On November 23, in the Hengshui Museum of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy in Hengshui City, Hebei Province, a display of wooden movable type printing skills was being held. Curator Liu Xingang was picking up wooden characters for movable typesetting.
Wooden movable type printing is a traditional craft of ancient Chinese movable type printing. It means that after engraving reverse characters on a wooden board, saw them into individual characters, trim them with a knife, and make them uniform in size and height. It is a printing method in which small bamboo sheets are used to pad and plug tightly, and then apply ink and lay paper.
The wooden movable type printing technique displayed in this museum strictly follows the ancient method and is very sophisticated. It requires a variety of tools, such as carving knives, carving plates, printing plates, hand brushes (brown brushes), etc. In addition to the manuscript link such as manuscript editing), the printing link includes fonts, word picking, typesetting, proofreading, etc., all by hand.
According to reports, the Hengshui Chinese Painting and Calligraphy Museum displays 12 sets of large cabinets for picking up characters, with a total of more than 200,000 wooden movable types of the Qing Dynasty, which have high historical research and cultural relic preservation value.
In 2017, the wooden movable type printing technique of Taocheng District, Hengshui City was selected into the Hebei Provincial Intangible Cultural Heritage List.
The picture shows wooden movable type into a board.
Photo by Zhao Qi
[Editor: Cao Miaoxin]