CHINA. 



379 



and ultimate punishment which the laws ordain is 

 death, either by strangulation or by beheading. 

 All criminals capitally convicted, except such atro- 

 cious offenders as are expressly directed to be exe- 

 cuted without delay, are retained in prison for exe- 

 cution at a particular period in the autumn ; the 

 sentence passed upon each individual being first ' 

 duly reported to, and ratified by the emperor. 



The Chinese, it is well known, have long been 

 possessed of the art of communicating ideas. 

 Little progress, indeed, can ever be made in the 

 cultivation of the arts and sciences, without writ- 

 ing and printing, but both have long been under- 

 stood, to a certain extent, in China. Before the 

 time of Fo-hi, says a Chinese writer, the central 

 government published its manifestoes by means of 

 a certain number of interlaced threads or cords re- 

 sembling the " Quippos " of the Peruvians, which 

 had a particular signification according to the num- 

 ber of knots or the manner of braiding. Fo-hi 

 first invented the eight Kua, the basis of the reli- 

 gion and legislation, as well as of the written char- 

 acter and literature of the Chinese empire. Great 

 attention was now given to the sciences; at least 

 from the time of the third dynasty, that of Tscheu. 

 Though the greater part of the old Chinese liter- 

 ature was subsequently destroyed, yet, under the 

 dynasty of Tang, there were as many and exten- 

 sive libraries to be found in China as in any other 

 part of the world during the sixth, seventh, and 

 eighth centuries. The emperor, the higher and in- 

 ferior officers of state, the literati, and the various 

 scientific and ecclesiastical institutions, possessed 

 considerable libraries, which are severally enum- 

 erated in the literary division of the Chinese "En- 

 cyclopaedia of Matuanlin," in the 174th book. At 

 that period China possessed a collection of not less 

 than 80,000 volumes on the various branches of 

 literature and science. These works were of course 

 very expensive, and Matuanlin says, that whoever 

 possessed a collection of books was regarded as a 

 distinguished person. There were but few copies 

 of the larger works, and great difficulty was found 

 in communicating their contents throughout the 

 empire by means of oral instruction. The distin- 

 guished individual who first discovered a remedy 

 for all these deficiencies, and who is still looked 

 upon by all the printers and bookbinders of the 

 empire as their patron, was Fong-tao, who flourished 

 in the first half of the tenth centuryof our own era. 



In the reign of Ming-tsong (927 934) Fong-tao 

 had the principal and, as they were called, classical 

 works, cut out in stone plates, which had been 

 done several times during the preceding dynasties, 

 and obtained the sanction of the emperor to take 

 off impressions from them, to be circulated in the 

 country. The emperor consented, and in the third 

 year of the period " Tschang-hing " of the reign 

 of Ming-tsong, A.D. 932, the art of printing by 

 means of stone plates began in China. The plate 

 was blackened, and the characters were engraven 

 on the stone in basso-relievo, so that on the im- 

 pression the paper was black and the letters white, 

 which is still the case in China in all their litho- 

 graphic printing. The stone plates, however, were ' 

 soon superseded by wooden ones, which gave rise 

 to the art of printing by means of plates of wood, 

 in the same way as is still done with all their 

 larger works. According to another writer, Fong- 

 tao is stated to have commenced at once with the 

 wooden blocks; and, in the annals of the later five 

 dynasties, it is stated that Fong-tao (in the second 



year of the period " Tschang-hing'' of Ming-tsong, 

 of the later dynasty of Tang, A.D. 931) had soli- 

 cited permission from the emperor to cut in wood 

 and print, for the use of the pupils of the imperial 

 college, an edition of the nine king or classical 

 works. He obtained the sanction, but the work 

 was not finished till the second year of the period 

 " Kuangschun," the founder of the later Tscheu 

 (A.D. 952). The process pursued in the printing 

 of this work by means of wooden plates has been 

 carried on down to the present day without any 

 essential alteration. The wood selected for these 

 blocks is strong hut not brittle ; it is called Li, 

 and resembles that of the pear-tree. From the 

 Chinese accounts it is smooth and shining, and has 

 a bitter flavour, on which account the worm never 

 attacks it. This process of wood engraving dif- 

 fered from the previous lithography employed, in- 

 asmuch as all the letters and figures were worked 

 in high relief; the wood being carefully cut and 

 filed down all round them. The characters there- 

 fore, as with us, are black when printed, while the 

 paper remains white. When we reflect on the 

 great number of letters which compose the Chinese 

 alphabet, the advantage of block printing is imme- 

 diately obvious and, in fact, it is the only method 

 adapted for works of any magnitude. It is by this 

 process that the Roman Catholic missionaries in 

 China have printed single pages and even entire 

 works in the Latin and other European lan- 

 guages such, for instance, as the Spanish and 

 Chinese Grammar of P. Varo, and two books of 

 Confucius works which are among the greatest 

 bibliographical curiosities in the world. The man- 

 ner in which the missionaries obtained these works, 

 was by writing in a very legible hand upon trans- 

 parent paper, which the Chinese wood engravers 

 faithfully copied, without understanding a single 

 word of the contents. 



During the succeeding centuries various attempts 

 were made to substitute moveable types for the 

 wooden blocks, but they always terminated in a 

 return to the old method. Under the great dynasty 

 of Soong (A.D. 960 1280) an attempt was made 

 to print by means of movable types made of 

 burnt earth, and the emperor Kang-hi, of the pre- 

 sent Mantschoo dynasty, had, according to Dr Mor- 

 rison, a great quantity of movable types cast in 

 copper. Kien-long, however, the second in suc- 

 cession to this wise prince, had all the types melted 

 down during a period of great scarcity of money, 

 in order to convert them into coin. In Dr Morri- 

 son's extensive collection of Chinese books, there 

 are a Chinese Dictionary, in 24mo., and a history 

 of the Loo-Chew islands, in 4 volumes, which were 

 printed with these movable types of Kang-hi's, 

 but the characters are far inferior in beauty and re- 

 gularity to those of the ordinary wood blocks. 

 Kien-long subsequently, however, caused 250,000 

 movable wooden types to be cut, which were then, 

 and still continue to be, used in the printing of 

 the " State Calendar," a work published every three 

 months. 



The works which have been printed in English 

 and Chinese, at the college founded at Macao by 

 Dr Morrison, by means of metal types, as well as 

 the specimens of movable Chinese letters cast 

 some years ago under the direction of M. Pauthier 

 at Paris, are everything that could be desired, 

 though there is no hope of ever attaining in our 

 metal types the ease and delicacy which the Chinese 

 engravers impart to their wooden blocks. 



