The "Chinese Classics and Intangible Cultural Heritage Special Exhibition" being held in the Jinwen Building of the Ancient Books Department of the National Library of China aims to explain the origin of intangible cultural heritage from historical classics. According to statistics, as of 2010, my country has 28 items selected into the UNESCO World Intangible Cultural Heritage, of which 6 items are listed in the "List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Urgent Need of Protection", among which woodcut movable type printing is listed.
The inventor of movable type printing is generally recognized as Bu Yibi in the Northern Song Dynasty. In "Mengxi Bi Tan", Bi's method of making clay movable type has been clearly documented. The exhibition displays a nine-year printed version of Yuan Dade's book, which is the earliest record of movable type printing in an existing classic.
After Bi, another person who made great contributions to the development of movable type printing was from the Yuan Dynasty. Wang Zhen, courtesy name Boshan, was a native of Dongping in the Yuan Dynasty. From the first year of Zhenyuan to the fourth year of Dade, he successively served as magistrate of Jingde County of Xuanzhou and Yongfeng County of Xinzhou. "Nongshu" is an agricultural work that summarizes the agricultural production experience of my country's Yuan Dynasty. It is a masterpiece that systematically studies the overall agriculture in various parts of the country. After the Ming and Qing Dynasties, there were many versions of this book. Its contents include "Nongsang Tongjue", "Hundred Grain Manual" and "Agricultural Instrument Atlas", almost all traditional agricultural tools and main facilities, with illustrations and pictures. The historical data on agricultural tools are particularly detailed, and most of the agricultural tools described in later agricultural books were modeled on this book. When Wang Zhen was the magistrate of Jingde County, he asked craftsmen to create more than 30,000 wooden movable types using the above method. In the second year of Dade, the "Jingde County Chronicle" was trial printed, with a maximum of 100 copies a month without soaping, which was very efficient. The movable type printing calligraphy attached to this book describes the printing technology of wooden movable type printing, leaving detailed information for future generations to understand the printing process of wooden movable type.
Wang Zhen’s main methods for making wooden movable type are: rhyming and engraving. Don't write in rhyme, stick it on a board and engrave it. Increase the number of engravings of commonly used characters. ***About thirty thousand words. Chinese characters can be edited. Saw the lettering on the wooden board into individual words, trim them and make them uniform in size according to the "standard". Helmet inlay method. Put the wooden movable type into the wooden helmet according to the rhyme and place them side by side on the rotating typesetting stand. Wheel making method. Make a wooden rotating typesetting stand and push the rotating wheel to facilitate word picking and returning. Word picking method. When typesetting, one person looks at the font size and another person takes the words from the wheel. How to print helmet characters. Type wooden movable type on a flat plate, fill it with small bamboo pieces, etc. Then print vertically along the border.
The "Agricultural Books" on display in the exhibition are a batch of rare books from Wuyingdian during the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty. Wooden movable type printing was widely used in the Qing Dynasty. There are 253,500 large and small jujube movable types engraved on the front and back of Wuying Hall, which were printed in the "Wuying Hall Treasure Edition Series". There are 134 kinds of books in this series and more than 2,300 volumes, which is the largest number of wooden movable type in history. Among them, the "Qin Ding Wu Ying Dian Juzhen Edition Program" records wooden movable type production and printing technology, which is better than Wang Zhen's "Movable Type Seal Calligraphy". This is after "Mengxi Bi Tan" and "Nongshu"