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Entry 106 of 240Invention

The First Printed Book

868 CE/East Asia/Tang China
Today Dunhuang, western ChinaSpan Tang dynasty · 618–907 CE

The oldest dated printed book is a Buddhist text, the Diamond Sutra, produced in China in 868 — nearly six centuries before Gutenberg — by carving each page into a wooden block and pressing it onto paper. Its colophon says it was made for free universal distribution, which is why it exists: merit came from spreading the text, not selling it. Woodblock printing spread scripture, calendars, and eventually paper money across East Asia. It did not detonate the way movable type later would in Europe, partly because a script of thousands of characters made cutting whole pages more practical than setting individual type.

◆ Worth knowingIt survived because someone bricked up a library and forgot. Sealed in a Gobi desert cave around 1000 CE with 40,000 other manuscripts, it sat untouched for nine centuries until a monk opened the wall in 1900.
◆ The mechanismInformation-medium revolution

A new way to record or transmit information lowers the cost of copying ideas and reorders who holds knowledge and power.

Also: Ideological movement · Labor displacement

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