History of Chinese Literature/Chapter 33
Chapter 33: Printing, Publishing, and the Material Culture of Literature
1. Introduction: The Material Foundations of Literary Culture
Literature exists not only as an intellectual and aesthetic phenomenon — as a collection of texts, ideas, images, and forms — but also as a material phenomenon, embodied in physical objects that are produced, distributed, bought, sold, stored, and sometimes destroyed. The history of Chinese literature is inseparable from the history of the technologies and the institutions through which literary texts have been materially produced and circulated — from the bamboo strips and silk scrolls of antiquity, through the woodblock-printed books of the Tang and Song dynasties, to the mass-produced paperbacks and the digital platforms of the twenty-first century. Each change in the material technology of literary production has had profound consequences for the kinds of literature that have been written, the audiences that have been reached, and the social and cultural roles that literature has played.
China occupies a unique position in the global history of printing and publishing. The Chinese invention of woodblock printing in the seventh century CE and of movable type in the eleventh century — technologies that would eventually transform the literary cultures of the entire world — gave Chinese civilization a head start of several centuries in the development of a print culture. The consequences of this early development were far-reaching: China had a well-established book trade, a substantial reading public, and a flourishing culture of commercial publishing long before the invention of the Gutenberg press in the fifteenth century brought comparable developments to Europe.[1]
This chapter traces the history of printing, publishing, and the material culture of literature in China from the earliest forms of textual production to the digital revolution of the twenty-first century, examining the ways in which changes in the material technology of literary production have shaped the development of Chinese literature.
2. Before Print: Bamboo, Silk, and Paper
The earliest Chinese literary texts were inscribed on materials that were, by modern standards, cumbersome and expensive. The oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1046 BCE) — which are the oldest surviving examples of Chinese writing — were carved into the bones of animals and the shells of turtles. The bronze inscriptions of the Western Zhou dynasty (c. 1046–771 BCE) were cast into ritual vessels. While these inscriptions are of enormous importance for the history of the Chinese language and the history of Chinese religion, they are not, strictly speaking, literary texts; they are divinatory records and commemorative inscriptions that were produced for ritual rather than for literary purposes.
The first materials that were used for the production and the circulation of literary texts in China were bamboo strips (竹简, zhujian) and silk (帛, bo). Bamboo strips — narrow strips of bamboo on which characters were written with a brush and ink, and which were bound together with cord to form scrolls — were the standard medium for the production of books in China from at least the fifth century BCE to the second or third century CE. The Confucian classics, the philosophical texts of the Hundred Schools, the historical works of Sima Qian and Ban Gu, and the poetry of the Chuci and the Shijing were all originally circulated in this form. Silk, which was more expensive but which offered a smoother writing surface and which was lighter and easier to transport than bamboo, was used for more prestigious or more portable texts.
The invention of paper (纸, zhi) — traditionally attributed to the eunuch official Cai Lun (蔡伦, c. 50–121 CE), who is said to have presented his improved papermaking process to the Han emperor in 105 CE, although archaeological evidence suggests that cruder forms of paper were in use several centuries earlier — was a development of incalculable importance for the history of Chinese literature. Paper was cheaper, lighter, and more versatile than either bamboo or silk; it could be produced in large quantities from readily available raw materials (tree bark, hemp, old rags); and it offered a writing surface that was suitable for both calligraphy and printing. The widespread adoption of paper as the primary medium for the production of books — a process that was largely complete by the fourth or fifth century CE — made possible the expansion of literary culture that would follow in the Tang and Song dynasties.
3. The Invention of Woodblock Printing and the Dunhuang Diamond Sutra
The invention of woodblock printing (雕版印刷, diaoban yinshua) — the technique of carving a text in reverse on a block of wood, inking the block, and pressing paper onto it to produce a printed page — was one of the most important technological innovations in the history of human civilization. The earliest surviving evidence of woodblock printing in China dates from the seventh century CE, and the technique was well established by the early eighth century, when it was used primarily for the reproduction of Buddhist texts, charms, and images.
The earliest dated printed book in the world is a Chinese text: the Diamond Sutra (金刚般若波罗蜜经, Jingang bore boluomi jing), a Buddhist scripture that was printed in 868 CE and that was discovered in 1900 in the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang in northwestern China by the Daoist monk Wang Yuanlu. This remarkable document — a scroll approximately five meters long, consisting of seven panels of text preceded by a frontispiece illustration of the Buddha preaching to his disciple Subhuti — is a work of considerable technical sophistication, featuring clear and well-proportioned characters, precise illustrations, and a colophon that records the date of printing and the name of the patron who commissioned it. The quality of the Dunhuang Diamond Sutra suggests that woodblock printing had already been practiced for a considerable period before 868, and that the technology had reached a high level of technical maturity by the late Tang dynasty.
Woodblock printing transformed the production and the circulation of literary texts in China. Before the invention of printing, books could be reproduced only by hand copying — a slow, expensive, and error-prone process that limited the number of copies that could be produced and that restricted access to books to a small elite of scholars, officials, and monks. Printing made it possible to produce hundreds or thousands of identical copies of a text quickly and cheaply, dramatically increasing the availability of books and expanding the potential readership for literary works. The consequences of this technological revolution for the development of Chinese literature and Chinese culture were profound and far-reaching.
The Song dynasty (960–1279) — which was, in many respects, the golden age of Chinese printing — saw the establishment of a flourishing book trade, the development of sophisticated printing techniques (including multicolor printing and the use of movable type), and the production of some of the most beautiful and the most technically accomplished printed books in Chinese history. The imperial government sponsored the printing of the Confucian classics, the Buddhist canon, and other important texts; private academies and scholarly institutions printed the works of their members and patrons; and commercial publishers produced a wide range of texts for the general reading public, including literary works, historical narratives, encyclopedias, and practical handbooks.[2]
4. Bi Sheng and Movable Type
The invention of movable type printing — the technique of composing text from individual, reusable type pieces rather than carving each page as a single block — is traditionally attributed to the Song dynasty artisan Bi Sheng (毕昇, c. 990–1051), whose invention is described in the Mengxi bitan (梦溪笔谈, Dream Pool Essays) of the polymath Shen Kuo (沈括, 1031–1095). According to Shen Kuo's account, Bi Sheng created individual type pieces from baked clay, arranged them on an iron plate coated with a mixture of pine resin, wax, and paper ash, and printed from the assembled type by applying pressure. After printing, the plate could be heated to melt the adhesive, and the type pieces could be recovered and reused.
Bi Sheng's invention predated Gutenberg's development of movable metal type in Europe by approximately four hundred years — a fact that is of enormous significance for the global history of technology, even though the impact of movable type on Chinese printing was, for reasons that are specific to the Chinese writing system, considerably less revolutionary than its impact on European printing. The Chinese writing system, with its thousands of individual characters, required an enormously larger set of type pieces than the alphabetic writing systems of Europe, making the production and the management of a complete set of Chinese movable type a far more complex and expensive undertaking than the production of a set of European type. For this reason, woodblock printing — which had the advantage of requiring only the carving of the specific characters needed for a given text — remained the dominant printing technology in China throughout the imperial period, and movable type was used primarily for the production of large reference works and official publications for which the investment in type production could be justified.
Nevertheless, the development of movable type continued in China after Bi Sheng. Wang Zhen (王祯, c. 1271–1333), an official of the Yuan dynasty, developed an improved system of wooden movable type and described it in his agricultural treatise Nong shu (农书, Book of Agriculture, 1313). The Korean development of metal movable type in the thirteenth century — which was influenced by Chinese models — produced some of the earliest and most technically accomplished examples of movable-type printing in the world. In China, metal movable type was used for the production of several major publications in the Ming and Qing dynasties, including the enormous Gujin tushu jicheng (古今图书集成, Complete Collection of Illustrations and Writings from the Earliest to Current Times, 1725), which was printed with copper movable type.
5. The Commercial Publishing Revolution of the Late Ming
The late Ming dynasty (roughly the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries) witnessed a revolution in commercial publishing that transformed the Chinese literary landscape. The growth of the urban economy, the expansion of literacy, the development of commercial networks that facilitated the distribution of books across a wide geographical area, and the emergence of a substantial class of readers who were willing to spend money on books for entertainment as well as for education — all of these factors combined to create conditions that were highly favorable to the development of a commercial book trade.
The center of the late Ming publishing industry was the city of Nanjing, which was home to dozens of commercial publishers who produced a wide range of literary and popular texts — including novels, short story collections, drama anthologies, poetry collections, encyclopedias, practical handbooks, and illustrated books of various kinds. Other important centers of commercial publishing included Jianyang in Fujian province, which specialized in the production of cheap, mass-market editions, and Suzhou and Hangzhou, which produced more expensive and more luxurious editions for the educated elite.
The commercial publishing revolution of the late Ming had a particularly significant impact on the development of Chinese fiction. The great vernacular novels — Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三国演义), Water Margin (水浒传), Journey to the West (西游记), and Jin Ping Mei (金瓶梅) — all circulated in printed editions during this period, and the availability of these novels in affordable printed form helped to establish the novel as a major literary genre and to create a substantial readership for vernacular fiction. The late Ming also saw the development of the practice of critical commentary on fiction — pioneered by the great commentator Jin Shengtan (金圣叹, 1608–1661) — which treated the novel as a form worthy of the same kind of serious critical attention that had traditionally been reserved for poetry and classical prose.
The illustrated book was another important product of the late Ming publishing industry. Advances in woodblock printing technology made it possible to produce books with elaborate and finely detailed illustrations, and the demand for illustrated books — which included illustrated novels, illustrated drama anthologies, illustrated encyclopedias, and albums of paintings and designs — drove the development of a sophisticated tradition of book illustration that was one of the glories of late Ming visual culture.[3]
6. Modern Publishing Houses and the Transformation of Literary Culture
The introduction of Western printing technology — including lithography, letterpress printing, and phototypesetting — into China in the nineteenth century, together with the establishment of modern publishing houses modeled on Western lines, initiated a new era in the history of Chinese printing and publishing. The two most important modern Chinese publishing houses — the Commercial Press (商务印书馆, Shangwu yinshuguan, founded in 1897) and the Zhonghua Book Company (中华书局, Zhonghua shuju, founded in 1912) — played a central role in the modernization of Chinese literary and intellectual culture, publishing enormous quantities of translated Western works, modern Chinese literature, textbooks, reference works, and scholarly editions of classical texts.
The Commercial Press, which was founded in Shanghai by a group of former employees of a Presbyterian mission press, became the largest and the most influential publishing house in China in the early twentieth century. Its publications included the Dongfang zazhi (东方杂志, Eastern Miscellany), one of the most important intellectual journals of the Republican period; the Wanyou wenku (万有文库, Universal Library), a massive series of affordable editions of Chinese and Western classics; and numerous textbooks, dictionaries, and encyclopedias that shaped the intellectual formation of generations of Chinese readers. The Commercial Press was also a major publisher of modern Chinese fiction, poetry, and drama, and its editorial choices helped to define the canon of modern Chinese literature.
The Zhonghua Book Company, which was founded by Lu Feikui (陆费逵, 1886–1941) as a competitor to the Commercial Press, specialized in the publication of classical Chinese texts and reference works. Its most important publication was the Sibu beiyao (四部备要, Essentials of the Four Divisions), a massive collection of classical texts that made the Chinese literary and scholarly heritage accessible to modern readers in affordable printed editions.
The establishment of modern publishing houses transformed the relationship between writers and their audiences. In the traditional Chinese literary system, the circulation of literary texts had been mediated by a complex network of personal relationships, patronage networks, and manuscript copying practices; the modern publishing house, with its professional editors, its marketing departments, and its distribution networks, created a new model of literary production and consumption in which literature was, for the first time, a commodity produced for a mass market. This transformation had profound consequences for the forms, the content, and the social functions of Chinese literature.
7. Literary Magazines and Their Cultural Role
Literary magazines have played a particularly important role in the history of modern Chinese literature — a role that has no precise equivalent in the Western literary tradition. In the West, literary magazines have been primarily venues for the publication of literary works and literary criticism; in China, they have been sites of cultural debate, vehicles of political mobilization, and instruments of literary and social reform.
The most important literary magazine in the history of modern Chinese literature is Xin qingnian (新青年, New Youth), which was founded by Chen Duxiu (陈独秀, 1879–1942) in 1915 and which became the principal organ of the New Culture Movement. It was in the pages of New Youth that Hu Shi (胡适, 1891–1962) published his proposal for a literary revolution based on the use of the vernacular language, and that Lu Xun published "A Madman's Diary" and other stories that helped to define the direction of modern Chinese fiction. New Youth was not merely a literary magazine; it was a cultural institution that shaped the intellectual life of a generation.
Other important literary magazines of the Republican period included Xiaoshuo yuebao (小说月报, Short Story Monthly), which became, under the editorship of Mao Dun (from 1921), a major venue for the publication of modern Chinese fiction and of translated Western fiction; Xiandai (现代, Les Contemporains), which was founded by Shi Zhecun (施蛰存, 1905–2003) in 1932 and which introduced Chinese readers to the literature of European modernism; and Wenxue (文学, Literature), which was founded in 1933 and which served as a forum for literary debate and literary criticism.
In the post-1949 period, literary magazines continued to play a central role in Chinese literary culture, although their function was transformed by the political environment of the People's Republic. Magazines such as Renmin wenxue (人民文学, People's Literature) and Shikan (诗刊, Poetry Journal) served as the official venues for the publication of literary works that were approved by the state, and the editorial decisions of these magazines — which works to publish, which works to reject, which writers to promote, which writers to criticize — had an enormous influence on the direction of Chinese literary production.
The post-Mao period saw an explosion of new literary magazines that served as vehicles for the literary experimentation and the cultural liberalization of the 1980s. Magazines such as Shouhuo (收获, Harvest) and Zhongshan (钟山, Bell Mountain) published the works of the avant-garde and experimental writers — Yu Hua (余华, born 1960), Ge Fei (格非, born 1964), Su Tong, and others — who were transforming Chinese fiction in the 1980s and 1990s, and the role of these magazines in promoting and disseminating new literary work was indispensable to the literary renaissance of the post-Mao era.[4]
8. The Digital Revolution: Online Literature Platforms
The advent of the internet and of digital communication technologies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has produced a revolution in the production, the distribution, and the consumption of literature in China that is comparable in its scope and its significance to the revolution produced by the invention of printing more than a thousand years ago. The development of online literature platforms — websites and mobile applications that allow writers to publish their works directly to readers without the mediation of traditional publishing houses — has created a vast new ecosystem of literary production that operates according to its own distinctive logic and that has profoundly changed the Chinese literary landscape.
The two most important online literature platforms in China are Qidian (起点中文网, Qidian Chinese Network), which was founded in 2003 and which specializes in genre fiction aimed at male readers (including fantasy, martial arts, science fiction, and historical fiction), and Jinjiang (晋江文学城, Jinjiang Literature City), which was founded in 2003 and which specializes in fiction aimed at female readers (including romance, boys' love, and historical romance). These platforms, together with dozens of smaller platforms, host millions of literary works by millions of authors and attract hundreds of millions of readers.
The scale of online literature in China is staggering. According to industry estimates, there were approximately 500 million online literature readers in China in the early 2020s — a figure that represents a substantial proportion of the Chinese internet-using population. The number of works published on online literature platforms runs into the tens of millions, and the most popular works attract readerships of millions — numbers that dwarf the readership of even the most successful works of traditional print literature.
The business model of online literature platforms is based primarily on the serialization model — the practice of publishing literary works in short installments, typically of two to three thousand characters, over an extended period. Readers can read a certain number of chapters for free and must then pay a small fee to access subsequent chapters. The most successful online writers can earn enormous sums from this model — some earning millions of yuan per year — and the prospect of financial success has attracted a vast army of aspiring writers to the platforms.
The literary qualities of online literature have been the subject of considerable debate. Critics of online literature have argued that the serialization model, with its relentless pressure to produce new content on a daily or near-daily basis, encourages a kind of writing that prioritizes plot and pace over literary quality — writing that is formulaic, repetitive, and lacking in the depth and the sophistication that characterize the best works of traditional print literature. Defenders of online literature have argued that the sheer scale and the diversity of online literary production ensure that works of genuine quality and originality are being produced alongside the formulaic and the mediocre — and that the democratization of literary production, which allows anyone with access to the internet to publish and to find readers, is a development of immense cultural significance, regardless of the average quality of the works that are produced.
9. Self-Publishing, E-books, and Audiobooks
The digital revolution has also transformed the material forms in which literary works are consumed. The e-book (电子书, dianzishu) — a digital version of a printed book that can be read on a dedicated e-reader device, a tablet computer, or a smartphone — has become an increasingly important format for the consumption of literature in China, particularly among younger readers who are accustomed to reading on digital devices. The Chinese e-book market has grown rapidly in recent years, driven by the expansion of smartphone ownership and the development of mobile reading applications.
The audiobook (有声书, yousheng shu) is another digital format that has experienced rapid growth in China. Platforms such as Ximalaya (喜马拉雅, Himalaya) and Lizhi (荔枝, Lychee) offer vast libraries of audiobooks and audio content — including readings of literary works, serialized fiction, and audio dramas — that cater to a growing audience of listeners who consume literary content while commuting, exercising, or performing other activities. The audiobook format has been particularly well suited to the Chinese literary tradition, which has a long history of oral performance and oral storytelling — from the storytelling traditions of the Song dynasty marketplaces to the pingshu (评书, "storytelling") performances that were a staple of popular entertainment in the Qing dynasty and the Republican period.
Self-publishing — the practice of publishing a book without the involvement of a traditional publishing house — has also become increasingly common in China, facilitated by the availability of digital publishing tools and the growth of online distribution channels. While self-published books in China face significant regulatory hurdles — all books published in China, whether in print or in digital form, must carry an ISBN issued by the General Administration of Press and Publication — the growth of online literature platforms has created a de facto self-publishing ecosystem in which writers can reach large audiences without going through the traditional editorial and publishing process.
The implications of these developments for the future of Chinese literature are profound and uncertain. On the one hand, the digital revolution has democratized literary production and literary consumption to an unprecedented degree, making it possible for anyone with access to the internet to write, to publish, and to find readers. On the other hand, the sheer volume of digital literary production — the tens of millions of works that are published on online platforms, the vast majority of which are read by only a handful of people — has created a crisis of attention and a crisis of curation that traditional literary institutions — publishers, editors, critics, and literary prizes — are only beginning to address.[5]
10. Conclusion: The Material and the Literary
The history of printing, publishing, and the material culture of literature in China demonstrates that the material conditions of literary production are not merely incidental to the history of literature — they are constitutive of it. The forms that literature takes, the audiences that it reaches, the social functions that it serves, and the cultural meanings that it carries are all shaped, in fundamental ways, by the technologies and the institutions through which literary texts are produced, circulated, and consumed.
The Chinese contribution to the global history of printing and publishing — from the invention of paper and woodblock printing to the development of movable type and the creation of one of the world's most vibrant digital literary cultures — is a contribution of incalculable significance, not only for the history of Chinese literature but for the history of human civilization. The technologies of textual reproduction that were invented in China — and that eventually spread, through complex routes of cultural transmission, to the rest of the world — have been among the most powerful forces shaping the development of human knowledge, human culture, and human society.
As the digital revolution continues to transform the material conditions of literary production and consumption — not only in China but throughout the world — the history of the Chinese book offers both cautionary tales and sources of inspiration. The history of Chinese printing and publishing shows that new technologies of textual reproduction have always produced both gains and losses — expanding access to literature while sometimes diminishing its quality, democratizing literary culture while sometimes undermining its institutions, creating new possibilities for literary expression while sometimes destroying old ones. The challenge for Chinese literature in the digital age — as it has been in every age of technological transformation — is to find ways to harness the creative possibilities of new technologies while preserving the literary values and the literary traditions that give literature its enduring significance.
References
- ↑ Lucille Chia and Hilde De Weerdt, eds., Knowledge and Text Production in an Age of Print: China, 900–1400 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 1–30; Joseph P. McDermott, A Social History of the Chinese Book: Books and Literati Culture in Late Imperial China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006), 1–40.
- ↑ Tsien Tsuen-hsuin, Written on Bamboo and Silk: The Beginnings of Chinese Books and Inscriptions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 1–50; Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 166–196.
- ↑ Cynthia J. Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow, eds., Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 1–50; Robert Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1–40.
- ↑ Michel Hockx, Questions of Style: Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China, 1911–1937 (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 1–40; Kirk A. Denton, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 1–30.
- ↑ Michel Hockx, Internet Literature in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 1–40; Heather Inwood, Verse Going Viral: China's New Media Scenes (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014), 1–30.