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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 editi | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
