East Asian Origins
Movable type was invented in China. Around 1040 the artisan Bi Sheng produced type from fired clay, set in a frame bedded with a warm resin and wax mixture that could be melted to release the characters for reuse. The technique is described by the polymath Shen Kuo in his Dream Pool Essays, written in the 1080s.
Later refinements followed. Wang Zhen described a wooden type system with a revolving typecase in a treatise of 1313, and metal type was cast in Korea, where the Jikji of 1377 survives as an early printed example. Korean printing received sustained state support, and the creation of the phonetic Hangul alphabet in the fifteenth century removed the main structural obstacle to movable type in the region.
That obstacle was the character set. Setting a page of Chinese required selecting from many thousands of distinct sorts, so the labour saved by reusing type was partly consumed by the labour of finding it. Woodblock printing therefore remained competitive in East Asia far longer than a purely technical account of the two methods would suggest.