History of typography
Typography is one of the four great inventions in China, and it is regarded as the mother of civilization. As early as Sui and Tang dynasties, woodblock printing was very popular; spread to Song Dynasty, BI Sheng invented movable type (around year 1041).Various movable type appeared in each dynasty included wooden movable type, ceramic movable type, porcelain movable type, and copper movable type; however, movable type was not popular in ancient China. Chinese characters are in huge numbers, and movable type was not as convenient as Western characters but with better technique demand and requirement. Woodblock was easy to present the calligraphic beauty of Chinese characters and was also easy to preserve. After the popular of computer typesetting, movable type was gradually disappearing.



The development of type
Around year 1440, the “type” movable print of Johannes Gutenberg started to spread out in Europe. Until year 1500, it spread out into various business centers in Europe and promoted print into industrialization essentially. From 1827 to 1835, an enthusiastic missionary from London missionary society in UK called Samuel Dyer in Malacca combined the European art technique with the handicraft of oversea Chinese craftsman and explored and designed a steel typeface of Chinese characters and flush lettering cooper mold to create Chinese metal movable type for more than 3,000 characters, and successfully printed Chinese bible with metal movable type print. The Chinese movable type characters produced by Chinese movable type printing of Anglo-Chinese College in Hong Kong was famous worldwide, and the imperial commissioner of the Russian Empire, Paris Association in France, Singapore Government, Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, Governor of Guangdong and Guangxi, Shanghai Taotai, and the Qing dynasty equivalent of the Foreign Office all bought the Chinese movable type or the whole set of movable type cooper mold produced by Anglo-Chinese College early or later; It was the first of the Chinese type character produced by the Western that was introduced into China.

Typography Procedure(Drawn: Pei-yan An)

Source of information:
National Science and Technology Museum:http://epaper.nstm.gov.tw/chinascience/F/f4-1.htm

Data compilation：Chi-Wei, Chieh-Chang
Resource: Chinese Social Science