Cool History Fact of the night
Before woodblock printing (which was extensively used in China well before the west), there was a very clever, effective way to mass-reproduce the most important texts.
A few different times in imperial China, stone tablets of the most important books were commissioned. Anyone could walk up and look at them, but more importantly: anyone could lay a wet piece of paper over them and then gently rub ink over the paper, which would create a copy of white text on a black background.(And unlike printing, nothing needs to be done backwards.)
And if you were a famous enough calligrapher, you'd be asked to write onto a stone so someone else could chisel out your handwriting exactly, and then copies could be mass-reproduced as teaching examples.
(and I'm fascinated by how the stone fragment here is 1800 years old but the writing style is already extremely legible to me. It still uses the X-style 五 but is otherwise very Normal)
#classicalchinese #typography #printing #handwriting
