So, Gutenberg Didn’t Actually Invent the Printing Press

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Bible thumping racist whites NOT ONLY STOLE land and wealth of
non-whites, they also STOLE Knowledge and claimed as their own to INJECT
white supremacy, self loathing and inferiority complex into Non-White Minds.

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So, Gutenberg Didn’t Actually Invent the Printing Press

On the Unsung Chinese and Korean History of Movable Type

By M. Sophia Newman
June 19, 2019

If you heard one book called “universally acknowledged as the most
important of all printed books,” which do you expect it would be?

If you were Margaret Leslie Davis, the answer would be obvious. Davis’s
The Lost Gutenberg: The Astounding Story of One Book’s Five-Hundred-Year
Odyssey, released this March, begins with just that descriptor. It
recounts the saga of a single copy of the Gutenberg Bible—one of the
several surviving copies of the 450-year-old Bible printed by Johannes
Gutenberg, the putative inventor of the printing press, in one of his
earliest projects—through a 20th-century journey from auction house to
collector to laboratory to archive.

Davis quotes Mark Twain, who wrote, in 1900, a letter celebrating the
opening of the Gutenberg Museum. For Davis, Twain’s words were
“particularly apt.” “What the world is to-day,” Twain wrote, “good and
bad, it owes to Gutenberg. Everything can be traced to this source. . .
.” Indeed, Gutenberg’s innovation has long been regarded an inflection
point in human history—an innovation that opened the door to the
Protestant Reformation, Renaissance, the scientific revolution, the
advent of widespread education, and a thousand more changes that touch
nearly everything we now know.

The only problem?

The universal acclaim is, in fact, not so universal—and Gutenberg
himself is a, but not the, source of printing. Rather, key innovations
in what would become revolutionary printing technology began in east
Asia, with work done by Chinese nobles, Korean Buddhists, and the
descendants of Genghis Khan—and, in a truth Davis acknowledges briefly,
their work began several centuries before Johannes Gutenberg was even born.

*

In a traditional printing press, small metal pieces with raised
backwards letters, known as movable type, are arranged in a frame,
coated with ink, and applied to a piece of paper. Take the paper away,
and it’s a printed page. Do this with however many pages make up a book,
and there’s a printed copy. Do this many times, and swiftly printed,
mass-produced books appear.

The printing press is often said to have been created by Gutenberg in
Mainz, Germany, around 1440 AD, and it began taking root in Europe in
the 1450s with the printing of the aforementioned Bible. Books
themselves had been present in Europe long before then, of course, but
only in hand-copied volumes that were accessible mainly to members of
the clergy. Access to mass-produced books revolutionized Europe in the
late 1400s, with advancing literacy altering religion, politics, and
lifestyles worldwide.
“What the world is to-day,” Twain wrote, “good and bad, it owes to
Gutenberg. Everything can be traced to this source.”

At least, this is how the story is rendered in most books, including,
for the most part, The Lost Gutenberg. But a single sentence late in the
book nods to a much longer story before that: “Movable type was an
11th-century Chinese invention, refined in Korea in 1230, before meeting
conditions in Europe that would allow it to flourish—in Europe, in
Gutenberg’s time.”

That sentence downplays and misstates what occurred.

The first overtures towards printing that began around roughly 800 AD,
in China, where early printing techniques involving chiseling an entire
page of text into a wood block backwards, applying ink, and printing
pages by pressing them against the block. Around 971 AD, printers in
Zhejiang, China, produced a print of a vast Buddhist canon called the
Tripitaka with these carved woodblocks, using 130,000 blocks (one for
each page). Later efforts would create early movable type—including the
successful but inefficient use of ideograms chiseled in wood and a
brief, abortive effort to create ceramic characters.

Meanwhile, imperial imports from China brought these innovations to
Korean rulers called the Goryeo (the people for whom Korea is now
named), who were crucial to the next steps in printing history. Their
part of the story is heavy with innovation in the face of invasion.

First, in 1087 AD, a group of nomads called the Khitans attempted to
invade the Korean peninsula. This prompted the Goryeo government to
create its own Tripitaka with woodblock printing, perhaps with the aim
of preserving Korean Buddhist identity against invaders. The attempt
would be prescient; it preserved the concept and technique for later
years, when more invaders eventually arrived. In the 12th and 13th
centuries, the Mongol ruler Genghis Khan had created the largest empire
in human history, which stretched from the Pacific coast of Asia west to
Persia. After he died in 1227, his successor, Ögedei Khan, continued
conquering, including gaining ground that Genghis Khan had never held.
In 1231, Ögedei ordered the invasion of Korea, and in 1232, invading
Mongol troops reached the capital. As part of their conquering, they
burned the Korean copy of the Tripitaka to ash.

The Goryeo dynasty immediately recreated the book. This is thought to
have been “as prayers to the power of Buddhas for the protection of the
nation from the invading Mongols,” per a text by Thomas Christensen, but
it was also done with the intention of preserving the dynasty’s culture.
This was important; attacks by Mongols would continue for the next 28 years.

The Tripitaka reboot was scheduled to take Korean monks until 1251 AD to
complete, and, meanwhile, the rulers began expanding into printing other
books. In 1234 AD, they asked a civil minister named Choe Yun-ui to
print a Buddhist text called The Prescribed Ritual Text of the Past and
Present (Sangjeong Gogeum Yemun). But the lengthy book would have
required an impossibly large number of woodblocks, so Choe came up with
an alternative. Building on earlier Chinese attempts to create movable
type, he adapted a method that had been used for minting bronze coins to
cast 3-dimensional characters in metal. Then he arranged these pieces in
a frame, coated them with ink, and used them to press sheets of paper.
When he was done, he could reorganize the metal characters, eliminating
the need to persistently chisel blocks. It was faster—to a certain
extent. He completed the project in 1250 AD.
Perhaps it should be Choe Yun-ui whose name we remember, not Gutenberg’s.

It is important to recognize what this means. The innovation that
Johannes Gutenberg is said to have created was small metal pieces with
raised backwards letters, arranged in a frame, coated with ink, and
pressed to a piece of paper, which allowed books to be printed more
quickly. But Choe Yun-ui did that—and he did it 150 years before
Gutenberg was even born.

Perhaps it should be Choe Yun-ui whose name we remember, not Gutenberg’s.

However, Korea’s printed books did not spread at a rapid pace, as
Gutenberg’s books would 200 years later. Notably, Korea was under
invasion, which hampered their ability to disseminate their innovation.
In addition, Korean writing, then based closely on Chinese, used a large
number of different characters, which made creating the metal pieces and
assembling them into pages a slow process. Most importantly, Goryeo
rulers intended most of its printing projects for the use of the
nobility alone.

Nonetheless, it is possible that printing technology spread from East to
West. Ögedei Khan, the Mongol leader, had a son named Kublai who had
situated himself as a ruler in Beijing. Kublai Khan had access to Korean
and Chinese printing technology, and he may have shared this knowledge
with another grandson of Genghis Khan, Hulegu, who was then ruling the
Persian part of the Mongol empire. This could have moved printing
technologies from East Asia westward by thousands of miles. “Mongols
just tended to take their technologies everywhere they go, and they
become a part of local culture, sometimes acknowledged, sometimes not,”
Colgate University Asian history professor David Robinson explains.

To get from East Asia to Persia at that time, one traveled the Silk
Road. In the middle of that route lay the homeland of the Uyghur people,
a Turkic ethnic group that had been recruited into the Mongol army long
before. “If there was any connection in the spread of printing between
Asia and the West,” the scholar Tsien Tsuen-Hsien wrote in Science and
Civilization in China in 1985, “the Uyghurs who used both blocking
printing and movable type had good opportunities to play an important
role in this introduction.”

This is because, in the 13th century, Uyghurs were considered
distinguished, learned people—the sort for whom printing might be a
welcome innovation. They had also something no one else in printing had
had up till then: an alphabet, a simple group of relatively few letters
for writing every word one wished to say.

There was no explosion of printing in the Western Mongol empire. “There
was no market, no need for the leaders to reach out to their subjects,
no need to raise or invest in capital in a new industry,” the historian
John Man points out in his book, The Gutenberg Revolution. Nonetheless,
movable-type Uyghur-language prints have been discovered in the area,
indicating the technology was used there.

Furthermore, the Mongols may have carried the technology not only
through Uyghur and Persian territory, but into Europe, including
Germany. The Mongol empire repeatedly invaded Europe from roughly 1000
to 1500 AD; that period saw the entry of enough Western Asian recruits
and captives to bring the loanword horde from their Turkic languages
into European ones. “Generally, if something is going from East Asia [to
the west], it would be hard to imagine without the Mongols,” Christopher
Atwood, a Central Eurasian Studies professor at Indiana University, said
in an interview.
The fantastical idea that Gutenberg alone invented the printing press
ignores an entire continent and several centuries of relevant efforts.

Eventually, early capitalists in Europe invested in Johannes Gutenberg’s
business venture—the one that combined technology quite like the movable
type innovated by Choe Yun-ui with a screw-threaded spiral mechanism
from a wine or olive press to ratchet up printing to commercial speeds.
That business took decades of his life to bring to fruition, forced him
into bankruptcy, and led to court filings by investors who repeatedly
sued him to get their money back. As Davis notes in The Lost Gutenberg,
these records are the means by which we know Gutenberg and his Bible:
“This most famous of books has origins that we know little about. The
stories we tell about the man, and how the Bibles came to be, have been
cobbled together from a fistful of legal and financial records, and
centuries of dogged scholarly fill-in-the-blank.”

*

Indeed, the entire history of the printing press is riddled with gaps.
Gutenberg did not tell his own story in documents created on the
printing presses he built; to the best of modern knowledge, he did not
leave any notes on his work at all. And if Gutenberg was reticent, the
Mongols, their Uyghur compatriots, and Eastern Asia government heads
were even more so.

But if doubts are natural, then the result we’ve made of them is not.
The fantastical idea that Gutenberg alone invented the printing press
ignores an entire continent and several centuries of relevant efforts
and makes no effort to understand how or why technology might have
spread. During a study of Gutenberg’s lettering techniques, computer
programmer Blaise Agṻera y Arcas pointed out how strange this is: “The
idea that a technology emerges fully formed at the beginning is nuts.
Anyone who does technology knows that’s not how it works.”

To her credit, Davis notes the same, explaining it this way: “Perhaps
the image of Johannes Gutenberg as a lone genius who transformed human
culture endures because the sweep of what followed is so vast that it
feels almost mythic and needs an origin story to match.”

But Davis, who was unavailable for an interview for this article, does
little to correct the record in The Lost Gutenberg. She mentions China
just a few times and Korea only once—and the Mongols, Uyghurs, and
non-Christian aspects of printing history not at all.

Indeed, she never explains that the Gutenberg Bible is not universally
acclaimed as the most important book in history. Nor are copies of the
Bible the oldest books created with movable type that still exist
today—although a reader could be forgiven for gathering that impression
from The Lost Gutenberg.

Rather, the earliest extant movable-type-printed book is the Korean
Baegun Hwasang Chorok Buljo Jikji Simche Yojeo (“The Anthology of Great
Buddhist Priests’ Zen Teachings”). It dates to 1377 and has served as a
starting point for scholarship on the origin of movable type.

Korea regards it and other ancient volumes as national points of pride
that rank among the most important of books. But it is only very
recently, mostly in the last decade, that their viewpoint and the Asian
people who created printing technologies have begun to be acknowledged
at all. Most people—including Davis, who declined an interview with the
remark, “I’m afraid I can’t really add much further on the topic of
ancient printing”—still don’t know the full story.