Carving a story of skill

Typically, 2-centimeter-thick blocks are hewn from fine-grained pear or jujube wood before they're polished and engraved.

Drafts of the words (Chinese characters) and images are then brushed onto extremely thin paper and proofed for mistakes before they're pasted onto the blocks. These designs provide guides for the artisans, who scratch them into the wood to generate the raised borders of words that will be coated with ink and then applied to paper pages.

Woodblock printing was initially used to publish Buddhist texts amid the religion's zenith in China during the Tang Dynasty (618-907).

It's considered one of ancient China's "four great inventions", along with papermaking, gunpowder and the compass.

The oldest surviving woodblock-printed text is a scroll of the Chinese version of the Diamond Sutra, which dates back to 868 and was discovered in the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang, Gansu province, in the early 20th century.

Woodblock printing enjoyed unprecedented development in Yangzhou during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), when Emperor Kangxi commissioned an official named Cao Yin to establish the Yangzhou poetry bureau. The publishing house's main focus was on engraving and printing books for the imperial collection, such as the 18th-century anthology, Quan Tang Shi (Complete Tang Poems). Kangxi wrote formal praise for this book, commending its compilation, carving, printing and binding.

The bureau brought skilled artisans to Yangzhou, where many quality private woodblock workshops sprung up in the following centuries. They ultimately played a vital role in preserving the complete set of techniques for woodblock printing until today.

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