Soon the question of reproducing the characters also arose. Chinese abrasions and simple printing of stone inscriptions on paper are considered to be early forms of printing. They enabled a direct spreading of texts. In the 2^nd century AD, at about the same time when in the western world the Roman emperor Marc Aurel recorded his philosophical thought on papyrus roles and for the duplication was dependent on scribes , in China since the year 175 of our time calculation the main works of the classical Chinese literature were cut in stone slabs. Thousands of copies were made by simple printing: Moistened paper was pressed onto the inscription stones, and when brushing the paper with ink the cut characters stood out white against the blackened paper. The next level was the so-called woodblock printing in the 7^th Century: Each character was cut in reverse into a piece of wood by removing all surrounding wood. These raised lines were dyed and abraded on paper, thus producing a positive print of the desired text.

This method remained over centuries the primary means for printing religious and everyday books, for playing cards, calendars, paper money and pictures in China. The sophisticated Chinese administrative and education system of the Song dynasty (960 - 1269) caused a printing boom. Thus, encyclopedias, manuals and literature collections of all kinds were produced. The method of printing from wood was used in China until the end of the 19^th century. But around 1040, when in Europe William the Conqueror still spent his childhood days in Normandy, a Chinese called Bi Sheng already experimented with movable, individual printing types made of ceramic. He arranged them an iron plate as whole texts and fixed them with a layer of wax and resin. These were then printed. If the characters were to be used again, one heated the iron plate until melting wax and resin released the forms again. 300 years later the first wooden characters appeared.

From there it was only a small step to manufacture the individual wood characters in uniform size to be able to always assemble them in standardized blocks. Soon successful experiments were carried out with characters of copper, lead or brass. But printing with movable characters never really established itself in China until the end of the last century. The reason was obvious: While traditional printing with whole wooden plates required enormous storage space, the thousands and thousands of Chinese characters prevented a simple and above all fast composition of printing plates from movable letters.

In comparison it was much simpler for Gutenberg, with 26 characters and a handful of auxiliary characters to set all words! In Asia only the Koreans reached the crucial step. They developed an alphabetical script called "Han’gul", almost at the time of Gutenberg’s invention in Germany. This script consisted initially of 28, and later 24 characters and was presented officially in Korea in the year 1444 - almost at the same time (i.e. from 1452 to 1455) that Gutenberg printed his famous bible in Mainz.