A page you can read can begin with a surface that looks backwards. In engraved-block printing, the raised parts of a wooden block carry ink. Press paper onto them and the impression reverses the design again, producing the readable page. The trick is simple to describe; making a whole page work requires much more care.
Chinese engraved-block printing brings together text preparation, engraving, printing and binding. It is a craft with several stages and different skills, rather than one person writing directly onto a board and hoping for the best.
Give the engraver a checked design
The heritage description published by the Bureau of Cultural Heritage begins with suitable wood and a prepared surface. Text is written onto thin paper, checked and transferred to the block to guide the carving. The engraver therefore works from a planned page rather than inventing every stroke while cutting.
The material matters because the block is both a surface to cut and a tool that must survive printing. The heritage account identifies woods such as pear and jujube. Choosing the wood is part of preparing a usable object, not merely deciding what colour the finished block should be.
On a relief printing surface, the places that remain raised are the places that can transfer ink. The spaces around the characters have to be cut away appropriately. This means the engraver works on the gaps as well as the marks the reader will eventually notice.
If you have ever used a rubber stamp, you have seen the same reversal on a smaller scale. Its face and its impression are mirror images. A whole woodblock page applies that relationship to many detailed characters or to an illustration, so a small mistake can become very noticeable after printing.
The first impression is a test
The heritage description includes checking impressions with red and blue ink and making corrections to the block. These are tests within the preparation, not a claim that every final page is printed in those colours.
Testing reveals the result in the direction the reader will encounter it. A space that seemed large enough on the block may not produce the desired printed appearance. Checking the impression brings the tool and the page together before further copies are made.
That is one of the important differences between writing one page and preparing a printing surface. A single handwritten mistake affects that copy. A mistake left on a block can be repeated on later impressions. Repeatability is the advantage of the method, but it is also the reason to spend time on checking.
The person taking an impression still needs control of ink and contact with the paper. A well-prepared block supplies the design; it does not make every later action irrelevant. Preparation and printing are connected skills, rather than competing explanations of who made the page.
Meet a printed scroll from 868
The British Library’s Diamond Sutra supplies a specific surviving example of Chinese woodblock printing. Its International Dunhuang Programme catalogue identifies it as Or.8210/P.2, dates it to 868 and records its materials as ink and paper. It was found at the Mogao caves near Dunhuang.
The object is a scroll, about 27.6 centimetres high and nearly five metres long. That changes the reading picture. It is not a modern paperback that happens to contain very old text. Unrolling a long surface presents material in a different physical arrangement from turning a sequence of bound pages.
The catalogue lets you examine the particular object instead of treating every example of printing as interchangeable. Its date, format and findspot belong to this scroll. They should not be used to suggest that all printed works had the same form, or that the entire history of printing can be reduced to one object.
The readable page hides a working tool
The finished impression makes the reversed surface easy to forget. What appears as an orderly page carries the results of selecting material, preparing a design, cutting the unwanted spaces, checking and printing.
A workshop’s achievement is partly that the reader need not think about any of this to follow the text. Look at the page once for what it says, then again for how its marks reached the paper. Behind the apparently effortless line lies a carefully made surface facing the other way.
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Sources
- Bureau of Cultural Heritage: Chinese engraved-block printing technique
- British Library / International Dunhuang Programme: Diamond Sutra, Or.8210/P.2, dated 868