The Past Life of Wood type printing

Open the new environment of printing, sowing orchid in Qianqiu.

Farewell to lead and fire, into light and electricity, artificial printing has long been replaced by machine printing on a large scale, but in the land of China, one of the four great inventions of printing did not withdraw from the stage of history.

In Dongyuan Village, Pingyangkeng Town, Ruian, there is an ancient skill - wooden movable type printing, which is the only "living" representative of movable type printing in China at present, reproducing the traditional process of ancient Chinese movable type printing, which can be called the living fossil of the world's printing.

Over the past weekend, the "Millennium Pear Motian Rui 'an" 2022 China Movable Type Printing Culture Tourism Festival was held in the local area. So, what is the "past life" of Dongyuan wood movable type printing?

Bi Sheng of the Northern Song Dynasty invented movable type printing. He successfully printed books with movable clay type during the Qing Li period of the Northern Song Dynasty. Later, this technology was gradually improved and upgraded, and spread to the land of China.

Opening the Wang family's genealogy of Taiyuan County in Dongyuan Village, in the early years of the Yuan Dynasty, Wang Famao, who lived in seclusions in Anxi County, Fujian Province, began to introduce wood movable type printing technology into the family (clan) spectrum editing business, and the art of "Ziji" (using wood movable type printing to edit genealogy) came out. During the reign of Zhengde in Ming Dynasty, some descendants of Wang Famao moved from Fujian to Pingyang, Zhejiang. In the first year of Qianlong in the Qing Dynasty (1736), Wang Yingzhong, the fifth king of Wang Famao, led his descendants to move from Pingyang to Dongyuan, and the art of "Ziji" took root in Dongyuan and has been passed down to the present.

To this day, Wang Chuanqiao, the 20th generation successor of Wang Famao, is still engaged in the work of "genealogy" in Dongyuan village, through the whole set of wooden printing, for the clan genealogy and blood management.

What are the characteristics of Dongyuan wood movable type printing?

Entering the "Chinese wooden movable type Printing Culture Exhibition Hall" converted into the ancestral house of the Wang family, the process, tools, fonts and printed genealogy of the wooden movable type printing are introduced in detail.

First, the characters used for engraving are old times, and the characters are primitive. Since the Ming Dynasty, the old Song typeface as an official font, a long-term monopoly of solemn occasions such as bulletins, communiques, and now is very rare, "things are rare for precious", Dongyuan people do the family tree is very valuable.

The second is the engraving, binding workmanship is very elegant. There are key points in engraving: backhand, horizontal first, vertical second, skimming after; Materials have to pay attention to: lettering must use good birchleaf pear wood, must not be sloppy; There is a formula: is a "king set up the palace, toward the shop pure." The common people are like law rites, and they are flat and clean and sealed..." The 158-character ancestral Song Formula, including most of the radicals of Chinese characters, is extremely rhymed, read in dialects, and catchy; The layout has a format, the first preface, postscript, annals and other large articles, in accordance with the layout of ordinary ancient books, followed by the text, vertical row each page five grids, each grid for a generation, meaning five generations.

Two ink color fragrance for hundreds of years, old and new from generation to generation.

How does this 800-year-old technique survive to this day?

Some experts believe that "printed genealogy is an important way for wooden characters to survive and survive until now."

The genealogy is a kind of special document that records the changes of the family lineage with blood relationship as the main body in the form of table spectrum, and it is a unique record of Chinese descendants searching for their roots.

Dongyuan movable type printing technology carries the traditional Chinese genealogy culture and is handed down. It pays attention to the ancestral system, paradigms and examples, traditional Chinese characters, old Song style, rice paper and thread packaging, which makes the genealogy printed by Ruian movable type have a strong style of ancient Chinese books, with a profound and elegant atmosphere in the primitive and simple. Only the genealogy printed in this way is the best carrier of family inheritance and memory.

"Looking at the genealogy repaired by our Dongyuan ancestors 300 years ago, the good rice paper and the words that do not fade are as good as the beginning, and the quality is not inferior to modern mechanical printing."

In the current era of modern printing such as offset printing and photocopying, there are still more than 80 genealogies in Dongyuan Village who still use the ancestral "zi Ji" technique to compile genealogies for people, and are active in Wenzhou urban and rural areas and counties.