industrial towns such as Ching-tê, in which the majority of the
population were workers and merchants, with some 10,000 families alone
producing porcelain. Yet, for many centuries to come, the state
controlled the production and even the design of porcelain and
appropriated most of the production for use at court or as gifts.

The third important new development to be mentioned was that of
printing, which since _c_. 770 was known in the form of wood-block
printing. The first reference to a printed book dated from 835, and the
most important event in this field was the first printing of the
Classics by the orders of Feng Tao (882-954) around 940. The first
attempts to use movable type in China occurred around 1045, although
this invention did not get general acceptance in China. It was more
commonly used in Korea from the thirteenth century on and revolutionized
Europe from 1538 on. It seems to me that from the middle of the
twentieth century on, the West, too, shows a tendency to come back to
the printing of whole pages, but replacing the wood blocks by
photographic plates or other means. In the Far East, just as in Europe,
the invention of printing had far-reaching consequences. Books, which
until then had been very dear, because they had had to be produced by
copyists, could now be produced cheaply and in quantity. It became
possible for a scholar to accumulate a library of his own and to work in
a wide field, where earlier he had been confined to a few books or even
a single text. The results were the spread of education, beginning with
reading and writing, among wider groups, and the broadening of
education: a large number of texts were read and compared, and no longer
only a few. Private libraries came into existence, so that the imperial
libraries were no longer the only ones. Publishing soon grew in extent,
and in private enterprise works were printed that were not so serious
and politically important as the classic books of the past. Thus a new