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In 691, she sent a message to a certain subject of her realm, Wang Qingzhi, “If you want to see me, just show this ‘printed paper’ to the palace gate keeper.” The “printed paper” to which she refers would have been stamped from a woodblock, its uniformity a mark of authenticity. This early evidence of woodblock printing is offered by Li Zhizhong, Dean of the Development Research Academy of the National Library of China, and a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.⁴³⁴

Near the end of her life and her rule in 706, Empress Wu Zetian had a religious message of thirty-one characters printed that she sent out to monasteries around her kingdom, the Great Spell of Unsullied Pure Light. “Loving the true way and the long-living holy immortals,” she began, in her appeal to immortality and power.⁴³⁵

Wu Zetian was a Buddhist, and the first Buddhist texts had been translated into Chinese as early as the second century. Writing the Buddha’s words was a path to the forgiveness of sins and immortality. Emperors in the century before her had ordered hundreds of thousands of scrolls to be hand-copied. Printing was a logical extension of this expression of religious and imperial power through the multiplication of text.⁴³⁶

Karl Wittfogel calls the type of regime that Wu Zetian ruled, “oriental despotism.” First an avid communist forced to flee Nazi Germany for the United States, after the travesties of Stalinism had been revealed he became an equally avid anti-communist who went so far as to testify against his former comrades in the McCarthy hearings. In imperial China and other such states, Wittfogel said, three kinds of power were concentrated into one: an agromanagerial bureaucracy, an army, and religion closely attached to the state – hence “genuinely despotic (total) power.”⁴³⁷ Wu Zetian’s armies brutally conquered large swathes of Western China. She ruled her court by murder and fear, cultivating in Buddhist texts a sense of her own supernatural powers.⁴³⁸

These were the symptomatic meanings of Wu Zetian’s texts – to gain safe passage into her lethally despotic court, and to connect religion to power, distributing those closely associated meanings far and wide across the kingdom. What the texts did was more important than what they said.

In two key technical respects, the media for this message-making were innovations of world-historical importance, paper and printing. The invention of paper is the older of the two, attributed to imperial courtier Tshai Lun in 105 CE. These were refinements, it seems, of even older processes. The second, however, was from Wu Zetian’s own time – woodblock printing.⁴³⁹

Wu Zetian’s “printed paper” exists only in mention, its material manifestation now lost. The oldest extant printed book is a Chinese translation of the Buddhist Diamond Sutra of 868CE. Now in the British Library, it consists of seven sheets of paper, pasted together into a scroll over five meters long. Along with thousands of other scrolls, it was discovered in a monastery cave in Western China by a monk, who in 1907 sold it to Hungarian-British archaeologist, Aurel Stein.⁴⁴⁰

In the third sheet of this Diamond Sutra, the Buddha explains that “learning four lines of this text and teaching them to others would bring Subhuti more merit than if he filled three thousand galaxies with treasure and then gave it all away to the poor.” Such was the power of mystical text ahead of the iniquities of inequality. Or, this was a way to reconcile oneself to their inevitability by diverting attention. Veneration for sacred text and its reduplication must have been the motive of the printer, who said in a colophon at the end of the scroll, “‘Reverently made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents, 11 May 868.”⁴⁴¹

Movable type came to China with an invention of Pi Sheng (990–1051). None of his printed texts survive, but a detailed contemporary description of his setting ceramic types convincingly explains the technology and its workings: types kept in cases; formes in which they were arrayed; then printing by impression onto paper.

“If one were to print only two or three copies,” says the commentator, “this method would be neither simple nor easy. But for printing hundreds or thousands of copies, it was marvelously quick.” This is perhaps the first insight into notions of modularization and economies of scale that were later to drive the industrial revolution. Wooden movable type is credited to Wang Chen (1290–1333), then bronze movable type in the second half of the fifteenth century.⁴⁴²

Paper was not introduced into Europe until nearly a thousand years after its invention in China. And as for Gutenberg’s famous printing press of 1454, the great sinologist Joseph Needham says, “It has always been extremely hard to believe that Johannes Gutenberg … knew nothing (even by hearsay) of the Chinese printed books which had been circulating in large numbers in China for five previous centuries.”⁴⁴³ The caves where the Diamond Sutra and other printed materials had been kept, at least since the ninth century, were on the “Silk Route” from China to Europe.

If Gutenberg’s printed works were in any immediate way a contribution to “enlightenment,” it was more of a Buddhist kind than modern or scientific. His 42-line Bible^§AS1.4.7c was, after all, in the Latin of a priestly elite, not the German vernacular. Its meaning was in the owning of the text rather than its reading and learning; it was a talisman before it was a text. This massive compendium of words was sacred for their objectification, their speaking-to more than their speaking.

The money Gutenberg lost in the monumental task of printing his Bible, he later made back by printing and selling indulgences, certificates for the remission of sins. The business he had before printing was where he had learned the metallurgy he later applied to type – the manufacture of mirrors that would transfer miraculous qualities in the relics of dead saints to those within their seeing.⁴⁴⁴ Gutenberg was a medieval man as much as he was modern.

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⁴³⁴ Li Zhizhong, 2010, “On the Invention of Wood Blocks for Printing in China,” pp. 35–44 in The History and Cultural Heritage of Chinese Calligraphy, Printing and Library Work, edited by S.M. Allen, L. Zuzao, C. Xiaolan, and J. Bos, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, p. 40.

⁴³⁵ T.H. Barrett, 2008, The Woman Who Discovered Printing, New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, pp. 91–103; Denis Twitchett, 1983, Printing and Publishing in Medieval China, New York: Frederic C. Beil, p. 13.

⁴³⁶ T.H. Barrett, 2008, The Woman Who Discovered Printing, New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, pp. 47, 62.

⁴³⁷ Karl A. Wittfogel, 1957, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, p. 100.

⁴³⁸ Jonathan Clements, 2008, Wu: The Chinese Empress Who Schemed, Seduced and Murdered Her Way to Become a Living God, Stroud, UK: Sutton Publishing; Nigel Cawthorne, 2007, Daughter of Heaven: The True Story of the Only Woman to Become Emperor of China, London: Oneworld Publications.

⁴³⁹ Tsuen-hsuin Tsien and Joseph Needham, 1985, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 5: Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 1: Paper and Printing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 40–41.

⁴⁴⁰ Ibid., p. 151.

⁴⁴¹ www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/sutra/accessible/section3.html#content

⁴⁴² Tsuen-hsuin Tsien and Joseph Needham, 1985, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 5: Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 1: Paper and Printing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 201, 206–08, 211.

⁴⁴³ Ibid., p. xii.

⁴⁴⁴ John Man, 2002, The Gutenberg Revolution, London: Review.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 163–166. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Empress Wu Zetian’s “Printed Paper” §AS1.4.7b