Nov 16th, 2018: The Oldest Printed Book in the World

[xoxoxoBruce]

There were books printed before this but none survive we know of.
Before Gutenberg, printing was done with set type and carved wood blocks.
This shows how advanced Chinese paper making was.

Frontispiece of the Dunhuang Diamond Sūtra.

In 366 AD, the itinerant monk Yuezun was wandering through the China’s arid desert landscape when a fantastical sight appeared before him: a thousand Buddhas, bathed in golden light. (Whether heat, exhaustion or the strange voice of the sands worked themselves on his imagination is anyone’s guess.) Awed by his vision, Yuezun took up hammer and chisel and carved a devotional space into a nearby cliff-face. It soon became a centre for religion and art: Dunhuang was situated at the confluence of two major Silk Road routes, and both departing and returning merchants made offerings. By the time the site fell into disuse in the 14th century, almost 500 temples had been carved from the cliff.

The entire Dunhuang Diamond Sūtra.

Among the hundreds of caves was a chamber that served as a storeroom for books. The Library Cave held more than 50,000 texts: religious tracts, business reports, calendars, dictionaries, government documents, shopping lists, and the oldest dated printed book in the world. A colophon at the end of the Dunhuang Diamond Sūtra scroll dates it to 868, nearly six centuries before the first Gutenberg Bible.

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