Genealogical Preservations and the Moveable Type

Chinese printing processes date back to the eleventh century, during the Song dynasty, in which arts, literature, and technology flourished. Even though printing had existed in China for hundreds of years, the eleventh century brought forth printing of materials other than religious texts and divinations.

Origin

During the northern Song dynasty (960-1127), movable type was used exclusively in Northern Zhejiang Province, corroborated by the fact that ceramics were also produced in the same area and local printing activities existed for that purpose. The use of “double plates of metal” (二板铁), as documented in the Collected Works of Mr. Binglü , refers to the two metal trays within which the types are placed to speed up the process of alternating the type positioning and subsequent printing.

Diffusion of the Movable Type

Large disparity between the speed of diffusion of the moveable type and their popularity in terms of use between Europe and Asian countries such as China. This difference is primarily attributed to the “limitless repertory of chinese characters,” as there are more than 8000 common characters. [3] In his book “Books and Printing in Sung China”, Ming-sun Poon discusses that Chinese printing presses need a font of 100,000 sorts while Western types, with upper and lower case letters, numerals, signs, and punctuations, require no more than 150 sorts. [4]

Adaptation for the printing of Genealogies

Due to the difficulty of printing and the vastness of character collections in order to fully execute the printing process, printing was allocated for the wealthy, and usually were carried out by non-professionals. When Zhai Jinsheng, a scholar in the Qing Dynasty (1640-1911), produced 100,000 types in five different fonts, he printed four books — “a collection of Zhai’s poems, a collection of a friend’s poems, a work by one of his cousins, and a genealogy of Zhai family”. [3] The importance of documentation of a family’s lineage is demonstrated by the prioritization of genealogies as one of the first printed texts by ancient Chinese scholars.

Modern Day Genealogical Preservation Efforts

Wooden movable-type printing is still being maintained in Rui’an County, Zhejiang Province. [5] For the sake of compiling clan genealogies, select men draw and engrave Chinese characters on wooden blocks, while women cut and bind the paper until an entire genealogy is complete. Due to the expensive nature of such printing techniques and its obsolescence due to modern technological innovations, the traditional practice of printing genealogies with moveable types may soon disappear. [6]

Fortunately, there are several modern-day digitization and preservation efforts pushed forth by the National Library of China. During the Chinese Japanese war (1937-1945), large amounts of documents were damaged, which captured the attention of the NLC immensely. To preserve these documents against the war, 20 years of collecting ensued. By the end of 1950, 348 titles of genealogies were collected. [7] By the end of December, 2012, over 50,000 volumes of genealogies now reside in the NLC, with recent efforts to digitize these rare collections. Through this database, one can explore the documented and digitized genealogies in China. Although this is an ongoing effort, over 5300 sheets are now accessible to all.

Bibliography

[3] He, Zhou. “Diffusion of Movable Type in China and Europe: Why Were There Two Fates?” Gazette (Leiden, Netherlands), vol. 53, no. 3, 1994, pp. 153–173., doi:10.1177/001654929405300301.

[4] Poon, Ming-sun. Books and Printing in Sung China. Verlag Nicht Ermittelbar, 1979. [5] https://en.unesco.org/silkroad/silk-road-themes/intangible-cultural-heritage/wooden-movable-type-printing-china

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGoNIomsQIM

[7] Xie, Dongrong, et al. “ The Collection and Digitization of the Genealogies in the National Library of China.” The IFLA Library, 24 June 2013, library.ifla.org/185/1/220-xie-en.pdf.