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2000 BCE
Three innovations developed by the ancient Chinese
Legend suggests that by the year 2000 B.C., a culture was evolving in China in virtual isolation from the pockets of civilization in the West. Three innovations developed by the ancient Chinese that changed the course of human events are known as gunpowder, paper, and the compass. -
1800 BCE
Ts-ang Chieh
About 1800 B.C., Ts-ang Chieh was inspired to invent Chinese writing by claw marks of birds and footprints of animals. Elementary pictographs of things in nature were highly stylized and composed of a minimum number of lines. -
1800 BCE
Chinese Calligraphy
There is no direct relationship between the spoken and written Chinese languages. Written Chinese was never broken down into syllabic or alphabetic signs for elementary sounds. The Chinese calligraphic writing system consists of logograms graphic signs that represent an entire word. Chinese calligraphic strokes express spiritual states and deep feelings. -
1800 BCE
Chiaku-wen
The earliest known Chinese writing, called chiaku-wen, was in use from 1800 to 1200 B.C. and was closely bound to the art of divination, an effort to foretell future events through communication with the gods or long-dead ancestors. It was also called bone-and shell script because it was incised on tortoise shells and the flat shoulder bones of large animals, called oracle bones. -
500 BCE
Relief Printing
Is the process of removing the negative spaces surrounding an image and then inking the raised surface, which is rubbed onto paper. -
105
Invention of paper
The Chinese wrote on bamboo slats or wooden strips using a bamboo pen and dense, durable ink. After the invention of woven silk cloth, it, too, was used as a writing substrate; however, it was very costly. Ts’ai Lun, a Chinese high government official, is credited with the invention of paper in A.D. 105, and was deified as the god of the papermakers. His process for making paper from natural fibers continued almost unchanged until papermaking was mechanized in nineteenth-century England. -
400
K’ai-shu
The final step in the evolution of Chinese calligraphy, the regular script is considered the highest art form in China, more important even than painting. -
868
Diamond Sutra
The oldest surviving printed manuscript is the Diamond Sutra, which was printed by one Wang Chieh to honor his parents and widely distributed in A.D. 868. It consists of seven sheets of paper pasted together to form a scroll. Six sheets of the text convey Buddha’s revelations to his elderly follower Subhuti. -
900
The Scroll Transformation
In China beginning in the ninth or tenth century A.D., the scroll evolved into a paged format. Instead of rolling the scroll, it was folded accordion-style. In the tenth or eleventh century, stitched books were developed: two pages of text were printed from one block; the sheet was folded down the middle, then the sheets were gathered and sewn to make a codex-style book -
1000
Paper Money
China became the first society in which ordinary people were in daily contact with printed images. In addition to block prints of religious images and texts, paper money began to be designed and printed around A.D. 1000 due to an iron shortage. -
1045
Woodblock print in China
When making a woodblock print in China, the wood around each character is painstakingly cut away. Around A.D. 1045, the Chinese alchemist Pi Sheng extended this process by developing the concept of moveable type, an innovative printing process that was never widely used in Asia because the sheer number of characters made the process too tedious. -
1249
Pages from the Pen ts’ao
Pages from the Pen ts’ao, A.D. 1249. In this illustrated woodblock book on Chinese herbal medicine, generous margins and ruled lines bring order to the page. -
"Album of Eight Leaves" by Li Fangying
The painting of bamboo from the "Album of Eight Leaves" by Li Fangying shows how vividly descriptive strokes made with a bamboo brush join calligraphy, painting, poem, and illustration into a unified communication.