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Nice Japanese printing block on ebay for someone's teaching collection. When I started looking at blocks a few years ago, I never imagined that I would be able to tell a Japanese block just something like the shape of the chisel (seen in img 2). No idea how to write about this.

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Devin Fitzgerald

@DevinFitzger

6月23日

Each engraving tradition is so distinctive and specific that it's truly stunning. That said, China is big... So even with a few thousand blocks seen, I would have a harder time creating a typology for Ming and Qing blocks than for Korean and Japanese blocks.

One really tell is always the depth of the carving. Japanese carving is always very shallow - probably because cherry is used pretty consistently and is tough as heck. Not sure what they use for Korean blocks, but always very deep engraving (img). Chinese engraving is in between

The Chinese blocks are personally own are on a wide range of different woods of varying qualities - this makes sense given the economy of printing for most popular stuff (slack season, agricultural households)

Of course, the Qing court, and the blocks in the Palace museum are all uniformly high-quality hardwoods - often cherry. But honestly, much like paper making in China, we have very little idea about the many local realities.

Really interesting observations. Do you have any thoughts on Tangut printing blocks, and how they compare to contemporary Chinese printing blocks?

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Andrew West

@BabelStone

2019年12月12日

返信先: @BabelStoneさん

This particular printing block (here mirrored) is for vol. 5 of the Tangut translation the "Shi moheyan lun" 釋摩訶衍論 (attributed to Nāgārjuna, but only extant in Chinese). As far as I know the Tangut translation only survives in the printing block fragments from Hongfo Pagoda.

Wow..very interesting. That's exactly the same look I would expect in Chinese. Tibetan tends to be deeper (like a Korean block). I would guess then that the Shanxi tradition of engraving really played a role

I've just looked through three Chinese sources that discuss these printing blocks, and none say anything about what sort of wood it is -- but maybe difficult to tell because the blocks have all been burnt and carbonized

Theoretically, different places use different sorts of wood to make printing blocks (because the species of trees vary from place to place). Checking where are these printing blocks come from might be helpful.

Andrew West

@BabelStone

This example is one of 2,000+ mostly very small fragments of printing blocks found inside the Hongfo Pagoda 宏佛塔 in Helan county 贺兰县 Ningxia during renovation (aka complete reconstruction) in 1990

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