works, or bencao (which also contain prescriptions). From the Yuan, two other books are on acupuncture and another two are brief overall discussions, one on pulse analysis (chamai) and one on febrile diseases (shanghan). There is only one medical classic—an edition of the Huangdi neijing suwen (Plain Questions of the Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine). The important point to note is that nearly all the medical books are ones that could be readily read and used by a lay person without much special medical experience. While a greater diversity of medical books were printed in Jianyang during the Ming, half of them would still be prescription collections. Encyclopedias Leishu are topically arranged compilations of passages from a number of sources, sometimes with the compiler's commentaries or summary at the end of each section. Actually the leishu category encompasses a variety of books ranging from everyday household manuals to rules and instructions for carrying out all kinds of family rituals to dictionaries of quotations to examination essays to works truly encyclopedic in their scope. The popularity of leishu in the Song can be accounted for in several ways. First, as printing made more works generally available, it was easier for scholars who wanted "to systematize existing knowledge into formats for methodical comprehension," largely for Classical studies and governance. Dissemination through printing also ensured the compilers that their labor would be rewarded by a larger readership than in the days of only hand-written copies. Second, leishu were of course a great convenience for readers who lacked access to a vast array of original sources and/or did not have the time or inclination to plow through so much material. This feature is especially evident in collections of essays used by students in preparing for the government examinations, but is also a feature that many scholars of the time felt to epitomize the broad but shallow approach to reading, or in the case of examination essays, reading only to memorize the text. Nevertheless, these critics were fighting a losing battle against the approach of reading broadly that was becoming feasible for many more people due to the greater availability of books through printing. Of the encyclopedic type of leishu , only one was printed in Jianyang in the Song and only two in the Yuan. None of the monumental encyclopedias compiled in the Song, such as the Cefu yuangui, Taiping yulan , and Wenxian tongkao, were reprinted in Jianyang until the Ming, and then only under official auspices. These facts suggest that the Jianyang printers may have had difficulty obtaining access to the large encyclopedic works and probably were reluctant to spend the time, money and labor needed for reprinting such large works which few customers could afford. Of the leishu that were printed in Jianyang during the Song, a number of them could be used as handy references and source books for the reader's own writings. These included the Xinbian gujin shiwen leiju of Zhu Mu; a small-character edition of the Leishuo, a dictionary of phrases and words from a large variety of belle-lettres sources; and the Huang Song shibao leiyuan, which culled passages from the xingzhuan (life and deeds) of famous Song men. It is no surprise that leishu were essentially topically arranged literary anthologies or dictionaries of phrases drawn from well-known works readily spawned more of the same. Even a quick comparison of ten of these works shows that they often cited the same passages. This is most likely because many of these collections were merely "re-compiled" (i.e., copied) from older collections, a cheaper and faster method than compiling from a large number of original sources that were hard to come by for a compiler or printer, even in a book-producing center like Jianyang. Several of the leishu printed in Jianyang during the Yuan were well-known ones compiled in the Song, but the majority were compiled during the Yuan. One was the Shilin guangji (Enlarged Record of Facts), compiled by Chen Yuanjing, a native of the Minbei area, in the thirteenth century and printed three different times in Jianyang during the Yuan. The value of this work, a general encyclopedia, is enhanced by large illustrations. Another work popular with the Jianyang printers was the Zengguang shilian shixue dacheng, a large poetry compendium of which there were three Jianyang editions in the Yuan. A third collection of literary excerpts compiled by a Jianyang native, the Song loyalist scholar Liu Yingli, the Xinbian shiwen leiju hanmo quanshu, would be supplemented and reprinted a number of times in the Ming. Several leishu in the form of examination essays were also published in Jianyang. One is the Xinjian jueke gujin yuanliu zhilun (The Best Essays, Old and New, with New Commentaries for the Examinations), of which there is at least one Jianyang edition in the Yuan (1367). This collection, originally compiled in the Song, contains detailed essays on the history of political and social institutions useful in preparing for the government examinations. The Jianyang edition is a very typical example of the widely deplored Mashaben with its cramped page layout, squeezing fifteen columns of twenty-five characters each onto each page. Such collections constituted one of the specialties of the Jianyang book trade, and judging from the extremely worn impressions of an extant copy, they sold very well. There was also a household encyclopedia, the earliest extant one printed in Jianyang, the Jujia biyong , which would be reprinted in variously supplemented editions in the Ming. The Jianyang imprint of a leishu on the study of the origins of clans and their surnames, the Xinbian paiyun zengguang shilei shizu daquan, turns out not to be such a complete compendium and to have copied much of its material from the Song compilation Gujin xingshishu bianzheng . Finally, there is a late Song/early Yuan Jianyang imprint entitled Xinbian hunli beiyong Yuelao xinshu (Newly Edited Handbook of the Old Man of the Moon for Marriage Preparations). This work is a manual which describes everything from how to conduct betrothal and wedding ceremonies to how to word invitations to these ceremonies and feasts to how the betrothed couple and their families should comport themselves. Again, it is a typical Mashaben , packing plenty of information (accurate and inaccurate) into cramped pages, and the extant copy looks as if it had been pulled off blocks that had already been used for several thousand copies. Anecdotists In this category, there are noticeable differences among the Jianyang imprints of the Song and Yuan. Among the Song works printed are highly popular collections of anecdotes and casual jottings by contemporaries, including the first four sections of Hong Mai's Yijian zhi, all four collections of Wang Mingqing's Huizhu lu, and the Xinbian Xuanhe yishi. There is one edition—the earliest extant—of a pinghua or vernacular historical narrative, the Xinbian Wudai shi pinghua, with stories of famous men from the Five Dynasties. For the Yuan, except for an edition of the Shishuo xinyu , the six other imprints of fictional works are illustrated historical novels: one printed by the Jian'an shutang (1294) and a series printed by the Yu(2) family of Jian'an. The titles of the five extant works from this series, which date from the early 1320s, all say "Newly printed, fully illustrated popular stories (xinkan quanxiang pinghua )..." The illustrations are in the shangtu xiawen format, that is, with the illustration on the top third of the page and the text below. They are the forerunners of the illustrated historical novels (tongsu yanyi) that represented one of the Jianyang printers' specialties in the mid- and late Ming. The Yuan works are far from deluxe editions, and the text portion resembles many of the other ordinary quality Jianyang imprints of the time, with its cramped page layout. They probably sold quite well, however, especially in large cities such as Hangzhou, and their existence attests to the long-distance Jianyang book trade, which must have been very well established by then. Collections Jianyang imprints in this category in the Song and Yuan are almost entirely limited to individual collections (bieji) and general collections (zongji). The bieji titles are interesting in what they again suggest about the Jianyang book trade: a few works were printed repeatedly. For instance, at least 6 different editions (i.e., from 6 different sets of woodblocks) of Su Shi's poems were printed during the Song and Yuan, 5 of Du Fu's poems, 4 of the Zhu Xi collated version of Han Yu's collected writings, and 4 of Liu Zongyuan's collected writings glossed by a multitude ( wubai jia zhuyin bian ...). This trend may not only indicate the popularity of the repeatedly printed works, but also the difficulty in obtaining the writings of less well-known authors, even if the printers knew of them. In addition, it seems that the Jianyang printers had not yet developed to any significant extent the practice of actively creating a demand for their books, which they would do in the Ming. The zongji works are a much more varied selection. It is possible to learn something of literary and intellectual trends and fads of the times by analyzing the titles of bieji and zongji works that were continuously brought out by commercial printers. There are three reasons Jianyang developed into one of the largest printing centers of the Song and Yuan: 1) the availability of all the natural resources necessary for woodblock printing, 2) the location of Jianyang and other Minbei towns on waterways that made them important entrepôts for the trade between Fujian and the Jiangnan area, 3) the intellectual tradition which led to the spectacular examination success of the region and which had its full flowering in the contributions of Minbei men to Daoxue learning. No one of these factors was necessary nor sufficient, but the combination of them provides a plausible explanation of the growth of the Jianyang book trade into one of broad regional scope in less than a century. The Jianyang printing industry may have begun as a "spin-off" from paper making and perhaps, like that in Sichuan , initially produced ephemera such as simple calendars, funeral money, and religious charms and sutras. But the printing of books probably could not have developed to such a spectacular extent without a substantial local market to begin with. Private academies, government schools, family schools and some tens of thousands of examination candidates not only created a great local demand for Jianyang imprints, but also determined the kinds of books that would be printed. Because such books were in just as great demand outside of Jianyang, the book trade became regional and to an extent national, facilitated as it was by the trade routes that ran through the region. The Minbei area was remote from the large urban centers of the Jiangnan area and from central government control, but far from isolated. It remained for all of late imperial China a debatable land whose mountains sheltered rebels, bandits, smugglers, miners, and all kinds of vagrants. For them, and for merchants and peddlers, the Wuyi Mountains proved to be a very porous border between Fujian, Jiangxi, and Zhejiang, rather than the impenetrable barrier they often presented to government forces. And perhaps it was just this selective penetrability that helped foster the Jianyang book trade as well as the Minbei intellectual efflorescence of the Southern Song. Away from the distractions of the capital, away from the political struggles there, it was possible to concentrate on one's scholarly activities. Schools and academies in traditional China mainly flourished in scenic country spots, and the Minbei region had its full share. Moreover, the lack of attention paid by the central government to this area offered certain advantages. For example, it was free to make, use, and sell its bamboo paper without having to surrender any of it for government use. And books from Jianyang, whether they were collections of examination essays excoriated by officials or the collected writings of men out of political favor or expounding unorthodox ideas, usually managed to get sold even in the capital without their printers being caught. The enthusiasm of Song scholars brought to correcting a text, to reconcile existing versions by removing the encrustation of corruptions accumulated through the ages contributed to their sagacious reputations. But the shape-shifting of texts by commercial printers, for good or for bad, must also be reckoned with if only because their power to broadcast their versions was that much greater. And Jianyang publishers were certainly among the foremost of these. Why the Jianyang printing industry continued to thrive in the Yuan is harder to explain. With the suspension of the government examinations and the tiny quotas for Chinese candidates even upon its restoration in 1315, it would seem that one of the major markets for Jianyang imprints was lost. However, there was no significant diminution of the number of Classics and related works printed. In fact, taking into account the Four Books and philological works, there was actually a significant increase of works in the Classics category. Furthermore, although the total number of books in the History category decreased, works related to annalistic histories, mainly critiques and digests, noticeably increased. There are several possible reasons. First, the intellectual tradition and the examination culture that flourished in the Song simply was too strong to die out in less than a century. In addition, a number of Song loyalist scholars who retired from public life were instrumental in keeping alive the Neo-Confucian teachings of Zhu Xi and other famous scholars of the Minbei region, by founding and maintaining academies and, to a lesser extent, by printing works they wrote or edited. Furthermore, scholars were persistent in collating, and adding new com-mentaries and critiques to the Classics and Histories and the examination system. Certainly the latter fuelled authorial and editorial efforts of all quality, but an even greater impetus had been the spread of the printed text, with its unprecedented potential for broadcasting and preserving, if only through the sheer number of copies, the efforts of a writer. Nothing in the Yuan diminished the power of print. Other factors just as important as the continuation of Classical learning explain the evolution of the Jianyang book trade in the Yuan. These involve the large number of medical works, especially collections of prescriptions, and non-scholarly works, such as household encyclo-pedias and illustrated historical fiction. Although similar medical texts and probably the other kinds of works were printed by the late Southern Song, their greater importance among Jianyang imprints of the Yuan argues that the printers were tapping into a large market made up of many different kinds of readers, a market that would be their mainstay in the Ming. There was a very large and important part of the commercial publishing that went on in rural areas and rivaled that which took place in large cities for nearly the entire period that block-printed books dominated China. Were the printers in the rural areas producing books for different audiences, or did they simply find operating outside the large cities more economical, even considering the costs of transport? Based on what is known of the Jianyang book trade, the latter seems more likely. Certainly, no easy and simple distinctions can be made between the publishing industries in the urban and rural areas. Printing, Examinations, and Intellectual Change in Late Ming China Historians are now taking a new look at the intellectual history of the late Ming. Nothing is more relevant than a close examination of the impact of the publishing boom on gentry culture in the late Ming. Ku Yen-wu (1613-1682) and Huang Tsung-hsi (1610-1695) had long concurred that the perennial problem of duplicity encouraged by the civil service examinations and the danger of recruiting officials from candidates who only excelled in memorization had become more acute as commercial printing expanded in the late Ming. Were they correct in their assessment that commercial printing only encouraged intellectual inertia and educational deficiency in the late Ming? Or were they oblivious to other effects of printing on the educated elite? Ku's and Huang's negative assessment of the effects of printing on education oversimplifies the complex relationship between printing and the education process, in particular the civil service examination. The relationship between printing and intellectual change is a very complex one. Printed books and materials are important bearers of values, ideas, and practices. But to assume a direct relationship between diffusion of texts and dissemination of ideas is to neglect the important issues of the reader's reception of ideas, and the numerous ways the use of printed books were shaped by cultural values and social practices. For example, the ownership of books cannot be used as the sole means for a reliable study of dissemination of ideas. Such an approach will either exaggerate the transforming power of the texts on the owners who might disagree with the books, or underestimate the influence of certain texts because ideas and values could be transmitted through collective uses of books, borrowing from public and private libraries. In China, as in early modern Europe , it is clear that all the books people read were not books they owned. As scholars studying the history of books in early modern Europe have demonstrated, studying intellectual change by examining ideas and values in printed texts needs to take into consideration the question of who read what, how, and where. European historians have cautioned against attributing too much to printing in explaining intellectual change since the Renaissance. Historians of China are beginning to investigate the complex relationship of printing to late imperial culture. Historians of eighteenth-century France agree that publishing was an activity where social, economic, and cultural forces naturally converged, and political factors need to be taken into consideration in the study of printing. This observation applies equally well to the study of printing in late Ming China. Printing and the Civil Service Examinations In the early Ming books were printed primarily by printing offices of both the local and central government. The two imperial academies in Peking and Nanking published only a small number of books. Private publishing shops began to proliferate in the late fifteenth century. Since the sixteenth century commercial publishing began to boom. It was part of the commercial expansion as it generated greater demand for paper, ink, woodblocks, and all the materials for packaging books. One scholar observed, with some exaggeration, that if printing blocks were sold on the market as fuel, the price of firewood and charcoal would fall sharply. There was no major technological breakthrough in printing in the sixteenth century except perhaps in multi-color printing. But the great expansion of commercial publishing both in scope and in volume resulted in greater division of labor and numerous refinements of the art of printing. Large numbers of books were printed to meet the various social, cultural, and religious needs of the diversified educated elite and growing urban population. In addition to the great demand for books published for the civil service examinations, publishers and printers produced books such as mountain gazetters, almanacs, encyclopedias, morality books, and medical manuals. Widely available were practical guides for writing letters, performing rituals, choosing dates for all kinds of ceremonies, activities, and entertainment. There were also books printed for guiding travellers, merchants, connoisseurs, and even for identifying methods of cheating commonly used by dishonest merchants and rogues. It is reasonable to assume the existence of several reading publics in the late Ming, when China had more than 120 million people. There were at least three reading publics: the general urban readers, the civil service examinees, and women. These reading publics were not mutually exclusive but overlapped in the books they read, especially those pertaining to practical uses and entertainment. Travel guides, almanacs, novels, plays, short stories, medical books, ritual manuals, and guides for letter-writing made general readings for all. Model examination essays, commentaries on the Four Books and the Classics, anthologies of prose, poetry, and other kinds of examination aids would be bought and read mostly by examinees. Students preparing for all levels of the civil service examination constituted one of the largest reading publics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For the educated elite in the late sixteenth century, printing was as common as it was affordable. For example, a low-quality commentary on the Four Books published in Nanking in 1615 was priced at only 0.5 tael. A private tutor probably with only a sheng-yuan degree could earn more than 40 taels from tuition in a year. For most tutors and examinees with higher degrees, they could get extra income through providing a wide range of services such as writing letters, calligraphy, commemorative essays, and epitaphs. For higher-degree holders, income from charging a fee for writing varied from a fraction of a tael to hundreds of taels. Hsi-men Ch'ing paid a chü-jen degree holder 0.5 tael for writing calligraphy on a pair of hankerchiefs. Hsu Wei (1521-1593), a renowned playwright and writer, received 220 taels for writing a commemorative essay. To be sure, his pay cannot be taken as ordinary. But books priced at half a tael were still affordable for the educated elite. The lower cost of printing offered new ways for publishers to exploit the book market by publishing more new types of examination aids. The examinees became increasingly dependent on printed books to enhance their chances of success in the civil service exam-inations. To attribute the ignorance of the candidates to their dependence on the model essays, as did Ku Yen-wu and Huang Tsung-hsi, oversimplifies the complex reading practice of the examinees in the late Ming. The examinees read more than just the model essays. We have a general idea of what the examinees read to prepare for the civil service examinations. The advertisement of books is a reliable source of information on how commercial publishers targeted their readers. In 1591 Yu Hsiang-tou, a prolific publisher from the famous printing center Chien-yang in Fukien, published a book with an advertisement listing a number of published and forthcoming books, and told the reader that they were "published exclusively for examination." The list includes Classics, histories, poetry anthology, examination model essays, and six commentaries on the Four Books. Examinees were required to answer questions on the Four Books in the "eight-legged" (pa-ku) style, a highly structured essay in eight parts. Because of this official requirement of style, these essays were also called (chih-i a , or chih-i b). By the late sixteenth century there were different types of model essays published by commercial print shops. The first type was essays written by examiners as models for examinees (ch'eng-wen). Essays on the Four Books by metropolitan graduates (chin-shih) were called mo-chüan. By the late sixteenth century, for each metropolitan examination, there were several hundreds of different selections of essays by metropolitan graduates. Competition for readers often led to rivalry and diatribes among professional writers. The third type was essays on the Classics by successful candidates of the metropolitan examinations (fang-kao). The "critical editor" (hsüan-shou) hired by commercial publishers selected and commented on the essays, explaining the writing skills and the reasons for their success. The fourth type was a new type of anthology published by literary societies. Exercises of members of literary societies were called she-kao . This type of anthology arose as examinees sought to organize into literary societies to help one another to prepare for the examinations in the 1620s. Printing had transformed education and scholarship into yet another commodity in the market economy of the late Ming. It quietly but profoundly transformed the teacher-student relationship. These examination aids significantly reduced the degree of dependence on the teacher's personal instruction for advanced students. Commentaries were written for examinees at different levels, ranging from beginner to intermediate and advanced levels. Beyond the elementary level, the authority of the teacher was now supplemented and in some cases replaced by professional writers' expert knowledge that was easily obtained in the bookshops in the cities. There were in fact complaints about the general decline in respect for government teachers. This might not be the case at the stage when the examinees were still teenagers trying to acquire the sheng-yüan status. The decline in respect for teachers may be explained in part in terms of the power of the examiners and the greater dependence of advanced candidates on printed books in their preparation for their examinations. Ch'en Chi-t'ai (1567-1641), a renowned writer himself, suggested that if the government outlawed the printing of essays of literary societies (wen-she) and the essays by successful examinees at the metropolitan level (chin-shih), money saved from printing, paper, and ink would help meet the financial needs of the government. If all the books were piled up, they were numerous enough to block the passage of Mt. Ch'ang. In 1595 a scandal broke out in Peking involving the second place graduate at the metropolitan examination. He was found to have copied verbatim from model essays published by commercial printers. Rumor had it that he had reproduced essays from printed model essays even in the first seven sessions of his examination. The case was in fact the tip of the iceberg. In 1616 the candidate who won the first place in the metropolitan examination ( hui-yüan ) was disqualified for having regurgitated the essay that had earned T'ang Pin-yin (1568-?) the first place back in 1595. Tang's essay, like all those of other metropolitan graduates, were widely available in printed anthologies. The wide circulation of examination essays in printed anthologies and the relatively limited number of examination questions on the Four Books made it possible for examinees to "duplicate" the success of previous graduates. Ku Yen-wu had stressed the important role of the printing of model essays in the breakdown of the civil service examination as a means for recruiting officials. He pointed out: "Everyone studies only the essays by winners of the metropolitan examination. Having immersed themselves in them for three to five years, an ignorant youth can by a stroke of luck pass the examination and rise to be an equal of the high officials." In a similar vein, Huang Tsung-hsi lamented that the majority of the examinees no longer read the Five Classics, the Tso Commentary, the Records of History, the Han Shu, and the prose of the T'ang-Sung Eight Masters. They committed to memory nothing but model essays and the essays of successful candidates. Another consequence of the publishing boom was the examinees' use of printing for publicity. The growing corruption in officialdom and the fierce competition had prompted candidates to resort to various ways to increase their chances of success. The majority continued to use conventional methods such as building connections through kinship, friend-ship, discipleship, and bribery of examiners and educational officials. Some sought to accumulate moral merit through keeping ledgers. Some advanced examinees began to resort to printing of their own exercise essays to create a "public" reputation in order to draw the attention of the examiners. They often sought prefaces from official examiners, provincial education intendants (hsüeh-cheng), government school professors at the prefecture and department levels ( chiao-shou ), the county level lecturers (chiao-yü), and locally eminent scholars. The numerous prefaces to the anthologies of examination essays in the "collected writings" of late Ming scholars attested to the emergence of this strategy. Greater publicity might bring success in the examinations, or in some cases in the publishing world. When the examinee acquired a reputation as a good writer, he might be invited or hired by publishers to comment on and to criticize examination essays of graduates. The increase in printed examination aids created opportunities for many talented but unsuccessful examinees. Many of the excessive number of literati that the bureaucracy failed to absorb found careers in commercial printing. Many literati, while continuing to prepare for the next examinations, took up writing, editing, compiling, or even publishing as viable means of living. The experience of Ma Yang-po's venture into publishing was quite common in the late Ming period. Some, like the playwright Chang Feng-i, (1527-1613) published their own examination aids. Acquiring a Classical education required special literary and linguistic skills. The examinees' training in calligraphy, Classical learning, historical knowledge, poetic and prose skills made publishing most feasible and desirable as a second option to government service and private tutoring. Publishing offered a second advantage. By working on literary materials, they could continue to take the examinations without having to learn a different trade anew. This body of specialized knowledge itself became a commodity in the publishing market. For many, the writing, compiling, and editing of books on subjects such as the Classics, history, prose, and poems coincided with their own preparation for the examination. For example, the famed publisher-cum-writer Feng Meng-lung (1574-1646) specialized in the Spring and Autumn Annals in order to better fulfill the required examination on one of the Five Classics . He did not even pass the prefectural examination and was only given the "presented licentiate" (kung- sheng) status at the age of 57. But he published many examination aids. Among them he authored two works on the Spring and Autumn Annals. Feng's example clearly shows the attraction of publishing jobs for examinees. The other obvious advantage would be access to the book collection of the publishers' library. But the sideline jobs turned out to be a life-long career by default for the majority of the professional writers, as they labored unsuccessfully to pass higher level of examinations. This new alternative career and the authority that came with the professional critic, however, was a mixed blessing for the examinees. The unprecedented expansion of the publishing industry benefitted as well as hindered their careers. It took place as the literati class grew in size and the average length of time for the successful candidates to obtain the highest degree increased. On the one hand, commercial printing created new career opportunities because private print shops needed writers, editors, calligraphers, and literary critics. On the other hand, expansion of education opportunities and widely available inexpensive books of all sorts made the civil service examination evermore competitive for the literati. Publishing for Success and the Pressure for Difference Most of the professional writers and editors were candidates who had passed lower levels of the examinations but failed to obtain either the chü-jen or the chin-shih degrees. Many of course never advanced beyond the lowest level (sheng-yüan) and remained professional commentators and/or private tutors for life. For some, failure in the examination was compensated by success in the publishing world. Some managed to acquire a reputation as a professional writer in many genres directly or indirectly related to the civil service examinations. The published writings of the famous prose writer Kuei Yu-kuang (1506-71) were well-known to some candidates from Fukien when they met in 1559 on their way to Peking for the metropolitan examination. Ai Nan-ying (1583-1646), a highly regarded critic of examination essays, was another good example. He was one of the few professional writers who had succeeded in earning a reputation in literati circles and the commercial printing world but never passed the metropolitan examination. Ch'en Chi-t'ai was a widely known "critical editor" from Kiangsi long before he graduated at the metropolitan examination at the age of 67. Many who studied his edited anthologies had long passed the metropolitan examination and had become high officials. It is ironic that many critics and writers achieved fame in commercial publishing but remained unsuccessful and frustrated in their attempt to obtain higher degrees. It was in their capacity as professional writers but disillusioned examinees that they came to exert a centrifugal influence on the examination process. The frustration of these writers was compounded by the double roles they played. On the one hand, they served as the critics of excellence for other examinees; on the other, they had to subject themselves to the examiners' criticism. Frustration in the role of examinee heightened the desire to assert autonomy in the capacity as a professional critic. Dependent on the patronage of publishers, professional writers often had to compromise their ideas. The immediate reward for professional writers was greater sale and remuneration from the printers, which had no direct bearing on their own quest for success in the examinations. Intense competition in the publishing world further increased the pressure for difference. Professional editors and commentators competed against one another for readership both at the regional and national levels. Many established their reputation in their home region, such as Ai Nan-ying, Ch'en Chi-t'ai, Lo Wan-tsao of Kiangsi, Chang P'u (1602-1641), Ch'en Tzu-lung (1608-1647), Ku Meng-lin (1585-1653) in Kiangsu, and Shen Shou-cheng (1572-1623) and Huang Ju-heng (1558-1626) in Chekiang. But some, like Ch'en and Ai, enjoyed a reputation beyond their region. Ai's selections were especially popular in the 1620s. But he was later challenged by a group of critical editors centered around Chang P'u, the leader of the Restoration Society. Intense competition in the book market created great pressure for the publishers and the writers to present their books as different, while claiming to reveal the secret of success in the examinations. Commentaries on the Four Books and Ming Intellectual History Of the three sessions of examinations, the first session on the Four Books was in fact the most important. Due to the small number of examiners assigned for each examination, the large number of examination essays had forced examiners to focus on the first session of the examination. Poor performance in the first session meant failure in the entire examination. The preponderant weight given to the Four Books created great demand for examination aids on the Four Books. Commercial study aids written for the Four Books were in great demand as well as in abundant supply. Some even reached foreign lands, including Japan. Commercially produced commentaries on the Four Books were written and published primarily for helping candidates to pass examinations. It can be assumed that with perhaps a few exceptions, all candidates would read this particular type of examination aids. Their degree of familiarity with these texts might have been much greater than their knowledge of the writings of eminent thinkers such as Wang Yang-ming (1472-1529) and Chan Jo-shui (1466-1560). Many of the commercial commentaries can be identified by the format of dividing the page into two, sometimes three sections. The two-section format resembles that of "illustration-above and text-below" ( shang tu hsia wen ) format used in most novels and drama. Many put the main text of the Four Books and commentaries in the bottom section. The top section was generally reserved for "purports of the chapters and verses" (chang-chih) or additional comments. There were many commentaries that did not use the sectional format but can be identified by explicit and implicit reference to the civil service examination in the prefaces and "reading directions" (fan-li). Some explicitly stated that the texts were written for examinees. Others included instructions for writing the "eight-legged" style. These works, however, present some difficulties in establishing authorship because forgeries and false attributions were common. Many works were sold under the names of recent chin-shih degree-holders or famous scholars. As Chang P'u, the leader of the Restoration Society (Fu-she ), had witnessed, bookstores in the cities were filled with all sorts of examination aids attributed to renowned scholars and high officials. In fact, over ten different anthologies of essays were attributed to Chang P'u himself. The famed painter T'ung Ch'i-ch'ang (1555-1636) also found that many collections of model examination essays bearing his name as the author had circulated widely in Ch'ang-an. It is difficult to establish authorship of individual texts, hence risky in any attempt to treat these works as sources for ideas of individual scholars. In many cases false attribution can be documented. It is nonetheless unwise to dismiss all as dirty tricks of commercial printers. One has to remember that taking the civil examinations away from home in the prefectural seat or in the capital was very costly. Candidates with moderate means had to support themselves by taking up tutoring, or other side-jobs. Even winning the first degree did not change one's economic condition overnight, for the official pay was very low. Many examinees in their quest for the highest degree had incurred a large debt from merchants, creditors, and possibly publishers. It would not be unnatural for a new chin-shih degree-holder to repay his debt by rendering his service as a commentary critic or editor. New Expositions and the Examinations The Ming official commentaries on the Four Books were written by Chu Hsi (1130-1200). Chu's exposition of the Confucian doctrine remained unchallenged until Wang Yang-ming. Despite his prominence as both a great official and a scholar, Wang's influence did not make a significant impact on the civil service examinations during the Chia-ching period. As was always the case, examinees were primarily interested in success at the various levels of examinations. They read examination aids to improve their chances of success. Throughout most of the sixteenth century till the Wan-li period, Ts'ai Ch'ing's (1453-1508) Ssu-shu meng-yin (Introduction to the Four Books for beginners), Ch'en Chen's (1477-1545) Ssu-shu ch'ien-shuo (The Four Books Made Easy), and Lin Hsi-yüan's (ca. 1480-ca. 1560) Ssu-shu ts'un-i (Questions About the Four Books ) had been popular commentaries among examination candidates. These three commentaries espoused primarily Chu Hsi's expositions. Deviations from Chu Hsi's exposition in examination essays appeared to be growing during the Chia-ching reign (1522-1566). In the first year of the Chia-ching reign, a bureau secretary (chu-shih) in the Board of Rites already denounced deviations and criticism of Chu Hsi's commentaries. From that time on, the Board of Rites issued several warnings to examiners against accepting answers deviating from the Ch'eng-Chu orthodoxy by examiners at the provincial examinations. But it is not evident that the Board of Rites was able to enforce the policy. The situation became more alarming from the mid-Wan-li period on. During the late Wan-li reign, examination essays hardly conformed to the official interpretation. Many followed the trend of advancing "new expositions" in order to attract the attention of the examiners. Candidates made extensive use of Buddhist texts in their answers. Ku Meng-lin, a member of the Restoration Society, lamented that since the 1590s students taking the civil service examinations favored new interpretations and simplicity. The Complete Compendium on the Four Books (Ssu-shu ta-ch'üan) was abandoned for its details and banality. Previously popular commentaries by Ming scholars also lost their appeal. Ku observed that by the late 1620s even the works by Ch'en Chen and Lin Hsi-yüan and the Complete Compendium on the Four Books were not available at the bookstores because commercial publishers no longer reprinted them for lack of demand. Ku and his friend Yang I strove to revive Ch'eng-Chu's rendition of the Four Books. While the printing of commentaries conforming to Chu Hsi's exposition declined, commentaries offering different interpretations proliferated rapidly. Printers and the professional writers began to play a much greater role in shaping the examinations through their control of the printing of examination aids. They decided what books, and hence whose interpretations, would be published. Fortunately, there was no monopoly of production and distribution of books. Competition contributed to the outpouring of even more "new expositions" (hsin-shuo). The proliferation of new commentaries obviously had great impact on the examinations. From the mid-Wan-li on, ministers of the Board of Rites, who were in charge of the civil service examinations, sought to correct the situation without success. Troubled by the spreading practice, Shen Li (1531-1615), the minister of Rites in the mid-1580s, recommended a crackdown on improper writing style and references to heterodox ideas such as Buddhism, Taoism, and the Hundred Schools. Shen specifically put the blame on examination aids printed by commercial publishers. Similar warning was issued by other ministers of the Board of Rites such as Yu Chi-teng (1544-1600). But the warnings had fallen on deaf ears. In 1602 Feng Ch'i (1559-1603), minister of the Board of Rites, was so disturbed by the widespread practice of citing Buddhist and Taoist texts as authority in criticizing the Confucian texts required for the examination that he recommended burning printing blocks of the "new expositions." But Feng himself complained that previous orders by the government to burn "heterodox" texts were not carried out by officials at the local level. Four years later, the minister of the Board of Rites, Li T'ing-chi, continued to criticize the trend of presenting "new expositions" and the common practice of citing Buddhist and heterodox texts in examination essays. He strove to screen essays passed by local examiners and disqualified any who violated the official standards set by the Board of Rites. Ironically, some commentaries bore his name as the commentator. One commentary printed by a Fukien publisher bears his name as the author and also lists Shen Li, minister of the Board of Rites, as one of the proof-readers. In the absence of institutional control over the publishers and a rigorous censorship system that required the submission of books for review, mere warnings from the Board of Rites failed to correct the problem. Although many publishers continued to offer new expositions, they did not ignore the government order completely. Some stated in the preface as a token act of compliance with government policy that they would exclude any expositions that took aim at Chu Hsi's views. But some writers resorted to a strategy that would allow them to include new ideas without risking the danger of being accused of violating the government policy. The author of Ssu-shu wei-yen (Subtle Words of the Four Books), for example, remarked in the preface that new expositions would be included only for the purpose of exposing their mistakes. But instead of leaving the new ideas out, he allowed the reader to know what the new ideas were, and the reader could choose to ignore the author's caveat at his own risk. This strategy would provide the author, or more precisely the publisher and the editors listed as proofreaders, a safeguard in case they were accused of promoting heterodox readings of the Confucian texts. Another strategy used by compilers was to include new expositions that had been accepted by previous examiners. The author of Ssu-shu shan-cheng (Corrected and Purged Four Books) provided a list of the new expositions that were at odds with Chu Hsi's commentary but were accepted by previous examiners. This strategy of appealing to precedents of practice had the advantage of avoiding being singled out for advocating heterodox interpretations. The outcome was the same: they encouraged discordance with the official interpretation and promoted differences. The commentaries themselves testify to the possibility of disparate interpretations, hence undermining the authority of the Ch'eng-Chu orthodoxy. New Commentaries and the Allegorical Approach As mentioned above, most of the commentaries printed in the first quarter of the seventeenth century had dispensed with the commentaries by Chu Hsi and other Sung and early Ming scholars. There are two possible explanations. Commentaries without the commentaries of Chu Hsi were meant to be texts targeted at more advanced students who already had committed to memory Chu 's commentaries. The second explanation is that with the growing dependence on printed "model essays," examinees found it more "effective" to cram ready-made essays than composing their own essays, drawing on "insights" of the commentaries. It is likely that both situations co-existed. In this type of commentaries, little information was provided to clarify pronunciations and meanings. The authors expressed no interest in philological and historical accuracy. One typical method of compilation used in these commercial commentaries was to list under each chapter and verse the "general inter-pretations" (ta-i) by other professional commentators. Whereas the works by Ts'ai Ch'ing, Ch'en Chen (1477-1545), and Lin Hsi-yuan (ca. 1480-ca. 1560) were commentaries which espoused Chu Hsi's expositions, these new commentaries took great liberty in advancing new explanations that were often at odds with of Chu's views. These commentaries on the Four Books promising to provide new interpretations flooded the book market. Many of them bear the titles "new ideas" (hsin-i) or "subjective meanings" (chu-i). This general emphasis on "new" or "subjective" readings of the Four Books should not be taken as evidence of the pervasive influence of Wang Yang-ming's teachings. They were in fact primarily the result of attempts of the compilers and the printers to offer multiple explications to the wide reading public of examinees, and Wang Yang-ming's views were among those that were gaining popularity. There was no attempt on the part of the compiler to explain the differences and similarities between various comments on the same text. One author explained that the reader would benefit from contrasting views and subtly different opinions. These types of commentaries were compiled to provide not so much one correct answer as suggestions of new ways of interpreting the texts. Many reputable authors of these commentaries were quoted as authorities, for Hsin-chien Liu ts'ai-tzu Ssu-shu sheng-jen yü (Newly Printed Awakening Statements by Six Talented Scholars on the Four Books), and Kuo Chu-yüan hsien-sheng hui-chi shih t'ai-shih Ssu-shu chu-i pao-ts'ang (Treasuries of the Four Books from Ten Official Historians Compiled by Mr. Kuo Chu-yuan). Many of these reputable commentators were well-known officials or professional writers. One compiler even included the commentaries by scores of writers of the Ming period. This inclusive approach is better understood in terms of the intention of the editors and printers to attract more readers than an intellectual commitment to pluralism. Nonetheless, by listing a large number of different expositions, commercial printers encouraged on the one hand an open attitude toward the Confucian Classics. On the other, the divergent views forced the intelligent reader to make his own choice if he was to achieve a coherent understanding of the text. Having said this, it does not mean that the majority of the literati would be trained to think independently. Even if, as Ku Yen-wu and Huang Tsung-hsi charged, commercial printing contributed to further emphasis on rote learning, the encyclopedic format of the late Wan-li commentaries nonetheless expanded the interpretive possibilities of the Classics. New Commentaries and Intellectual Trends Within the expanding intellectual horizon there were some discernible intellectual trends. Among the several trends evident in the commercially produced commentaries was the growing popularity of the teachings of Wang Yang-ming and his disciples such as Wang Chi and Wang Ken. Wang Yang-ming's new teachings were already well-known among the gentry during the Chia-ching reign (1522-1566). When Ou-yang Te served as the Director of Studies at the Imperial Academy (Kuo-tzu chien ssu-yeh) in 1527, he held public lectures on Wang Yang-ming's teachings. Wang's teachings gained greater popularity when Hsü Chieh (1503-1583), a disciple and exponent of Wang Yang-ming's teachings, became grand sec-retary. The tablet of Wang Yang-ming was approved by imperial order to be inducted into the Confucian temple in 1573. Wang's ideas began to appear in examination essays. If students were not interested in attending public lectures in which new teachings were often popularized, candidates would still come to know Wang Yang-ming's new teachings through commentaries on the Four Books. The popularity of the ideas of Wang Yang-ming and his disciples was on the rise and it aroused criticism from exponents of the orthodox view of Chu Hsi. A commentary published in the late 1570s took aim at the idea that liang-chih (innate knowledge of the good) is spontaneous. Even by the 1590s, some writers continued to endorse Chu Hsi's view and criticized Wang's idea of the unity of the mind and principle. But many published after 1590s were particularly enthusiastic in promoting Wang's teaching of liang-chih. Some even included Wang Yang-ming's polemical view that Chu Hsi in his last years regretted his mistake and agreed with his critic Lu Chiu-yuan. Others continued to reiterate Wang's rejection of Chu Hsi's "supplementary section" on "investigation of things" (ke-wu pu-chuan). What needs to be underscored is that Wang Yang-ming did not command the highest regard among the many professional critics. He was but one of many authorities from the perspective of both the compilers and the readers. Another trend was the popular practice of explicating the Confucian texts in Buddhist terms. There were many commentaries employing Ch'an Buddhist terminology in abandon. Ssu-shu shuo-sheng (Residual Meanings of the Four Books), printed in the 1610s, bristled with Buddhist ideas. In another commentary, Ssu-shu wu-hsüeh wan-yang pien (My Personal Learning of the Profound Meaning of the Four Books), the Buddhist comparison of the mind to a lamp was used to explain the term " ming-te " (illustrated Virtues) in the Great Learning . A commentary published in 1620 explicitly stated in the preface that it was through Buddhism that the author came to understand Confucian teachings. This is reminiscent of Wang Chi's statement that "what Buddha taught is fundamentally the great path of us Confucians." Many others explained that insights from Buddhist and non-Confucian texts would be included. This willingness to look to Buddhist, Taoist, and "heterodox" texts for new ideas was congenial to the various syncretic movements examined in many works on the intellectual development of the late Ming period. If we put this syncretic movement in the light of the flourishing printing industry and the civil service examination of the late Ming, it can be argued that the publishers and writers had played an important role in "publicizing" the syncretic approach to the Confucian canon. The quest for new ideas also led many writers to return to high antiquity for inspiration. Some turned to the "Hundred Schools of philosophers" (chu-tzu) for inspirations. Commercial printers had made these works widely available since the rise of the Archaist (ku-wen) school under the leadership of the Seven Early Masters (ch'ien ch'i tzu) in the mid-Chia-ching and the early Wan-li periods. The Seven Early Masters' interest in emulating the writing style of Han and pre-Han works had prompted the reprinting of the works by the "Hundred Schools of philosophers." The literary importance attached to these "Archaic texts" continued to animate the Seven Later Masters, who dominated literary circles in the late Chia-ching and early Wan-li periods. These Han and pre-Han texts were not consulted by the Archaic writers such as Li P'an-lung (1514-70) and Wang Shih-chen (1526-1590) initially for inspiration in producing new interpretations of the Four Books . But widely available printed texts were culled by commentators on the Four Books for new ideas. They easily found their way into the commentaries printed in the late Wan-li period. The forgotten antiquity suddenly became a rich source for new ideas. In 1595 Ch'en Yu-mo (1548-1618) published Ching-yen chi-chih (Insignificant Meanings of the Classics), which included 24 chapters on the "names and things" (ming-wu) in the Four Books . As a common practice of late Ming publishing, these twenty-four chapters were also published separately as the Ssu-shu ming-wu pei-k'ao (Reference for the Names and Articles in the Four Books). Under each entry was listed a number of references. Among the work cited was a large number of exegeses by Han scholars, such as Erh-ya (Approach to Elegance), Feng-su t'ung (Comprehensive Fecord of Customs), Ch'un-ch'iu fan-lu (The Radiant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals), and Pai-hu t'ung-te lun (Comprehensive Discourse of the White Tiger Hall). The citations often differed from and even contradicted one another. Many ancient Ch'in and Han texts were available for allegorical uses thanks to the publisher's efforts in reprinting them. If taken out of context, these extensive citations of pre-Han and Han texts could be taken as evidence for the beginnings of the philological movement that was to prevail in the mid-eighteenth century. Literary Criticism and the Erosion of the Authority of the Classics Examiners had long been trapped in a dilemma. The examinations were designed to test students' understanding of the meaning of the Four Books and the Classics. But repetition and the limit of the number of questions often encouraged the use of criteria other than distinction in comprehending and explaining the texts. Formal rules of writing—the "eight-legged" style—had long been made an important criterion for success. Often candidates were dis-tinguished more by literary style than by intellectual profundity, which was a rare attribute even among the examiners themselves. The dependency on writing style for selecting successful candidates contributed to the further erosion of the authority of the Confucian Classics, which were increasingly treated as models of literary writings, rather than canonical texts in the hands of the professional critics. The inherent tension between the literary requirement and the intellectual requirement was hightened by division of labor among the professional critics. While the examiners had to find both literary and intellectual qualities in a candidate's essays, the professional writers could choose to focus on just one aspect. Writers of commentaries on the Four Books , for example, could devote themselves to new interpertations of the texts without concern for literary skill. Critics specialized in critiquing literary style were not obligated to offer the "correct" exposition of the texts. The critics by virtue of their professional role was to criticize. As critics, they had the obligation to point out the strengths and weaknesses of the literary skills of the authors of the Confucian texts. Indeed the Four Books and the Classics were no longer regarded as sacred, but were treated just like other literary texts to be subjected under the critics' scrutiny. The sages of the Confucian texts were examined for their writing skills, not their moral wisdom. Ku Yen-wu, writing in the early Ch'ing, was particularly strident in his condemnation of Chung Hsing and Sun K'uang for their irreverence toward the Confucian texts. The Classics also suffered a decline in significance as a result of the growing sophistication in drama production theory. The Ming literati's interest in drama both as audience and as playwrights was unparalleled in Chinese history. Discourse on writing and staging drama reached greater sophistication in the sixteenth century. Both novelists and playwrights drew upon the same sources of existing folk tales, official and popular historical narratives. Many wrote novels as well as plays. In the late Ming there were no strict boundaries between literary genres, nor were there institutional constraints imposed on writers in matters of criticism. Writers borrowed insights freely from critics in other literary fields. The important issue of colloquialism in literary criticism of drama is a case in point. T'ang Shun-chih (1507-1560), whose interest was in prose writing rather than drama, advocated the need to write in plain and simple style. His disciple, the famous playwright Hsü Wei (1521-93), applied this idea to plays. He argued that colloquial expressions were essential to the realistic presentation of characters on the stage. A good playwright would avoid putting refined words and ornate expressions in the mouth of illiterate characters. The literary demands inherent in the genre of drama rendered Classical authority an obstacle to the pursuit of artistic excellence. Hsü Wei insisted that "the Classics should not be used in poetry, let alone in drama," and "it is better to be vulgar and easily understood than to be elegant and incomprehensible." Hsü's remarks clearly show that the generic requirement of the drama as a performative art for all social groups could not use the gentry's style of expression. It called for the realistic representation of the social and language practices of the disparate classes. Hsü rejected the Classics not so much on ideological grounds as on the ground of literary theory. In the hands of professional writers, the Confucian Classics came under critical examination in the ways novels and plays were. For many writers and playwrights, the Classics lost their sacred aura. The archaic language of the Classics was simply not suitable for writing novels and plays. Even if they were written to convey moral messages derived from the Classics, they were articulated in the familiar, vernacular language, and in ideas and sensibilities closer to the audience. The growth of interest in novels and plays among the late Ming educated elite contributed to the increasingly positive reception and tolerance of "heterodox ideas" and vernacular expressions in the examinations. Not only Taoist and Buddhist ideas, but also Ch'in-Han exegeses were widely used to explain the Confucian Classics in the examination aids. Shen Shou-cheng in his popular work, Ssu-shu shuo-ts'ung (Collection of Expositions on the Four Books), clearly told his readers that he included vernacular novels and any other types of sources insofar as they offered insights into the Confucian texts. Shen's inclusive criterion was shared by other authors. Some literati even continued to include vernacular phrases and expressions in memorials after they became officials. Memorials submitted by censors were no exception. The practice of using colloquial expressions had grown to such an alarming degree that in 1602 the imperial court approved the Board of Rites' recommendation to ban the use of quotations from vernacular novels and dramas in memorials. Conclusion The combined effects of commercialization and printing in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had transformed a significant segment of the Chinese literati from custodians of Classical truths to professional writers who attempted to help their readers succeed in the examinations. To do that they needed to first attract customers and meet the publishers' demands. If commercial success required departure from orthodox interpretation, the professional writers and publishers would have no choice but to sell the readers what they wanted. They were, however, not passively responding to the demands of the readers and the publishers. The professional role of the examinee-cum-writers subjected them to pressures from not just the publishers' profit-driven demands, but also the dictates of the literary genres. As professional writers they were also actively involved in the development of theories for different genres. Artistic demands of various genres claimed precedence over the ideological requirements of the civil service examinations. When the central government slackened its control over candidates' conformity to the official interpretation, the stage was set for the explosion of "new ideas" in the Wan-li period. The long-term frustration of the examinee-writers also contributed to the outpouring of "new" interpretations. The desire to assert autonomy in explicating the Confucian canon was satisfied when the examinee selected and critiqued model examination essays, Classics, history, and other examination-related texts. The new roles of the Chinese literati as professional writers attested to the irony of their experience. Many literati established themselves as authorities on how to attain success in the examination, even though they had been unsuccessful themselves. The new role as professional writers demanded that they look beyond the Ch'eng-Chu orthodoxy and the Confucian tradition for insights. To search for new expositions, commentary writers looked to "heterodox" and ancient texts for new ideas, which were made widely available by the major printing centers. The quest for new ideas and the inclusion of divergent views in the examination aids fostered a personal or subjective approach to Confucian doctrine. Indeed, the emphasis on "new" and "subjective" reading of the Classics appears to fit in with the prevalent trend of this new "individualism." This approach can be easily viewed as a result of the influence of Wang Yang-ming's teaching about intellectual autonomy. But while there is no denying that Wang's teachings were very influential in the Wan-li period, notice should be given to how printing and the swelling of the literati class had contributed to the rise of various intellectual trends such as syncretism, populism, and individualism. By making dissenting expositions widely available, the publishers and writers helped to create an intellectual environment that was conducive to the spread and reception of the "individualistic" message that Wang Yang-ming and his followers had promoted. Also very importantly, the publishing boom did not contribute to the popularization of any specific school of thought. As a public means of communication, it was appropriated by different groups to serve a great variety of purposes. But publishers and writers did play an important part in making available and accessible a much larger number of texts with information and views that helped to expand the intellectual horizon of the various reading publics. However readers might have responded to the new expositions, they learned that there was more than one way to approach the Confucian canon. It is clear that the expansion of printing in the sixteenth century brought about a literary culture so diverse that it not only eroded the authority of the government orthodoxy, but also gentry dominance in intellectual and esthetic sensibilities. these new intellectual and cultural trends began to threaten the Confucian social order. Amid the diverse and sometimes conflicting values embraced and promoted by the literate urban class, there was evidence for a distinctive culture deeply rooted in an expanding commercial economy and a highly fluid social structure. The unrestrained application of the allegorical method to the explication of the Confucian Classics created far more problems than just the polemical debate between supporters of Wang Yang-ming's teachings and the defenders of the Ch'eng-Chu orthodoxy. There were other problems exacerbated by printing and the burgeoning free publishing industry: confusion between history and fiction, forgery, dismemberment of texts. These problems could only be resolved by rigorous methods of textual criticism, philological, and historical research. Finally, the rise of the Han Learning movement in the mid-eighteenth century needs to be understood, among other things, in terms of the trends in the publishing industry, which reintroduced into the book market rare Han texts in ever greater numbers. The End
This work is solely for scholarly and non-commercial purposes. The Editor wishes to thank the following resources and publications for references and adaptations, with no copyright infringement intended. Sections of this scholarly and non-commercial work Written and Edited by Charles Daniel using the follows sources and references: List of Contributors to the references:Catherine Bell is a Professor in the Department of Religion at Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California . Cyntia J. Brokaw is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon . Timothy Brook is a Professor in the Department of History, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada . Roger Chartier is Director of Studies in the Centre de Recherches Historiques at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France . Lucille Chia is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Riverside, California . Kai-Wing Chow is an Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Department of History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois .
Late Imperial China 17.1, June 1996 Edited by James Lee and William T. Rowe Special Issue: Publishing and the Print Culture in Late Imperial ChinaContributorsArticlesChartier, Roger, 1945-.
Chia, Lucille.
Brokaw, Cynthia Joanne.
Brook, Timothy, 1951-.
Chow, Kai-wing.
Bell , Catherine M., 1953-.
Printing -- China -- Social aspects. And with special thanks and appreciation to the John Hopkins University
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The “Hsing Shu,” or the”Running Script,” which is executed With flowing or "running" brush strokes.
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