First Printed Book

In 868 AD, a Buddhist text known as the Diamond Sutra was printed in China using carved woodblocks. It is the oldest surviving printed book with a specific date on it, and it is often called the first printed book. The claim needs a caveat: printing almost certainly existed earlier, but no dated work of this kind survives. Its importance lies in showing that, by the mid-ninth century, printing was a mature craft capable of producing a sophisticated, illustrated text.

Printing grew out of several older technologies. Paper had been developed in China centuries earlier, and carved seals and stamps had long been used to mark documents and impress images. Buddhism also played a central role. Believers considered copying sacred texts an act of merit, and demand for scriptures, charms, and devotional images encouraged ways to reproduce them in quantity. Woodblock printing appears to have emerged in Tang dynasty China, probably by the seventh or eighth century, though historians cannot pin down exactly when or where it began. Fragments of earlier printed material from China and Korea hint at a longer prehistory.

The Diamond Sutra of 868 takes the form of a scroll about five meters long, made from several sheets of paper pasted together. Its text was produced from carved wooden blocks, with a frontispiece showing the Buddha addressing a disciple. A colophon at the end states that it was made on behalf of a man named Wang Jie, to honor his parents, and gives a date corresponding to 868. Such a dedication reflects the religious motive behind much early printing, which was as much about spreading merit as spreading information.

The scroll survived because it was sealed in a cave library near Dunhuang, an oasis town on the Silk Road, where thousands of manuscripts were hidden for roughly nine centuries. The cache was rediscovered around 1900, and in 1907 the explorer Aurel Stein acquired the scroll, which is now held by the British Library in London.

Woodblock printing went on to shape East Asian culture. Over the following centuries it was used for Buddhist canons, government documents, calendars, and classical texts, and it helped sustain the scholarly examination system. Movable type was later developed in China in the eleventh century and used in Korea, before Johannes Gutenberg's press appeared in Europe in the fifteenth century. Whether and how these traditions influenced one another is debated. What the Diamond Sutra offers is a firm anchor: a dated, finely made printed book showing that the technology was well established long before the age of the Gutenberg Bible.