I just read about how the Song dynasty is actually credited with the creation of the first printing press, but I'm a little confused about how it worked since the Chinese have over thousands of characters that stand for words and not letters or phonetic sounds. So how did their printing press work? Was there a character for each word as with the language? Thanks :)
Printing Press Movable character blocks were invented by Bi Sheng in 1045. A method for arranging and printing pages in mass quantities was devised. However, this was not efficient when applied to the Chinese language, which possesses over 5000 characters, and thus could not spur on the same printing revolution as that which occurred in Europe. ------------------------ I hope this is helpful.
Ancient Chinese Printing Press
