Movable type before Gutenberg

Around 1040, in China, a craftsman named Bi Sheng had an idea: instead of carving a whole page into one wooden block, why not make each character a separate piece that could be arranged, printed, and then reused?

He shaped individual characters from clay and baked them hard. Common characters had twenty or more copies, so a page could use the same one several times. The pieces were set in an iron frame and held in place for printing. We know this because the scholar Shen Kuo described the method in his Dream Pool Essays. Shen Kuo noted that it was slow for a handful of copies, but very fast for hundreds or thousands. None of Bi Sheng’s type survives.

Chinese writing uses thousands of different characters, which made movable type hard work, and carved woodblocks remained common in China for centuries.

In Korea, printers moved to metal type in the 1200s. The oldest surviving book printed with movable metal type is the Jikji, a collection of Buddhist teachings printed at Heungdeok Temple in 1377, about 78 years before Gutenberg’s Bible. A copy is kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, and UNESCO recognises it in its Memory of the World register.

Look closer: Gutenberg did not invent printing or movable type. What he built was a whole system that made printing fast and cheap in a language with a small alphabet.