Printing for Profit: The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Fujian

by Lucille Chia

From the eleventh through the seventeenth centuries, the publishers of Jianyang in Fujian province played a conspicuous role in the Chinese book trade. Unlike the products of government and educational presses, their publications were destined for the retail book market. These publishers survived by responding to consumer demands for dictionaries, histories, geographies, medical texts, encyclopedias, primers, how-to books, novels, and anthologies. Their publications reflect the varied needs of the full range of readers in late imperial China and allow us to study the reading habits, tastes, and literacy of different social groups. The publishers of Jianyang were also businessmen, and their efforts to produce books efficiently, meet the demands of the market, and distribute their publications provide a window on commerce and industry and the growth of regional and national markets.

The broad cultural, historical, and geographical scope of the Jianyang book trade makes it an ideal subject for the study of publishing in China. Based on an extensive study of Jianyang imprints, genealogies of the leading families of printers, local histories, documents, and annotated catalogs and bibliographies, Lucille Chia has written not only a history of commercial printing but also a wide-ranging study of the culture of the book in traditional China.

Genres: Nonfiction

472 pages, Hardcover

First published March 30, 2003

Reviews

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is amazing. I read it as background reading for my dissertation and marked up nearly every page with a useful note. I borrowed this copy from SOAS library, and though it costs nearly £30 I'm thinking I may end up buying my own copy and it has so much useful and interesting information. The book focuses on the commercial publishers in one small area of China. A group of publishers who had the reputation of producing cheap, shoddy and inaccurate books. However, this was not the case. It was interesting to see the way in which the books they produced deviated from the norm. For instance in the Song it is widely accepted that most printing was done for the classics and religious texts of Taoism and Buddhism. However, these commercial publishers produced virtually no religious texts and the books they produced the most of were medical texts. (In this instance medical texts also includes works on divination). Chia outlines the physical nature of the books produced, the topics of the books produced, and a bit about those who produced them for each period covered in her book. It is interesting to see how she combines the physical description with the social history as usually these two matters are discussed separately. The book also contains many many plates of illustrations of the original books, outlining the different physical points that the author discusses. The book gave me many ideas for my dissertation. Including the idea that I should include a chapter entitled "The history of cheating" as it seems that many of the books produced in this area were designed to help would-be-officials taking the exams to cheat. Small books were produced that could fit inside sleeves. (Many of which were discarded on the way out of the exams so few survive). This book is an absolutely fascinating study, normally books that focus on printing in Imperial China ignore the works of commercial publishers, so much of the information in this book was new to me. I can't say enough about how excellent this book is.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jianyang in the mountains of Northwestern Fujian province was a major center of printing during the Song, Yuan, and Ming and Chia carefully documents the fascinating story of Jianyang printing. According the Confucian scholar Zhu Xi, there was no place in China where Jianyang imprints could not be found.

One of the areas of Jianyang, Masha gave its name to Masha editions, known as badly printed, illegible, and ink smudged prints, but Chia delves deeper into the question and concludes that Masha edition were probably overprinting on woodblocks.

Jianyang printing flourished in both the Song and Ming dynasties, but declined drastically in the Qing. Many of the Jianyang printers were allied with the Southern Ming loyalists and faded away with the fall of the Ming.

Unlike early Renaissance printers, we do not know a lot about the personal lives, costs, and print runs of the Jianyang printers.

This is a fine study of a major aspect of late imperial China: printing.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another top-notch work and fun read. Recommended to anyone interested in Chinese literature: the materiality of books matters! not just words themselves :)
Oh, could someone please explain to me why there had been so few printed buddhist sutras in Song? and in Ming Chia didn't even mention anything about printed sutras... so puzzled.