印刷术——使知识得以倍增

English

Paper made it possible to write cheaply. Printing made it possible to copy at scale. These are related but distinct transformations: the first democratizes the act of writing; the second democratizes access to what has already been written. Together, they constitute the most significant change in the infrastructure of human knowledge before the internet — and both originate in China.

中文

纸张使廉价书写成为可能。印刷术使规模化复制成为可能。这是相关但不同的两种转变：前者使书写这一行为民主化；后者使获取已经书写之物的途径民主化。合而观之，它们构成了互联网之前人类知识基础设施中最重要的变革——两者都起源于中国。

Block Printing: The First Form

雕版印刷

English
The earliest form of Chinese printing was block printing — xylography — in which a text or image is carved in relief onto a wooden block, inked, and pressed onto paper or fabric. The process was in use in China by the seventh century CE, initially for printing textiles and Buddhist texts. The Diamond Sutra, printed in 868 CE and discovered in the Dunhuang caves in 1900, is the oldest dated printed book in the world. It is a sophisticated, professionally produced text of considerable length, printed on seven sheets of paper joined into a scroll, with a precise colophon recording the date and the name of the commissioner.

中文
中国印刷最早的形式是雕版印刷——将文字或图像凸刻在木板上，涂墨后压印在纸张或织物上。这一工艺在公元七世纪的中国已经在使用，最初用于印刷纺织品和佛教文本。868年印刷的《金刚经》，1900年在敦煌石窟被发现，是世界上现存最古老的有明确纪年的印刷书籍。它是一部专业制作的、相当篇幅的精致文本，印在七张拼接成卷轴的纸张上，附有精确记录日期和施印者姓名的题记。

Bi Sheng and Movable Type

毕昇与活字

English
Around 1040 CE, during the Northern Song dynasty, a craftsman named Bi Sheng developed movable type — individual characters that could be arranged, printed from, and then rearranged for the next use. His type was made from baked clay. The account comes from Shen Kuo’s Brush Talks from Dream Brook, one of the most important works of scientific observation in Chinese history. Bi Sheng’s clay type was succeeded by wooden type and later by metal type — bronze type was in use in Korea by the thirteenth century, predating Gutenberg’s metal type by more than a century. The Chinese writing system, with its thousands of characters, made movable type more complex to implement than for an alphabetic script; block printing therefore remained common alongside movable type for many purposes.

中文
约于公元1040年，北宋时期，一位名叫毕昇的工匠发明了活字印刷——单个字符可以排列、印刷，然后重新排列用于下一次印刷。他的活字由烧制的陶土制成。记载来自沈括的《梦溪笔谈》，中国历史上最重要的科学观察著作之一。毕昇的泥活字之后出现了木活字，再后来是金属活字——铜活字在十三世纪的朝鲜已经在使用，比古腾堡的金属活字早一个多世纪。中文书写系统有数千个字符，使活字印刷比字母文字更复杂；因此，雕版印刷在许多用途上与活字印刷长期并存。

Gutenberg and the European Revolution

古腾堡与印刷革命

English
Johannes Gutenberg developed his printing press with movable metal type in Mainz, Germany, around 1450 CE — approximately four centuries after Bi Sheng’s clay type, and more than a century after Korean bronze type. Whether Gutenberg had any knowledge of Asian printing is debated; the most defensible position is that he developed his system independently, working within the European context of existing technologies including the wine press and metalworking. What Gutenberg’s press achieved was a particular synthesis: movable type with oil-based ink, a screw press, and paper available in sufficient quantities. The Gutenberg Bible of 1455 was printed in about 180 copies in two years, each requiring weeks rather than months of a scribe’s labor. The consequences — the reformation of European Christianity, the spread of humanist learning, the standardization of vernacular languages, the emergence of scientific publishing — are well known. All of these required paper, and paper had come from China.

中文
约翰内斯·古腾堡约于公元1450年在德国美因茨发展出带有可动金属活字的印刷机——大约在毕昇泥活字之后四个世纪，在朝鲜铜活字之后一个多世纪。古腾堡是否了解亚洲印刷技术，至今仍有争议；最站得住脚的立场是他在欧洲现有技术背景下独立发展出了自己的系统，包括榨酒机和金属加工传统。古腾堡印刷机所实现的是一种特定的综合：活字与油基墨水、螺旋压力机以及足够数量的纸张。1455年的古腾堡圣经在两年内生产了约180册，每册只需要数周而非数月的抄写工时。其后果——欧洲基督教的宗教改革、人文主义学识的加速传播、白话语言的标准化、科学出版的兴起——众所周知。所有这些都需要纸张，而纸张来自中国。

What Printing Changed

印刷的深层意义

English
Printing changed not only how many copies of a text could be made, but what a text was. A manuscript culture produces texts that drift: each copy is the work of a human hand, and human hands introduce variations, corrections, improvements, and errors. No two manuscripts of a long text are identical. A print culture produces texts that are fixed: every copy of a printed edition is, in principle, identical. This fixity — the ability to establish an authoritative version of a text and reproduce it reliably — was a precondition for the kind of cumulative, public knowledge-building that we now call science. In China, this process began in the Song dynasty. In Europe, it began with Gutenberg. The transformation is the same.

中文
印刷术改变的不只是一部文本可以制作多少份复制品，而是文本是什么。手稿文化产生的文本会漂移：每一份复制品都是人手的作品，而人手会引入变异、修改、改进和错误。没有两份长文本的手稿是完全相同的。印刷文化产生固定的文本：一个印刷版本的每一份复制品，在原则上与其他每一份都完全相同。这种固定性——建立一个文本的权威版本并可靠地复制它——是我们现在称之为科学的那种累积性、公共性知识建构的前提条件。在中国，这一过程始于宋代。在欧洲，它始于古腾堡。转变是相同的。

Printing 印刷术