Knowledge and Action in the Heart, Fortune Becomes Thunder

"This block-carving and printing is part of the sage's instruction of the people. There must be some hidden Principle within it!"

With that thought, Hua She's dejection eased somewhat. He gathered his spirits again and followed this line of thought, slowly recalling the hardships of carving books in the past, recalling his experiences with different printing blocks.

Most printing blocks in use today were wooden, because wood readily took ink. Besides these, there were also metal blocks, mostly copper and tin. Since they did not take ink easily, they demanded more of the pigments, and the cost rose accordingly.

Yet this also reflected, from another angle, the development of printing technology.

Correspondingly, the advancement of printing had also brought forth many new things, one of them being paper currency.

The paper currency known as Jiaozi, which had originated in Jiannan and the Central Passes, used metal-block printing and was attractive and neat.

This was only natural. When merchants traveled abroad, carrying too much coinage was inevitably inconvenient. Once the technology matured, more convenient things would naturally emerge—not to mention the precedent set by the previous dynasty's Flying Money.

Naturally, the book-carving workshop established by the Meng Residence would not print paper currency, so metal printing blocks were quite rare in the Book Pavilion. Most were still wooden blocks, but that did not hinder the adoption of a technique derived from metal blocks—Color Woodblock Printing.

Using red and black in overprint to display two colors upon a single sheet of paper was, to people from Qiu Yan's previous life, an exceedingly simple thing. So simple that few regarded it as technology or innovation, instead taking it for granted. Yet in the course of its development, it had gone through a long process.

For a minor worker like Hua She, mastering such