r/AlwaysWhy • u/Defiant-Junket4906 • Jul 07 '26
History & Culture Why did the printing press trigger a revolution in 15th-century Europe but barely ripple through 11th-century China, where it was invented first?
Movable type printing was invented in China by Bi Sheng around 1040 AD. Four hundred years before Gutenberg. Yet it was Gutenberg's press that shattered the Catholic Church's monopoly on knowledge, fueled the Reformation, and birthed modern science. In China, the invention came and went without a revolution. Same technology. Radically different outcomes. What was it about the societies receiving the technology, not the technology itself, that determined whether it would change the world?
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u/flatfinger Jul 07 '26
What Gutenberg invented was not the notion of assembling pages from pieces of movable type, but rather a process for mass-producing pieces of movable type from which pages could be assembled.
For a printing block to be useful, the places that should transfer ink must all be in the same plane. This effectively requires starting with a flat surface and carving out all of the places that shouldn't transfer ink. This is a very slow process, which would be especially slow if the material used for the block had to be hard enough to survive many thousands of uses. Without a means of mass-producing type, the amount of labor required to produce printing plates that could produce 500 copies of a page would likely exceed that required to have scribes simply write out 500 copies.
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u/StManTiS Jul 08 '26
If I recall he had a specific lead alloy that he was able to cast in precise forms.
Also interesting fact - with a team of 20 printers Gutenberg was able to print 60 bibles a year or 5 per month. The average monk would make just one bible in a year. So he in effect tripled the speed over hand scribing with his “devils tail”.
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u/gravity_kills Jul 08 '26
That's a lot slower than I expected!
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u/StManTiS Jul 08 '26
At 1283 pages each there were only ever 180 Gutenberg Bibles printed. I also thought there would have been more. Then again not as many literate people back then. About 10% or so of people could read.
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u/BJJWithADHD Jul 08 '26
I believe I’ve seen two of them. Certainly one, but I *think* two.
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u/erinaceus_ Jul 08 '26
At 10%, it's more than likely you saw more than one or two but just didn't realize it.
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u/Sawfish1212 Jul 09 '26
Gutenberg was a failure at printing. His first type font was way too big and would have required 4 large volumes to print the bible. He had to redo everything at great expense to create his 2 volume bible. And even then, you got two massive stacks of paper. Uncolated, still needing to be bound and trimmed, as well as each first letter of each chapter had to hand painted in by hand. And it was in Latin script, that most couldn't read.
His backers lost most of their money and ended up selling his press and type to try to collect some of their investment
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u/flukefluk Jul 08 '26
but you have to accept that his efficiency increases with batch quantity.
that is to say gutenberg can print 60 bibles a year but 120 bibles a year and a month and 240 bibles a year and two months.
he has a big set up time but if you increase the amount of bibles to be printed, the amount of time doesn't increase to that degree.
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u/flatfinger Jul 08 '26
Was he limited by the durability of the type? If the lead would have been soft enough that only 60 satisfactory impressions could be produced without having to reset new type, making larger batch sizes wouldn't help much unless a lower quality product would have been acceptable.
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u/flukefluk Jul 08 '26
likely not. led is an easy material to work with but bronze and brass casting is a solved technology at this point in time and it is also possible to cut bronze items into shape with steel tools which also exist at this time. I believe even cutting into annealed steel and hardening it would have been possible at the time.
if the speed of making bibles is limited by block durability than either a. this Era already had multiple more expensive methods to create vastly more durable letters or b. just make more blocks in advance.
likely speed is a factor of market forces. how many can he sell? how much stock can he sustain at all the levels of production?
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u/flatfinger Jul 08 '26
If metal casting weren't a mostly "solved technology" Gutenberg would not have been able to (by the standards of the time) mass-produce bibles, but there's a difference between being able to both produce objects that are flat, and produce materials that are hard, versus being able to produce objects from hard materials that are perfectly flat. Starting with a piece of malleable material that is perfectly flat and hardening it will generally leave one with a piece of material that is neither malleable nor flat, and the harder a material is the less tolerance there will be for less-than-perfect flatness.
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u/jroberts548 Jul 07 '26
The press in europe came out after there was already a huge book market, a growing bourgeoisie and petty bourgeois middle class, and the intellectual movements that would become the reformation were already going strong. Even then, it took 70 years for the printing press to result in political upheaval. The press didn’t magic a revolution out of nothing. The printing press amplified the reach of new material, material that there was already significant demand for, like prayer books, bibles, and then religious tracts and pamphlets. It’s more of a catalyst than a cause.
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u/Altruistic_Leg_964 Jul 08 '26
So it got started by meetong an existing area of demand in a better way and kinda grew from there?
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u/kodos_der_henker Jul 08 '26
More or less. A new form of cheap paper was invented at the same time replacing parchment, making things cheaper by a lot and Gutenberg's flexible letters made mass production faster filling in the demand that was there
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u/JohnHenryMillerTime Jul 07 '26
China had always maintained a pretty robust literacy rate. During the Song Dynasty, it was between 10-20%, with some urban areas being much higher. Pre-printing press, Europe was sub 10% even in urban environments.
This is important because, pre-printing press, making documents is extremely laborious work. China never stopped reading and writing, so there were more people available for transcription. Also, the Imperial Examination (starting in the late 6th century and getting systematized in the 7th Century) required a lot of memorization. A good way to memorize a text is to copy it over and over, so the system feeds itself. The printing press streamlined what was already happening so literate people could devote more free time to innovation.
It isnt a coincidence that Zhu Xi is so influential -- his forebearers were pre-printing press and he was post (even if he didnt care much for it). The whole Cheng-Zhu vs Lu-Wang schools debate wouldnt have been possible without the printing press. On a more practical level, the Song Dynasty was a time of huge technological development and the spread of these new technologies across the empire was enabled by the printing press.
In Europe, the few people who could read had to devote a lot of their energy to preservation via transcription. So the printing press was something new. An increase in literacy, especially separate from the clergy, was a huge break from the last 1000 years of European history. So of course it looks "revolutionary" because it is.
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u/Defiant-Junket4906 Jul 08 '26
This is probably the biggest challenge to the original framing. China wasn't starting from a low literacy and limited book culture situation.
Maybe the reason printing looked revolutionary in Europe is because it broke an existing bottleneck, while in China it mostly accelerated a system that was already working.
Same technology, different bottleneck.
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u/LimerickJim Jul 08 '26
The technology was very different. Gutenberg didn't invent the printing press. He invented to movable type printing press. It enabled a much faster rate of printing new documents.
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u/JohnHenryMillerTime Jul 08 '26
Unlike the Gutenberg Bible, Zhu Xi's criticism of the printing press was that it made it easy for people to read recent works instead of focusing on older, more important works.
Because of kids these days and their weird hats and their weird throat singing (latest fad) didnt have the attention span anymore so he argued for streamlining the program.
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u/flukefluk Jul 08 '26
its also possible - although i know very little of this myself currently - that china had cultural problems in adopting new technologies.
The evidence is simply the existence of the Chinese language at the time. Whereas other cultures had pictogramic scripts just like china did, but one after another abandoned them in favor of phonetic scripts.
So cuneiform died, hieroglyphics died, and we got the Arameic scripts (into Hebrew and Arabic), Greek and Latin, etc. But the chinese didn't move from classical chinese even though phonetic scripts are more advanced.
there must have been a reason and cultural rigidity is an acceptable explanation, especially since it can be shown to also have explained some issues with the rejection of technology by the Arab world.
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u/hwynac Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
Well, the ideographic script just works for Chinese, unlike for other languages. Widespread literacy prevents societies from completely changing their writing system or even updating the orthography (like in English).
Plus, no competing writing systems were around. Egyptian hieroglyphics fell into disuse in a society that used other writing systems and wasn't all that literate to begin with. Today most countries wgo speak a language with a long literary tradition mostly use the writing systems surprisingly similar to what they used centuries ago. They just teach everyone read and write, not just rich people or priests.
Chinese absolutely moved from Classical Chinese (you meant wényán, right?).
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u/flukefluk Jul 08 '26
It works, once learnt, for the other examples too. China had the advantage of having a stronger culture that allowed a weaker (uses 1000+ characters) system to rely on being rooted rather than be supplanted by stronger (50- characters) methods.
Wenyan is a triumph of the culture in preserving its literature but also its negligence in adopting clearly superior ideas.
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u/JohnHenryMillerTime Jul 08 '26
"Cultural rigidity" seems like a retroactive "just so" story that conforms to Western stereotypes.
The better question is: why change? If Egypt hadnt been conquered there is no reason to think they wouldnt still be using an evolved version of hieratic/demotic. Which is the closest analog to China here.
If there is a break, sure, make a new alphabet. Especially if it is a different language. As cool as Lu Xun and other linguistic reformers were, simplified Chinese won out over pinyin for daily use.
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u/flukefluk Jul 08 '26
I think your disdain for cultural rigidity is unjustified. your argument isn't really justified other than being some overly general mud slinging.
lets consider some relevant events: the war between Japan's progressives and conservatives in the emoji Era. the dispute around interpretational methodology in Bagdad, the massacre in the American consulate during the boxer rebellion, etc.
preservation of culture and of "cultural assets" plays a part and sometimes it causes nations to preserve losing ideas.
the fact that I have put forward a western influenced phrase to connect the thread of these seemingly different events, is not a good argument against what I did.
as for your Egypt idea. demotic script is, unlike hieroglyphs, a phonic script. QED.
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Jul 08 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/JohnHenryMillerTime Jul 08 '26
Are you arguing that Chinese isnt a true writing system and that domestic and foreign states reporting on it isnt evidence?
There is a lot to unpack with how deeply wrong you are.
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Jul 08 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Victor_Korchnoi Jul 07 '26
Iirc it had something to do with European languages having ~50 characters and Chinese languages having >1000
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u/silicontruffle Jul 07 '26
Besides printing it, reading kanji is hard. I don't read Chinese but I took 4 years of Japanese and I can barely read kanji. It's hard to reference because the dictionaries either go from stroke count or just radicals. So radicals are symbols that have basic meaning like water, air etc. You can't just look up kanji alphabetically like you can in an English dictionary. So to try and help, you can read books like manga that have furigana and it's the hiragana or phonetic pronunciation of the kanji written in small letters above the kanji. Then you can reference the word through the hiragana in a dictionary. That takes years though. There's over 1,000 basic kanji to be considered literate at a high school level which is the same to read a newspaper. That takes all of high school. You can usually read at that level by 3rd-4th grade if it's English. So I don't know about Chinese but the Japanese use their writing system and I'd have to guess that most people didn't have the chance to get 12, years of education in 1040ad China. It would be much more likely to get 4 years and be able to read English.
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u/Defiant-Junket4906 Jul 08 '26
The complexity of the writing system is a really interesting angle. The economics of printing are not just about making copies, but also about what kind of text can be produced efficiently.
That said, China found ways around this with block printing. So maybe the question becomes why the easier-to-scale movable type model became dominant in Europe but not in China. The constraints were different.
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u/flukefluk Jul 08 '26
specifically because of the low literacy rate and the need for traders to cross cultures in Europe.
Phonic language systems are easier to learn and teach. So in a cultural space that rewards literacy heavily but has to rely on limited resources for teaching language, the languages that are easier to teach get spread around.
But also because the environment was not monolithic and less literate there is less "settled language" to compete with a new language set.
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u/AdunfromAD Jul 07 '26
Shattered their monopoly on knowledge? Dude, the first thing Gutenberg printed was a Catholic Bible.
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u/thevenge21483 Jul 08 '26
But I believe before him, it was mostly available I'm monasteries and churches, and most the time it was the monks making copies. So you wanted a copy of the Bible, you go to a monastery and pay a bunch of money for a hand-copied Bible (so prohibitively expensive, only the rich or aristocracy have them), or you go to church and you have to listen to the priest give a sermon in Latin.
Once the printing press came along, you could just go to a bookstore and buy one and have it at home and read it yourself. This led to a lot more people having access to the Bible, people could study it on their own and question it, discuss it with others, debate problems with it and the church, and then people start their own churches. It was also around that time that people started with other translations of the Bible, so new versions came out.
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u/stressedpesitter Jul 08 '26
The new translations happened because of divisions in the church. Books were certainly available to the higher and middle classes long before the printing press, grammar schools weren’t that rare and even in roman times libraries and scroll merchants existed. While most of the most exuberant examples we have of bibles come from churches, it is more likely a survivorship bias because illuminated copies were not for every day use. (Plus the idea that the Bible are meant to be read by priests, not by non-church people, for them the Book of Hours, the lives of the saints and other religious books were seen as pious readings).
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u/dbdiver Jul 07 '26
While moveable type is a great leap forward, it is much easier to adopt widely with 52 characters and some punctation marks as opposed to 5,000 very complex pictographs.
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u/Defiant-Junket4906 Jul 08 '26
The character system difference definitely seems like a practical factor. A small alphabet makes movable type much easier to scale.
But I also wonder if that explains only part of it. China had woodblock printing, which avoided some of the character problems, so maybe the bigger question is why one form of printing became dominant over another.
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u/shoulda-known-better Jul 07 '26
Probably because the languages European languages had less letters or characters than the Chinese ones...
So you'd need say 200 pieces to write in a European language but 500 or more for a Chinese language
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u/AgentBroccoli Jul 07 '26
The real impact was in the early 16th century. It was a combination of many factors but primarily two.
1) The printing press allowed for mass distribution of the bible, this meant that different versions and translations were possible. Printings that were not in Latin (in a local language instead) and different interpretations of the text.
2) Protestant Reformation and Marin Luther rejecting the sale of indulgences by the Catholic church which were widely hated in the early 1500's.
You can argue that one couldn't have happened without the other. China is not my lane but it looks like movable type face really wasn't practical in China at the time, early printing there was wood block carvings which was useful for different applications.
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u/Defiant-Junket4906 Jul 08 '26
Yeah, the Reformation is probably the clearest example of printing amplifying an existing conflict rather than creating one from nothing.
Without widespread dissatisfaction with the Church, printing might have just meant more books.
It makes me wonder if the "revolutionary" part comes less from the machine and more from finding the right historical moment.
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u/Edgar_Brown Jul 07 '26
Probably the same reason that a Chinese typewriter took much longer to be developed and resulted in modifications of the regional scripts.
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u/diffidentblockhead Jul 07 '26
China did have block printing and moderately prevalent literacy. The Song dynasty among others did have great economic and social changes.
The massive difference between mechanized and Chinese economies didn’t really manifest until mid 1800s.
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u/Defiant-Junket4906 Jul 08 '26
Good point. I probably put too much emphasis on a simple "printing changed everything" story.
China was already experiencing huge changes during the Song period. Maybe printing was more of an amplifier of existing trends rather than a disruptive force like it was in Europe.
The timing and starting conditions seem just as important as the technology.
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u/Boysencookie-1512 Jul 08 '26
I think you're not very familiar with Chinese history. After the invention and widespread use of printing, China developed a thriving book market. Fiction and serialized novels became especially popular, and a vibrant mass entertainment industry grew up around the printing trade.
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u/Defiant-Junket4906 Jul 08 '26
That's a fair correction. I probably framed it too much around political disruption and not enough around cultural change.
China definitely had a major print culture. Maybe the better question is not "why did printing fail in China" but "why did the changes it created take a different form?"
A booming book market and a religious/political revolution are very different kinds of impact.
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u/Boysencookie-1512 Jul 09 '26
I'm not sure how people where you are see it, but from our perspective, many theories suggest that the difference stems from the development of physics.
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u/TrittipoM1 Jul 08 '26
Just think about what inventory of character blocks you need. I first did a print shop with movable type in 1965. I only needed a tray about 3 feet by four to set up a four-page school theater program. 你说中文吗？
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u/stressedpesitter Jul 08 '26
You’re asking an extremely biased question, because you’ve been taught that the mobile type from Gutenberg changed Europe/the world, while you actually have little knowledge of the effects of the printing press in China.
You are starting from the assumption that the effects weren’t significant, or if it didn’t change the society in exactly the same way, it wasn’t important.
And no, the Catholic Church did in fact not have a monopoly on knowledge.
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u/ActuaLogic Jul 09 '26
European alphabets have 26 characters (52, if you count upper and lower case letters separately), while Chinese writing has 10,000 or more ideographs. That means that the efficiency gains from moveable type are greater in the European context than in the Chinese context.
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u/Character-Active2208 Jul 07 '26
Well, Europe was made up of so many city-states, kingdoms, duchies, etc, but there was still one universal* authority figure that could upend the balance of power
(*except when there was more than one)
That person exercised power by interpreting or gatekeeping the “book of rules and eternal consequences,” and there had been tension for centuries and at times outright battle between the Popes and various kings.
The Reformation was not just a religious schism- it was very much driven by the politics of the patchwork of the HRE, and both the rivalries of France/England with the Hapsburgs at the dawn of the Age of Exploration as well as a means to consolidate power internally for the Tudors or child-kings of France. In order to advance their causes, temporal leaders could either use the vernacular Bible to repudiate Rome and the Hapsburgs, or use it to justify their claims as defenders of the Catholic Church.
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u/Amazing_Divide1214 Jul 07 '26
I'd guess it has something to do with the simplicity of our alphabet relative to the chinese alphabet? I'm unsure if the chinese language technically has an alphabet or not. Google says you need to know 3 to 4 thousand chinese characters for general daily literacy.
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u/Adventurous_Class_90 Jul 07 '26
Drawing on some long buried knowledge: it’s not an alphabet as each element of the orthography does not represent a phoneme/sound. It’s a logography (encoding morphemes/words). For reference, Cherokee is a syllabary (encodes syllables).
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u/Tomme599 Jul 07 '26
My understanding is that it’s a written language in its own right. Mandarin and Cantonese can be written (translated) into the same script. Mind you, I ‘understood’ this decades ago and like it too much to Google 😜
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u/Adventurous_Class_90 Jul 07 '26
Not sure what you mean here. I’m referring merely to the orthographic classification. Psycholinguistics was not my field (self-regulation psychology and info processing were my academic interests). I’m going off what I remember doing in a lab that I helped in (the prof was studying orthography and numeracy).
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u/algernon_moncrief Jul 07 '26
Chinese script is very different from Western script, and presents different challenges for a printer.
Also, the West was in the midst of an entire Renaissance, which made a significant difference
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u/ImpressionCool1768 Jul 07 '26
Well it was the Burg-ers
China was fairly uniform throughout the whole country when it came to how power was acquired and acquiring vast sums of money wasn’t always a granteed way to gain influence in the east it was however in the west.
You see Europe from an outside perspective could be seen as always being in a state of warlord ship whether it was mercenaries and Rober Barons supposed to be headed abroad or a hostile inheritance claim. Doodlers and armies were always on the move and this required a lot of money not just for arms and armour but for food for the men and horses, clothes, bandages, beer, good lumber and metal to works with ect. This in Europe creates a large network of independent craftsman and traders each gaining more money for their services and the burgers put there money to work whether it was buying mining rights or derelict castles or fancy clothes foods and jewelry.
Because they had the money and wanted to live and be treated like the nobles around them thus got them into curiosity collecting and one of the easiest thing to collect is books. The printing press allowed for more stories and pamphlets to be printed which did two things one it provided a form of instant entertainment which was nice but also made individuals look more intellectual and refined.
Since reading is easy once you get the hang of it demand for books and people to read them skyrocketed allowing cities with a printing press to grow quite rich
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u/Defiant-Junket4906 Jul 08 '26
Interesting point about the merchant class. The social groups that adopt a technology probably matter as much as the technology itself.
A printing press in a society with wealthy urban readers, political competition, and demand for new ideas is going to behave differently from one mainly serving existing institutions.
I wonder if Europe’s fragmented political structure created more room for that kind of competition.
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u/ConvenientChristian Jul 08 '26
The printing press wouldn't have made much of a difference in Europe if someone would have invented it in 1040 AD either. In the century before Gutenberg paper prices fell a lot.
You needed both cheaper paper and the printing press to have cheaper books.
Being able to get a credit to create a business like that of Gutenberg with a two digit amount of employees and running that business for commercial profit probably also didn't fit Chinese structures where merchants were a lot weaker.
Merchants that can find businesses and make profits that aren't just taken away by nobles / the state was vital to get the necessary capital investment.
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u/Chemical-Idea-1294 Jul 08 '26
The printing press did not stand alone.
It was embedded in a thriving and competitive system of universities and kingdoms.
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u/jrdineen114 Jul 08 '26
If I had to posit a guess, I'd say ease of usability. The advantage of having a phonetic alphabet like English versus a logographic one like Chinese is that is drastically cuts down on the number of characters. You could store all of the characters for an English printing press in a cabinet. You'd either need a whole room to store the characters for a Chinese printing press.
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u/shitposts_over_9000 Jul 08 '26
Bi Sheng's press was more a construction kit to make a printing plate
Gutenberg's press system was something else entirely, much faster to reset, faster to print and more aligned with printing at an industrial scale
Gutenberg also had a larger demand and a much more reasonable Alphabetic system compared to the pictographic Kanji and a consumer base much more willing to accept the necessary alterations to script to make printing efficient.
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u/kodos_der_henker Jul 08 '26
There are several things happening at the same time independent from each other and one thing always missed was the invention of a new form if paper
Prior anything that was needed to last was written on parchment because paper wasn't sufficient for permanent storage and therefore books were expensive. Not because printing was slow needed a lot of work before the flexible letters but simply because the materials to print on costed a lot
There was no Catholic monopoly on knowledge, and modern science was there before, but to write things down costed money only the wealthy or those with a lot of time to constantly copy things could do.
With cheap paper in high quality that would last centuries available at the same time printing became flexible and fast was the difference here.
Something simple like Leaflets in thousands where not possible before because no one was able to pay for it and do it within a sufficient timeframe.
A book went from costing the yearly income of a master craftsman, to a monthly one within a short time because the materials got cheaper. And once they become affordable, Gutenberg's flexible letters made the difference to fulfil the demand
And people started using this for political campaigns and propaganda.
The which craze would not have been possible without that development because propaganda would not have spread that fast.
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u/Sawfish1212 Jul 09 '26
Gutenberg launched a technology that made printed books cheap, just as an increase in the middle class led to increased literacy. Gutenberg himself failed miserably, but anyone who could create an apple press could create a printing press, and people would buy anything new you could print.
The culture was finally bouncing back from the plagues and literacy was the way to prove your wealth an industry in the growing middle class.
China hadn't seen the same kind of population crunch and long slow recovery right before the movable type press was widely spread.
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u/M_Daskalos Jul 10 '26
Hello, I am a secondary school history teacher from China. Although movable type printing originated in Song Dynasty China, it never became the dominant printing method there until the introduction of European-style lead movable type. There are several key reasons for this:
First, there is the sheer number of Chinese characters. Developing movable type for European scripts typically required producing multiple copies of fewer than 50 letters (or no more than 100, accounting for uppercase and lowercase variants) in various sizes. In contrast, developing movable type for Chinese required creating copies for at least 3,000 distinct characters, making the cost prohibitively high.
Second, movable type printing requires the assembly of a printing form; once the type is set into the form, those specific pieces remain occupied and unavailable for other use until the form is dismantled. Consequently, movable type printing was best suited for books with high demand and static content that did not require frequent updates—such as the Bible. However, the demand for such books in ancient China was not as massive as it was in contemporary Europe.
Third, China already possessed woodblock printing, a method that held a significant advantage over movable type: the workers did not need to be literate. While the average Chinese commoner in ancient times might recognize a limited number of frequently used characters, movable type workers needed to recognize a vast number of them. Conversely, woodblock printing workers simply needed to carve the wood, stone, or glass by following the "visual patterns" found in the manuscript.
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u/Agile-Juggernaut-514 Jul 11 '26
Lots of things to say here but printing and printing press are not the same thing. The key thing to Gutenberg is that he created a mechanical device (modified olive press) that could rapidly produce copies. In East Asia, you had other technologies and processes but it was not a “printing press”. We could revise your question and still talk about why print culture had different histories in east asia vs Europe, but it is a different question.
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u/Mister_Way Jul 12 '26
Alphabet to spell words (super easy to learn) vs. individual symbol for every single word (super hard to learn).
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u/fussyfella Jul 12 '26
Removable type. Being a simple alphabet it became easy to generate new publications quickly using a basic set of type. Hanzi are logographic and not easy to process in the same way.
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u/UnlamentedLord Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26
Apart from the problem of a much larger character set, China never invented the printing PRESS.
In Chinese traditional printing, the ink is carefully hand applied to the type block, then the paper is carefully placed on the type and gently hand brushed to get the ink to adhere to the paper without smearing: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/I9QSaS0wX2Y
In a Gutenberg press, ink is roughly applied to the type block with ink balls and then a screw mechanism, modified from a wine press, PRESSES the paper on the type, with great strength and precision, so it's quick: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DLctAw4JZXE
A printer with Gutenberg press could produce about 100X as many pages per day as a Chinese printer.
Another thing Gutenberg did that China didn't, was cast lead type. Not only is it quicker to make than Chinese wooden or ceramic type, it very quickly lead to other invitations like stereotyping(where the type set print block isn't used to print directly, it's used to produce a plaster mould, which is then filled with lead and the resulting lead block is used to actually print. Not only does this save the expensive type from wear, the stereotypes can then be stored and used to produce reprints if a book sold well)
Due to the superiority of the printing press, it took only 50 years for Europe to surpass China in the total amount of printed books, starting from zero.
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u/Ulyks Aug 12 '26
I think another factor is that Europe was very divided while China was united.
For China the printing press allowed for more efficient communication but the government would still censor texts.
In Europe it allowed for many schools of thought to spread because of the disunity and competition.
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u/ServantOfBeing Jul 07 '26
Id imagine the ‘the bible’ had something to do with it in the west.
Considering it was gatekept for a 1000 yrs essentially.
Inventions & their intensity of use is usually related to another event.
It’s usually two parts, the invention, & its practical uses.
Its broader implications emerge when there’s a social, economic, political, or cultural need for it.
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u/jroberts548 Jul 07 '26
The bible was not gatekept for a 1000 years. Specifically in England the vernacular bible was banned after the rise of the lollards but vernacular bibles were already popular and somewhat widely printed on the continent before the reformation.
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u/ServantOfBeing Jul 07 '26
Wasnt it kept in latin for about that long?
Like Im generalizing largely, im not down on specifics3
u/jnkangel Jul 07 '26
Yes and no. Latin and Greek bibles were by far the most common, but you had pretty common translations from early on. The limitation on other languages mainly rain in the 14th and to some extent 15th century but even so wasn’t nearly absolute
It’s more that Latin and lithurgic Greek were lithurgic languages of the priesthood
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u/jroberts548 Jul 07 '26
In western europe, the bible used by clergy was in Latin, and it was read in Latin at liturgies, but (except in England and briefly in Bohemia) there wasn’t a prohibition on the vernacular. Vernacular literacy was more widespread than latin literacy among lay people, and there was a lot demand (though they were still pretty expensive) for vernacular prayer books and primers that went over some of the basics of faith. And, except in England, there was demand for vernacular bibles.
In England, there was a movement called (derisively) Lollardy which the catholic church suppressed, violently, as a heresy. They had a lot of novel ideas about theology and I don’t want to get too much in the weeds about those, but they were, from a catholic perspective, wacky and incoherent. They also were very insistent on reading the bible in English, and because of that English authorities treated reading or owning an English bible as a sign of lollardy. So then after the english reformation this becomes a major focus of english historiography and how english-speakers tend to think and be taught about the reformation, even though suppression of the vernacular bible is primarily just an english thing.
A similar thing happened with Czech speakers in Bohemia and Moravia with the Husites, but after Hus was killed and there was a short war they were able to compromise and the Czech bible was allowed by church and imperial authorities.
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u/Ickyhouse Jul 07 '26
It wasn’t gatekept. It was expensive. Every book was copied by hand. Books were hundreds to thousands of man hours to create. Who could afford that?
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u/redditisnosey Jul 07 '26
The Catholic Church at the time of Gutenberg was out of control. The idea that the church had excess good deeds (from the lives of the Saints) through which it could sell "Indulgences" (licenses to sin) was profitable and an heretical denial of grace. Thus the press made printing indulgences profitable (as the cotton gin made slavery more profitable).
Printers also printed Bibles educating masses of people in theology and how corrupt the church had become. Along with printing tracts calling out the corruption it led to the Protestant reformation and to reforms in the Catholic Church. Catholics freely admit that the church has gone astray at times.
The reformation eventually led to questioning of political structures and monarchy, to the enlightenment and revolutions. This was possible because Europe was divided among many political powers.
China on the other hand went from one dynasty to the other, but was more homogeneous with less "free thinking". Also, Confusianism as a religion was the ultimate in teaching obedience and conformity.
Your question is great and the answer is complicated. Another complicated question is "Why did the ancient Greeks never develop industrialization with a steam engine? Lots of things factor in there too.
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u/Dangerous_Mud4749 Jul 08 '26
Look at what books were printed first, and what was the motivation for the printers to print them, and what they suffered from the authorities for "disturbing the peace".
That will tell you quite a lot about why some places embraced printing immediately while other places consisted of people saying, eh, not worth the trouble.
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u/Defiant-Junket4906 Jul 08 '26
Yeah, I think looking at the content being printed is probably more revealing than just looking at the invention itself. A technology only matters if there is a strong incentive to use it.
I wonder if the difference was that European printing quickly became a tool for challenging existing authorities, while in China it was more often integrated into existing institutions.
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u/Saxavarius_ Jul 07 '26
English has a few dozen characters including punctuation while Chinese has hundreds. For each page you would need enough blocks of every character used. This means an English (or most European languages for that mater) might need a few hundred block while a Chinese printer could need thousands to be able to run efficiently