This woodblock for a Tangut Buddhist text which was found inside the Hongfo Pagoda 宏佛塔 north of Yinchuan Ningxia in 1990 is believed to be the oldest surviving text printing block in China (I took the photograph at the Ningxia Museum in 2016 commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hong).
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It is the largest of about two thousand printing block fragments (1,000 with text) that were found during restoration of the pagoda in 1990. The pagoda dates back to the Western Xia (1038–1277), and I visited it in August 2016 babelstone.co.uk/BabelDiary/201
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.
This evening I spent a quiet couple of hours attempting to transcribe the Tangut text on this woodblock, and approximately match it against the corresponding Chinese text of 釋摩訶衍論 (T1668).
Here are some more typical-sized fragments of Tangut wooden printing blocks (photo taken by me at the old Xixia Museum in Yinchuan; no provenance given but probably also from Hongfo Pagoda)
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