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This article focuses on the intersection of English-language scholarship between the history of publishing and the history of medicine in Imperial China. As an important part of cultural and social history, both topics have attracted attention from a number of historians. This article contains three sections. The first section introduces the evolution of Chinese book and publishing history in recent years and examines what book historians have done in relation to traditional Chinese medicine. The second section explores how medical historians have considered the role of printing in the history of Chinese medicine and the ways in which medical publications were used as primary sources or subjects of research. The third section explores scholarship on medical epistemic genres, a subfield of medical history, in Chinese medicine, specifically focusing on medical case histories and recipes from the comparative and cross-cultural perspectives. Finally, the conclusion explores potential future directions from the integration of Chinese publishing history and medical history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focusses on the production of Sino-European intercultural books in China from the late Ming until the mid-Qing (1582– c.1823). It seeks to answer questions such as: where were the Sino-European books printed? How did the printing places evolve over time? And which factors influenced this evolution? It does so by investigating the private publishing places of these books, which have been referred to as ' tang printing' (tangke 堂刻) or more specifically 'church printing' (jiaotang ke 教堂刻). By using historical and geospatial data visualization, this article locates, maps, and analyses the production centres of Sino-European books over the course of more than two centuries. It further puts the evolution of this industry in the context of the available printing techniques, the social actors, and the relevant socio-political changes. This investigation shows that the technology of woodblock printing and the flexibility and elasticity of the labour force made the expansion of publishing Sino-European texts relatively easy. As will be discussed below, the regional spread of printing centres over the course of time was determined by internal factors linked to social actors, such as the number of European missionaries and their productivity, and by socio-political external factors, such as periods of persecution and exile. After delineating the printed artefacts that are used for this research, this article establishes a historical and geospatial narrative of the development of this intercultural 'book world', visualizing its evolution through digital humanities methods. In doing so, it gives unique insight into the printing history of the early Sino-European encounter in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two recent monographs address distinct but interrelated aspects of China's modern publishing industry. The interplay between intellectuals and the state, the transformation of the publishing industry via foreign knowledge, and the modification of Chinese social, cultural, and legal practices by evolving approaches to the production and distribution of knowledge are among the themes of modern Chinese history common to both studies. Researchers of book culture, publishing and printing history, cultural history, the history of media and popular culture, or intellectual history will find these books valuable. This essay discusses the following works. Robert Culp. The Power of Print in Modern China: Intellectuals and Industrial Publishing from the End of Empire to Maoist State Socialism. Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. 371 pp. $65.00 (cloth). | Fei-Hsien Wang. Pirates and Publishers: A Social History of Copyright in Modern China. Histories of Economic Life Series. Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. 350 pp. $39.95 (cloth). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before and after the First Opium War, missionary printers such as Samuel Wells Williams collaborated in publishing millions of pages while striving to augment the Mission Press's technological capacities in South China. The monthly Chinese Repository (1832–51) is one result of his extraterritorial print endeavors and holds great potential for new scholarly directions in American studies. Consider the journal's 1850 republication of two thirteenth-century letters by ruling khans to the king of France. They are topically fascinating for proposing a Franco-Mongol alliance against Islam in a war for Jerusalem. However, the letters' typographical appearance is more important: they appear in traditional Mongolian script, rendered from metallic Manchu fonts. The present article explains how these letters' appearance reflects the international circuitry of American extraterritorial printing, the world historical scope of missionaries' evangelical print ambition, and their awkward accommodation of free trade imperialism in China. Finally, the letters' republication registers the term Mongolian as a cultural and racial category with enduring significance for Williams. The term resurfaced in state and federal policies restricting Chinese immigration—policies that Williams protested in writings that register both his racialist sense of culture and his disillusionment with print evangelism in the aftermath of the Taiping Rebellion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western historians locate the origins of the newspaper in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This article demonstrates that newspaper-like periodicals known as chao-pao and xiao-pao emerged much earlier in Hangzhou, China during the Southern Song Dynasty. Journalistic activities in Hangzhou at this time were not only the most well developed in China but also considerably more advanced than those of any city in Western Europe. Contrary to the idea that the modern printing press and modern styles of journalism originated in Western Europe, this article argues that Hangzhou holds an important place in journalism history for its journalistic activities nearly nine centuries ago. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents a brief history and poses questions about traditional Chinese movable type printing. This is a technology that developed in the pre-modern period and never underwent in the mechanization in the ways that Western movable type printing did. Nevertheless, even today, Chinese traditional movable types continue to be used in some places in China. The authors not only describe the chronology of but also analyse significant cultural, political, and social factors affecting the development traditional Chinese typography. The first part of this article discusses the movable type made of earthenware and of wood, which are described in various sources written by scholar-officials. In the case of movable type for the Tangut script, however, the main evidence come from chiefly religious imprints which provide information about material evidence as well as a few about printers, typesetters, etc. The second section describes the long hiatus from the Yuan until the second half of the fifteenth century in the utilization of metallic typography in the private circles in Wuxi in Jiangnan, whose publications still survive, and how during the last dynasty, the movable type production reflects some trends in book publishing in general, with the important engagement of some of the Manchu emperors. In the last section of the paper, the authors explain why although wooden types existed in the Kingdom of Xixia (1032-1227) and in the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), it was only in the Ming (1368-1644) to Qing (1644-1911) periods that their use became more widespread in China. Wooden movable type played a key role in the printing of genealogies in various areas (e.g. Zhejiang, Anhui, Jiangsu, Hunan, and Fujian). That all also indicates that wood is the "material medium" of traditional Chinese printing, never mind if employed in blocks or types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the history of publishing and printing in China during the early Qing era. Emphasis is given to the how the social role of the print medium was appropriates by the early Qing literati to position themselves within an economy of cultural influence and elite social prestige. The author focuses on publisher Zhang Chao and the communal production and circulation of manuscripts among elite social networks. The benefits of exclusivity to the reputation and market value of Zhang Chao's printed books are noted.

Abstract / The Chinese used paper for two or three centuries before CE 105, when Cai Lun, director of imperial arsenals under Emperor He of the later Han dynasty (25-220), officially reported the 'invention' of paper. The Chinese began the first printed newspaper, Jing Bao (originally Di Bao), in 713 under the Tang dynasty (618-907); and it continued until the collapse of the Manchu dynasty in 1911. In 868, Wang Jie printed the famous Diamond Sutra (Kumarajiva's Vajracchedika Prajna Paramita), the earliest printed book in existence. Xylography (block printing) was known in China for at least four centuries before 932, when Prime Minister Feng Dao supposedly 'invented' it by directing the printing of the 11 Confucian classics filling 130 volumes - a task that took 20 years. Alchemist Bi Sheng experimented with movable type for eight years from1041, four cen-turies before Gutenberg. In 1313, Wang Zheng traced the development of movable type in his Nong shu, a treatise on agriculture. Chinese also made typography a fine art and produced numerous books. Printing from movable type reached its highest development in Korea from 1403 onwards. If the invention of printing ushered in the second communication revolution, then the celebration of Gutenberg as the inventor of printing represents a distortion of human history by those trying to document a so-called European 'exceptionalism' of the 15th century. The horizontally integra-tive macrohistory approach should set the record straight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]