(13-1, p. 4)

By David J. Marcou

Although it is commonly believed in the West that Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany invented movable metal-type printing between 1436 and 1444, printers in Korea had in fact already done so in the early part of the thirteenth century. Gutenberg's contribution to the history of mass communication was in the development of the type mold or matrix as well as the overall method that many printers in the West would use until the twentieth century. Western scholars have long considered fifteenth-century European books printed from movable type to be "incunabula"—lit. "cradle books"—or books produced in the infancy of the art.1 But the real infancy of movable metal-type book printing occurred in Korea on Kangwha Island in 1234, following the lengthy development of woodblock printing in Silla Korea and Sung China.

The Eurocentrism of most writers on printing history was challenged by Douglas C. McMurtrie in his 1937 history, The Book: The Story of Printing and Bookmaking, who claims instead:

Not only block printing (with wood) but also movable types originated in China .... The Chinese invention of separate types antedated experiments of Gutenberg by more than four hundred years. The inventer was Pi Sheng, and his types were made of baked clay and not of metal. 2

Types from Pi Sheng's era (ca. 11th century) are also reported to have been made of tin, but these, as well as the earthenware types, did not work well with the water-color ink used by Chinese printers of the time. So wooden types were made, in spite of the practical objections Pi Sheng raised against them (that wood absorbed too much moisture). There is a record of wooden types being made in 1313 or 1314 by Wang Cheng, who first cut the characters on a block of wood and then sawed them apart. 3

The Western scholar who has made the most convincing claims for the Korean origin of printing is William E. Henthorn. 4 Henthorn goes a step further than McMurtrie and (13-1, p. 5) states that printing from woodblocks or xylographs had been practiced since the Silla period in Korea (ended 936 A.D.), thus previous to or at least contemporaneous with China. The earliest extant xylographic print discovered in China is a book with a woodcut frontispiece found in the vicinity of the Chinese city of Tun-huang, and dating from 868 A.D. 5

State Support for Printing

Silla printing with woodblocks continued on a large scale during the subsequent Koryo period. The stimulus for state activity in this field was increased internal demand created by the enlargement of the National Academy, the establishment of regional schools, the importation of thousands of texts from Sung China, and the increased concern with historiography—which led to the compilation of official histories and the production of works by Korean authors. Sung editions of classics, commentaries, histories, mathematics, medicine, and, in particular, those texts necessary for the Koryo examination system were reprinted in Kaesong for schools in the capital and in the major regional centers. Many of these Korean editions found their way to Japan.

Buddhist monks were extremely active in printing and publishing projects. King Munjong's fourth son, Uich'on (1055-1101), for instance, established a compilation and printing office at Hungwang- sa, which published the Supplement to the Buddhist Canon (Sokchanggyong), a vast undertaking of several thousand volumes, including the writings of Koryo, Chinese, and Khitan monks. Uich'on also made a contribution to Buddhism in China when he repatriated to Sung several thousand volumes of Chinese works that had been lost on the mainland. Increased regional contacts during this period permitted a widespread exchange of Buddhist texts between the Southern Sung dynasty, the northern Khitan Liao dynasty, Korea, and Japan.

The most outstanding state undertakings were the two carvings of the complete Buddhist canon, the Tripitaka (P'alman (13-1, p. 6) taejanggyong). The first carving was intended as an act of faith to gain the protection of the buddhas against the Khitan invasions of the eleventh century. After these woodblocks were destroyed in the Mongol invasion of 1232, a second carving began, which was completed in 1251. These 81,137 woodblocks are today stored in the monastery at Haein-sa on Mount Kaya, west of the city of Taegu.

During the eleventh century experiments were being carried out with movable wooden and clay type in Sung China, which may have influenced Korean experiments in this direction. Movable iron type was cast on Kanghwa Island in 1234 and was used to print the fifty- volume Sangjong kogum yemun, a work on ceremony and propriety compiled by Ch'oe Yunui (1102-1162). This was the first known use of movable metal type in the world, preceding its use in the late Yuan period in China (late-fourteenth century) and 200 years ahead of its use in Europe. 6 With the overthrow of the Mongols near the close of the fourteenth century, the country was redeemed by the Korean hero, Yi Songgye (1392-98). Yi founded the new dynasty of Choson and gave Korea a vigorous and enlightened administration and encouraged literature and the arts. In the Korean annals for 1392—still antedating Gutenberg by half a century—we find a record of the establishment of a department of books, among the responsibilities of which were "the casting of type and the printing of books."

Revival or Continuity

McMurtrie states that "There are records that printing with movable types had been known in Korea as far back as the first half of the thirteenth century," but he makes the dual mistake of concluding that "the activities at the close of the fourteenth century should perhaps be regarded a revival of a method of printing which had fallen into disuse" (my emphasis), and that only with this "revival" were the types made of metal. 7 Henthorn separates himself by implication from McMurtrie in an important way. He writes:

By 1392, a Book Bureau in charge of fonts of movable type and book printing had become a standard government office. The development and use of movable metallic type was continued through the Yi period. Many fonts were cast and thousands of books printed. Printing also stimulated developments in paper making, and Koryo became famed for the quality and variety of its paper. 8

In short, book printing was a prized and practiced occupation throughout the Koryo period, and from 1234 to 1392, Korean book printers were as busy as ever in the practice of their trade. Bookmaking had become more than an experiment in Korea. And between 1403 and 1544 there were eleven royal decrees concerning the casting of new fonts of type. A type of small size was produced in 1420, but it was found to be difficult to read, so a larger face was cast in 1434. In two months' time over 200,000 types of the new face were produced. 9

There is little doubt that large quantities of books were printed in this period of Korea's history, prior to the promulgation of King Sejong's han'gul alphabet in the second quarter of the fifteenth century. A chronicler in 1422 ecstatically wrote:

There will be no book left unprinted, and no man who does not learn. Literature and religion will make daily progress, and the cause of morality must gain enormously. The T'ang and Han rulers, who considered the first duty of the sovereign to be (13-1, p. 7) finance and war, are not to be mentioned in the same day with the sovereign to whom this work is due. 10

A large number of fifteenth century Korean incunabula are still to be found in the libraries of Korean and Japanese monasteries.

In the same period, the Koreans came ingeniously close to the creation of types for single letters—which, in mixtures of lead, was another of Gutenberg's contributions to the history of printing. At the same time, large numbers of Sanskrit and Tibetan books were imported by Korean Buddhist monks, and the study of foreign languages flourished. Korean scholars thus learned to read alphabetic scripts, and finally, in the second quarter of the fifteenth century, a Korean phonetic alphabet was created, under the initiative of King Sejong. Types were actually cast for this alphabet and one book printed from that type in 1434. McMurtrie notes that "the Koreans, like the Uigurs [Turks] more than a century earlier, stopped just short of going over wholly to alphabetic printing. For they combined their new phonetic alphabet with the old Chinese ideographs in such a way that each type carried a Chinese character together with its corresponding Korean phonetic symbols." This provocative strategy was eventually bypassed, but Korea's contribution to the history of printing with movable metal type remains intact.

Printing Methods

Western scholars often state that the Koreans developed a "primitive" type mold or method of casting types. McMurtrie, for one, speculates here about the alignment of types in the mold:

Their types were cast in sand, with wooden types used as dies in forming the sand matrix, as is recorded by Song Hyon, writing at the end of the fifteenth century. Some eighteenth-century Korean types preserved in the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, give unmistakable evidence in the texture of their metal sufaces that they were sand-cast. In my opinion, when set up for printing they were imbedded in a plastic base which was ribbed with half-round or round rods which fitted into a semi-circular groove in the feet of the types, serving as guides to alignment. 11

Another Western scholar, James Moran, concludes from all this that

Typographic printing... with its special characteristics, can be truly said to be a European invention. The Koreans came nearest to developing this form of printing, but did not progress beyond primitive sand-casting of their characters, which, in any case, did not lend themselves to mass-reproduction techniques. For it was the lack of an alphabet of a limited number of characters which made this mass- production of types impracticable. 12

But was the commitment to the inclusion of Chinese ideographs in the one recorded metal-type book from the era of Sejong the real reason that so few books of this type were produced during the next two centuries? That proposition seems doubtful. Rather, the interfactional and regional battles that continued from 1544 to the mid-1700s probably had a lot to do with the disuse of movable bronze type. By 1770, though, an intellectual revival was taking place in Korea, with legal compendia and agricultural and ceremonial texts being printed in great numbers. 13

It is therefore certain that Korean printers contributed a great deal to the presses of the modern world. And just as importantly, they began making this contribution hundreds of years before Johannes Gutenberg perfected his lead-type press. For this and for countless related contributions, the world owes the Koreans a debt of gratitude.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DAVID J. MARCOU is a freelance writer and photographer who graduated from the Missouri School of Journalism in 1984. His work has appeared in several newspapers and magazines, including The Korean Times and Business Korea. During the mid-1980s he spent two years as a journalist in the Republic of Korea.

NOTES

1. John Clyde Oswald, A History of Printing: Its Development Through Five Hundred Years (New York: D). Appleton and Company, 1928), p. 3; S. H. Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing (Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1974), pp. 15-17.
2. Douglas C. McMurtrie, The Book:The Story of Printing and Bookmaking (New York: Covivi, Freide, Publishers, 1937), p. 95.
3.The New Encyclopaedia Britannica in 30 Volumes: Macropaedia (Chicago, London, etc.: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1981), p. 1053; McMurtrie, p. 96.
4. William F. Henthorn, A History of Korea (New York: The Free Press, 1971), pp. 109-110; Pow-Key Sohn, "Early Korean Printing," Journal of the American Oriental Society 72 (1959):98.
5. McMurtrie, p. 86.
6. Henthorn, p. 109.
7. McMurtrie, p. 97 .
8. Henthron, pp. 109-110.
9. McMurtrie, p. 98.
10. Thomas Carter, The Invention of Printing in China and Its Spread Westward (New York: Columbia University Press, 1925), p. 173.
11. McMurtrie, p. 99.
12. James Moran, Printing Presses: History and Development from the Fifteenth Century to Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 16.
13. Henthorn, p. 211.