Printing press without copyright: a historical analysis of printing and publishing in Song, China

Abstract

This article explores the development of printing and publishing in the Song Dynasty to reconsider the historical linkage between the printing press and the birth of copyright. Focusing on the widespread use of woodblock printing during the Song Dynasty, this article analyzes (1) technical features of woodblock printing, (2) the political economic structure of the publishing industry, and (3) the socio-economic status of professional writers in China. The absence of copyright despite the substantial development of printing in the Song Dynasty resulted from the country's unique communication contexts that were shaped by a combination of technological, political, socio-economic, and cultural factors. The development of printing in China did not have the same kind of historical trajectory and effect on the emergence of the copyright system as it did in Europe. This distinction implies that copyright is not an ahistorical concept.

Keywords:

• printing press
• communication law
• copyright
• history
• China

Notes

^1. Historical records indicate that before the Qing Dynasty, Imperial governments and officials issued a variety of orders to prohibit unauthorized reprinting of certain materials. However, these orders were not so much intended to protect individual authors as they were designed to control the flow of unorthodox ideas. Therefore, they were far from the legal form of copyright seen in modern times. The Chinese government passed the 1910 Copyright Law because of increasing foreign pressure. By doing so, China was integrated into the Western-centered international copyright regime (Han, 2010). Similarly, many scholars agree that the history of copyright laws in most non-Western countries started at the same time as the former colonial powers extended their national legislation to their colonies. Consequently, most of the former colonies achieved independence with copyright laws inherited from Western colonial governments (Bettig, 1996; Li, 2006; May & Sell, 2006; Ploman & Hamilton, 1980).

^2. In China, woodblock printing started during the Tang Dynasty (618–907). When Wang Ji produced the first complete printed book, Diamond Sutra, in 868, large-scale woodblock printing began. Between 932 and 953, Prime Minister Feng Dao (882–954) ordered the printing of the Confucian Classics, which consisted of 130 volumes and were “the world's first official printed publications” (Temple, 1986, p. 112).

^3. The first known movable type system for printing was created in China around 1040 AD by Bi Sheng (990–1051). Shen Kuo (1031–1095), a famous scholar and scientist in the Song Dynasty, left the earliest record of Bi Sheng's invention of movable type. In his Dream Pool Essays (Mongxi bitan), Kuo described the full technical details of Bi Shing's type-making, typesetting, printing, and other related technical procedures (Tsien, 1985, p. 201). Shen Kuo's record of Bi Sheng's experiment inspired others to try the movable type later. According to Zhang and Han (1998), a government officer (Zhou Bita, 1126–1204) of the Southern Song Dynasty followed the method described by Shen Kuo and printed a book with clay type in 1193.

^4. The most recent update is available at http://sunsite.utk.edu/songtool/index.html. For the original printed edition, see Bol (1996).

^5. The term “affordances” is borrowed from D. Norman (1990) to specify the features that are facilitated or constrained by the perceived properties of an object or process.

^6. For example, Wang Zhen (1260–1333), a local magistrate of Anhui County, printed 100 copies of a local gazetteer with his set of wood-based movable type in 1298. Wang Zhen reported that the type-cutting process alone took more than two years (Tsien, 1985).

^7. The contrast is fairly clear if we consider the European language with an alphabetic system. All the upper and lower case letters, numerals, and signs required for European alphabets would include no more than 150 characters.

^8. These situations were very different from the history of European movable type printing, which required greater skill and education for printers. In sixteenth-century Europe, a printer was usually a skilled metalworker who had been trained through apprenticeships in the craft. These early printers were well educated and knew enough Latin to typeset fonts correctly (Febvre & Martin, 1985).

^9. The Nine Classics include the original texts of the Four Books (The Analects of Confucius, Works of Mencius, The Great Learning, and The Doctrine of the Mean) and the Five Classics (The Book of Poetry, The Book of History, The Book of Changes, The Book of Rites, and Spring and Autumn Annals).

^10. For instance, in 977 only some 5000 men attended the examination; in 982 over 10,000 appeared, and in 992 more than 17,000 sat for the test (Bol, 1992, pp. 54–55). Later on, the number of candidates grew exponentially. According to Chaffee's estimation, the number of candidates taking the prefectural examinations increased from 20,000 to 30,000 in the early eleventh century, further rising to nearly 80,000 around the 1100s, finally reaching an astonishing 400,000 exam takers by the thirteenth century (Chaffee, 1985). The substantial growth of candidates for the examinations throughout the Song Dynasty indicates that there must have been a large number of standard textbooks for the examinations.

^11. According to Chaffee (1985), in Imperial China the impact of printed Confucian Classics for the examination system was as profound as the vernacular Bible's publication for the Reformation in Europe.

^12. According to Chow (2004), a skillful carver could cut 150 characters a day. A block with an average folio of full text (21 characters by 18 columns) usually had 378 Chinese characters, so a skillful carver would require at least two or three days to complete just one block.

^13. For example, Susan Cherniack (1994, p. 79) argues, “Although government, private and commercial printing are sometimes treated as separate systems, government, quasi-official, private, and commercial presses all competed for sales at the local level”.

^14. The meaning of juan (chapter or volume) originally derived from a bundle of bamboo tablets as a part of a book. Its length varies from several to several dozen pages.

^15. It is worth noting that the library holdings of imprints in this article were not used to generalize the actual number of official and non-official prints. Rather, the data were presented to show a relatively large share of official imprints.

^16. In the early decades of the Song Dynasty, four massive encyclopedias and anthologies were compiled by the Directorate of Education: Imperial Encyclopedia of the Taiping Period (Taiping yulan), Expanded Records of the Taiping Period (Taiping guangji), Blossoms from the Garden of Literature (Wenyuan yinghwa), and Primal Mirrors from the Records Archives (Cefu yuangui) (Egan, 2011, p. 35).

^17. Since the early Southern Song period, the Directorate's practice of state-wide donation and distribution of standard texts dwindled (Chia, 2002). This change parallels the altered role of the Directorate from the major producer to the principal inspector of printed books around the same period.

^18. This finding is similar to the pattern of Song imprints shown in Table 1. The share of other categories includes philosophy/reference books (25.4%) and belles-lettres (26.9%). For more detailed data about Song commercial imprints, see Table 2 in Chia (1996, p. 30).

^19. In England, the Stationers' Company was established as a quasi-state organ to control publishing. By the late seventeenth century, the power of the Company based on printing privileges was under attack because of its monopoly control over the book trade. The enactment of the Statute of Anne replaced the conventional power of the London publisher with the statutory code supporting an author's right in literary property.

^20. According to Zhang (1989), despite the emergence of commercial printing since the Song Dynasty, no guild existed prior to 1671 in China's printing history. Brokaw (2005) argues that it was not until the late Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) that a self-regulatory guild system was developed by commercial printers.

^21. For instance, Jianyang, where about 50 commercial printers were in operation, was far removed from the major cities of the Song Dynasty, such as Najing, Suzhou, and Hangzhou.

^22. Commercial printers in the Song Dynasty often adopted disreputable business strategies, such as producing erroneously abridged versions of lengthy works, publishing forged books, and releasing incomplete works as complete ones. Because of such practices, it was difficult for commercial editions, especially those from Jianyang, to establish a good reputation. For more detailed descriptions of such practices, see Poon (1979, pp. 172–178).

^23. For additional examples of negative attitudes toward commercial printers in the Ming Dynasty, see Oki (2004).

^24. Some of these works are preserved in the Beijing Library: A Collection of Essays (70 volumes), New Anecdotes of Su Shi's Poetry (25 volumes), Essays of Lao-chuan with Anecdotes by Tung Lai (12 volumes), Essays of Chao Ching-hsien-kung (16 volumes), and Chang Li's Essay Collection (40 volumes).

^25. Regarding the pattern of book-gift and book-sharing practices among elite book collectors in Imperial China, see McDermott (2006, pp. 84–85).

^26. Compiling and re-editing of anonymous ancient works and/or works attributed to multiple authors is one of the most common characteristics of Chinese classic texts. For instance, the Book of Poetry (or Book of Songs), one of the Five Classics, is often credited to Confucius' compilation of 305 poems traditionally narrated at court festivities and ceremonies, but all the poems collected in the Book of Poetry are anonymous. As another example, Confucius created the Classic of History (Shu jing, also known as Shang shu) by rearranging and editing original historiographic documents in 3240 chapters into a work of 120 chapters (Huang, 1994).

^27. This strict moral requirement for scholar-officials is well addressed by Mencius, the most famous Chinese philosopher after Confucius. According to Mencius, intellectual laborers (laoxinzhe) as “men of a superior grade” have separate social duties from those of physical laborers (laolizhe) (Song, 2002).

^28. Some scholars argue that the development of private and commercial printing reflected the dismantling of bureaucratic authority on the civil service examination (Chow, 2004). Against the rigid bureaucratic nature of the civil service examination system, Davis (1986) and De Weerdt (2007a) also emphasized the relative autonomy of commercial printing in the civil service examination field.

^29. As political economists tend to seek the origins of capitalism in fourteenth-century Venice, which was a center of commerce, banking, and finance in the regional economy (Beaud, 1983; Wallerstein, 1979), legal historians view that a prototype of modern patent rights came out of the commercial interest of the city's craft guilds associated with glassmaking (Long, 1991). Around the same period, the concept of trademarks also emerged as a device to identify the craftspeople responsible for manufacturing commercial products in the marketplace (Miller & Davis, 2000).