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Foreigners explore the beauty of moveable types in Shandong

2017/6/1 13:48:09   source:sdchina.com

In Time Impress, an experience center for movable-type printing, the old printing press, neatly ordered type stock and the flavor of printing ink make you feel as if you travelled back to the ancient time. Recently, 6 foreigners together with "Touch Shandong" column arrived here to explore the beauty of moveable types and the ancient technique of moveable-type printing. (Photo/sdchina.com/Jiang Ruili)

Moveable-type printing, as one of the four great inventions of ancient China, was not only a great technological revolution in the history of printing but also vastly promoted the development and spread of human civilization.

The printing techniques invented in ancient China contain the moveable type printing and the woodblock printing, which were as significant as nowadays technical revolution.

Li Qian, a staff member of the center, gave a brief introduction of the printing techniques. Moveable type printing and woodblock printing are two completely different technologies. The moveable type printing only accounted for a small proportion in ancient printing; among one hundred books, only one used moveable type printing, a strong contrast with our inherent understandings.

“There are Yangwen, characters and patterns cutting in relief and Yinwen, those cutting in intaglio in the moveable-type printing. What we see today are all Yangwen and they are all reverse characters”, Li Qian said.

Picking out the right characters, setting types, brushing ink, then placing the paper on the types and pressing evenly, a moveable-typed poem came into existence eventually. The process seems easy. Yet the foreign students encountered some problems while printing by themselves. The experience center has a whole set of character fonts including over 5,000 simplified Chinese characters, each with nine Song typefaces, totaling more than 53,000 type matrixes. It is not an easy thing for native-speakers of Chinese to find out the right characters from such a large word stock, let alone foreigners.

Today, the low efficient moveable-type printing has already replaced by the industrial production. The ancient technique has also become a subculture, sealing up in our memory. However, Time Impress Movable-type Printing Experience Center holds fast to its dream, committed to the inheritance and spread of this ancient culture in its own way.

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Sponsor:Information Office of Shandong Provincial People’s Government