Movable Type Printing Spreads Beyond Bi Sheng's Workshop

1093

Decades after Bi Sheng's death, his clay movable-type technology found new practitioners across Song China. Printers experimented with wooden and eventually metal characters, improving durability and precision. The technology remained less efficient than woodblock printing for Chinese - thousands of characters made sorting laborious - but the principle was proven and preserved. When the technique eventually reached Korea and then Europe, it would be refined into the instrument that remade the world.