Block printing made possible the flowering of Chinese culture in the Sung renaissance (960–1127), and the printed Confucian classics revived a Confucian literature. Before the end of the tenth century appeared the first of the great Chinese dynastic histories, a work of several hundred volumes which consumed seventy years. Meanwhile, by 983 the Buddhists had produced something even more spectacular, the Tripitaka, the whole Buddhist canon in 5,048 volumes totaling 130,000 pages, each printed from a separately carved block. The king of Korea received a set from the emperor of China, and when a
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