Beyond the Woodblock: State Periodicals and Print Innovation in Late Imperial China

Between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, the Qing dynasty in China outsourced the

publishing of official gazettes and directories to commercial publishers based in Beijing and

provincial capitals. The circulation of the “Peking Gazette,” a daily gazette that recorded

authoritative versions of bureaucratic activities and imperial actions, was a crucial element of the

information order built by the Qing state. Meanwhile, quarterly directories alerted readers to the

changing ranks of the imperial bureaucracy. Within a commercial publishing environment,

gazette and directory publishing became key sites for print innovation. Publishers drew on

vernacular techniques for the printing of ephemeral news-sheets to construct malleable frames

for the emendation and quick circulation of printed texts. Gazette publishers experimented with

clay, plant fiber, and wooden types and developed customized type for standard phrases

employed in official documents. The prevalent use of movable type techniques for periodical

printing in late imperial China contradicts assumptions based on elite and literati preferences for

rare and collectible editions. The collectors’ impulse has led scholars to emphasize the

dominance of the woodblock and overlook the use of alternative printing techniques in late

imperial China. Movable and semi-movable type techniques were prevalent especially in the

production of cheap, ephemeral, and periodical texts that were of little interest to collectors. In

this paper, I will demonstrate the accessibility and suitability of alternative printing techniques in

the publication of directories and gazettes, the most important periodical representatives of the

state in late imperial China. In so doing, I seek to affirm the flexibility of the publishing

enterprise in China prior to the advent of “modern” technologies like lithography, and to argue

that the woodblock itself was not monolithic. In addition, I introduce new questions of the role of

the state, temporality, and customization in the study of premodern Chinese printing.