Gutenberg in Shanghai

A Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
The Weatherhead East Asian Institute is Columbia Universitys center for
research, publication, and teaching on modern and contemporary Asia Pacific regions. The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute were
inaugurated in 1962 to bring to a wider public the results of significant new
research on modern and contemporary East Asia.

Contemporary Chinese Studies

Gutenberg in Shanghai is a volume in the Contemporary Chinese Studies

series. This series, a joint initiative of UBC Press and the UBC Institute of
Asian Research, Centre for Chinese Research, seeks to make available the
best scholarly work on contemporary China. Volumes cover a wide range of
subjects related to China, Taiwan, and the overseas Chinese world.
Other books in the series include Glen Petersons The Power of Words: Literacy and Revolution in South China, 1949-95; Wing Chung Ngs The Chinese
in Vancouver: The Pursuit of Power and Identity, 1945-80; Yijiang Dings Chinese Democracy after Tiananmen; Scars of War: The Impact of Warfare on Modern
China, edited by Diana Lary and Stephen MacKinnon; and Gender and Change
in Hong Kong: Globalization, Postcolonialism, and Chinese Patriarchy, edited by
Eliza W.Y. Lee.

Gutenberg in Shanghai
Chinese Print Capitalism,1876-1937

Christopher A. Reed

 UBC Press 2004

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior
written permission of the publisher, or, in Canada, in the case of photocopying
or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian
Copyright Licensing Agency), www.accesscopyright.ca.
10 09 08 07 06 05 04

54321

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Reed, Christopher A., 1954Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese print capitalism, 1876-1937 /
Christopher A. Reed.
(Contemporary Chinese studies, ISSN 1206-9523)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7748-1040-8
1. Printing China Shanghai History. 2. Publishers and publishing China
Shanghai History. I. Title. II. Series.
Z186.C5R43 2003

686.2095113

C2003-911109-1

UBC Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for our publishing
program of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry
Development Program (BPIDP), and of the Canada Council for the Arts, and
the British Columbia Arts Council.
This book has been published with the help of grants from the Chiang
Ching-kuo Foundation and from The Ohio State Universitys College of
Humanities and Institute of Chinese Studies.
UBC Press
The University of British Columbia
2029 West Mall
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2
604-822-5959 / Fax: 604-822-6083
www.ubcpress.ca

To Lihua
... one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face ...
W.B. Yeats

and with gratitude to Jimmy Carter and Deng Xiaoping,

without whose efforts in 1978-79,
she and I probably would not have met in 1991

The common people remember and tell what they are able to grasp and
what they are able to transform into legend. Anything else passes them
by without deeper trace, with the dumb indifference of nameless natural
phenomena, which do not touch the imagination or remain in the memory.
This hard and long building process was for them a foreign task undertaken at anothers expense. Only when, as the fruit of this effort, the
great bridge arose, men began to remember details and to embroider the
creation of a real, skilfully built and lasting bridge with fabulous tales
which they well knew how to weave and to remember.
Ivo Andric, The Bridge on the Drina

Contents

Illustrations / ix
Acknowledgments / xi
Introduction / 3
1

Gutenbergs Descendants: Transferring Industrialized Printing

Technology to China, 1807-1930 / 25

Janus-Faced Pioneers: The Golden Age of Shanghais Lithographic

Printer-Publishers, 1876-1905 / 88

Sooty Sons of Vulcan: Forging Shanghais Printing Machinery,

1895-1937 / 128

The Hub of the Wheel: Commerce, Technology, and Organizational

Innovation in Shanghais New-Style Publishing World, 1876-c. 1911 / 161

The Three Legs of the Tripod: Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books,

and World Books, 1912-37 / 203
Conclusion / 257
Appendix: A Birds-Eye View of 1930s Shanghais Fuzhou Road/
Wenhuajie District / 280
Glossary of Chinese Terms, Titles, and Names / 289
Notes / 297
Selected Asian-Language Bibliography / 360
Selected Western-Language Bibliography / 367
Index / 379

This page intentionally left blank

Illustrations

Maps
1 Map of China c. 1930 / 2
2 Shanghai concessions in 1916, with Wenhuajie district
outlined / 18

I.1
1.1
1.2
1.3
1.4
1.5
1.6
1.7
1.8
1.9
1.10
1.11
1.12
1.13
1.14
1.15
1.16
1.17
1.18
1.19
1.20
1.21

Figures
Gutenberg, the inventor of cast movable type / 15
Jost Ammans Casting Movable Type, 1568 / 33
On the [Chinese] Characters, 1814 / 35
Morrisons Entries for Shang and He, 1815 / 38
Morrisons Entries for E, 1819 / 39
Western-created mid-nineteenth-century Chinese fonts / 46
Gambles APMP type fonts / 46
APMP supplemental type fonts / 47
Gambles type case arrangement, Shanghai, 1895 / 48
Unitary long type rack, Shanghai, c. 1905 / 49
American Presbyterian Mission Press, Shanghai, 1895 / 50
Advertisement for the American Presbyterian Mission Press and
Type-Casting Establishment, Shanghai, 1875 / 51
Major Republican Chinese fonts / 54
Advertisement for Chong Shing automatic type-casting machine,
Shanghai, 1940 / 55
Advertisement for Jianye Machine-Making Company type-caster,
Shanghai, 1937 / 55
Advertisement for Ruitai Machine Shop type-caster and offset
cylinder proofer, Shanghai, 1937 / 56
Advertisement for new Song-style matrices, Shanghai, 1937 / 57
Advertisement for Linotype, Shanghai, 1937 / 58
Web-fed offset lithographic press, Shanghai, 1927 / 63
Gutenbergs printing press, fifteenth century / 68
Earliest imported Western printing press, pre-1912 / 70
Harrild & Sons cylinder press, Shanghai, 1876 / 72

Illustrations

1.22 Four cylinder machines and one platen press, APMP press room,
Shanghai, 1895 / 75
1.23 A steam-powered printing-and-folding machine, Beijing, 1872 / 76
1.24 Web-fed rotary press, Shanghai, 1927 / 77
1.25 Advertisement for Miehle high-speed job and book press,
Shanghai, 1937 / 78
1.26 Tushanwans mechanized lithographic press, Shanghai, c. 1900 / 80
1.27 Dianshizhai lithographic printing plant, Shanghai, c. 1884 / 81
1.28 Dianshizhai book-printing notice, Shanghai, c. 1890 / 82
2.1 Shenchang Calligraphy Studio and Shenbao newspaper office,
1884 / 105
2.2 Dianshizhai branch store (Hongqiang Western Building),
Shanghai, c. 1880s / 106
2.3 Dianshizhai advertisement for lithographic printing and
publishing, Shanghai, c. 1890 / 108
4.1 Shanghai Booksellers Self-Protection Corps, 1910 / 179
4.2 Shanghai Booksellers Trade Association, 1917 / 180
4.3 Officers of the Shanghai Booksellers Trade Association,
c. 1911 / 182
4.4 First print shop of the Commercial Press, 1897 / 190
5.1 Commercial Press and Zhonghua Books retail outlets, Shanghai,
1932+ / 208
5.2 World Books retail outlet, late 1920s / 209
5.3 Commercial Press editorial offices and printing plant, Shanghai,
pre-1932 / 214
5.4 Zhonghua Books general printing plant, Shanghai, 1935 / 239
Tables
1.1 Western print media in China, 1700-1931 / 28
1.2 Western printing presses and printing machines in China,
1830-1925 / 30
3.1 Chinese-made type-casters, printing presses, printing machines,
and other machinery, 1900-1950s / 130

On the cover: (top) Gutenberg, the inventor of cast movable type

(Yiwen yinshua yuekan/The Graphic Printer [Shanghai] 2, 2 [1939]: 14;
(bottom) Printers by Chen Shuliang, Woodcuts of Wartime China,
1937-1945 (Shanghai: Kaiming shudian, 1946), 22.

Acknowledgments

In the early 1970s, concern about the relationship between modern science, technology, and nationalistic politics as well as the tendency of disciples of all three to impose an apparently unquestioned uniformity on the
world led me to specialize in European philosophy and intellectual history
at McGill University, Montral, Qubec. There, it became clear that the
universalistic claims of science and the modern nation-state could be opened
to question, but what about those of technology? After all, no less a figure
than Francis Bacon, the father of the scientific method, claimed that technology (three technologies in particular: printing, the compass, and gunpowder) was what made our world different from that of the ancients.1
Precisely because more recent technologies have appealed to so many worldwide, it also seemed important to question received opinion regarding
technologys role in shaping the modern world since Bacons day, although
I did not formally start that process until much later.
In the late 1970s, however, I witnessed first-hand one aspect of the international confluence of culture and technology when I lived with the family
of John Yi-fang So, an engineer, in the southern Taiwan industrial port of
Kaohsiung while teaching English at the citys YMCA night school. John
Sos parents, Taiwanese Presbyterians, operated a good-sized printing business on the first and second floors of their shop house. Each time I entered
or left the house, I passed through a whirl of printing workers and printing
presses, all sounding, as Andr Malraux once wrote about another printing
shop in his novel, Mans Fate (La condition humaine), like an enormous ventilator in bad condition.2 Questions of the sort that I address in this book,
such as Where did these machines come from?, How were they modified
to print the Chinese language?, How important is the Christian context?,
and Is this society changed by Western machinery? occurred to me in
those days, even though I then had no real means of answering them.
While studying Soviet political economy at Adam Smiths University of
Glasgow, in one of modern Europes great industrial, scientific, and technological centres (The Workshop of the World), I began to see how politics,
economics, and culture could influence each other. Learning about the Soviet Union as a functioning economic system and about its varying degrees

xii Acknowledgments

of replication in Central Asia and Eastern Europe raised as many questions

in my mind about the history of capitalism and industrialization and their
multiple national forms as it gave me insight into what many in the Soviet
orbit regarded as the universalistic values of scientific socialism. My reading
also alerted me to the field of business history, which offered a means of
studying national differences in economic organization while simultaneously
holding open the door of comparative generalization.
At the University of California at Berkeley, I first encountered Lucien
Febvre and Henri-Jean Martins The Coming of the Book (Lapparition du livre).
Febvre and Martin helped me to understand the origins of Western book
culture, its link with early technology, capitalism, and higher learning, and
their combined social effects through history. At about the same time, in a
casual conversation with Frederic Wakeman, Jr., on the question of how
knowledge circulated in imperial China, I learned that scholars could not
yet supply an answer. During my research intended to help explain that
process, he, Wen-hsin Yeh, and James Cahill supplied inspiration and guided
me toward issues, texts, and documents that proved to be fundamental to
my project. In particular, without their efforts to place me at both the InterUniversity Program in Chinese Language in Taipei and the Institute of History of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS), this book could
not have been completed. Also, although I had begun by researching Beijings
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century publishing industry, Wu Xiaolin of
the Institute of Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, via David
Johnson, suggested that I turn my attention to Shanghai. I am very grateful
for this advice.
My research on the history of a key modern Western civilian communication technology, the printing press, and interpretations of its worldwide
impact began in Berkeleys libraries, at Stanford Universitys Hoover Institution, and at the University of San Franciscos Ricci Institute. Later, the
SASS Institute of History opened the doors of its own library and those of
the Shanghai Municipal Archives and the Shanghai Municipal Library to
me. SASS also arranged permission for me to use the San Zi (Three Selfs)
Protestant Library, Huadong Teachers University Library, and the Shanghai Research Institute of Printing Technology Library. Working in these
surroundings made clear for me the importance of proposing a new narrative to take the place of largely implicit or unexamined assumptions about
the triumph of Western technology in non-Western environments.
The following persons assisted me in this effort in different ways while I
was in Shanghai: Tang Zhijun, Xiong Yuezhi, Zhou Yuangao, Cheng Zai,
and Wu Jianxi, all of the SASS Institute of History; Wang Zhen, a SASS
alumnus and assistant researcher at Shanghai Cishu Publishing Company,

Acknowledgments

which inherited Zhonghuas editorial library; Feng Shoucai and Ma Changlin

of the Shanghai Municipal Archives; Song Yuanfang, president of the Shanghai Publishers Association and vice president of the Publishers Association
of China, as well as director of the Publishing Materials section of the Shanghai Local History Office, and his assistant Qiu Ping; Li Yihai, of the SASS
Foreign Affairs Bureau; and, of course, his unforgettable colleague, Monsieur Zhao Nianguo.
Two of my greatest resources at SASS were the book kiosk and its manager, Cao Jiming. He frequently found published materials for me. Moreover, Mr. Cao alerted me to the existence of the New Fourth Army History
Research Groups Printing and Banknote Organization, an unofficial peoples
organization (mintuan). I am grateful to the seven elderly members of that
organization for sharing their memories and publications with me. Also, at
the very beginning of my research in Shanghai, sitting at the New Long Bar
of the Portman Hotel, fellow Glasgow alumnus and Shanghai scholar Brian
G. Martin gave me invaluable advice concerning the ins and outs of conducting research in that city. Near the end of my research, Patricia Stranahan
introduced me to members of the Historical Research Group of the Shanghai Communist Party, who in turn alerted me to new sets of documents.
In Shanghai, Zhang Shunian spoke to me extensively about his father
Zhang Yuanji and arranged a tour of the Commercial Presss rebuilt Baoshan
Road printing plant. When the Commercial Press celebrated its ninety-fifth
anniversary in 1992, Mr. Zhang invited me to the commemorative conference, held in Haiyan, Zhejiang, Zhang Yuanjis hometown. Dr. Fei Chengkang
of the SASS Institute of Law also opened many doors for me in both Shanghai and Suzhou. Together, Dr. Fei, a native of Suzhou, and I visited the
Publishing History section of the Suzhou Local History Office, whose members, led by Xu Peiji, answered my questions about the Suzhou Booksellers
Guild while also working to complete their own draft history. Dr. Fei and I
joined forces again to interview the manager of Suzhous Classics Bookstore, who had run a rare book business prior to 1949. Talking with him
reminded us that book people have long memories, whether or not they are
historians. When the manager first saw my name card with the University
of California logo, he said he wondered whether we had come to pick up
an outstanding order for the Berkeley library. He had not been able to fill
it in the late 1940s, he apologized, because the Communist revolution had
intervened.
When I hunted down an original edition of the Dianshizhai Pictorial in the
Shanghai Drama Institutes library, I received a particularly poignant lesson
of a different sort in the ways that scholars can have a beneficial effect on
the preservation of historical sources in a country with a lot of them. I had

xiii

xiv

Acknowledgments

assumed that the Pictorial would be useful in stage design and so would be
valued particularly highly by a drama library. I sought out the librarian and
made my request. It seems that I got there just in time. The librarian found
that someone had decided to weed out the entire series from the main collection. It had been moved from its place on the shelf to a stack of items
intended to be incinerated. The apparent reason: It was old. Needless to
say, a foreign historians interest guaranteed that it was saved from the flames.
As important as advisors, institutions, and serendipity are to the initiation and pursuit of scholarly projects, the support and camaraderie of ones
fellow students and friends are essential to the completion of such undertakings. I began graduate school at Berkeley with one outstanding cohort of
graduate students, including Mark Elliott, Blaine Gaustad, Melissa
Macauley, Julia Strauss, and Tsao Jr-lien, and finished with another, namely,
Carlton Benson, Sarah Fraser, Mark Halperin, Keith Knapp, Timothy Weston,
and Marcia Yonemoto. Each in his or her own way enriched my time at
Berkeley and/or in Shanghai. Also, from my research period in Shanghai I
would like to thank my friends Li Yi, Li La, Cao Tongyi, Wang Yaping, Chen
Haiyan, Du Kelei (Clay Dube), and He Ailian (Ellen Hertz). Back in Berkeley after Shanghai, I received help in material and spiritual ways from Daniel
Cornford, Hsing-yuan Tsao, Steven and Mary Diamond, and Jane Turbiner.
From my year of teaching at the University of Oklahoma, I am grateful to
Mikael Adolfson, Sidney Brown, Sandie Holguin, David Levy, Roberta
Magnussen and Kip, Donald Pisani, and Melissa Stockdale for their support and friendship. At Reed College, as befits one of Americas great liberal
arts institutions, Douglas Fix, Hsieh Ting-hua, Hyung Rhew, David Harris
Sacks, and Charles Wu Qianzhi recalled me from my preoccupation with
the professional and administrative sides of writing a book to the broader
intellectual value of historical research. After a hiatus of two decades, this
project also brought me back in contact with my old Montreal university
friends, Siu Tong Kwan and Elbert Lee of Hong Kong and Gordon SuiKwong Lee, now of Columbus, among whom I had first discovered the satisfaction that comes of asking big questions about culture and values and
then turning for answers to written or printed texts.
It is a pleasure to acknowledge the inspiration and support that I received
in various ways, including substantial comments on manuscript chapters,
from my Ohio State University colleagues Julia F. Andrews, Kenneth Andrien,
James Bartholomew, Alan Beyerchen, Mansel Blackford, Philip Brown, Chang
Hao, Xiaomei Chen, William Childs, Samuel Chu, Stephen Dale, Kirk
Denton, John F. Guilmartin, Jane Hathaway, K. Austin Kerr, and Randolph
A. Roth. Along with these persons, I must recognize the aid given to me by

Acknowledgments

my former PhD student, research and teaching assistant, and now professor, Liyan Liu. Other research assistants who aided me at Ohio State included Ying Bao, Ying Chua, and Su-hsing Lin. The staffs of Ohio States
East Asian library, of Ohios superb library consortium known as OhioLink,
and of the Big Tens library consortium Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) also advanced my research in substantial ways.
From the Columbus phase of this project, I would like to single out Patricia
Sieber and Cynthia J. Brokaw for their special interest in my project. Each
saw the project through to completion in a different way. Purely fortuitous
good fortune brought Pat and me separately to Ohio State, where we have
each written books related to issues of Chinese print culture. Our two intense years of intellectual and editorial exchange constituted one of the
scholarly high points of my time in Columbus. Pat read every page of my
manuscript, some of them more frequently than she or I would care to recall, and offered consistently sound counsel. A nonnative speaker of English
who speaks and writes the language with greater control and precision than
many of us born into it, Pat helped me to rekindle an old love for the pursuit of expository clarity that had fallen dormant. Cynthia J. Brokaw came
to Ohio State during my fifth year here. She read multiple versions of this
text and offered trenchant suggestions and insights based on her own research into an earlier period of Chinese print culture and print commerce.
This book is much tighter thanks to her comments.
Outside Ohio State, numerous people read chapters and various versions
of the manuscript. Those who offered extended criticism and suggestions
included David S. Barker, Robert Culp, James Huffman, Pieter Keulemans,
Joseph P. McDermott, Andrea McElderry, Kristin Stapleton, and Patricia
Stranahan. Former Ohio State graduate student David Wittner, now a professor and scholar of Japanese industrialization, also provided a trenchant
critique. In addition, my father and my mother, Russell A. Reed, EdD, and
Regina B. Reed, PhD, both of whom are retired from teaching, encouraged
me so enthusiastically and for such a long period that they gave new meaning to the term active retirement. With the publication of this book, to fill
their new-found spare time they may have to take up golf.
I offer thanks to the United States and Taiwan Fulbright Graduate Student (Institute of International Education) research grant program and the
Inter-University Program at National Taiwan University for financial support in Taiwan in 1990-91. The American Committee for Scholarly Communication with China awarded me a grant for research in Shanghai in
1991-92 and extended it for half a year, for which I am especially grateful.
In 1999, the United States and Taiwan granted me a Fulbright-Hays Senior

xv

xvi

Acknowledgments

Scholar fellowship, which I used at the Institute of Modern History and

Institute of Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica; National Library;
Sun Yat-sen Library; Kuomintang Party Archives; and at Nanjings Second
Historical Archives. During both of my Fulbright periods, Taiwans Foundation for Scholarly Exchange, directed by Dr. Wu Jing-jyi and supported by a
superb staff, epitomized the best in international academic exchange program administration. In addition, Taiwans Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation
awarded this project a publication grant. The Ohio State University supported my research with a Seed Grant in 2000-1 and Special Research Assignments in the fall of 2000 and the spring of 2001 that were invested in
this book. Ohio States College of Humanities and Institute of Chinese
Studies also helped production of this book with publication subventions.
I would like to thank my UBC Press editors, Emily Andrew, for having
endorsed this project in the first place, and Holly Keller-Brohman, for her
flexible but efficient supervision of its progress from manuscript to book. Their
involvement with Gutenberg in Shanghai extended far beyond the written
page. In particular, the book benefited from Emilys ability to find knowledgeable readers capable of passing on balanced insights and suggestions in
a timely manner. The ability to give constructive criticism dispassionately is
an unsung talent in todays world, and so I would also like to acknowledge
both of the anonymous reviewers for their efforts to do so.
These two reviewers were not the only anonymous persons who aided
completion of this book. It is fitting that I acknowledge here the invaluable
help that I received from an Ottawa, Ontario businessman whom I met in
the Shanghai Conservatory of Musics foreign student dormitory in 1991.
After listening to me describe my project in a hallway conversation, when
he left to return to Canada, he generously left me a copy of a ChineseEnglish printers dictionary that he had picked up in a Shanghai bookstore.
I myself never did come across a copy of the dictionary on sale in any
bookstore. Without it, however, I would still be looking up technical terms.
Not knowing his name, but still believing that he advanced this project in
an immeasurable way reminds me of the debt that we historians owe to
anonymous individuals and organizations of the past along with those that
we can name.
When all is said and done, however, the person who helped me the most
with this book is my wife, Leah Lihua Wong. Lihua and I met and married
during my two-year research stay in Shanghai, where she was teaching at
the Shanghai Drama Institute. The welcome that I received at the homes of
Lihuas parents, Wang Rongbin and Ye Jingfen of Qingdao, Shandong province; her brother, Wang Zhijun of Shanghai; and her sister, Wang Hui, now
of Los Angeles, gave me respite from the trials of extended archival and

Acknowledgments

library research. Once we left China, Lihua accompanied me, invariably

with an openness to possibilities and discoveries, over the next four years to
Berkeley, California; Norman, Oklahoma; Portland, Oregon; and finally to
Columbus, Ohio. Her irrepressible optimism, sense of humour, creativity,
intelligence, and wisdom inspired me in ways that I lack the vocabulary to
express. An oil painter by training, she first encountered the potential of
computers in Pasadena in 1993 and has gone on to become an award-winning
graphic designer while continuing to paint and teach. She designed the book
cover and created the graphics used inside this book.
I can only hope that these individuals and the organizations that helped
me satisfy my curiosity about the relationship between modern technology,
economics, culture, and politics in late imperial and Republican China find
that this book justifies their investments. Needless to say, any errors of
judgment or fact in this book are now mine alone.
Authors Note:
Birth and death dates for individuals are indicated in parentheses in the
text when they are available. Dates of most non-Chinese have been omitted
unless they have special relevance to the subject of this book or to Chinese
history in general.
Permission to reprint material from a previous article written by me, entitled Sooty Sons of Vulcan: Shanghais Printing Machine Manufacturers,
1895-1932, is gratefully acknowledged. It appeared in Republican China
[now known as Twentieth-Century China] 20: 2 (April 1995): 9-54. Permission to quote from Wu Woyao, Vignettes from the Late Ching: Bizarre Happenings Eyewitnessed over Two Decades, trans. Shih Shun Liu (Hong Kong:
Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1975), is appreciated, as is permission to reprint images from Don J. Cohn, Vignettes from the Chinese: Lithographs from Shanghai in the Late Nineteenth Century (Hong Kong: Chinese
University of Hong Kong Press, 1987). Permission to reprint their photographs in the book was received from the Shanghai Municipal Archives. A
reasonable attempt has been made to secure permission to reproduce all
material used. If there are errors or omissions they are wholly unintentional
and the publisher would be grateful to learn of them.

xvii

This page intentionally left blank

Gutenberg in Shanghai

Map 1 Map of China, c. 1930.

Introduction

In March 1949, when Mao Zedong set out for Beijing from Xibaipo, the
remote village where he had lived for the previous ten months, he took
along four printed texts. Included were the Shiji (Records of the Grand
Historian, c. 100 BCE) and the Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror for
Aid in Government, c. 1050 CE), two works that had been studied for
centuries by emperors, statesmen, and would-be conquerors. Along with
these two historical works, Mao packed two modern Chinese dictionaries,
Ciyuan (The Encyclopedic Dictionary, first published by the Commercial Press
in 1915) and Cihai (Ocean of Words, issued by Zhonghua Books in 193637).1 If the two former titles, part of the standard repertoire regularly reprinted by both traditional and modern Chinese publishers, are seen as key
elements of Chinas broadly based millennium-old print culture, then the
presence of the two latter works symbolizes the singular intellectual and
political importance of two modern industrialized publishing firms. Together
with scores of other innovative Shanghai-based printing and publishing
enterprises, these two corporations shaped and standardized modern Chinese language and thought, both Maos and others, using Western-style
printing and publishing operations of the sort commonly traced to Johann
Gutenberg.2
As Mao, who had once organized a printing workers union, understood,
modern printing and publishing were unimaginable without the complex of
revolutionary technologies invented by Gutenberg in the fifteenth century.
At its most basic level, the Gutenberg revolution involved the adaptation of
mechanical processes to the standardization and duplication of texts using
movable metal type and the printing press. This new process resulted in the
far-flung proliferation of printed matter throughout each society that it influenced. Simultaneously, the Gutenberg revolution also transformed business and social relationships, bringing forth, among other changes, one of
the worlds earliest capitalist enterprises, the print shop, with its attendant
class divisions.
In Maos day, China, like numerous countries, was still striving to come
to grips with the Gutenberg revolution. What sets China apart from other

Introduction

countries, however, is that the full story of its complex relationship with the
modern Western intellectual and material culture epitomized by that revolution is still far from widely known. Scholarly works that have examined
Chinas modern intellectual culture have tended to focus on Western missionary educational institutions after 1860, on Chinese-sponsored changes
in the education system between 1895 and 1949, or on the impact of Western political philosophies on the Chinese after 1895. Very few, however,
have studied the material culture, particularly the communications technology, that was a necessary, if not sufficient, cause of this intellectual change.
This book seeks to redress the imbalance by examining the Shanghai-based
printing and publishing system that delivered words, texts, and ideas to a
new mass audience preoccupied with aiding Chinas twentieth-century quest
for wealth, power, and international stature.3
Broadly speaking, this book studies the reciprocal influences of material
and mental culture that were a central part of the social history of Shanghai
life between 1876 and 1937. These were the years between which everincreasing numbers of Chinese invested in and worked with capital-intensive
Western printing technology. Spreading outward from Shanghai, the technological functions of modern printing and the intellectual culture of publishing also had a major impact on the country as a whole. The continuum from
material to intellectual culture, from printers to publishers, and from publishing companies to government patrons and reading audiences provides
the framework for this book. Together printing and publishing formed a
knowledge-based micro-economy that merged a modern mechanized industry with the ancient literary culture of China while simultaneously advancing the organizational practices of the corporation, industrial trade
association, and copyright protection in China. The evolution from traditional Chinese woodblock printing (xylography) to Western-style mechanized printing is an important part of that story as is the transformation of
traditional Chinese print culture and commerce into modern Chinese print
capitalism.
From the Xylographic to the Mechanical Age:
Print Culture, Print Commerce, and Print Capitalism
In recent years, three concepts print culture, print commerce, and print
capitalism have had a profound impact on the efforts of historians to
understand the mental and social context of national development. Of the
three, the reach of print culture is the most comprehensive. As Roger Chartier,
a major proponent of this historiography, has explained, print culture is a
term rooted in the efforts of European historians to understand the social
implications of the Gutenberg revolution of early modern Europe.4 In the

Introduction

case of China, conversely, study of print culture generally involves examination of the impact of woodblock printing from its development in the early
Tang dynasty (618-907), nearly eight centuries before Gutenbergs birth,
its proliferation during the Song (960-1279), the Yuan (1279-1368), and
the Ming (1368-1644) dynasties, and then its climax under the Qing (16441912) dynasty. Both in this broad form, as well as in Chartiers narrower
sense of the set of new acts arising out of the production of writing and
pictures in a new form,5 the historiography of print culture has profoundly
changed the ways that social and cultural historians of China perceive that
empires mental culture.
Western-language studies of premodern Chinese print culture have been
loosely divided between those that address the official noncommercial and
those that analyze the private commercial publishing realms, although the
precise relationship between these two sectors is still the focus of debate.6
Official noncommercial publishing largely supported the imperial orthodoxy. As is well known, Zhu Xis (1130-1200) rearrangement of the Chinese Classics into the Four Books, as well as his commentaries, became,
from the Yuan period down to Qing times, the core curriculum for the highly
competitive civil service examination system and remained so until the abolition of that system in 1904-5. That system set Qing Chinas meritocratic
personnel selection system apart from the aristocratic systems found throughout most of the world and contributed to the development of a broadly
based print culture and publishing system in advance of that which developed in Europe after Gutenberg.7 In a summary of publishing output that
underestimates the real numbers of books in circulation, Tsuen-hsuin Tsien
observes that It is estimated that 253,435 titles are registered in various
dynastic and other bibliographies from Han [206 BCE to 220 CE] to the
1930s; 126,649 were produced under the [Qing].8 This output was produced chiefly for the literate public whose preoccupation was success in the
imperial civil service examinations and in gaining a place in the administration directing the vast Chinese empire.9
The national audience for printed texts in late imperial China, especially
but by no means exclusively of examination-related materials, was sizable.
In one view, between 30 and 45 percent of Chinas total male population
and as much as 10 percent of its female population were functionally literate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.10 By implication, according
to this view, out of a nineteenth-century population of 450 million, perhaps
half could read with some degree of ease. Others estimate late Qing Chinas
literacy rate at between 20 and 25 percent overall, a figure that still yields a
reading public of between 90 and 110 million, albeit concentrated in urban
areas.11 Very few of these literates were actually officials, but many people

Introduction

were familiar with parts of the official curriculum and its anticommercial
physiocratic ideals as well as with other reading materials.
While the presses of the emperors, both in Beijing and in the provinces,
produced mountains of finely crafted editions of encyclopedias, classics,
histories, literature, and books of scholarship, the similarly not-for-profit
presses of bibliophiles and scholars followed suit. Over the course of the
Qing, private collectors created more than 750 famous libraries.12 By that
time, independent study, book collecting, and philanthropic printing and
publishing had all long been recognized as part of elite Chinese life. True to
the common conception of publishing as the civic-minded pursuit of literati, such men produced books for the love of learning, out of respect for the
past, and to gain the respect of others. Sun Congtian (c. 1680-1759) was
airing a widely held view when he wrote in his Cangshu jiyao (Bookmans
Manual) that Books are the most valuable treasure in the world. For it is in
books that we find discriminated the good and the bad in human nature
and the strong and weak points in the ways of the world. In this world of
ours, it takes well-read men to cultivate their persons and consequently to
govern rightly their states.13
If print culture provides a loosely structured means of understanding elite
Chinese intellectual life, the concept of print commerce enables inquiry
into the world beyond the imperial state and its noncommercial, or even
anticommercial, ideology. Scholars have recently begun to uncover an initially sizable, and eventually huge, commercial publishing sector in late
imperial China, separate from the well-known elite worlds of imperial and
philanthropic publishers and bookmen.14 In her study of the commercial
publishers of Jianyang (Fujian), for instance, Lucille Chia covers the six
centuries from the Song through the Ming.15 Timothy Brook, Dorothy Ko,
and Kai-wing Chow discuss the intellectual and cultural effects of print
commerce in the late Ming and early Qing. Ellen Widmer has studied the
market-driven Hangzhou/Suzhou publishing house Huanduzhai from the
1620s to the 1690s.16 Cynthia J. Brokaw takes the story of commercial publishing into back-country Fujian in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,17 and James Flath examines the adaptation of north Chinas commercial
nianhua (New Years prints) craft business to historical changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.18
These works illustrate that, from the late Ming onward, the expanding
national economy stimulated and directed commerce in printed commodities. In this period, print commerce was already widely scattered throughout the Chinese empire, demonstrating the existence of a national market
in books long before the appearance of Shanghais Gutenberg-influenced
printing, publishing, and marketing system. Already by the mid-Ming,

Introduction

important literati publishing and marketing centres were found in the two
capitals, Nanjing and Beijing, as well as in Hangzhou, Huizhou, and
Jianyang.19 In the late Ming and early Qing, the elite trade moved decisively
to the lower Yangzi, just west of Shanghai. Suzhou was the leading seventeenth century site, followed by Hangzhou, Nanjing, and Yangzhou.20
Initiative shifted north in the late eighteenth century when Beijings
Liulichang booksellers district appeared. By the early nineteenth century,
Liulichang was well known throughout China and East Asia as the empires
leading antique, art, and book emporium. There the anticommercial values
of the Chinese literati rubbed up against the economic realities of the marketplace without, however, rupturing social relations in any particularly novel
or dramatic fashion. Nonetheless, something more than mere connoisseurship underlay the success of the Liulichang shops, as indicated by the epitaph of an elite bookseller. The eulogy reveals a public rationale that seeks
to justify monetary profit as a natural by-product of societys pursuit of
learning:
With regard to trading books with people, we did not calculate profits too
closely. If the books that [others] received [from us] were valuable, we would
take ten taels [ounces of silver] and only sell them for a small amount over
that. If the books we got were less valuable, we would sell them for only a little
more. We took a long-term view and in this way earned more. We sought
profit, and made a living. We liked profit but also let those who bought books
get their profit, too. Who is not like us in desiring profit? If we had concentrated only on profit, then goods would not have circulated, and this would
have been the same as losing profit.21

In the 1870s, the redoubtable English ambassador Sir Rutherford Alcock

made his way to Liulichang.22 He confirmed the existence of a great deal of
private commercial printing taking place there in the nerve-centre of the
worlds most populous empire.
The mixed attitude toward profit expressed in the eulogy cited above
provides one hint of a problem that plagued Liulichang despite its success
as the empires largest bookselling district: a high rate of business failures.23
If profit was not the primary raison dtre of Liulichangs and other elite
booksellers and publishers throughout China, profitability was nevertheless
a necessity of survival. During Liulichangs first century of existence, an
uncertain supply system, limited numbers of high-quality editions, forgeries, and changing consumer tastes all constantly threatened to bankrupt the
districts book dealers and publishers. By the end of the nineteenth century,
however, bankruptcy was less of a threat than competition emanating from

Introduction

Shanghai, which had historically been a cultural backwater. Thanks to a

drastic realignment of intellectual and technological forces, by the first decade of the twentieth century, Shanghai had succeeded in marginalizing
Beijing and all other Chinese publishing centres.
Thus, the commercial perspective modulates our view of post-Tang print
culture as a by-product solely of imperial publishing. It adds a vital material
context to the moral economy of imperial officials and their print culture. It
also suggests that books, even the same book, and other printed matter
could be simultaneously repositories of moral values and material objects of
pecuniary value. In the first instance, books yielded existential insight or
influenced behaviour. In the second, they fetched profits of a more metallic
sort that could be turned to various objectives, regardless of the refinement
of those who acquired them. These trends and characteristics continued
into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when Shanghai ratcheted them
all up several notches through its joining of Western printing technology
with Chinese print culture and commerce.
In contrast to the concepts of print culture and print commerce, the term
print capitalism, which often appears side by side with discussions of
European print culture, has had less impact on scholarly analysis of China.
In part, this omission reflects uncertainty about the nature of print capitalism, a term first popularized by Benedict Anderson.24 Perhaps because print
capitalism is a concept placed in service to his theme, nationalism, Anderson never really defines it, not even in the concepts and definitions section of his book. Generally, though, it may be inferred that, for Anderson,
print capitalism refers simply to the commercialized, secularized, nongovernmental, and nonphilanthropic production of texts for a popular audience. However, this definition is historically so imprecise that it could
easily apply to the entire long history of late imperial Chinese book production, dating back to at least the Song. During the nine centuries that followed, Chinese workers carved blocks and used them to print all kinds of
secularized, nongovernmental books. Their craft-based, handmade books
then circulated commercially throughout China, without, however, establishing print capitalism.
Andersons notion of print capitalism was presaged by Lucien Febvre and
Henri-Jean Martins discovery that the European print shop was the worlds
first capitalist enterprise.25 Many elements of what we today call capitalism
have indeed been widely present in Western society since Gutenbergs day.
However, they did not come together in a consistent and replicable international format until the late nineteenth century.26 Although Karl Marx, the
first serious analyst of the modern mode of production, focused on the
economic and social relations that defined what later came to be called

Introduction

capitalism, he also acknowledged, like Febvre and Martin, that technology

was a critical part of the capitalist system. Specifically, Marx argued that the
development of machinery marked the genesis of the Industrial Revolution,
And to this day [technology] constantly serves as such a starting point,
whenever a handicraft, or a manufacture, is turned into an industry carried
on by machinery.27
Print capitalism, I argue in this book, is an offshoot of the process of
mechanization in the printing and publishing sector. Print capitalism may
be said to have arrived when commercialized, secularized, nongovernmental, and nonphilanthropic printing came to be done, not as a handicraft, but
as a form of industry carried on by machinery. Historians have become
more aware of the roles of commerce and even industry in the late imperial
Chinese world, but few demarcate the discontinuity between commerce and
capitalism as acutely as Marie-Claire Bergre. In her study of the Chinese
bourgeoisie in the early twentieth century, for instance, Bergre argues that
capitalism [did] not spring from a multiplication of markets nor even from
their more or less organised integration, but from the introduction of
mechanisation into a highly commercialised society.28 In addition, she maintains, mechanization laid a groundwork for the Chinese bourgeoisie.
Similarly, I argue that mechanization laid the material foundation that
made Chinese print capitalism possible. At the same time, however, Chinese print capitalism required operating capital and a sizable market. Capital was obtained via the joint-stock limited liability corporation and from
Shanghais modern banks, two organizational entities borrowed from the
West that contrasted with the strongly familial enterprises of China; a large
market was available only outside Shanghai, making the Shanghai publishers financially dependent on a national clientele to whom their new products, particularly textbooks, scholarly works, reference books, etc., could be
sold. That patronage was regulated by tumultuous, frequently changing
political regimes situated beyond the confines of the treaty port. Protection
of the intellectual and manufacturing effort needed to produce printed commodities was an important part of the print capitalist process. Likewise, the
creation of specialized managerial leadership led to employment of an adjunct workforce, a new form of skilled labour that turned out to be less
vulnerable to patriarchal domination by management than traditional printers had been.
To date, just as print capitalism has received little attention from China
scholars,29 so too the important changes in Chinas publishing sector brought
on by adoption of Western technology have been largely overlooked. With
a history stretching back to the early Tang dynasty, xylographic printing
and publishing had become widely dispersed by the late imperial period.

10

Introduction

Traditionally, blocks were made from treated pear, jujube, or catalpa wood,
all of which were widely available.30 During the Song dynasty (960-1279),
the block-carving craft reached such heights that engravers were able to
imitate individual calligraphic styles while still working within the Kaishu,
or plain written hand, script. Three centuries later, during the Ming,
xylographic innovations, such as three-colour printing, were added to the
older techniques, but by then block-carving had spread widely throughout
the empire and book printing encompassed a broader range of quality and
genre.31 By the nineteenth century, the process of carving wooden blocks
had become so widespread and simplified that, at printings lower reaches,
illiterate women and children were hired to perform the task.32 The
xylographic printing process, itself even simpler than that of carving, also
promoted dispersal. In each case, a sheet of paper, most likely a common
southern bamboo paper such as lianshi, was laid over an inked block and
rubbed with a long brush (changshua) or printing burnisher (cazi)33 to
transfer the watery Chinese ink from block to paper, which was then peeled
off and hung to dry. The tools themselves were rustic and easily obtained or
adapted from other uses.
Nineteenth-century technological changes not only created the context
for the rise of print capitalism, but also transformed the geography of Chinese publishing. To be sure, xylographic printing continued throughout that
century and much of the next, but from the late nineteenth century on
Shanghai was unquestionably the single most important centre of Chinese
publishing, largely because it was the site in which most new printing technology was introduced. This technological revolution, as Perry Link has
pointed out, encouraged the growth of Chinas modern literature and made
possible the expansion of commercially driven readership markets.34 Scholars such as Leo Ou-fan Lee and Andrew J. Nathan35 have traced the origins
of Chinese mass culture to Shanghai and its modern publishing industry,
observing that, after 1895, political news and new ideas were delivered to
the Chinese people almost exclusively through the press36 and modern
periodicals.
Indeed, successful Shanghai publishers turned what Daniel R. Headrick,
a Western historian of technology, and Zhang Xiumin, the leading historian
of Chinese printing, both might call a civilian tool of Western empirebuilding37 into one of the most efficacious devices underlying the multiple
reconstructions of Chinese cultural life and state-building in the twentieth
century. As we will see in this book, Chinese modernity was multifaceted
and did not follow a simple straight line. This book problematizes our understanding of the Chinese and the Western, the traditional and the modern,

Introduction

and shows them working constructively together rather than counterproductively against each other.
The intellectual influence of early-twentieth-century Shanghai periodicals is undeniable. However, in the period after 1895, books, particularly
textbooks and reference books, but works of fiction and social science as
well, were at least as important as periodicals in shaping long-term Chinese
opinion. In fact, textbooks consistently reached more people than periodicals and presented a more stable message. As a result of their devoted pursuit of an expanded readership, Shanghais comprehensive publishers,
particularly the Commercial Press and Zhonghua, were forced into the technological vanguard of Shanghais printers and publishers. In contrast to the
decentralized traditional publishing business, the technological foundation
on which their national intellectual leadership depended also granted
Shanghais book publishers an industrial supremacy unrivalled by other
publishing centres.
For all the importance of new foreign machines in redefining and centralizing printing and publishing in Shanghai, older Chinese cultural values
and practices did survive the arrival of that technology. In his enterprise
history of the Commercial Press, Jean-Pierre Drge emphasizes that, in pre1949 China, unlike in Western publishing operations in the same period,
the three functions of editing, printing, and distribution were all united
under one publishing roof. Just as significant, reminding us of the influence
that noncommercial moral ideals of the literati had on modern Shanghai
publishers, Drge also stresses, against Febvre and Martins view of the postGutenberg Western publisher as an early capitalist dependent on machinery, that there were ... two essential aspects in [Chinese] publishing, the
idealistic aspect and the commercial aspect, and the reputation of a house
depended in large part on reconciling them.38 Here Drge is hinting at the
prominent role of an inherited set of cultural values in influencing modern
Chinese publishing business practices. This present work will extend Drges
conclusions to demonstrate the continuing influence of a traditionalistic
print-culture mentality on the decisions of the modern industrial print capitalists who directed late Qing and Republican Chinas leading corporate
publishing firms.
Late Qing and Republican Shanghais printing and publishing world illustrates the merger of the three worlds of Chinese print culture, commerce,
and capitalism. Shanghai tied culture and commerce together through a
machine-based industry and provides us today with an ideal setting for
studying their influence on each other. No other cultural industry was as
central to the self-identity of the Chinese elite as the one that produced

11

12

Introduction

books, and no other was as close to the heart of the Chinese state. For this
reason, almost no other Chinese-owned industry was modernized as quickly
as this one, with the result that Gutenberg was himself a familiar figure to
literate Chinese of the 1920s and 1930s.
Gutenberg in Shanghai
Although his progeny, in the form of typography, printing presses, and printing machines, appeared in Shanghai in the nineteenth century, Johann
Gutenberg (1400?-68) himself did not figure as a recognizable name or
noteworthy personality in the Shanghai consciousness before the mid1920s.39 His appearance then reflected growing public awareness of the importance of technology in national development as well as the widespread
dissemination of the industrially manufactured book and journal. Gutenberg
was absent from Chinas first modern dictionary, Xin zidian (New Dictionary) issued by the Commercial Press in 1912. Likewise, he did not appear
in the Commercial Presss 1915 phrase dictionary, Ciyuan, or in Zhonghua
da zidian (Zhonghua Big Dictionary), issued the same year by Zhonghua
Books.40 Nonetheless, all three modern dictionaries, the most important to
appear in Chinese since Kangxi zidian (Kangxi Dictionary) of 1716, were
printed using technology that could be traced to Gutenberg.
The absence of Gutenbergs biography from these reference works reflected
venerable literary conventions that began to change in the 1920s. Traditional biography (zhuanji, liezhuan) typically focused on the public accomplishments of noteworthy Chinese officials, artists, and writers. Certainly
not a Confucian official, painter, or writer, Gutenberg was also a foreigner, a
group rarely treated by Chinese biographers. Even Chinese naturalists, scientists, and inventors seldom merited entries in early-twentieth-century
dictionaries, not to mention older ones. By the mid-1920s, however, foreign historical categories such as science, technology, invention and inventors, and important Western historical figures did begin to appear in the
published Chinese consciousness.41
After a period of adjustment that lasted from the mid-1920s to the mid1930s, Chinese biographical entries started to focus on newly important
themes such as the creation of individual scientific achievements, individual
technological accomplishments that led to public benefits, and the inventiveness of the working class. By the 1930s, in the profile of Gutenberg
presented to the reading public, older didactic qualities began to merge with
newer concerns. In some cases, these themes also helped to support the
view that China should be given credit for its contributions to world scientific and technological civilization.

Introduction

When Gutenbergs name finally did appear in Chinese discussions of printing history, it was initially in the context of defensively assertive claims
about Chinas contributions to world printing history. Such discussions
reflect the almost immediate impact that Thomas Francis Carters nowclassic study in comparative history, The Invention of Printing in China and
Its Spread Westward (1925), had in China, even in the original Englishlanguage edition. Convinced, and even inspired, by Carters argument that
the source of one of the distinguishing technologies of Europes modern
period lay in China, the Chinese now began to lay emphasis on their countrys
central place in world technological history in general and, more specifically, in printing history.
In 1927, for example, a well-known Shanghai journalist named Ge
Gongzhen (1890-1935) issued Chinas first modern history of journalism
under the imprint of the Commercial Press. Ges work displayed some of
the defensive posturing typical of this period. Discussing the art of printing,
Ge stated that Westerners take the German Gu-teng-bao (Guttenberg [sic])
as the ancestor of civilization and do not know that his invention of movable type was already 500 years late.42 In fact, said Ge, Printing was one of
the technologies passed from China to the West. The book The Invention of
Printing in China, written by the American Mr. Ka-de [Carter] records this in
particularly great detail.43 His nationalistic rhetoric aside, Ges citation of
Carters book marks one of the first acknowledgments in a modern Chinese
publication that printing technology was deemed an important element in
national identity.44
Four years after Ge Gongzhens book appeared, He Shengnai, the Commercial Presss colour-printing supervisor, wrote that Chinese printing technology spread first to Japan (in the eighth century) and eventually to Europe,
where the German, Gutenberg, was influenced by it. Like Ge Gongzhen, He
Shengnai stated that his source for this insight was Carter, who read our
ancient printing history and really worshipped our previous eras spirit of
creative progress.45 Nonetheless, Gutenberg was important to He, as he
was to Ge only as a means for making claims about Chinas past greatness.
In the 1930s, however, as Chinas modern education system became increasingly Westernized, bringing with it the popular ideal of technological
progress,46 Gutenberg grew more recognizable to the Chinese for the lessons
that he could teach. For example, a discussion of Gutenberg could be found
in the essay Zhongguo yinshua yu Gu-deng-bao (Chinese Printing and Gutenberg),47 which appeared in the journal Kexue de Zhongguo (Scientific China)
in 1934. The author showed interest in Gutenberg as the first to create
Western movable type. Like his predecessors, this author also qualified

13

14

Introduction

his observation with the statement that a Chinese (Bi Sheng, in 1040) had
developed movable type four centuries earlier.48
Nonetheless, here Gutenberg emerged as a creative personality who had
overcome hardship to make his contribution to society. Readers learned, for
instance, that the inventor had come from a wealthy family, one that spent
money like water, yet had not succumbed to this temptation. Further
moralizing revealed that, during his time in Strasbourg, Gutenberg had
avoided the problems with drink that were common there. He had an extremely fertile imagination, was good in action, clever in thought, behaved
in a secretive manner, was quite short-tempered, and for this reason was
long criticized by people,49 the writer concluded.
By the time Zhonghua Books issued its landmark dictionary, Cihai, in
1937, Gutenberg merited a full entry alongside outstanding Chinese literary and historical figures, foreign statesmen, and important historical and
cultural events. Here, in a dictionary that took the place of the three cited
above and reflected increased Chinese awareness of the non-Chinese world,
Gutenberg was identified as the German inventor of movable type. More
interestingly, readers were told that he had originally been a machine worker
(jixie gongren). In 1450, Gutenberg entered Fusts metal workshop and founded
the first print shop using movable lead type,50 says the dictionary. Implicitly,
the status of machine workers now approached those of literary and official
figures.
In 1939, in a multipart, illustrated translation series, Shanghais and
Chinas leading graphic arts journal, Yiwen yinshua yuekan/The Graphic Printer,
continued to explain Gutenbergs historical significance to Chinese printers. Like the authors of the three articles discussed above, the translator
reminded his readers of Bi Sheng and Chinas ancient contribution to
Gutenberg, whose importance, he said, stemmed not only from his movable
type and printing press but also from a technique for double-sided printing.
Even with improvements over the following 487 years, his general idea is
still like it was in the old days,51 a statement that established Gutenberg as
the fountainhead of all ideas advancing the craft since his own day.
Introducing Gutenberg via one of his many purely imaginary portraits
(see Figure I.1), The Graphic Printers article went on to discuss Gutenbergs
experiments with his inventions after 1439.52 Following a failed lawsuit in
Strasbourg, readers were told, Gutenberg moved back to Mainz, where he
set up a print shop with Johann Fusts help. Now he put his invention to
work. Calling Fust a disciple with evil designs, the article presented a
cautionary tale in which Fust installed his son-in-law in Gutenbergs print
shop. Once the son-in-law mastered Gutenbergs techniques, readers were

Introduction

Figure I.1 Gutenberg, the inventor of cast

movable type.
Source: Yiwen yinshua yuekan/The Graphic Printer
(Shanghai) 2, 2 (1939): 39.

told, Fust called in his loans and, when Gutenberg could not pay, confiscated the print shop. Still, the authors stressed, Gutenbergs spirit would
not be subdued. With the help of Conrad Hummery, Gutenberg started up
another printing operation, but unfortunately he died in 1468 before he
could make a success of it.
From these evolving Chinese views of Gutenberg, several conclusions can
be drawn. First, and most significant, Chinese initially became aware of his
general importance to Western cultural history through an interpretation of
their own printing history undertaken by a foreign scholar, Carter.53 Second,
their initial interest had less to do with Gutenberg himself and more to do
with Carters enthusiasm for Chinas own ancient role in the development
of what the world acknowledged to be an important technology. Third, openness to Carters argument eventually led Chinese writers to accept the view
that technological advance, led by those who invented and paid for it, as
well as by those who built and worked machines, was an important part of
national development with key moral lessons to be learned by all.
These changing images of Gutenberg, influenced by varying Chinese habits, needs, and choices, suggest a parallel with the history of Chinas adaptation of his technological legacy. Among civilian technologies of the nineteenth

15

16

Introduction

century, printing presses of the sort that Chinese of the 1930s believed
could be traced to Gutenberg had arrived in China with a variety of more
recent technologies. These newer technologies overcame the limitations of
his original conception even as they incorporated many of his original ideas.
Unlike Europeans who had grown accustomed to incremental technological
advance, a process that designated the latest technology as the best technology, however, nineteenth-century Chinese had encountered an extensive
range of European technologies from which they had chosen the best for
their purposes. In the process of choosing, culture and history had inevitably influenced the technological choices that they had made along with the
intellectual ones.
Furthermore, China was unlike most other non-Western regions that had
experienced the Gutenberg revolution. Where indigenous print culture was
absent or limited in range, the role of local culture and history was minimized in the absorption of this technological revolution. By contrast, late
Qing and Republican China offers an outstanding opportunity to show how
technologies, deemed to be universal because they are thought, ipso facto,
to be culturally neutral, are reshaped by the societies to which they are
passed. Except for the Chinese, few other civilizations in world history prior
to the mid-twentieth century have been the ancestral homeland of a technology that was transferred to the West and then itself became the recipient
of a later generation of that technology.54 Discussing the influence of Chinas
traditional and modern culture on its choices of industrial technology will
alter our categories of universals and particulars. We will find that Chinas
millennium-old print culture profoundly influenced its modern technological choices, enabling traditional systems of values to live on in the modern
era.
Origins of Shanghais Booksellers District (Wenhuajie)
On 29 August 1842, the Treaty of Nanjing was signed onboard HMS
Cornwallis, moored in the Yangzi River, ending the First Anglo-Chinese War
(a.k.a. Opium War, 1839-42). The first of a long series of unequal treaties
between the Qing dynasty and foreign powers, this document opened five
treaty ports to foreign residence and trade. Located a few kilometres from
the sea on the Huangpu River, Shanghai, then an administrative and commercial centre of some 230,000 residents,55 was one of the five.56 By the end
of the century, there would be 100 or so treaty ports scattered throughout
China. Shanghai, however, by then inhabited by about one million persons,
would tower over all of them.57 Most inhabitants were Chinese and they
joined the foreign merchants and missionaries who occupied the Anglo-

Introduction

American International Concession and the French Concession. The Westerners created self-governing settlements that were defended against Qing
interference by a series of regulations, including extraterritoriality, and security forces.58 Chinese were drawn to the concessions by various factors,
including the benefit of having a cordon sanitaire between themselves, the
deteriorating Qing state, and then the weak Republican governments.59
Among the Chinese who crowded into the settlements were numerous heirs
to the print-culture and print-commerce traditions of the surrounding
Jiangnan region.
Two inimical systems of values, the literati and the commercial, both rooted
in Chinas late imperial past, vied for influence among Shanghais booksellers. Between 1876 and 1937, the citys modern publishers transmuted
Chinas millennium-old print culture and three-century-old print commerce
into modern industrial print capitalism. The public stage on which this
drama played itself out was Wenhuajie. The name Wenhuajie (Culture-andEducation Streets) is a creation of the 1920s and 1930s. Already after the
1880s, however, along Henan Road (originally known as Qipanjie, or Chessboard Street), and soon spreading westward into Fuzhou Road (today still
also known as Simalu, or Fourth Avenue), right in the middle of the AngloAmerican International Concession, assembled all of Chinas major trade
and journalistic publishers. They were joined by their retail outlets and
trade associations, along with jobber printers, stationers, calligraphers, and
painters. Numerous shops sold traditional literature and antiquarian books.
Several others specialized in the traditional four treasures of the scholars
studio (wenfang sibao: namely, brushes, ink, paper, and inkstones) or marketed paintings and stele rubbings.
From this commercial district of low-rise, high-density structures piled up
just behind the financial arsenals of the Bund,60 the directives guiding late
Qing and then Republican Chinas intellectual fashions and products were
issued. Proximity to financial power promoted the growth of the modern
publishing media. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some 300 major and minor publishing firms and bookstores assembled
there (for an inventory of the district during its heyday, see the Appendix,
A Birds-Eye View of 1930s Shanghais Fuzhou Road/Wenhuajie District).
At the same time, Wenhuajies location, concentrated between the banks
and counting houses along the river and the sales depots of fabrics, jewellery,
perfumes, and other luxuries, situated farther out along Nanjing and Canton Roads, symbolized the ambiguity of the book trade in Shanghais consumer economy (see Map 2).61 The intellectual middle ground, symbolized
physically by the Fuzhou Road neighbourhood and politically by its location

17

18

Introduction

Map 2 Shanghai concessions in 1916, with Wenhuajie district outlined.

Source: Carl Crow, Handbook for China, 2nd ed. (Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, 1916), between 82-83.

in the concession, placed Chinese booksellers and publishers in the forefront of both cultural conservation and cultural transformation.
In recent historical scholarship, so much attention has been paid to commercialization of the late imperial economy that awareness of the older
anticommercial Chinese literati service ideal, essential for understanding
Shanghais booksellers, has nearly been eclipsed. Yet the moral economy of
the Chinese literati counterbalanced commodification of print culture in a
historically and intellectually significant way between 1876 and 1937. Both
of these dynamics the inherited and the acquired injected values and
social patterns into what became Wenhuajie. Late imperial bookmen were
vital to the creation of Shanghais print capitalism at the end of the Qing dynasty. Their equivocality, by which they claimed links both to an elitist cultural past and to a commercial present, continued into the capital-intensive,
industrialized printing and publishing era of Republican China and suggests the continuing, if irreconcilable, vigour of both.
A satirical novel published in Shanghai in the middle of the period discussed in this book sheds light on the survival of literati ideals in late-

Introduction

nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Shanghai. In Wu Woyaos (18661910) Ershinian mudu zhi guai xianzhuang (Vignettes from the Late Qing),
books, print culture, and print commerce play just as important a role as
anticommercial literati values.62 In the face of the commodification of print
culture, Wu reminds us of the continuing vitality of the deeply ingrained
service ethic that underlay Chinas late Qing literati world and suggests
why such values survived in Republican Shanghais Wenhuajie.
Vignettes from the Late Qing first appeared in book form in 1909 through
the Shanghai publisher Guangzhi shudian. Assuming a pose of high dudgeon, author Wu Woyao63 strikes directly at early-twentieth-century Fuzhou
Road and the behaviour, whether foul, praiseworthy, or humorous, of its
denizens. In particular, Wu fires salvos at two major groups that he believed
bore responsibility for Chinas crisis of belief in his day. Commercially driven
booksellers, marketing useless ancient writings and modern fluff, are shown
to distort the proper ends of learning for private gain at the expense of the
public realm. Narrow-minded, overeducated readers also use books as an
escape from public responsibility. From the standpoint of Wus novel, both
publishers and readers need to rectify their attitudes.
The meeting of the books chief protagonist with the moral hero of the
story provides a glimpse of Wus view of the ambiguous men who worked in
Shanghais early-twentieth-century book industry. Wu also reveals insight
into booksellers own ambivalence about their careers in commerce. An episode involving a bookseller occurs just after the narrator (Wu) has arrived
at his Shanghai hostel, likely located in the Fuzhou Road district that became Wenhuajie. The narrator enters a neighbouring room to inquire about
buying a couple of tao (sets of books) from the elderly northern bookseller
occupying it. The bookseller turns out to be Wang Boshu, both the narrators
relative and a former prefect of Datong, Shanxi. Handicapped by his nearsightedness and, more important in the narrators view, by his honesty, the
old man once made the mistake of criticizing the governor of Shanxi province to his face without knowing to whom he was speaking. Given the situation, Wang felt obliged to request medical leave. He has been working in
the book trade ever since, buying lithographically printed books (shiyin shu)
in Shanghai, reselling them in Beijing, and then using his profits to market
more Shanghai-lithographed works.64
After relating experiences that allude to the triumph of merchant selfseeking over anticommercial literati ideals, Wang Boshu presents the narrator with the gift of a book. The text, a Chinese translation of a Japanese
work entitled Fuguo ce (Plans for Enriching the Country), is given in the hope
that the narrator can gain some practical knowledge and free [himself]
from the dilemma of those impractical old-style scholars [mingshi] who do

19

20

Introduction

not know how high the sky is and how thick the earth is.65 Wang then goes
on to describe those impractical old-style scholars. As a former official
himself, Wang insists that officials are simply high-profile representatives of
learned Chinese as a group. Whether viewed from a southern or a northern
perspective, all of these well-read persons are just as pernicious: There is a
group of people who are colloquially referred to in Shanghai as poisonous
scholars [shu du tou], and who are known in the north as bookworms [shu
daizi]. Just imagine, after they study their books, which are good things in
themselves, they get poisoned and they become mere bookworms. How
can they attend to their duties when the time comes?66
Moving on to address his chief anxiety, Wang explains that the Western
powers are not only poised and ready but also able to partition China. Its first
line of defence, a narrow-minded officialdom, is not prepared either practically or intellectually to resist the onslaught, he laments, precisely because
of the controlling influence of these poisonous bookworms on officialdom.
The fault of poisoned officialdom lies in ancient books, which can no
longer provide an adequate guide to officials, Wang then observes. In the
modern world, Chinas traditional domestic cultural diplomacy revealed in
the Twenty-Four Dynastic Histories, by means of which foreign invaders such
as Mongols and Manchus were sinicized, is inadequate. Modern Western
countries first conquer foreign lands politically and then rob them of their
cultural identities. Shocked by this hair-raising information, the narrator
asks Wang, Could China one day sink so low? If so, what can be done to
avert that? Given the heavy moralizing owing at least partly to the literati
tradition, Wang has a ready answer: education. Yes, avoid unnecessary waste,
secure the borders, but above all else, he insists, China needs to establish
schools for every subject under the sun. While still an official, he petitioned the governor of Shanxi on the issue but achieved nothing, So, I got
into the book trade, he announces. This was done with a definite purpose
in mind ... The ordinary book-vendors were all uneducated and ... all ... they
were after was profit. They did not know, nor did they care, which books
were useful. My object was to sell only books that are useful.67
Wang Boshu, a failed but still high-minded moralist, entered the book
trade with the best of intentions but nave about the height of the obstacles
facing him, as he freely admits. Before long, he discovered that the purchasers of books were just as unenlightened as the book-vendors. They
sought only old-style romances or miniaturized editions useful for the examinations of the sort marketed by the Shanghai-based lithographic publishers.68 When presented with practical works of the sort that Wang gives
the narrator, they showed no interest: If one day these men were lucky
enough to enter the official world, what would happen to our country?69

Introduction

Replying to the narrators comment that not all such readers can become
officials, Wang laments the fact that readers worse than they have already
become officials. Referring to the well-known phenomenon of selling degrees that accelerated after the Taiping Rebellion (1851-64) and its insidious influence on public culture and learning, Wang reports As to those who
have bought their titles ... they are an even worse lot. Far from serving the
country ... theyre in business just as much as I am, but their search for
profit is even keener than that of businessmen ... What will become of the
country?70 Wangs only hope for Chinas future, its youth, is a predictable
clich in the early twenty-first century. At the time of the books publication, though, he anticipates an elite, youth-led rejection of conventional
late imperial values that would not be realized until the New Culture Movement of 1915-21. It is not surprising that that attack was only the first in a
series of attacks on the profit-driven publishers of Shanghais Wenhuajie.
In fact, already in Wu Woyaos day, some actual Shanghai publishers, as
opposed to the fictitious ones of his novel, were trying to produce the useful books for which Wang Boshu calls. By 1909, when Wus complete
novel appeared, the print commerce that Wu describes had already given
way to a print capitalism based on the industrial production of useful books.
Publishers such as the Commercial Press, for instance, had been manufacturing texts intended to school a new, post-civil service examination generation in modern, morally just principles for some time already. The public
service ethic of such publishers was motivated, not by profit-free philanthropy, but by what they deemed the enlightened pursuit of industrial profits made from printed works for sale in what would soon be known as
Wenhuajie. At the same time, the intellectual and material impacts of their
activities would reverberate well beyond it.
In Wus day, Chinese print capitalism still had half of its six-decade lifespan
ahead of it. As innovative and inventive as Shanghai-based Chinese print
capitalism demonstrated itself to be between 1876 and 1937, however, turmoil from 1937, when Chinas second modern war with Japan began, to
1949, when the Republic of China collapsed, irremediably weakened its
viability and its centrality in Chinas economy. If print capitalism itself did
not survive, however, both the Commercial Press and its chief competitor,
Zhonghua, outlasted the Republican government and were present figuratively, via publications such as Ciyuan and Cihai, at the founding of the
Peoples Republic of China.
Even more important historically, the Chinese chapter in the technological
dimension of the Gutenberg revolution proved to be irreversible. Since Mao
Zedongs declaration of the Peoples Republic on 1 October 1949, China
has again become one of the worlds preeminent book cultures. Even the

21

22

Introduction

Cultural Revolution, conventionally viewed as a profoundly anti-intellectual

and antibook movement, promoted large-scale book production and consumption. No symbol of the Cultural Revolution itself compares with the
potency of Mao Zhuxi ylu (Quotations from Chairman Mao), the infamous
Little Red Book. The first edition, after editing by Minister of Defence and
Marshal Lin Biao (1907-71) that began in 1961, was published by the Political Department of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) in May 1964.
The same bureau also promoted the movement to study Maos longer writings. Over the next three years, one modern historian has estimated, the
PLA printed nearly a billion copies of the Quotations along with some
150,000,000 copies of Maos Selected Works.71 The technological means by
which these books reached a national audience of hundreds of millions were
those of a modern industrialized publishing industry whose roots lay in the
period studied here.
Organization of This Book
Gutenberg in Shanghai is a chronologically organized, problem-oriented, analytical history of the Shanghai printing and publishing industry that focuses on the period from 1876 to 1937. Combining the approaches of the
history of the book and print culture, the social history of technology, and
business history, it examines the origins of Chinas modern print media
industries in the late Qing dynasty and their development in the Republican period. It argues that traditional Chinese print culture and print commerce influenced Chinese technological choices and created a narrative of
adaptation at odds with the conventional Western history of print capitalism. At the same time, the material cost of Gutenbergs and subsequent
technology imposed an organizational imperative that transformed conventional Chinese printing and publishing organizations along with workplace
relations in them.
Presented through the eyes of Chinese commentators of the 1920s and
1930s, Chapter 1 explains how the system of printing technology associated with Gutenbergs name was transformed by the late-eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century European Industrial Revolution and how the Gutenberg
revolution came to China. This chapter provides the first-ever detailed
English-language account of how the inventions of Knig, Walter,
Mergenthaler, and others that influenced the book-publishing trade came
about and were introduced to China via Shanghai. Central to this story is
the role of the Commercial Press, which, like the Times of London in earlynineteenth-century England, was important for subsidizing and promoting
new machinery in China. In spite of having its roots in an illegal effort at

Introduction

ideological subversion, this process marks the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as one of world historys most fertile periods of international
technological transfer prior to the post-World War II era.
Chapter 2 shows how the conservative motivations of traditional Chinese
publishers and booksellers were reflected in Shanghais lithographic industry starting in 1876. Reversing the conventional narrative, for the first time
in either Chinese- or English-language scholarship, this chapter demonstrates
that lithography, not letterpress (movable lead type) printing, was the industry that brought about the transition from traditional woodblock printing to mechanization. For the first time in China scholarship, it shows that
Chinas traditional culture influenced its modern technological choices in
constructive ways. Despite their conservatism, the lithographers simultaneously raised treaty-port Shanghais intellectual profile and brought about
new social and commercial forms that set the stage for the comprehensive
lead-type printing and publishing industry that, in turn, superseded but did
not wholly replace lithography or even xylography.
The following stage in Chinas mastery of the nineteenth-century European revolution in printing technology is examined in Chapter 3, which
studies Shanghais printing-press manufacturing industry. In this period,
lasting from about 1895 to 1937, the Chinese learned how to manufacture
their own printing presses and other machines, providing domestic printers
and publishers with an alternative to many lines of imported machinery. In
time, the success of Shanghais machine-makers contributed to the spread
of Gutenbergs revolution well beyond the confines of treaty-port Shanghai,
but not before the Chinese gained a sense that they had sinicized this modern Western invention rooted in the technology of medieval China. Combining technological with social history, the chapter delves into the shadowy
world of apprentices and masters, showing that the brutality of the printing
machine trade created conditions that radicalized its workers.
After Chapters 1, 2, and 3 establish the importance of printing technology to the creation of modern Shanghai-based publishing, Chapter 4 investigates the development of Shanghais multivalent modern publishing
enterprises from the 1880s to approximately 1911. Their origins are traced
to the reformist Chinese gentry, particularly to the contradictory influences
of the imperial service ethic and the modern demand for adequate compensation for intellectual labour. This latter influence resulted from the high
costs of mechanization, particularly from the price of adopting Western-style
movable-type presses. High costs, in turn, promoted the awareness of textual property symbolized intellectually by the copyright and organizationally by the industrial trade association. In spite of the high rate of failure, by

23

24

Introduction

adapting the joint-stock limited liability corporation to Chinese conditions,

publishers in this phase also laid the groundwork for the industrial, commercial, and cultural bonanza that followed.
Building on the discussion of joint-stock firms, Chapter 5 details the rise
of the three most important corporate publishers of Republican China in
the context of the physical and symbolic development of Shanghais Fuzhou
Road/Wenhuajie booksellers district. Wenhuajie was a highly meaningful
cultural symbol to the Chinese of the Republican period. More than any
other group among the scores, if not hundreds, of Shanghai publishers, the
three big joint-stock companies (Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and
World Books) studied here dominated the district and promoted its image
as a national cultural centre. No mere cultural district, however, it was also
a commercial one inseparably linked to Shanghais industrial suburbs, as
the chapter shows for the first time. Chapter 5 also demonstrates that the
professionalization of publishing, by the 1930s, represented the culmination of the evolution away from late imperial literati print culture and created a new kind of Chinese intellectual.
The final section pulls all these topics and themes together into a summary and conclusion. Here the importance of Shanghais printing and publishing industry as a first step toward understanding modern Chinese
intellectual, cultural, and social history is highlighted. Print culture, technology, and the business organizations of print capitalism are all vital parts
of this story and suggest the value of empirical research in overcoming the
limits of nostalgic views of the past. Where many works imply that technological diffusion and change, along with social transformation and adaptation to that change, are best left unexamined, this book deliberately seeks
to problematize them. The traditional Chinese printing and publishing industry was widely dispersed across the Chinese empire, partly for cultural
reasons and partly because of the nature of its technology. Making sense of
the meaning of the centralization that occurred when Shanghai came to
dominate the modern industry is possible only when that industry can be
compared both to what came before it in China and to what was common in
other parts of the world.

1 Gutenbergs Descendants:
Transferring Industrialized Printing
Technology to China, 1807-1930

Printing can be said to have been reinvented in Europe and America several times throughout the nineteenth century. In fact, a major distinction
between the print commerce of the early modern era and the print capitalism of the late modern period was the growth of mechanization and industrialization. This reinvention, partly fostered by publishers themselves,
expanded the contours of the broad printing revolution usually traced to
Johann Gutenberg. In turn, the industrial transformation of Western-style
printing created a new publishing industry, one that sought the patronage
of millions of purchasers and readers worldwide, not merely that of a few
thousand early modern European elites. True modernity in printing and
publishing emerged only when the processes were mechanized and industrialized in the nineteenth century.
Still, the significance of Gutenbergs invention and later innovations that
built on it cannot be adequately understood unless we analyze its distribution and adaptation across times, spaces, and civilizations far broader than
those so far examined by scholars. This technological transformation did
not remain solely the preserve of Western nations. It became a global development that included China and Chinese inventors. Starting with the small
number of print workers and Christian converts discussed in this chapter,
the Gutenberg revolution eventually expanded to include the legions of printers and publishers involved in Chinese print capitalism, most of whom congregated in Shanghai between 1876 and 1937. They themselves contributed
in a major way to the modification of Western printing technology by adapting it to the Chinese language and local print commerce, with Shanghais
Chinese book publishers usually acting in advance of their colleagues in the
newspaper and general printing businesses.
This chapter examines the diffusion of printing media, printing presses,
and printing machines from Britain, America, and, to a lesser extent, France
and Germany to China between 1807 and the early 1930s. Through a combination of governmental and private efforts, Japans printing industry
reached a high level of expertise in Western-style printing in advance of that
of late Qing China, with the result that Japan, too, figures significantly in

26

Gutenbergs Descendants

the later phases of this story, starting in the early 1900s. Inter alia, the
various forms of motive power available for bringing the media, presses, and
machines together will be discussed. As this Chinese phase in the Gutenberg
revolution unfolded, Western printing technologies were typically absorbed
first in Macao, Canton, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and other treaty ports along
the southeastern littoral, areas where missionary organizations, both Protestant and Catholic, were most active. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, only one of these multiple locations Shanghai turned out
to be propitiously enough situated and to have adequately educated Chinese leadership to combine Western printing technology with Chinese publishing culture in order to create a new Chinese industry.
Christian missionary printing appears as only the first of several important steps in this process. When it began, with the goal of producing textual
and visual materials for proselytizing, Sino-foreign relations were still regulated by the restrictive Canton System (1756-1842). The missionaries operated in spite of the fact that their activity was illegal in China before
1844, by which time the Opium War had forcibly opened five treaty ports
to them, and was only just tolerated by the Qing government after that.1 To
compensate for limited manpower and restricted inland travel and to maximize the impact of their message, many missionary organizations experimented with numerous printing technologies, both indigenous and Western,
that could be used to produce Chinese-language texts.
Although printing machinery initially developed or imported by foreign
Christian missionaries did lay early material conditions for the Chinese print
capitalism that developed in Shanghai, missionaries were not axial to later
developments. After 1807, expensive, technically demanding Western mechanical printing technology began trickling into China. Not surprisingly,
for six decades, it made little headway against cheap, far more convenient
native printing techniques. Then, in a striking reversal of their initially lukewarm interest in Western printing technology, starting in the 1870s and
culminating in the 1930s, the Chinese enthusiastically embraced the printing press as a distinct form of Western machinery. Chinese who encountered Western printing technology now acknowledged the need to understand
the advantages of modern industrial manufacturing processes, particularly
the ways in which the respected cultural work of publishing could be combined with it. In this period, missionaries largely dropped out of the technological vanguard, replaced by Chinese print capitalists.
As we will see in this chapter and in the next two, there was nothing
inevitable about either the Chinese reinvention of Western printing technology or the sequence in which it was adopted. The Chinese made conscious choices. A societys willingness to accept the value of certain kinds of

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

technology when presented with various options all at the same time, rather
than sequentially, as happened in the West, is influenced by its own history
and culture. Although Western printers surmounted multiple difficulties in
creating serviceable early Chinese type fonts, their efforts were eventually
thwarted by Chinese emphasis on the aesthetics of calligraphy in particular.
As a result, from 1876 to 1905, Chinese visual sensibility led to major Chinese investments, not in movable-type letterpress printing operations, but
in lithographic ones. On the one hand, lithography, the most important
Western technological alternative to techniques of casting and setting type
for use with printing presses, provided a culturally sensitive compromise
between the limitations of both Chinese xylography and imported typography. On the other hand, after 1905, Chinese-designed type fonts, which
could be harnessed to fast letterpress printing presses, edged out both lithography and the old missionary fonts just in time for use in late Qing educational and revolutionary movements.
Thus, in the long run, in one of historys more striking ironies, the missionaries printing technology itself turned out to have a much greater impact on the Chinese than the religious messages it was intended to convey.
It is well known that the technological revolution that began with Gutenberg
in the fifteenth century eventually undermined the unquestioned hegemony
of Roman Catholicism in Europe. Just as significantly, Western printing
technology provided anti-Qing and anti-Nationalist reformers and revolutionaries with the printing hardware that enabled them to spread their messages broadly, quickly, and relatively anonymously. In doing so, Western
printing technology contributed, not to the creation of the Christian kingdom that nineteenth-century missionaries longed for, but to the Communist Partys establishment of the Peoples Republic of China.
An Era of Metal, Steam, and Chemistry; Printing Media, Presses, and Machines
The full range of nineteenth-century Western printing media comprised
surfaces in relief (letterpress), surfaces that were planographic (lithography),
and surfaces that were in intaglio (gravure printing, etching, engraving) (see
Table 1.1). Overlapping and used with these three kinds of inked print media were three varieties of presses (see Table 1.2). All involved pressing in
the sense that the machines in each stage all used some sort of pressure,
whether with two flat surfaces (a typeform and a platen), one flat surface
(typeform) and one curved surface (impression cylinder), or two curved
surfaces (typeform and impression cylinder), to transfer an imprint of ink
from type to paper. Given this broad range of printing technologies, the
Chinese faced a number of options. Contrary to popular belief, the mode of
printing passed to the Chinese was not limited to a single medium. Even

27

28

Gutenbergs Descendants

Table 1.1
Western print media in China, 1700-1931

Media name

First recorded
use for Chineselanguage printing

Relief media (Ch. tuban yinshua)

Cut type
(Ch. diaoke huozi)
1814

First recorded user

Cai Gao, London Missionary

Society (LMS), Malacca
Peter Perring Thoms, East India
Company (EIC), Macao

Cast-type matrices/
movable types
(Ch. zimo/huozi)

(1) 1838
(2) 1845

(1) Samuel Dyer, LMS, Penang

(2) Richard Cole, American
Presbyterian Mission Press
(APMP), Ningbo

Clay stereotype
(Ch. niban)

1845

Richard Cole, APMP, Ningbo

Plaster stereotype
(Ch. shigao)

c. 1860s

J.M.W. Farnham, Qingxin Hall

School, Shanghai

Electrotype
(Ch. diandu tongban)

1860

William Gamble, APMP, Ningbo

Papier-mch stereotype
(Ch. zhixing)

c. 1885-95

Xiuwen yinshuju, Shanghai

Photoengraving
1900
(Ch. zhaoxiang tongziban)

Tushanwan Print Shop, Shanghai

Boxwood/yellow poplar
(Ch. huangyang ban)

1904

Commercial Press, Shanghai

Three-colour
(Ch. sanse ban)

c. 1908-12

Commercial Press, Shanghai

Planographic media (Ch. pingban yinshua)

Stone-based lithography (1) 1832
(1) Qu Yaang, LMS, Canton
(Ch. shiyin)
(2) 1876
(2) Tushanwan, Shanghai
Collotype
c. 1875-85
(Ch. keluo ban, boli ban)
Stone-based
photolithography/
zinc-plate
(Ch. zhaoxing shiyin)

Tushanwan, Shanghai

no later than 1882 Dianshizhai, Shanghai

Stone-based
chromolithography
(Ch. caise shiyin)

1904

Wenming Books, Shanghai

Tinplate
(Ch. makoutie)

1918

Commercial Press, Shanghai

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

Table 1.1

Offset lithography
1921
(Ch. xiangpi ban, jiao ban)

Commercial Press, Shanghai

Facsimile
(Ch. chuanzhen ban)

Commercial Press, Shanghai

1931

Intaglio media (Ch. aoban yinshua)

Copperplate
(1) c. 1700
(Ch. diaoke tongban)
(2) 1885-95

(1) Kangxi emperor, Beijing

(2) Jianghai Customs Printing
Office, Shanghai

Photogravure/
heliogravure
(Ch. yingxie ban)

1923

Commercial Press, Shanghai

Colour photogravure
(Ch. caise yingxie ban)

1925

Commercial Press, Shanghai

from among the media and processes taken to China, the Chinese made
conscious decisions about what they would adopt and reject. Those choices
changed over time as the demands placed on written texts changed.
When letterpress printing and lithography arrived in Shanghai in the 1870s
and 1880s, each technology was influenced by a largely noncommercial,
philanthropic sectarian affiliation. Since early in the century, Western Protestant missionaries had coalesced around relief media and Catholics around
planographic ones. However, the next phase in Western-style printing in
China would not be a noticeably Western, Christian, or philanthropic one
at all but a Chinese, secular, and industrial one that reflected the historical,
cultural, and financial predispositions of Shanghais Chinese printers. Using lithography, which appealed to them for special historical, cultural, and
financial reasons, Shanghais Chinese printers would take the first significant step in undermining, if not totally replacing, Chinese xylographic printing and establishing print capitalism.2
From 1807 to 1876, however, Protestant missionaries and some of their
Chinese converts dominated mechanical printing on the south China coast.
Strikingly, nearly every well-known nineteenth-century Protestant missionary account of China discourses to some extent on printing technologies. A
handful of them also discuss the importance of choosing from among multiple competing technologies. In this way, they anticipate Chinese concerns
while reaching different conclusions. One of the first such discussions of
print technology appeared in 1833 in a missionary journal summarizing
the views of the Reverend Samuel Dyer (1804-43). Revealing both the limits of early Protestant missionaries knowledge of written Chinese, as well as

29

30

Gutenbergs Descendants

Table 1.2
Western printing presses and printing machines in China, 1830-1925
First recorded
use for
Name of press
printing Chinese
First recorded user in China

A. Relief (Ch. tuban) (letterpress, typographic) printing presses and machines

Platen (pingzhuang yinshuaji)
Washington?
(1) 1830-31?
(1) American Board, Canton
(2) 1861
(2) American Methodist Episcopal
Mission (AMEM), Fuzhou
Albion
1833
unknown, Macao and Canton
Columbian
1850-56
American Board, Canton
Self-inking Washington 1878-79
AMEM, Fuzhou
Cylinder printing machines (lunzhuan yinshuaji)
Unknown
1862
APMP, Shanghai
Unknown
1860s,
LMS, Shanghai
before 1867
Harrild & Sons
bed-and-platen
1872
Shenbao, Shanghai
Double royal cylinder
Wharfedale
Ya-er-hua-de
(Walter press?)
Miehle

1895
1906

AMEM, Fuzhou
Hushang shuju, Shanghai

1911
1919

Commercial Press, Shanghai

Commercial Press, Shanghai

Rotary printing machines (lunzhuan yinshuaji)

Walter press
c. 1900
Hushang shuju, Shanghai
Ba-De
(Baensch-Drugulin?) 1914
Xinwen bao, Shanghai
Osaka-Asahi
(Marinoni)
1916
Shenbao, Shanghai
Ai-er-bai-tuo
(Albright?
Heidelberg?)
1922
Commercial Press, Shanghai
Vomag
1925
Shibao, Shanghai

B. Planographic/lithographic (pingban, shiyin) presses and machines

Mitterers star-wheel
(1) 1832
(1) Qu Yaang, LMS, Canton
(2) 1850
(2) APMP, Ningbo
(3) 1876
(3) Tushanwan, Shanghai
Lead-plate
1908
Commercial Press, Shanghai
Four-colour lead-plate c. 1912
British-American Tobacco (BAT),
Shanghai
Harris offset
1915
Commercial Press, Shanghai
Mann two-colour
offset
1922
Commercial Press, Shanghai

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

the primitive state of the missionaries Chinese typography, Dyer wrote that
Chinese metal types [sic] are exceedingly desirable, in order that we may
be able to combine the Chinese character with the European (emphasis
added).3 Combining then still imperfect Chinese type with English words in
the same text would eventually improve compositors ability to correct proofs,
one of the chief advantages of movable type, by making single character
changes possible.
Among these assessments of competing technologies, Walter Henry
Medhurst (1796-1857), who apprenticed to a printer of Gloucester, England, at age fourteen and was running London Missionary Society printing operations in Malacca seven years later in 1817, offered the most
articulate evaluation in a widely distributed 1838 publication.4 Later statements by Protestant missionary printers indicate that Medhursts analysis,
which combined commentary on cost, technology, and missionary linguistic limitations into an argument favouring letterpress, remained paradigmatic among them until the end of the Qing period.
Printing Christian books and tracts for clandestine circulation in China
occupied Medhursts early days in the South China Sea and the Straits of
Malacca. Basing his presentation on his printing experiences among Chinese populations at the British colonies of Malacca and Singapore and the
Dutch one of Batavia (Jakarta), Medhurst compared the costs of the three
different printing options then available (xylography, lithography, and letterpress) for missionary publishers wishing to produce 2,000 copies of a large
book such as a Chinese Bible in octavo. Medhurst concluded that the cost
of xylographic printing would have been 1,900 and that three years would
have been needed to complete the job. Included in the final price were the
costs of hiring nine Chinese blockcutters and five printers and binders; the
blocks, tools, transcription, cutting, paper, ink, and binding were also included in his calculations.5 Lithography, a newly invented technology of
which Medhurst was an atypically enthusiastic pioneer among Protestant
missionaries, would have been significantly cheaper and somewhat faster
than xylography for the same job. The cost for two lithographic presses,
stones, materials, transcription, paper, printing, and binding, along with six
employees, would have totalled 1,262 and taken two years rather than
three. According to Medhursts estimate, printing the same Bible with metal
type would have taken seven workers one year, and the whole price would
have been 1,515.
In the view of Medhurst and other Protestant missionaries, although the
cost benefit and some time advantages seemed to lie with lithography, longterm considerations actually favoured letterpress. Their reasoning is instructive, partly because it became a pattern among Protestant missionaries in

31

32

Gutenbergs Descendants

China. To Medhurst, xylographic blocks would have been limited to a single

run of perhaps 2,000 high-quality copies. With lithography, only the presses
and stones, badly worn, would have remained after printing. Conversely,
with letterpress, the newly invented iron press and a set of punches and
matrices that could have been used to cast more type would have remained
to produce up to fifty more runs.6 Like Medhurst, John C. Lowrie of the
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Canton emphasized the mechanical efficiency and logic of letterpress, writing in 1843 that
We live in an era of metal and steam ... hence, I am strongly in favor of
giving a full and fair trial to our Chinese metal type.7 Lowrie might have
added that Qing prohibitions against Chinese collaboration with the missionaries may have enhanced the value of letterpress, a technology whose
control they may have believed would remain in their own hands.8
Medhursts and Lowries discussions of xylography, lithography, letterpress,
printing stones, and the iron press recall the complexity of the nineteenthcentury Western printing industry. Many of the questions confronting Chinese printers would turn out to resemble those that Medhurst first articulated
in the 1830s regarding technological choices, costs, durability, and even
aesthetics, although, almost inevitably, Chinese answers would differ from
those reached by Westerners. By the 1920s, Chinese were increasingly aware
both of the nineteenth-century renewal of European printing hardware and
of the part that Chinese had played in introducing it to China. In their view,
three key phases relief, planographic, and intaglio in the development of
Western printing media and presses culminated in the options available to
Chinese printers then.9 To understand the blend of old and new technologies brought to China between 1807 and the 1930s and the effects of its
diffusion on a society with its own printing history, we must first understand the Gutenberg revolution itself as well as subsequent changes in printing
technology. The following survey of nineteen forms of printing technology
reveals the complexity of the choices that Chinese made in the course of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Relief Media (Chinese, tuban yinshua)
In the 1930s, Gutenberg was best remembered by Chinese writers on printing history for having developed a means of manufacturing movable, cast,
lead type. Yet three operations were critical to the mechanical duplication
of texts in both the pre-industrial and the industrial ages: type-casting and/
or cutting (commonly called engraving, despite the fact that type was created in relief, not in intaglio), typesetting, and printing. All three operations
were central to the process of adapting Gutenbergs technology with its
later forms to Chinese conditions.

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

Figure 1.1 Jost Ammans Casting Movable

Type, 1568.
Source: Illustration by Amman (Frankfurt, 1568),
reprinted from Yiwen yinshua yuekan/The Graphic
Printer (Shanghai) 2, 3 (1939): 39.

Influenced both by Western scholarly views of the day and by actual

printing practices, Chinese assumed Gutenbergs method of casting type to
have used a mould and a matrix (see Figure 1.1).10 Gutenbergs process involved first cutting a letter in relief onto a hard steel punch, then used to
create a matrix (a reversed intaglio version of the letter) in a softer metal,
probably copper.11 The concepts of both punch and matrix predated Gutenberg. The matrix formed the bottom of a casting mould, which is what
Gutenberg actually created, into which a molten lead alloy was poured to
cast shanks of metal of a standardized height.12 Once the type cooled, it had
a uniform height (with a letter in relief at one end) but was of variable
breadth (depending on the width of the letter).
Separate pieces of type could then be used to make up words, lines, and
paragraphs, on up to half-pages. Because words in European languages differ in length, line ends were made even, or justified, using blanks. Since
type was of a standard height, it could be placed in a galley, which was
locked into a frame, or chase, to produce a rigid printing surface, the form.
Using Gutenbergs casting mould and a tiny beaker of molten tin and lead,
one worker could cast about 4,000 pieces of Roman alphabet type in a tenhour day.13 Hand-cast movable metal type was soon supplemented with type

33

34

Gutenbergs Descendants

stamped out using dies. These two kinds of type became the chief printing
medium for the centuries between 1450 and 1800.14
Using both type-casting and type-cutting techniques that dated from
Gutenbergs era, Europeans sought to reproduce Chinese texts in print as
early as the sixteenth century.15 The letterpress printing of Chinese, a nonalphabetic language with some 40,000 characters,16 required the creation of
standard-size, indivisible logotype (word type), rather than mere letters
used to make up words, a requirement that stymied early foreign efforts.
Although the Chinese had intermittently cast movable type using various
metals since the fourteenth century, even they did not do so consistently
prior to the arrival of Europeans in the nineteenth century.17 Furthermore,
regardless of whether a Chinese character had few or many strokes, all characters had to be the same size on the printed page to look acceptable to
Chinese readers.
Four centuries of European type-founding notwithstanding, European
missionaries in Asia initially cut their Chinese fonts. Type-casting of Chinese
characters using engraved dies and Gutenberg-style moulds began in 1814
but was not fully successful until 1838. Depending on what needed to be
printed, missionary printers determined that they could narrow the number of typefaces down from the full range of 40,000 to between 4,700 and
6,600.18 Even this reduced number was a significant obstacle to early efforts
to produce fonts of cast type, however.
One successful, but still only partial, font of Chinese characters was cut
between 1805 and 1810 by Baptist missionaries at Serampore in Bengal;
they first used it to print a New Testament. The same basic font (see Figure
1.2) was reused to print Elements of Chinese Grammar (1814), written by the
Baptist missionary Dr. Joshua Marshman (1768-1837). The author told his
readers not only about the technology used but also something of its convenience, its aesthetic, and the expenses involved in its creation: The Chinese characters in this work are printed from Metal Types [which], when
brought to perfection, will essentially promote the cause of Chinese literature, as well as the dissemination of the Holy Scriptures; as while they add
greatly to the legibility if not to the beauty of the Chinese characters, their
being moveable enables us to print ... any Chinese work whatever, at an expense too by no means immoderate.19
Reflected in Marshmans comments is the view that the aesthetics of his
printed Chinese characters had been sacrificed for the convenience of being
able to print English and Chinese side-by-side. Secondly, at least by implication, Marshman suggests that metal type allows the printer to correct
individual errors, albeit at great overall expense.20 Both capacities were lacking from the manufacture of wooden blocks, a Chinese technology with

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

Figure 1.2 On the [Chinese] Characters, 1814.

Source: Joshua Marshman, Elements of Chinese Grammar (Serampore: [Baptist]
Mission Press, 1814), 64.

which Marshman was familiar. A glimpse at his text reveals the slashed,
choppy, unbalanced appearance of the Chinese characters, an appearance
typical of early on-site nineteenth-century European attempts to print Chinese.21 Nonetheless, Marshman was one of the first Westerners to point out
that the aesthetics of the text were important to Chinese readers.
Marshmans cut font was followed in 1814 by another partial cut font
created in Malacca, Britains Malayan colony that predated the founding of
Singapore (1819). In Western accounts of Chinese-language printing with
metal type, Englishman Dr. Robert Morrison (1782-1834) and Scotsman
Dr. William Milne (1794-1821) are typically given credit for the creation of
this second partial font. Morrison and Milne were members of the London
Missionary Society, an interdenominational organization formed in London in 1796. Morrison had arrived in Macao in 1807 and worked for the

35

36

Gutenbergs Descendants

East India Company (EIC) as a translator in Canton until 1815. Milne

arrived in Macao in 1813. He then proceeded to Canton, where he worked
briefly with Morrison before leaving to missionize the Chinese communities in Java and Malaya.
In 1818, Morrison and Milne established the London Mission Press, affiliated with Malaccas Anglo-Chinese College,22 of which Milne became
principal. Clearly, part of their objective was to circumvent Qing, Catholic,
and even EIC restrictions on Protestant printing in Macao. The following
year, they finished printing their Chinese New Testament, again using handcut type.23 In 1824, a complete Chinese Bible was issued at Malacca. The
London Mission Press would remain in the Straits, distant from China, for
another two-and-a-half decades, until settlements following the Opium War
permanently opened Canton to it and foreign merchants.
Writing in 1931, Commercial Press printer He Shengnai (active 1920s1930s) corrected Western accounts of the beginning of this printing operation to emphasize that the Malacca font was probably cut by the Chinese
Christian convert Cai Gao (1787?-1818).24 He did concede that Cai was
likely supervised by Morrison and Milne. The lack of a foundry at Malacca
is what necessitated painstaking cutting of the characters (in reverse).25 The
characters were cut using much the same technique as woodblock cutting, a
process with which Cai may have been familiar. After being outlined on
transparent paper, the reversed characters were drawn on type blanks, and
then unnecessary metal was cut and filed away.
Although religious literature intended to be smuggled into China had to
be printed at Malacca, Morrison did manage to print his famous Dictionary
of the Chinese Language at Macao with assistance from the EIC, his onetime
employer.26 Although the EIC trading monopoly feared that religious publications would destabilize its relationship with the Chinese empire, it found
practical commercial value in the dictionary and supported the project. In
1814, an EIC printer-translator named Peter Perring Thoms (active 181451) brought movable type, blanks, and other essentials from London to
Macao at the trading companys expense to assist in printing the Morrison
dictionary.27 The dictionary combined the largest number to date of Chinese characters with extensive English text. Employing Chinese assistants,
Thoms arranged to cut two partial Chinese fonts using a tin alloy. The first
part of the dictionary was printed in 1815, 1822, and 1823, and the second
and third parts appeared in 1820 and 1822, all on Chinese paper.28
In the Advertisement to the first part of the dictionary, written when
Morrison, then at Canton, was separated by 140 kilometres from Thoms in
Macao, Morrison refers to the challenges of producing such a work under
those conditions. Not only did he have to work in China, distant from

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

Western printing supplies, but even those sent to him from England were in
peril: The First [part] appears under disadvantages, from the whole of the
Italic Types having been stolen before they were landed from the Ship which
conveyed them from England.29 Furthermore, says Morrison, Thoms had
had to work largely alone, serving as compositor, pressman, reader, and corrector, aided only by Natives who understood not the English language.30
Later, in the Introduction to the same volume, Morrison discusses the
influences, both intellectual and orthographic, on his dictionary. Stating
that Letters and the Press constitute a mighty engine,31 he notes that his
dictionary borrows heavily in arrangement from the Kangxi Dictionary (1716),
using its system of 214 radicals to organize the entries in the first part. After
criticizing tienne Fourmonts (1683-1745) Linguae Sinicae grammatica (1742)
for its frequent erroneous use of printed characters, Morrison praises C.L.J.
de Guigness 1813 Paris-published Chinese dictionary printed from the
manuscripts of Catholic missionaries, a dictionary that he calls the most
useful book, on Chinese, yet Printed in Europe.32
In spite of the virtues of that work, avers Morrison, the French dictionary
was marked by severe limitations that his own dictionary surmounts. For
example, the French dictionary featured only 13,316 main character entries, he says, and the examples (i.e., binomes and phrases) did not include Chinese characters. By implication, the limitations were typographic;
printing Chinese in the examples would have required the creation of a
second font. In the case of Morrisons dictionary, this material defect is
addressed: two fonts were used, a large main entry and a smaller font with
examples (see Figures 1.3 and 1.4).33 All told, the number of entries, following the example of the Kangxi Dictionary, is about 40,000.34
Like Marshman, Morrison acknowledges that the aesthetic appearance of
the Chinese character on the printed page is of utmost importance. For
Morrison, the reason for stressing aesthetics is tied to the way that the
character works on the mind of the reader: To convey ideas to the mind, by
the eye, the Chinese Language answers all the purposes of a written medium, as well as the Alphabetic system of the West, and perhaps in some
respects, better ... The Character ... is considered beautiful and impressive.
The Chinese fine writing ... darts upon the mind like a vivid flash; a force
and a beauty, of which Alphabetic Language is incapable.35 Given that the
character itself is acknowledged to be a thing of great potential beauty,
Morrison stresses the importance of producing type that would flatter it.
After briefly tracing the evolution of the various forms of writing characters, he notes that, about 300 CE, the so-called Kaishu (plain written hand)
form of the character developed. Eventually, says Morrison, it was joined by
the Song character, which derived its name from the Song dynasty.36

37

38

Gutenbergs Descendants

In the Preface to the second part of his dictionary, printed in 1819 with
more recently created fonts, Morrison repeats the view that the aesthetics
of the font can enhance or detract from the appeal of a printed Chinese
book. Indeed, blame for the ugliness of the font used in this part, Morrison
says, can be laid at the foot of misguided policies emanating from the Manchu

Figure 1.3 Morrisons Entries for Shang and He, 1815.

Source: Robert Morrison, Dictionary of the Chinese Language (Macao: East India Company Press,
1815), 1: 1, 16, 305.

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

court in Beijing, which prohibited Chinese assistance in the production of

Western-printed texts:
The Chinese Letters in this part of the Dictionary, are confessedly deficient in
elegance of form. The large ones in the first Part of the Dictionary, are in

Figure 1.4 Morrisons Entries for E, 1819.

Source: Robert Morrison, Dictionary of the Chinese Language (Macao: East India Company Press,
1819), 2: 1, 142.

39

40

Gutenbergs Descendants

general, beautifully written; but those in this volume, though correct, are sometimes rather clumsy. The difference was occasioned by an Act of the Chinese
Government; it said, You may learn our language if you can, but we will
afford you no facilities; our subjects shall not cut letters for you. In consequence of this decision, it became necessary for an English Printer [Thoms]
to write the Characters, and to employ Portuguese subjects to cut them. And
for some time, neither the Writer, Printer, nor Type Cutters, had any native
assistance.37

Over the next forty years at Macao, Thomss numerous assistants cut
more than 200,000 characters,38 with over 20,000 compound words, in two
font sizes. In addition to the multivolume Morrison dictionary, Thoms and
his Chinese workers printed two small dictionaries and twenty bilingual
books. Sadly, during the chaos that ensued in Canton at the start of the
British-provoked Arrow War in 1856, the hand-cut Morrison (or, more accurately, Thoms) font was lost.39 Eventually, one missionary publication,
after concluding that the Morrison fonts of 200,000 type, with each
character ... carved on the face of the block [or slug], were among the
most costly fonts of type ever made,40 hinted at the reason cost why
casting of Chinese type began to occupy the concerns of missionary printers who could not draw on the resources of the EIC to have type cut for
them. Although Morrisons characters cut in the Song face were said to be
stiff, the face came to be widely used in printing missionary books (see
Figures 1.3 and 1.4, which show the main entries in the Kaishu form and
the examples in the Song form, albeit with qualitative differences between
those cut by Chinese [Figure 1.3] and those done by Portuguese [Figure
1.4] assistants; both are clearly great improvements on Marshmans font).41
Thoms was also the first to create Chinese-type moulds of the sort that
Gutenberg had pioneered for European printing. First used around 1815 by
Marshman, Thomss own moulds did not catch on with a wider public and
did not spread into China.42 Like the original cut Serampore and Malacca
fonts, Thomss new East India font, in the 1833 words of a missionary
writer, is not only inelegant, but possess[es] an air so foreign, that it is by no
means advisable to print the Scriptures and tracts with them, while we can
obtain woodenblocks [sic]; for these latter far surpass anything we have yet
seen printed with metal, either at Macao, Malacca, or Serampore.43
In 1827, Samuel Dyer, the nonprinter who had arrived at the London
Mission on Penang Island the year before, began research into producing a
font of Chinese type more cheaply than Thomss Morrison and EIC fonts.
Dyer immediately undertook tests with stereotyping (Chinese, qianban), a
major alternative to printing with individual type. Stereotyping was then

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

about a century old.44 To produce individual type after creating plaster moulds
and lead-alloy plates, Dyer cut out small squares from the plates, a method
that produced coarse type that would last only five or six years before it had
to be remade.45
Eventually, in 1838, Dyer made Chinese type the Gutenberg way, by casting. Supervising Chinese workmen cutting steel Chinese type punches (in
relief) for use with softer matrices, Dyer developed punch fonts that sold
for 400, not cheap but still a tenth of what he had once estimated they
would cost.46 At the time of his death in 1843, 1,845 punches, out of the
needed 4,700 to 6,600, had been completed.47 Combined with a small
casting-furnace, the punches allowed isolated missionary stations to begin
casting their own Chinese-character type. For missionary printers, Dyers
success in this latter technique settled the issue of producing Chinese fonts
until the late 1850s. Dyers Penang font, remade by Richard Cole in Hong
Kong in 1851, remained the standard for Chinese printing until it was replaced by William Gambles in 1859, created by a totally new process.48
Meanwhile, conditions for missionary printing and publishing within Chinese territory improved following the Opium War. In the early 1840s, Scottish missionary and sinologist-to-be James Legge (1815-97) relocated the
London Mission Press (by then called Mohai shuguan in Chinese) from
Malacca to Hong Kong, newly acquired by Britain in the wake of the Treaty
of Nanjing.49 In 1846, Dyers punches arrived in Hong Kong.50 Thereafter,
the London Mission Press, under Legges supervision, but thanks also to
Richard Cole,51 an Indianapolis type maker, established itself as the centre
of Protestant publishing efforts in East Asia.
In 1847, Cole was engaged to superintend a new type-foundry and printing business at the London Mission on Hong Kong island. Cole completed
two sets of small type matrices, numbering 4,700 each, in 1851. Known as
the Hong Kong font, it involved recutting many of Dyers Penang punches.
Each set included enough characters to be useful for printing not only religious materials but also some ordinary Chinese-language works.52 According to the missionary who excitedly announced the creation of the font,
For symmetry of form and beauty of style, these two fonts exceed any type
yet made by either Chinese or foreigner.53 Cole left for California in 1852
and was replaced as superintendent by Huang Sheng (Huang Pingfu, also
Wong Shing [active 1848-74]).54 In 1873, Beijings Tongwenguan, the interpreters school (directed by another Indiana-bred missionary, W.A.P.
Martin [1827-1916]) affiliated with the Zongli Yamen, Chinas new foreign
affairs bureau, began to use Coles Hong Kong font.
In addition to their Hong Kong operation, the London Missionary group
opened a second publishing house on Shandong Road in Shanghai in 1843

41

42

Gutenbergs Descendants

or 1844.55 Run at first by Walter Henry Medhurst, in 1847 operation of the

Shanghai mission press passed to Alexander Wylie (1815-87).56 Wylie remained in charge until 1860. The Shanghai branch closed around 1864, by
which time all of its printing had been passed over to the American Presbyterian Mission Press.57 The Hong Kong press was sold in 1873 to Superintendent Huang Sheng and Wang Tao (1828-97), the Shanghai branchs
Chinese editor, for Mexican $10,000.58
Previously, in 1830, with the London Mission Press still based in Malacca, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, a Congregationalist missionary organization formed at Andover Seminary in 1810,
had boldly ignited renewed enthusiasm for founding a Western-style printing establishment inside China itself. American Board missionary Elijah
Coleman Bridgman (1801-61) had written home from China in 1830, arguing that a printing press would enhance the goals of a mission in Canton.59
Within a year, a printing press, most likely a Washington (see Table 1.2A),
had been sent to Canton from the United States, and with it the American
Congregationalists had established the first, if illegal, modern, nonprofit,
Western-style printing/publishing house inside China. In 1833, this early
Washington press had been joined by an Albion.60
Used initially by Bridgman to issue the Chinese Repository, a missionary
journal, in 1833 the American Board presses had been taken over by Dr. S.
Wells Williams (1814-84), a trained printer. Williams ran the presses until
1856 when, along with Thomss type, they were destroyed by fire. Initially,
all printing was done in English, partly because of uncertainty about whether
Westerners would be able to evade restrictions on printing in Chinese within
China. Just as important, however, were technical considerations. According to a report issued in 1879, At that time [early 1830s] Chinese metallic
types had not been provided except by the laborious and expensive process
of cutting. There was no foundry provided with the requisite matrices from
which a font of type could be secured (emphasis added).61
In 1833, having been invited by a group of New Yorkers to send a Chinese text for experimental stereotyping, Cantons American Board missionaries decided to forward a Chinese translation of Sermon on the Mount.
Chinese woodblocks cut with the text were sent to Boston, where they were
stereotyped and then used to issue the sermon in tract form.62 The first
Chinese work to be printed in the United States, the tracts were then sent
back to Canton for distribution. Stereotypes ensured greater consistency,
reliability, and quantity, and avoided the problem of wear on the wooden
blocks. Aside from the fact that the woodblocks might not have withstood
the pressure of iron Western printing presses, however, one should not lose

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

sight of the fact that both woodblocks and stereotypes were relief media
that duplicated entire pages.63
Although the New York sponsors of the project concluded that stereotyping was the ideal alternative to the as-yet unresolved challenge of creating serviceable Chinese type, in the end the American missionaries in Canton
decided that stereotyping was not the solution to their needs. Great efforts
were made to develop a full range of metallic type, including purchasing
them from Penang, but the American Board Mission Press turned increasingly to readily available Chinese technology. Indeed, the Canton operation
continued printing Chinese-language religious tracts using woodblocks until 1854, two years before it closed.64
In 1844, the dominance of Hong Kongs London Mission Press was challenged by the American Presbyterian Mission Press (Meihua shuguan, hereafter APMP). 65 Founded at Macao by Richard Cole, the American
Presbyterians presses were operated by three Chinese workmen. All of the
type came from Paris, based on a new composite font created by M. Marcellin
LeGrand, one of the most expert type founders in France.66 Between 1834
and 1836, under the patronage of the Paris-based Socit Asiatique, Marcellin
LeGrand had developed a new system of Chinese matrices by reducing the
total number needed to print the 214 Kangxi radicals and another 1,100
common characters.67 These 1,314 characters could then be combined to
make compound characters. Marcellin LeGrands matrix font, which eventually reached 3,000, was cut by Chinese students in Paris and produced a
smaller imprint than Dyers. When combined, however, Marcellin LeGrands
font could make a total of 22,741 characters.68
Under the conditions of the Treaty of Wangxia (Americas first unequal
treaty with China, it was signed 3 July 1844), Americans shared in the
privileges of the Treaty of Nanjing (1842) won by the British. Losing little
time in asserting those rights, in 1844 or 1845, Cole moved the APMP and
its Paris font to Ningbo. There five Chinese workmen were engaged to print
mostly religious tracts, now reluctantly tolerated by the Qing government.69
In this way, the APMP became the third foreign, the second American, and
the first legal movable-type Christian publishing house to open in China.
From the moment the APMP arrived in Ningbo, efforts were made to
expand its Chinese font.70 On-site clay stereotyping (niban) was introduced
to the Chinese mainland to augment the APMP type supply.71 Also, a new
press, electrotyping equipment, and a type-casting furnace arrived in 1846,
foreshadowing the end of cut type. The same year, a Qing civil official in
Ningbo requested that the APMP print for him an abridged Chinese history, so impressed was he by the quality of the Chinese printing being done

43

44

Gutenbergs Descendants

at the missionary press. The APMP refused to print the officials book because doing so would have compromised its noncommercial self-image.72
Despite these early advances, prior to 1858, the Ningbo press apparently
did not make rapid strides. One matter of great concern to its directors was
the publishing houses inability to attract a trained Western printer. Before
1858, all metal Chinese fonts in use in East Asia, except Dyers 1843 Penang
font and Coles 1851 Hong Kong font,73 had been produced by cutting.
Indeed, lack of foundries for casting type fonts as well as a shortage of
professional printers in the missionary ranks continued to hamper the development of Western-style printing in China until the late 1850s. Until
the end of their days in China, Western printers also remained dependent
on imported materials and presses. Eventually, they passed this dependency
on to early Chinese printers.
Meanwhile, in the early 1850s, as Catholics also returned to mainland
China in the wake of the Opium War, French Jesuits opened a woodblock
printing shop at their new orphanage in Caijiawan, near Shanghai.74 After
losing a priest to the Taiping army, which attacked Caijiawan in August
1860, the Jesuits moved first to Dongjiadu near the wall of the native city.
In 1864, they established a second orphanage for 342 children at Tushanwan,
Xujiahui (Sikkawei/Zikawei), in what is now a southwestern district of
metropolitan Shanghai. To support their missionary efforts and to teach
their charges a useful livelihood, the Catholics opened a print shop there,
too. By 1869, the Tushanwan orphanage had added a woodblock printing
shop,75 and in 1874 the Jesuits introduced metal type to their printing facilities there.76 Exactly what method they used to create the type is not clear,
but it seems likely that they may have purchased machines and type from
Shanghais other printing shops as well as a set of Marcellin LeGrands font
from Paris.77 Among their publications were linguistic, scientific, and educational works, along with Shanghais third newspaper.78
The influence of Tushanwans Catholic orphanage notwithstanding, British and American Protestants continued to be the main source of Western
letterpress technology and technique in nineteenth-century China. By 1870,
the plaster (shigao) stereotype plate had been introduced to Shanghai thanks
to the efforts of American Presbyterian J.M.W. Farnham (1829-1917).
Farnham was the director of Shanghais Qingxin Hall (Qingxintang) school,
located outside the Great Southern Gate (Da Nanmen) of Shanghais
preconcession Chinese city (Nanshi).79 Farnham seems to have modified
the plaster technique, first cutting intaglio characters or illustrations directly into a flat piece of plaster. This negative intaglio mould was then used
to make a positive relief plate that could be used on a standard printing press.
At about the same time, a Mr. Liu, working at the Jiangnan Arsenals

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

Translation Bureau, located within walking distance of the Qingxin school,

created printworthy illustrations for the Arsenals scientific translations using the same technique.80
In Shanghai, despite the easy availability of papier-mch (zhixing), paper
moulds (flong), another relief technique, were not used until the midGuangxu era (i.e., 1885-95). A Japanese firm, with the Chinese name Xiuwen
yinshuju, then adopted the practice.81 In 1921, the Commercial Press bought
a faster, high-pressure version of the papier-mch mould technology. It soon
spread from the book publisher to the newspapers.82
In 1846, says He Shengnai,83 a newer form of printing plate known as
electrotype (diandu tongban) was developed in Europe as an alternative to
stereotyping. Electrotypes were created by making a wax mould of the typeform; after the mould was separated from the form, copper or nickel was
precipitated onto the inside of the mould. The new copper or nickel matrix
was separated from the wax and given a type-metal backing.84 Electrotypes
produced a finer imprint, for a longer period of time, than did stereotypes,
which is why they appealed to book printers. They could also produce the
halftone pictures and images that stereotypes could not.85
Although the APMP had made trials with electrotypes as early as 1846,
when it was still an experimental technology, success came only in 1860,
first at Ningbo and, later that year, in Shanghai.86 In October 1858, William
Gamble (1830-86), an Irish Presbyterian immigrant who had trained in
publishing houses in Philadelphia and New York,87 arrived in Ningbo. He
brought the APMP the equipment and know-how finally to create Chinese
typefaces by means of electrotyping. Gamble modified the new electrotyping
process to make type matrices and to speed up Chinese-language printing.
In so doing, he superseded Dyers, Coles, and Marcellin LeGrands casting
methods, all of which depended, as we have seen, on processes dating back
to Gutenberg.
Gambles electrotyping required both a calligrapher to draw the desired
character on boxwood (a.k.a. yellow poplar, hence huangyang ban)88 and a
type cutter to execute the design. The character was then imprinted on a
plastic matrix that was in turn electrotyped.89 When completed, the characters were more finished and possessed more of the caligraphic [sic] excellence prized by the Chinese than could be obtained by steel punches,90
relates one European account from 1895. Nonetheless, as we will see below,
within a few years of this statement, Chinese printers would start searching
for even more calligraphic alternatives to Gambles font.
News of Gambles successful new Chinese matrices spread quickly, leading unnamed Ningbo-area Chinese printers to approach the Presbyterian
press with the intention of purchasing sets for their own use. Their purchase

45

46

Gutenbergs Descendants

implies that the Chinese intended to use the matrices with Western printing presses, although it is also conceivable that they set them up in a chase
and printed the traditional Chinese way that is, with Chinese ink and a
changshua or a cazi. In 1875, however, discussing a type-making process similar
to that practised by Gamble, and with a knowledge of printing that now
reflected just how far the technology had come since Lowries 1843 comment about it involving only metal and steam, the Shanghai-Hong Kong
publisher Wang Tao pointed out that the making of type and plates ... with
chemistry [is] really the most modern of new methods.91

Figure 1.5 Western-created mid-nineteenth-century Chinese fonts.

Source: S. Wells Williams, Movable Type for Printing Chinese, Chinese Recorder 6 (1875): 30.

Figure 1.6 Gambles APMP type fonts.

Source: Gilbert McIntosh, The Mission Press in China
(Shanghai: APMP, 1895), 27.

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

Gambles method considerably reduced the time previously spent to produce type. Type size also became more easily varied, allowing Gamble to make
seven different styles of typeface. His type is known both as Song type,
after the book-printing style thought to have been developed in the Song
dynasty, and as Meihua type, after the APMPs Chinese name. Eventually, Gamble electrotyped Double Pica, Small Double Pica, Small Pica, Brevier,
Two-Line Brevier, Three-Line Diamond, and Small Ruby fonts,92 which the
press then began to sell independently of Gambles matrices (see Figures
1.5, 1.6, and 1.7).
Gambles second innovation at Ningbo took a year-and-a-half of experimentation and was completed in 1860. Deciding that compositors, using
the type cases developed thirty years before in Malacca, took an excessive
amount of time to set up a page of type, Gamble redesigned the type racks

Figure 1.7 APMP supplemental type fonts.

Source: Gilbert McIntosh, The Mission Press in China
(Shanghai: APMP, 1895), 28.

47

48

Gutenbergs Descendants

Figure 1.8 Gambles type case arrangement, Shanghai, 1895.

Source: Gilbert McIntosh, The Mission Press in China (Shanghai: APMP, 1895), opposite 20.

used in printing Chinese (see Figure 1.8). Multiple type fonts totalling about
160,000 characters were rearranged according to the radicals used in the
Kangxi Dictionary93 and placed into eighty-eight reduced-size type cases.
Twenty-four cases of frequently used characters were arranged on a rack in
front of the typesetter, with another sixty-four cases placed on racks to his
sides, the whole arrangement making up the shape of the letter U. As a result,
a compositors work could be accomplished in a third of the original time.94
By 1879, Gambles type display was the only kind in use in Chinese or foreign
printing firms95 and remained so until well into the twentieth century, when
it was replaced by two new arrangements, including the unitary long rack
(tongchang jia; see Figure 1.9), both introduced at the Commercial Press.96
In December 1860, after the Taiping rebels drove Chinese woodblock
publishers and others out of Suzhou and surrounding areas and into Shanghai, Gamble closed down the Ningbo publishing house. By then, Shanghai
had already displaced Ningbo as the leading Western entrept. In Ningbo,
moreover, it had become increasingly difficult to obtain supplies from
abroad.97 Likewise, the shipping of completed publications out of the city,
which does not provide ready access to inland China, had also become difficult.98 Over a three-week period, the APMP, its five presses, its electrotyping equipment, its fonts, and all of its Chinese workmen relocated to North
Sichuan Road, Shanghai. At this point, the publishing firm was printing
eleven million pages per year.99 The demand for English-language printing
rose rapidly after the Presbyterians arrived in Shanghai, and three Chinese
boys from a mission school, most likely Farnhams Qingxin Hall, were soon
apprenticed to provide the firm with a new generation of trained printers.

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

Figure 1.9 Unitary long type rack, Shanghai, c. 1905.

Source: Yiwen yinshua yuekan/The Graphic Printer (Shanghai) 1, 7 (1937): 25.

Between 1862 and 1875, the APMP moved to larger Shanghai quarters
and increased its output considerably. By the end of 1876, matrices had
been created to cast fonts in five sizes of Chinese type, five varieties of
Japanese, one Manchu, and two English, while a [font] of music type was
imported.100 Fonts were supplied steadily to the Shanghai daotai (circuit
intendant), the American Board Press (now reopened in Beijing), the I.M.
Customs Statistical Department, as well as several Chinese printing firms,101
all of which must have found, like the Ningbo official back in 1846, that
Western processes yielded finer, easier-to-read results than xylography, even
if the fonts were not yet all they would become under Chinese leadership in
the early twentieth century.102
In 1869, electrotyper William Gamble resigned from the APMP and was
replaced by several directors in succession.103 During his tenure from 1871
to 1876, J.L. Mateer supervised the firms further expansion into permanent quarters. When he resigned to return to the United States, Mateer left
the APMP with a large, new, three-storey edifice (see Figure 1.10) at 18
Beijing Road, Shanghai. On the premises were a foundry, a bindery, and a
library. In the rear could be found lodgings for the printers as well as the
firms chapel.104
When Mateer left, the Reverend W.S. Holt was named director of the
APMP. That year the missionary publishing firm had eight hand presses in
use, operated by sixty to eighty Chinese workmen.105 Three years later the

49

50

Gutenbergs Descendants

Figure 1.10 American Presbyterian Mission Press, 18 Beijing Road, Shanghai, 1895.
Source: Gilbert McIntosh, The Mission Press in China (Shanghai: APMP, 1895), frontispiece.

firms inventory revealed one hundred fonts of metal type, including ten of
Chinese, nine of Japanese, and one of Manchu.106 The firm had also built a
large business selling type (see Figure 1.11); the APMP disseminated
Gambles typefaces widely, selling them to Shanghai newspaper offices, including Shenbao (Shanghai journal, founded 1872), to the Zongli Yamen,
and finally to Japan, England, and France.107 China was now exporting type
to the world.
Just as the lack of a type-foundry had slowed the growth of the American
Board Press in Canton in the 1840s, and just as the lack of a professional
printer had slowed expansion of Ningbos APMP until the arrival of William Gamble in 1858, Holts operation of the APMP at Shanghai was hampered by a shortage of skilled foundry workers. Despite its expansion and
the publishers apparent successes, in 1879 Holt noted that the APMP is
now working up to its full capacity in all departments except the foundry.108
The shortage of needed foundry workers impeded the further expansion of
the publishing work of the firm, suggesting that, by the late nineteenth
century, the cultural work of publishing and the industrial manufacturing
processes involved in printing were inseparable. Holt was neither the first
nor the last China printer to reach this conclusion.109
Holt also stated that the APMP assisted printing offices in Beijing, Suzhou,
Ningbo, Canton, and Shanghai to secure presses and printing material from

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

abroad. Just as this dependence on imported machinery had limited the

operations of Malaccas, Hong Kongs, and Shanghais London Mission Press,
of Cantons American Board Press, and of the APMP in Ningbo and Shanghai, so too foreign dependency would prove debilitating to the Chinese
letterpress industry until the early twentieth century. At that point, however, Chinese foundry workers would have mastered the difficult electrotyping techniques pioneered by William Gamble to develop type matrices.
More important, they would have also learned to duplicate many Western
printing presses.
The APMP would have a major indirect impact on Chinas modern printing industry in the mid-1890s. Then the Presbyterian publisher would hire

Figure 1.11 Advertisement for the American

Presbyterian Mission Press and Type-Casting
Establishment, Shanghai, 1875.
Source: Chinese Recorder 6 (1875): back cover.

51

52

Gutenbergs Descendants

Xia Ruifang (1872-1914) and the two Bao brothers, all of whom were graduates of Farnhams Qingxin Hall Presbyterian missionary school. At Qingxin
Hall, the three men had learned the major elements of the Western-style
printers trade. At the APMP, they joined the largest (now with 126 employees, 116 of them directly involved in printing and binding) self-supporting,
all-purpose missionary printing-publishing operation in China. After perfecting their skills and watching how the APMP conducted what was by
then an all-purpose commercial publishing operation, the three would leave
the APMP to found the Commercial Press in 1897. Eventually, they also
took one of the APMPs Chinese managers with them.110
By the end of the nineteenth century, nineteen other lead-type printing
enterprises would join the missionary publishers and the Commercial Press
in Shanghai.111 Among them were both Western- and Chinese-owned firms,
most of them commercial in orientation. Along with Shanghais Britishowned, English-language North China Herald and Chinese-language Shenbao
newspapers, well-known lead-type firms were Shenbaos subsidiary Shenchang
shushi and Tushujicheng shuju, the Arsenals print shop, the Guangbaisong
zhai (founded by Xu Run [1838-1911], the famous Cantonese compradore,
around 1898; it will be discussed further in Chapter 2), and Xu Shigengs
Luyin shanfang. Wang Licai, a former itinerant bookseller in Nanjing and
Kaifeng, both locales where he had failed the civil service examinations, and
Xia Songlai (Qingyi) founded the late Qing firm Kaiming shudian as a leadtype printing house in Shanghai.112 Feng Jingru, a follower of Sun Yat-sen
(1866-1925), and He Chengyi, a disciple of Liang Qichao (1873-1929),
founded Guangzhi shuju. Guangzhi, with a branch in Beijings Liulichang,
was in operation for over three decades.
Other lead-type firms from late Qing and early Republican Shanghai were
the Zuoxinshe, started by Sun Yat-sens anti-Qing Xingzhonghui (Revive
China Society); Zhongguo tushu gongsi (Chinese Library Company); Guoxue
fulunshe; and Shenzhou guoguangshe.113 All these other operations notwithstanding, by the Republican era, the lead-type trade would come to be dominated by the three legs of the tripod (sanjia dingli) that is, the three
leading comprehensive publishers: the Commercial Press (founded in 1897),
Zhonghua Books (Zhonghua shuju, also Chung Hwa, 1912), and World
Books (Shijie shuju, 1921).114
Mechanical Type-Casting
Type-casting was the necessary first step in letterpress printing. Manual
type-casting was also the phase on which Gutenberg left his particularly
large mark. In the division of printing labour, however, composition, or
typesetting, was closely related to type-casting. Typesetting by hand was a

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

glacially slow process. Moreover, it could frequently be held up by manual

type-casting. With the advent of steam-powered printing at the London
Times in 1814, the combination of manual type-casting and manual typesetting began to create a critical bottleneck in the printing and publishing
business.115 Nonetheless, it would be seven decades before casting and composition were combined into one mechanical process, bringing both into
line with rapid power-driven printing presses.116 The solution to this twopart problem fell to Ottmar Mergenthaler (1854-99), another of the many
Germans who figure in the long history of printing.
Until the 1830s, alphabetical type was cast chiefly by hand. In 1838, a
New Yorker patented the first functioning type-casting machine (zhuzi ji).117
The type-caster that William Gamble brought to China in 1858 was almost
certainly a version of it. At that time, hand-casting of Chinese type was still
achingly slow; a good worker could probably produce no more than ten Chinese characters an hour, resulting, in the course of a ten-hour workday, in
about the same number of characters that a woodblock cutter could produce
in a day.118 However, Gamble soon adapted his type-caster for making Chinese type. Over the years, Chinese printers, using hand- or foot-powered
casting machines, would boost their rate to 700 or 800 characters an hour,
modifying the original technology based on Chinese matrices and adding a
degree of speed to the process that could not be matched by woodblock
cutters. By 1895, sixteen years after Holt began selling Gambles type, the
APMP added missionary presses in Beijing, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Korea, as
well as the German Imperial Printing Press in Berlin, to its growing list of
clients,119 presumably using Gambles type-caster to supply them.
In 1913, the Commercial Press started to use Thompson automatic casters (tangmusheng zidong chouzi ji), which could spit out more than 15,000
Chinese characters a day. The publishers machine shop also began to replicate the Thompsons. After witnessing the publishers success with the automatic casters, more and more of Chinas lead-type printers began to buy
supplies from the Commercial Press. Various new Commercial Press fonts
gradually eliminated the leading nineteenth-century missionary fonts (Coles
Hong Kong and Gambles Song/Meihua). Although Gambles font in particular was useful and historically momentous, many educated Chinese,
having long familiarity with and appreciation of calligraphy, thought it unappealing. Between 1908 and 1921, Chinese typographers, led by the Commercial Press, searched widely for alternatives to the Hong Kong and Song/
Meihua fonts. By the mid-1920s, four main styles (see Figure 1.12), all
regarded by Chinese as aesthetically superior to the Western-created fonts,
had come to dominate Chinese-language printing. Of the four, Zhengkai and
an early version of Cu ti were developed by Commercial Press typographers

53

54

Gutenbergs Descendants

Figure 1.12 Major Republican Chinese fonts.

Source: Based on Wu Tiesheng and Zhu Shengyu, Guanggao
he xiandai yinshua shu, Yiwen yinshua yuekan/The Graphic
Printer 2, 6 (1939): 21-31.

or by traditional calligraphers in their employ. Fangsong was developed by

Zhonghua Books.120 It is not clear who created the popular Song font.
By the 1930s, at least three Shanghai machine firms were manufacturing
and selling their own type-casting machines. Chong Shing (Mandarin,
Changxing), Jianye Machine-Making Company, and Ruitai Machine Shop
all advertised their type-casting machines in Yiwen yinshua yuekan/The Graphic
Printer (see Figures 1.13, 1.14, and 1.15 (top), Chinas only nationally distributed, Chinese-language, printing trade journal. Strikingly, Chong Shing
stressed the links between its machinery, lead-type printing, and cultural
progress: Printing is a tool for advancing culture ... lead type is the most
important part of printing, and an outstanding automatic type-caster is the
best product to advance the business ... it can do the work of eight or nine
men, producing 150 type an hour ... we guarantee you will be satisfied.121

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

Figure 1.13 Advertisement for Chong Shing automatic type-casting

machine, Shanghai, 1940.
Source: Yiwen yinshua yuekan/The Graphic Printer (Shanghai) 2, 8 (1940): 52.

Figure 1.14 Advertisement for Jianye MachineMaking Company type-caster, Shanghai, 1937.
Source: Yiwen yinshua yuekan/The Graphic Printer
(Shanghai) 1, 7 (1937): 7.

55

56

Gutenbergs Descendants

Figure 1.15 Top: Advertisement for Ruitai Machine Shop typecaster, Shanghai, 1937; bottom: Advertisement for Ruitai
Machine Shop offset cylinder proofer, Shanghai, 1937.
Source: Yiwen yinshua yuekan/The Graphic Printer (Shanghai) 1, 3 (1937): 6.

Clearly, insofar as printing did advance culture, the efforts of the machinists
in the Commercial Press who had converted the Thompsons to produce
Chinese type were advancing it more rapidly than those at Chong Shing.
At about the same time, Zhu Tian, a former head of Zhonghua Books
Song facsimile book department and then manager of Zhongguo fanggu
yinshuju (Chinese Book Facsimile Publishers; see Figure 1.16), advertised that
he had developed new-style Song type matrices for use with type-casting
machines. Boasting twenty-five years of far-ranging experience with the pros
and cons of the lead-type printing industry, Zhu said that his highly aesthetic matrices were now ready for sale.122 This is an indication that, even as

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

Figure 1.16 Advertisement for new Song-style matrices,

Shanghai, 1937.
Source: Yiwen yinshua yuekan/The Graphic Printer (Shanghai) 1, 3 (1937): 4.

utilitarian Western technology was adapted to Chinese printing needs, it was

turned in a direction that appealed to the discerning eye of the Chinese reader.
Hand-casting gradually declined in the West after the 1840s, and in 1886
Gutenbergs greatest invention was superseded by Linotype. In that year,
Ottmar Mergenthaler created the first real advance since the fifteenth century in setting individual lines of type. A mechanical wizard, Mergenthaler
combined type-casting and typesetting into a one-person, one-step process.
His new Linotype machine (Lainuo zhupai ji, also Laina paizi ji) made it
possible for a keyboard operator to punch out an entire line o type and set
it up for immediate printing or rapid conversion into stereotypes. First used

57

58

Gutenbergs Descendants

at the New York Tribune and rapidly circulated to other newspaper companies, the Linotype had limited appeal for book printers because of their
need for frequent proofreading and correcting. By 1899, though, the era of
hand-cast type for book printing initiated by Gutenberg essentially came to
a close with Ohio-born Tolbert Lanstons (1844-1913) invention of the
Monotype (Monuo zhupai ji, danzi zhupai ji, also Mana paishaoji).123 This new
machine adapted the typists keyboard for mass production of individual
pieces of type and brought the type-casting and typesetting innovations of
the entire nineteenth century to bear on book printing, allowing for both
increased speed and the flexibility to correct texts. Furthermore, the range
of classic type fonts made available by the Monotype Corporation appealed
broadly to book printers.124
Chinese printers employed in printing non-Chinese-language periodicals
and books utilized both Linotype and Monotype machines for many years.125

Figure 1.17 Advertisement for Linotype, Shanghai, 1937.

Source: Yiwen yinshua yuekan/The Graphic Printer (Shanghai) 1, 7 (1937): 4.

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

By the late 1930s, a Shanghai advertisement would claim that there were
Linotype-brand printing and typesetting machines in every Chinese province, with service and parts available from branches in Shanghai and Hong
Kong (see Figure 1.17). English-language Monotype machines were discussed
at some length in the same publication.126 At this time, Japanese-made versions of Monotype were also available in China.
In 1926, a Chinese named Wang Longyou began experimenting with a
Chinese-language version of the Monotype.127 Wangs type-casting and typesetting machine, known as the Sinotype (Huawen paishaoji), was said to
have been modelled on the Monotype.128 An important indicator of the
Chinese awareness of the publishing bottleneck that resulted when typecasting, typesetting, and printing were not uniformly mechanized, Wangs
experiments with the Sinotype did not lead to its mass production during
the Republican era. Hence, in Shanghai, and in China generally, letterpress
printing, which now used machine-made plates (stereotypes, electrotypes),
along with automatic machine-cast type, had advanced significantly beyond
Cai Gaos and Morrisons/Thomss efforts of the early nineteenth century.
Although mechanized type-casting of Chinese type was achieved in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, no means of combining Chinese
type-casting mechanically with typesetting was put into operation until the
late 1950s.129 Continuing commitment, stretching through the Second SinoJapanese War (1937-45) and the Civil War (1946-49), to resolving the challenges that remained reveal the continuing impact of the Gutenberg
revolution on China.
Relief Illustrations
For printing illustrations, three main categories halftone, photoengraving,
and boxwood prints were available to Chinese printers in the early 1900s;
one of the three processes, the last, may have been perfected in China.
Illustrations in relief media became possible on letterpress machines only
when the halftone (bansi tiao) was developed in Vienna in 1877.130 Halftones
arrived in New York in 1880,131 where Harpers Magazine famously adopted
them.132 Colour printing developed as a three-colour (and black) process
(sanyuanse zhiban, originally sanse ban) about 1900 in the West. The threecolour relief process arrived in Shanghai fairly rapidly sometime in the Xuantong reign (1908-12) via the Commercial Press.133 Three-colour process
printing, however, became important in China only after the Commercial
Press sent You Hengta to the United States to study printing around 1920.134
A second relief illustration technique, photoengraving (zhaoxiang tongziban),
was developed by the Frenchman M. Gillot in 1855 and improved by the
German Georg Meisenbach (1841-1912). Photoengraving was one of the

59

60

Gutenbergs Descendants

important Western printing techniques imported by Shanghais Tushanwan

Jesuits.135 Although Mr. Liu of the Arsenal Printing Office had had some
success photoengraving books for the Arsenal and for the Guanggangyan
shuguan, also probably in the 1870s, few outsiders knew about it. Then, in
1900, a man called Disciple Xia (Xia Xianggong) from Tushanwan began
to experiment with photoengraving. The next year, a team made up of Father Fan and Disciples Cai and An started to get significant results. Soon
Fan, Cai, and An were able to teach two others, Gu Zhangquan and Xu
Kangde, their technique, which took six to seven days to produce one photoengraved plate.136
In 1902, Yu Fu (Zhonghuan), Lian Quan, and Ding Fubao (1874-1952)
opened Wenming shuju (Wenming Books), the largest and most important
Chinese-owned general publishing firm of the early 1900s, in Shanghai.
Zhao Hongxue, who had watched plates being made for Western books,
was hired to photoengrave plates for Wenmings Chinese textbooks. The
next year, Shanghais Commercial Press became a Sino-Japanese joint venture when the Japanese publisher, Kinko-do- (Chinese, Jingangtang) invested
150,000 yuan.137 Perhaps taking advantage of the companys new tie to
Japans modern publishing industry, the Commercial Press hired two Japanese technicians to set up their photoengraving section the same year.
In 1906, Gu Zhangquan left Tushanwan and joined the Zhongguo tushu
gongsi (Chinese Library Company) in Nanshi, Shanghai, to run its photoengraving department. Then Xu Kangde entered the photoengraving section of the Commercial Press, where he worked on textbooks.138 Xu was
soon joined by an American photoengraver. Xu, together with the Japanese
and the American, developed a new process considered to have been faster
and more productive of fine results than the original Tushanwan process.
This was not the first time Tushanwan lost inventive printers to the citys
vibrant capitalist printing sector.
Boxwood blocks (huangyang ban), a means of printing images from the
same dense wood that Gamble had used for electrotyping matrices, were
adopted by the Commercial Press in 1904.139 Possibly reflecting its new link
to Kinko-do- , the Commercial Press then hired a Japanese named Shiba Den
to come to Shanghai to teach the new process to the firms Chinese printers. Shiba used a photosensitive emulsion to put on wood an original image
that resembled a photograph. Next he cut the wood through the image.
According to He Shengnai, the results were deemed as good as copperplate. Some practitioners used a direct photographic method, with a result
similar to [that of] photoengraving.140 Although boxwood blocks could be
used for both monotone and colour printing, their high price retarded widespread adoption of this technique, even at the Commercial Press.141

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

Planographic Media (pingban yinshua)

Planographic (lithographic) printing processes differ from letterpress in that
printing is done using a flat surface medium manipulated on the principle
that water and grease repel each other. As the nineteenth century advanced,
Wang Taos comment about chemistry being the most modern printing process became increasingly valid. Historically, the earliest planographic process was stone-based lithography, also the first to arrive in Shanghai, followed
by zinc-plate lithography (zincography, also photozincography) and finally
by offset (rubber-plate or -blanket) lithography. The fundamental technique
of production involved in this method of printing remained constant throughout the lithographic era and was so influential that its original name (meaning stone-printing) was employed to the end of the period.142
Today lithography is known chiefly as a technique employed by artists and
printmakers, but this view obscures the history of an important nineteenthcentury industry. Invented in 1798-99 by Alois Senefelder (1771-1834),
who called his new process chemical printing, lithography was the first
really new text-printing technology developed after Gutenbergs inventions.143
Throughout the nineteenth century, European printers carried on a wideranging and highly inventive search for nonrelief methods to produce books.
Printers sought technologies that could print nonalphabetical texts such as
musical scores and visual images. New technologies for printing these classes
of works emerged and jockeyed for position with relief-based techniques,
such as woodblocks, dating from the late-medieval period. Once Senefelder
perfected lithography, the new printing technique spread rapidly throughout Europe and Britain.144 In France, for example, by 1838, lithography was
a fully formed national industry.145 As a result, for the next century, lithography reigned as the printers single most important alternative to setting
texts in movable type.
Similar efforts were made by the China missions to find alternatives to
the time-consuming process of creating enough Chinese type to supply a
printing operation. In 1829, the London Missionary Societys Walter Henry
Medhurst, superintendent of printing at Malacca, began lithographing Chinese books at Batavia. Medhurst was drawn to the technology by its efficiency and low cost. In the 1830s, he concluded, the art of lithography ...
rendered the missionaries independent of native type-cutters and was found
to be much cheaper than the former mode of printing by means of wooden
blocks.146 Medhurst soon opened a lithographic print shop in Macao. By
1832, his operation had spread to Canton, where it was directed by the
Chinese convert, Qu Yaang (active 1810s-40s).147 Two years later, the missionaries lithographic press enabled the new British free-trade commissioner,
Scottish peer Lord William John Napier (1786-1834), to respond quickly

61

62

Gutenbergs Descendants

with Chinese-language placards criticizing the Qing for suspending trade

after he had insisted on its liberalization.148 In 1850, Ningbos APMP acquired a lithographic press.149
The quest for improved printing technology was brought to Shanghai by
the Jesuit printing masters who ran the Tushanwan Printing Office. Most
Shanghai Chinese commentators overlook Qu Yaang at Canton. For them,
Chinese lithographic printing began at Xujiahuis Tushanwan print shop in
1876,150 nearly eighty years after Senefelder had invented it. After its arrival, it was quickly commercialized by the Dianshizhai Lithographic Studio, which was then joined by 148 other lithographic printing shops and
publishers before 1911.151
First developed in Europe around 1850, stone-based colour lithography
(chromolithography, caise shiyin) did not arrive in Shanghai until 1904, the
same year that the third major form of lithography, offset lithography (discussed below), was developed.152 When Shanghais Wenming Books acquired
its colour lithographic press in 1904 and needed assistance in its lithographic
shop, like other Chinese firms of that era, not surprisingly, it turned to
Japan, where lithography had developed early and rapidly.153 Wenming hired
three Japanese technicians, who rapidly began to issue light and shade
colour plates (nongdan seban) of fairly high quality.154
Contrary to their use in everyday Chinese speech, the terms photomechanical printing and photo-offset155 (yingyin, also zhaoxiang zhiban) refer
to a broad category of processes rather than to any single process. The most
widely known process in this category is photolithography (zhaoxiang shiyin,
also known in English as zinc-plate, zincography, and photozincography).
Photography, dating from 1840, was first applied to printing via photolithography, developed in 1859. By 1882, photolithography, involving the projection of photographic negatives of book pages onto a stone treated with a
photosensitive emulsion, had become one of the main processes in the single
most important branch of Western-style printing in Shanghai.156
Possibly reflecting its Protestant lineage, the Commercial Press was no
more than a minor player among the early photolithographers. In 1905, it
hired eight Japanese colour lithography masters to teach the firms printers
how to execute the photolithographic process,157 used to print old paintings
of landscapes, flowers and grasses, and figures.158 The combination of lithographic plates with newer cylinder presses led to heightened mechanical
precision. Now it became possible for a wider range of printers to use planographic media without extended apprenticeships. The Commercial Press
reorganized its lithographic studio in 1920.159 The next year, it hired an
American technician to bring colour photolithography to China.160 Then, in

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

1931, the Commercial Press, seeking to overcome the limitations of printing with gelatine-based photomechanical processes, began to use facsimile
printing (chuanzhen ban) which became even more popular than the older
zinc-plate process.161
Offset lithography (jiaoban, xiangpi ban), a different process altogether from
photo-offset, was developed by Ira Rubel and Harris Brothers.162 Offset lithography was a process that worked with three cylinders: a design was created,
sometimes by photography, on a positive plate and then transferred to a
rubber blanket or roller as a negative before finally being printed as a positive on paper.163 The great advantage of offset lithography was that the image could be exposed right-reading.164 The Commercial Press brought offset
lithography to Shanghai in 1915.165 A photograph of a web-fed offset litho
press found in Ge Gongzhens (1890-1935) 1927 history of Chinese journalism (see Figure 1.18) likely features this offset printing machine at the
Commercial Press. Shanghais famous magazines of the 1930s, Liangyou
and Meishu shenghuo, were published using offset presses.166 By then, offset
technology was being manufactured in Shanghai by Ruitai, as indicated in
Figure 1.15 (bottom).167

Figure 1.18 Web-fed offset lithographic press, Shanghai, 1927.

Source: Ge Gongzhen, Zhongguo baoxue shi (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1927), 201.

63

64

Gutenbergs Descendants

After lithography, a second major planographic process of great popularity in Shanghai was collotype168 (keluo ban, boli ban), invented in Germany in
1869. The fine tone and delicate shading produced by collotype gave it
wide appeal,169 which may explain why Tushanwans Catholic printers brought
it to Shanghai at about the same time as lithography.170 At Tushanwan, collotype was used to reproduce images of the Holy Mother.171 Yu Fus Wenming
Books, the Shenzhou guoguangshe, Youzheng shuju, and Yanguangshe were
other Shanghai printer-publishers that eventually specialized in collotype
reproductions of paintings, stele inscriptions, and Song/Yuan woodblock
books.172 Youzhengs staff, in particular, studied with a Japanese technician.
In 1902, Wenmings Zhao Hongxue succeeded in printing with collotype.
The Commercial Press founded its colour collotype operation in 1907. The
next year, it sent Huang Zixiu to Japan for advanced study of the process.173
Finally, tinplate (makoutie) reproduction of illustrations, the third major
lithographic technique, was already widely available by 1870 in France.
Tinplate techniques arrived in England in 1872 but did not reach Shanghai
until 1918. In that year, tinplate was implemented by a Japanese technician
hired for the job by the Commercial Press.174 The next year, a Chinese printer
named Tang Chongli took over from his Japanese supervisor. From the Commercial Press, tinplate printing passed to the preserved and canned goods
labelling industry.175
Intaglio/Gravure Media (aoban yinshua)
In contrast to relief media, whose printing surfaces protrude, and planographic surfaces, which are flat, the printing surfaces of intaglio media are etched
or engraved. The best-known examples of intaglio media are those used to
print early maps as well as financial instruments. Dies for printing currency,
bonds, stamps, etc., are mostly intaglio media; by and large, intaglio media
were used for printing images or images with a small amount of text.
Reversing the more ordinary process of technological adoption in nineteenthcentury China, in which new printing technologies were usually absorbed
first in Macao, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, the north took the lead in developing intaglio printing. The reasons for this anomaly developed in the political realm. Qing state sponsorship underlay the first major uses of intaglio
printing. During the reign of the Kangxi emperor (r. 1662-1722), Jesuit
mapmakers brought the first Western intaglio medium, the copperplate
(diaoke tongban), to Beijing. By 1716, each province had been surveyed and
mapped according to Jesuit instructions. In the following year, a copperplate atlas of China was printed. Other copperplated maps were completed
in 1747, 1774, and 1783.176

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

Intaglio processes did not become significant again until after the administrative reforms of 1901, when, again, imperial politics played an important role in introducing modernized Western processes. Zhili Viceroy Yuan
Shikai (1859-1916) appointed Yan Fansun and Hu Yuefang to supervise
the modernization of Beiyang education. Possibly influenced by statist reforms in Japan and by private efforts in Shanghai, after establishing their
offices in Tianjin, Yan and Hu opened schools and printed textbooks and
official newspapers. They also ordered a number of letterpress and lithographic printing machines to print money and books. Soon they were imitated by the Board of Revenue in Beijing which established a Board of
Revenue Printing Office (Duzhibu yinshuaju).177 In 1908, Chen Jintao (18701939), after becoming deputy director of the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, decided that American printing methods thwarted stamp
counterfeiters more effectively than those of other Western countries. Chen
invited William A. Grant (1868-1954) of the American Banknote Company and Lorenzo J. Hatch (d. 1913), a highly skilled illustrator and master
engraver, to come to China to supervise the Bureau of Printing and Engraving.178 Grant remained with the bureau until his retirement in 1924, having
trained several hundred Chinese in steel engraving and printing. Hatch,
after designing much Chinese currency, died in Beijing. His apprentices carried on his work, creating plates for postage stamps, government seals, and
other security instruments.179
Another example of intaglio printing is gravure printing (zhaoxiang aoban),
first developed in England in the late eighteenth century with the use of
copperplates (diaoke tongban, tongke ban). The Shanghai Customs Printing
Office (Jianghaiguan yinwuchu) adopted gravure printing after a native of
nearby Yuanhe, Wang Zhaohong, who had studied mapmaking in Japan in
the 1880s, returned to Shanghai. In 1889, Wang published his Tongke xiaoji
(Brief Account of Copperplating), one of the earliest modern technical manuals authored by a Chinese.180
In 1852, Englishman W.H. Fox Talbot (1800-77) invented the first mechanical intaglio process, known as heliogravure or photogravure (yingxie
ban).181 Commercial exploitation was slow to develop. In 1902, five decades
after Talbot, a German by the name of Mertens perfected the process, which
was particularly good for reproducing paintings, an application of great interest to the Chinese. Photogravure printing was adopted by the Commercial Press in 1923.182
In 1924, the British American Tobacco (BAT) printing plant in Pudong,
across the river from Shanghai, sent its master printer and two others to
Leidens Dutch Heliographic Printing Company to learn the photogravure

65

66

Gutenbergs Descendants

technique. While there, the three bought a colour photogravure (caise yingxie
ban) press and shipped it to Shanghai. It arrived in May or June 1925, just
as the May Thirtieth Movement commenced in the city. BATs business
suddenly collapsed, and there was no way to set up the new press. As an
unintended consequence of the political disruption, the Commercial Press
acquired BATs press. In this accidental way, photogravure became another
Western printing technique mastered by the Commercial Presss Chinese
printers in advance of the citys newspaper and general printers.183
Printing Presses and Machines
As we have seen, historically, as well as taxonomically, there were three major categories of printing media or processes in Western-style printing: relief
(letterpress), planographic (lithography), and intaglio (etched, engraved).
Each process had its own origin and evolutionary trajectory. Each process
also required a different kind of press, which had to be bought separately
and called upon a special kind of expertise from its pressman. Although the
Chinese, particularly the Chinese state, had had repeated experience with
metal type, they had had no experience with printing presses before the
arrival of the Western press. The high cost of cutting thousands of individual movable type was widely discussed by missionaries and scholars. As
seen in the earlier section, Western casting methods accelerated the duplication of type and reduced its cost.
To date, however, neither Western nor Chinese scholars have discussed a
startling printing phenomenon encountered by missionaries in south China
namely, the high rate at which Chinese-language metal type could become
worn and damaged when they were used, not with Western printing presses,
but with traditional Chinese ink, paper, and, especially, stiff-bristled brushes
such as the changshua and cazi. This innovative blending of Western-style
typographic technology with Chinese printing techniques was first mentioned in 1850 in a comment on a Chinese printer-publisher-bookseller and
type-maker named Tang, from Foshan, outside Canton.
Using a clay matrix method (to make tin type) that Tang claimed to have
invented, he prepared two (or three, depending on the source) fonts totalling 150,000 (in some versions, 200,000) Chinese type. The project cost
$10,000 and was completed around 1850 (alternatively, between 1850 and
1852). The initial motivation was to print two varieties of lottery tickets.
Tang printed them himself using Chinese ink and paper in the ordinary
Chinese way with a brush (emphasis added).184 According to the missionary
source, the long brush wore the type out more quickly than use of the
Western press would have done. The next year, discussing the condition of
Tangs font after it was used to reprint the 120-volume Song work Wenxian

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

tongkao (Antiquarian Researches, 1851) by Ma Duanlin (c. 1254-c. 1323),

the same missionary source concluded that the tin type was much worn by
the friction of the brushes used in taking the impressions, and therefore do
not look as well as those previously given, which were nearly new.185 By contrast, Dyers stereotypes lasted five to six years using a printing press; cast
type probably lasted at least as long.
For this reason, it is arguable that the lack of indigenous printing presses186
in China and the process of brushing the ink rather than pressing it into
place may have been important, if heretofore unacknowledged, factors militating against long-term Chinese use of movable metal type prior to the
nineteenth century. If so, then the arrival of the Western printing press must
be regarded as having been just as historically momentous as the development of rapidly duplicable type in advancing the Gutenberg revolution in
China. In what follows, I survey the most important letterpress and planographic presses in their countries of origin and their diffusion to Shanghai.187
Relief (Chinese, tuban) (Letterpress) Printing Presses
Relief or letterpress printing presses, the sort of device with which the early
modern European historian is most familiar, were built in three basic varieties. The platen press, initially known as the screw press and, later, as the
common press, dates from Gutenbergs era. It was followed, historically, by
the flatbed or cylinder press (1812) and then by the rotary press (1847-48).
The development of the latter two presses coincided with the steam era, but
only the rotary press had to be used with nonmanual power.
Platen Presses (pingzhuang yinshuaji)
Not until 1798 did the wooden screw press familiar to Gutenberg (see Figure 1.19) finally begin to give way to substantially newer models. Seeking
to put a strong new industrial product, cast iron, at the service of printers,
Charles Mahon, Third Earl of Stanhope (1753-1816) developed the first
modern platen about 1800. Although much sturdier than the old wooden
presses, Lord Stanhopes iron press was still hand-operated and capable of
printing no more than the wooden presss upper quota of 250 pages an
hour. For the first time, though, the common press began to print both
halves of a single side of a sheet,188 reducing printing time by half. As a
result, the Times of London bought a number of Stanhopes189 at double the
cost of a wooden press.190 These presses formed the core of its printing plant
until 1814. From that time on, the Times, anticipating the roles that Japans
Meiji government and then the Osaka Asahi, as well as Shanghais Commercial Press would play in China, began to promote and sponsor improved
printing machinery.191

67

68

Gutenbergs Descendants

Figure 1.19 Gutenbergs printing press, fifteenth century.

Source: Yiwen yinshua yuekan/The Graphic Printer (Shanghai) 2, 3 (1939): 40.

A famous American version of Stanhopes iron platen press was the

Columbian press, first developed in Philadelphia in 1814. Technically, the
Columbian reduced the physical demands on the printer with an ingenious
combination of new levers adapted from the principles of the Newcomen
steam engine of 1712 and from Stanhopes press while also applying great
pressure on the platen.192 The Columbian eliminated Gutenbergs screw altogether, using a hinged elbow-joint and counterweights, which included a
spread-winged American eagle that rose high into the air each time the lever
was pulled, to lower and retract the platen.193 In 1817, the American producer set up an English workshop to serve as a branch of the main Philadelphia manufactory. Soon twenty-five different British firms were copying
the Columbian press, minus the American eagle that soared on its top beam,
and it remained in use for more than a century in Europe and North
America.194 The Columbian reached Qing China sometime around the middle
of the century.
Philadelphias Columbian was followed in 1821 by the Washington press,
developed by a New Yorker. Improved by 1829, the lightweight Washington
could be disassembled for shipping, eventually making it the press that conquered the American frontier. It was also most likely the sort of press sent to
the American Board at Canton in 1830-31. In 1835, R. Hoe & Company195

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

of New York and London, one of the most prolific builders and inventors of
printing machinery in the nineteenth century, acquired the patent. Almost
immediately, Hoe began to manufacture the Washington in seven different
sizes.
In 1861, the American Methodist Episcopal Mission at Fuzhou acquired
one of Hoes Washington presses.196 The Fuzhou missionaries also bought a
font of Double Pica Chinese type from the London Mission Press in Hong
Kong.197 They purchased a Hoe Hand Press with a font of Three-Line Diamond Chinese type in 1863. A dozen years later, in 1875, the Fuzhou mission bought two type fonts from the APMP in Shanghai. Hoe developed an
important modification to the Washington in 1847 with the self-inking
apparatus.198 Presses of this sort must have first reached China fairly soon
thereafter. The American Methodist Episcopal Mission Press in Fuzhou
bought one in 1878-79, by which time it was employing ten Chinese workmen.199 A larger self-inking Hoe press was purchased in 1886.200
Of equal importance historically was the British version of the Columbian,
the 1820 Albion press, for which a self-inking apparatus was developed in
1825. Unlike the Columbian, the early Albions used a spring to lower the
platen.201 Like the Washington press, however, to which it was also related,
the Albion was manufactured to be taken apart for easy mobility throughout the British Empire. The Albion, predictably, replaced the American eagle
with royal insignia.202 The first explicit mention of an Albion in China occurred in 1833 at Macao, after which the press was moved to Canton. In
1869, American missionaries took it to Ningbo.203 The smudged ornamentation at the top of the press shown in Figure 1.20 suggests the Albions
insignia. The location of the press in the figure is unknown, but it was
probably in Ningbo or Shanghai. The photograph, which shows men with
queues dressed in traditional magua (hemp) outfits, was most likely taken
before 1912. The caption reads Earliest imported Western printing press,
a claim that is historically and generally accurate.
Cylinder or Flatbed Printing Machines (lunzhuan yinshuaji)
In the early 1800s, two Germans, Friedrich Knig (1774-1833) and Andreas
Bauer, developed the first modern printing machine (as opposed to the platen
press).204 Patented in 1810, Knig and Bauers cylinder printing machine
(flatbed press) was first manufactured successfully in 1812,205 a dozen years
after Stanhope modernized the platen press. Unlike the platen press, which
had employed two flat surfaces, the cylinder press used a flat surface and a
curved one. Because the area of contact between the two was narrowed to the
thin band of the cylinder that touched the platen, the amount of pressure
needed to transfer the ink from the flat typeform to the curved cylinder

69

70

Gutenbergs Descendants

Figure 1.20 Earliest imported Western printing press, pre-1912.

Source: Ge Gongzhen, Zhongguo baoxue shi (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1927),
pre-1912.

that held the paper was reduced. The 1812 cylinder printer produced a
record-breaking 800 impressions of book printing an hour. Four years later,
the worlds first book produced on a printing machine appeared.206 In the
same year, Knig and Bauer built the worlds first perfecting (two-sided)
printer, capable of producing 900-1,000 perfected that is, two-sided
sheets per hour.207
Eventually, Knigs machine was updated by what was called the bedand-platen press. One reason that such presses were needed was that cheap
and efficient steam engines did not become widely available to general printers until the 1840s;208 previously, use of such engines had been limited to
deadline-driven, high-volume newspaper printers. The first successful bedand-platen press, used to print high-quality book work, was developed by
Daniel Treadwell of Boston in the 1820s. In addition to printing more quickly
than the hand press, it could be turned by horses if steam power was not
available.209
Shanghais London Mission Press was supplied with three double-cylinder
printing machines, two hand presses, and a lithographic press.210 The press
that Wang Tao saw there in 1848 was a bed-and-platen of the sort that
Treadwell had invented. In his diary, Wang wrote:

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

As soon as we came up the [Huangpu River], I suddenly found myself in a

different world ... The foreign scholar Medhurst was at the time in charge of
the London Mission Press, which was printing books by a machine from movable type. This was considered to be a great novelty and I specially went to
pay him a visit ... I was brought into a room the walls of which were covered
with bookcases full of Chinese books ... After that, Mr. Medhurst took me to
see where the printing was done. The press was turned by a water buffalo and
could produce several thousand impressions a day. The office had glass windows and was very bright and clean. The type was arranged in cases according
to the order of the dictionary.211

Details recorded by Wang are perhaps the earliest articulate Chinese evaluation of Western printing technology. The reference to movable type is
straightforward, as is the mention of the mission library. Just as important
is Wangs reference to the buffalo, an obvious Chinese stand-in for the horse,
and the presss production rate, all of which strongly suggest that a bedand-platen press is being described.
In the 1840s, Henry Ingle of London developed a simple, light, bed-andplaten press that remained in wide use until the end of the century. The
bed-and-platen cylinder press (see Figure 1.21) was generally used in Europe to print books (with movable type). The very unfamiliarity of its name
reminds us that the nineteenth-century printing revolution was effected
partly by many dozens of individually owned proprietary firms whose names
are now forgotten. Harrild & Sons, the London printing firm founded in
1801, began manufacturing its own bed-and-platen presses in the 1860s.
Nearly thirty years after Wang Taos first mention of Shanghais London
Mission Press, Wangs Yingruan zazhi (Yingruan Records, 1875) describes a
scene that Wang could have witnessed no later than about 1864, when,
according to APMP records, Shanghais London Mission Press closed. In
Wangs view, the press, his employer from 1849 to 1861, had been the most
renowned of numerous Western missionary printing firms then active in
China. Regarding its press, we read that it used type cast from poured lead
and ink made from clear glue and soot that were simmered together.212 We
are also given a verbal picture that calls a larger model of Figure 1.21 to
mind:
[The press] used iron to make a printing cart bed that was ten Chinese feet
[about twelve English feet] long and perhaps three Chinese feet [three and a
half English feet] wide. On the side are two heavy wheels with teeth. On one
side stand two men overseeing the printing, using a buffalo to turn it. There
are two big empty cylinders hanging there using a leather belt to make them

71

72

Gutenbergs Descendants

Figure 1.21 Harrild & Sons cylinder press,

Shanghai, 1876.
Source: Gezhi huibian (Shanghai) (1876): 21.

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

turn and to forward the paper. With each turn, two sides are printed. It is
quite simple and fast213 ... The end of the printing bed has an ink trough and
uses an iron pivot to rotate it, sending ink onto the flat plate. At the side, there
are several ink rollers laid out. They wipe the flat plate with ink, sending it
onto the type form with uniform thickness ... There are two kinds of bookprinting machines in Western countries, one large and one small. The large
one uses a buffalo to turn it, the small one uses a man to rotate it. The one
rotated by a man is also very cheap. For no more than a hundred pieces of
[silver] money, you can buy one.214

It was not the accelerated production rate that most impressed Wang Tao.
Rather, like the Ningbo official who had approached the APMP in 1846,
Wang found the selling point of the cylinder press-printed books to be the
quality of the product. Wang concluded his account with praise for the precision of the instrument: In every case, the ink has a clear impression from
the type and [so] these are not Mount Sha [Shashan, Fujian] books [i.e.,
smeared due to the use of softwood blocks and perhaps unskilled carvers].215
Other Chinese who came to visit the London Mission Press were just as
impressed by the mechanical printing operation. Rather than describe the
process through prose, though, some indulged in the literati convention of
lyricizing facets of daily life. Sun Cigong, one literati visitor to the London
Mission Press, composed a wry poem about the missions cylinder press
that calls on conventions of contrast that would have been clear to any
educated reader of the time:
The cart stirs up the sea of ink as it turns the axle round,
A hundred marvellous writings are passed on to the world
The busy old buffalo has yet to comprehend
Hes not ploughing a hillside for grain, but planting a paddy field for books.216

Rather than focusing on the new, as Wang Tao had done, Sun alludes to the
conventional Confucian contrast between those who work with their minds
that is, via book culture and those who labour with their bodies to
provide the other class with its products. In this case, a water buffalo provides motive power to a printing press rather than labouring to provide
grain. Nonetheless, both products, books and grain, were essential for the
sustenance of the nonlabouring literati. Suns poem also enthusiastically
promotes the expansion of Chinas literary culture through the mechanical
multiplication of a hundred marvellous writings.

73

74

Gutenbergs Descendants

In 1872, Shanghais Chinese-language Shenbao newspaper company installed a hand-operated cylinder press and signed on as Harrilds local agent.
The hand-operated cylinder press could produce about 100 pages an hour,
whether of book work or newspapers. Soon after this hand-powered press
came to Shanghai, it was joined by similar presses driven by steam engines
(zhengqi yinjin) and even automatic gas engines (zilaihuo yinjin), which, along
with replacing the attendants, also doubled printing speed.217 No later than
1876, we know from an advertisement (see Figure 1.21) in a Shanghai scientific newspaper, the Gezhi huibian/Chinese Scientific and Industrial Magazine,218 Harrilds bed-and-platen press was being marketed to prospective
Chinese printers.219 Although the platen press produced finer work, the bedand-platen offered lightness and convenience when those virtues were more
important than product quality.220
The Ingle cylinder press, mentioned above, was followed by William
Dawsons Wharfedale, the most popular bed-and-platen press, as well as
one of the most famous and popular presses of any sort, of the nineteenth
century. Its use became widespread because Dawson never patented it.
Wharfedale cylinder presses, similar to the Knig press but named after the
Yorkshire town where Dawson first developed them in 1858, eventually
became the standard book press throughout the British Empire. Wharfedales
were capable of printing from 1,000 to 1,500 single sides of paper (i.e., two
pages of a book) an hour. Before long, the Wharfedales were supplemented
by lighter, more transportable, and easier-to-assemble presses from North
America built using similar principles.
Four cylinder machines, along with one platen, can be seen in Figure 1.22,
which shows the APMPs Shanghai press room in 1895. Eleven years later,
in 1906, nearly four decades after the Harrild, the electric Wharfedale
(Huafutai dangun tongji, literally Wharfedale single-cylinder press) itself
reached Shanghai. A British Wharfedale of this type was purchased by
Hushang shuju.221 Since it came from England, the Wharfedale was also
known to Shanghai pressmen as The Big English Press (Daying ji), which
could print 1,000 pages an hour.222 Five years later, in 1911, Shenbao bought
the Ya-er-hua (Walter?) Companys double-cylinder press (shuanglun zhuanji),
whose output was 2,000 pages an hour, not a staggering rate by world standards, but it was faster than anything else in Shanghai at that time.
In 1887, Chicagos Miehle Printing Press and Manufacturing Company
put into production a multiple-cylinder press that rapidly became the industry standard.223 It still used the same kind of type as the platen press,
lying flat and locked into a chase.224 In 1919, the Commercial Press became
the first Chinese publisher to purchase an electric Miehle. Because the
Miehles printing cylinder never stopped between imprints, the Chinese

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

Figure 1.22 Four cylinder machines and one platen press, APMP press room,
Shanghai, 1895
Source: Gilbert McIntosh, The Mission Press in China (Shanghai: APMP, 1895), opposite 29.

called it a double-turning cylinder press (shuanghui lun zhuanji). Apart from

the single-colour Miehle press, the Commercial Press had also obtained a
two-colour Miehle and a Miehle perfecting press for printing books before
1931.225
Rotary Presses (lunzhuan yinshuaji, also juan ban juanzhi yinji)
In 1872, one of the earliest Chinese-language discussions of new Western
printing technology appeared in the Beijing-based missionary journal Zhongxi
jianwen/Peking Magazine (literally, Chinese and Western knowledge; see
Figure 1.23). The article set out to explain the benefits of rotary printing
on the Walter press (Walideer lunzhuanji) or Steam-Powered Printing-andFolding Machine.226 Most important among its advantages, in the eyes of
the missionary journal, was speed. Every hour, one man could print 1,700
large pages using type arranged on rollers. Adding more printing rollers increased the speed to as high as 10,000 pages per hour, insisted the journal.227
In addition to emphasizing the extraordinary speed and precision of the
Walter press, the article was one of the first to present its subject to Chinese
readers via a schematic drawing, then a new form of visual communication
in Europe and North America.228 Unfortunately, no responses that Chinese
readers of the journal may have had to this illustration survive.229
Efforts to produce a rotary press had begun in England nearly six decades
earlier. In 1816, London Times engineers had begun to experiment with

75

76

Gutenbergs Descendants

Figure 1.23 A steam-powered printing-and-folding machine, Beijing, 1872.

Source: Originally in Zhongxi jianwen (Beijing), 1872, reprinted from Zhang Jinglu, ed., Zhongguo
jindai chuban shiliao, er bian (Shanghai: Qunlian chubanshe, 1954), 393.

curved stereotype plates of the sort that would make possible, by 1847-48,
their first rotary press, capable of printing 10,000 sheets an hour,230 or 35,000
newspapers a day.231 Rotary press machines using stereotypes in place of
movable type were also developed in France and the United States. Rotary
presses further reduced the amount of pressure exerted on the paper by
eliminating almost all friction caused by the flat platen of the cylinder press
and substituting a curved one. By 1850, rotary presses were printing with
two curved surfaces.232 The minimized stress on the paper reduced the need
for dense, smooth paper, and the web (or roll) of pulp paper was now introduced.233 In 1868, only four years before it was advertised in the Beijing
journal, the Walter press, which the Times had patented in 1866, began to
set a new standard for rotary presses with the capability of printing 12,000
perfected copies per hour.234
The first Chinese printing and publishing firm to purchase a rotary press
was Shanghais Hushang shuju, which bought a cut-rate, Japanese-made,
European-style electric rotary press at the turn of the twentieth century,235
approximately the same time that it bought its electric Wharfedale cylinder
press. In 1914, the citys Xinwen newspaper plant installed a two-tiered Bade [Baensch-Drugulin?]-style rotary press.236 In 1916, however, Shenbao

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

bought its own Japanese-made, Marinoni-style rotary press, presumably that

marketed as the Osaka-Asahi. Even at 8,000 pages an hour, it was slower by
more than half the world standard, and it lacked a folding machine.237 In
1918, Shenbao secured a three-tiered American rotary that could print 10,000
copies of a twelve-page section each hour.
In 1922, the Commercial Press finally bought a perfecting Ai-er-bai-tuo
(Albright?, Heidelberg?) Company rotary press from Germany. Complete
with its own folding machine, it could print 8,000 perfected pages an hour,
the equivalent, says He Shengnai, of ten Miehle presses.238 The Commercial Presss plant was quickly overtaken in 1925 when the Shibao newspaper
plant installed a German Vomag colour rotary press that could do several
colours at once. Ge Gongzhens 1927 history of Chinese journalism includes a photograph of a web-fed rotary press installed in Shanghai (see
Figure 1.24), probably from the early 1920s.239 In Hes view, these three
firms, the Shenbao and Shibao newspaper plants and the comprehensive publisher, Commercial Press, were without peer in East Asian printing, thanks
to these rotary presses.240
By the 1930s, Miehle was actively pursuing an advertising campaign in
Shanghai to sell its double-cylinder rotary press (see Figure 1.25). In addition, in the late 1930s, Duplex Tubular Plate rotary presses became available in Shanghai through the Linotype and L & M Machinery Company

Figure 1.24 Web-fed rotary press, Shanghai, 1927.

Source: Ge Gongzhen, Zhongguo baoxue shi (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1927), 201.

77

78

Gutenbergs Descendants

Figure 1.25 Advertisement for Miehle high-speed job and book press,
Shanghai, 1937.
Source: Yiwen yinshua yuekan/The Graphic Printer (Shanghai) 1, 4 (1937): 4.

(Lai-nuo yinzhu jiqi zhizaochang), an offshoot of Britains Linotype company.241 The same companys Number 3 rotary press was popularly known
in Shanghai as an English Miehle (Yingguo Mi-li-ji).242
Physically, these latter presses resembled the schematic illustration shown
in Figure 1.23. They were available in various sizes and speeds, ranging
from a single-cylinder machine that could print 40,000 single-colour or multicolour perfected pages (quanfen) an hour to one that could do 30,000 and
another that produced no more than 6,000.243 The last-mentioned press
could work with flat lead plates or movable type. From its Shanghai plant,
L & M also sold a press that printed 2,800 sheets an hour.244 With their

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

acquisition of these rotary presses, Shanghai printers had clearly become

part of the modern world of mass printing and publishing.
Planographic Presses (pingban, shiyin)
Senefelders lithographic hand press of 1796, known as the pole, lever,
and gallows press, was quickly surpassed technologically by the wooden
cylinder or star-wheel press, created in 1805 by Hermann Josef Mitterer
(1764-1829).245 By the 1820s, Mitterers star-wheel press, with its sliding
bed, had become the standard for fine printing. Over the next half century,
numerous modifications on it were made in Germany, England, France, Italy,
and even America,246 though not in China. Although regularly modified by
others, Mitterers hand press remained the industry standard until 1852,
when the first steam-powered press was built in Vienna.247 Between about
1850 and 1880, flatbed cylinder machines were developed that permitted
striated zinc plates (the earliest photomechanical plates) to be substituted for the cumbersome stones, and machines were so greatly improved
in precision and in speed that lithographic firms increased in number all
over the world,248 according to one historian of printing.
In 1876, stone-based lithography reached Shanghai. The Jesuit directors
of the Tushanwan lithographic shop were the Frenchman mentioned in the
Chinese documents simply as Disciple or Brother Weng Shouqi (his
original name has been lost) and the Chinese Qiu Ziang.249 Their early efforts at printing were limited to reproducing Catholic religious materials.
Unlike that of the Protestants, the Catholic objective was to create illustrations that would appeal to semiliterate or illiterate converts. The Jesuits
lithographic presses were initially all made of wood, and workers rotated
them by hand, suggesting that they were a version of the star-wheel press.250
One early commentator, the Shanghai writer Mao Xianglin, penned an ironic,
most likely contemporary, account of the process in a chapter titled The
Ink-Eating Stone: The West has an ink-eating stone. If one uses ink to
write characters onto paper and then presses them onto the stone, after a
short while, the inked characters seep into the stone. Then they apply more
ink, and only the places where there are characters absorb the ink, whereas
blank spaces do not.251 By 1900, Tushanwans manual star-wheels had been
replaced by advanced industrial lithographic presses (see Figure 1.26) manned
by a total of twenty to thirty workers specialized in the production of book
illustrations and religious pictures. The latter were sold throughout China,
in the Pacific region, and even into the Americas.252
Just as the Jesuits were setting up their lithographic studio in 1876, however, across town, English merchant Ernest Majors compradore, Chen Huageng
(also Shengeng),253 had begun to search for ways to supplement the income

79

80

Gutenbergs Descendants

Figure 1.26 Tushanwans mechanized lithographic

press, Shanghai, c. 1900.
Source: Gu Yulu, Shanghai Tianzhujiao chuban gaikuang,
Chuban shiliao 10 (1987:4): 30.

generated by Majors newspaper, Shenbao. Ernest and his brother Frederick

had come to Shanghai in 1859 after the failure of their Italian silk filature.
In Shanghai, the Majors invested in a wide variety of ventures, including a
tea-trading firm, a chemical works, a silk-reeling operation, a soap factory, a
match factory, and an oil press operation.254 When Ernest returned to England in 1889, his investments were said to be worth 30,000 taels.255
Shenbao had been Chen Huagengs idea. After gaining Majors approval for
the newspaper enterprise, Chen had invited his fellow Jiangxi provincial Wu
Zirang, to assume the position of chief editor. Major and Chen then sent
Qian Zheng, Wang Taos son-in-law, to study Wangs Hong Kong printingpublishing operation. After Qians return, they started up Shenbao, which
first went to press on 30 April 1872.256 In addition to printing the newspaper with lead type, from 1872 to 1895, Shenbao issued lead-type printed
books.257
Meanwhile, Chen had convinced Major to invest in the lithography business. Together they lured the Tushanwan lithographer Qiu away from the
Jesuit fathers to their shop on Nanjing Road at the corner of Sinza Road
(now Liuhe Road).258 Thus was born, in 1877, what would become the
Dianshizhai Lithographic Bookstore,259 managed, much as its companion
newspaper Shenbao was, by its Chinese employees. Beating the Tushanwan
Jesuits to the punch, Dianshizhai would be the first privately owned commercial Shanghai lithographer to print books.
Major and Chen bought twelve hand-cranked lithographic presses. Two
hand presses and five hand-cranked (by teams of four workers) flatbed,

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

photolithographic presses (still using stones) can be seen in Figure 1.27

drawn by Dianshizhais famous illustrator, Wu Youru (1840?-96?).260 Wus
illustration itself was printed lithographically for a Shanghai miscellany,
Shenjiang shengjing tu (Scenic Spots of Shanghai). Although Wu Yourus drawing features a full range of early and later, more sophisticated lithographic
printing technology, from the perspective of the more efficiency-conscious
1930s, He Shengnai pointed out that, originally, Each press [required] eight
men, divided into two groups taking turns rotating [it]. One person fed in
the paper, two received it. The process was troublesome and full of surprises. Its output was barely several hundred pages per hour.261 Figure 1.28,
taken from a late-1880s or early-1890s advertisement announcing
Dianshizhais fine printing of Chinese books, pictures, and stele rubbings,
provides a close-up view of the three printing workers that He describes
manipulating the paper. The lithographic press seems to be suspended from
a belt leading to a power source, somewhere off-stage; starting with gas
engines in 1890, Dianshizhai gradually mechanized its operations.

Figure 1.27 Dianshizhai lithographic printing plant, Shanghai, c. 1884.

Source: Wu Youru, Shenjiang shengjing tu, juan shang (1884), 60, in Zhang Jinglu, ed., Zhongguo jindai
chuban shiliao, er bian (Shanghai: Qunlian chubanshe, 1954), opposite 361.

81

82

Gutenbergs Descendants

Figure 1.28 Dianshizhai book-printing notice, Shanghai,

c. 1890.
Source: Don J. Cohn, ed. and trans., Vignettes from the Chinese:
Lithographs from Shanghai in the Late Nineteenth Century (Hong Kong:
Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1987), back cover.

A different, more positive appraisal of lithography was offered by Huang

Shiquan, a late Qing writer closer in time to the phenomenon that he described than was He Shengnai. Just as Wang Tao had offered positive evaluations of the London Mission Presss printing technology, Huang, in his
Songnan mengyinglu (Account of Dream Images in Wusong, 1883), wrote
specifically of Dianshizhai and sounded more enthusiastic than had He:
Lithographed books use stone plates from the West, rubbed smooth like a
mirror. Using an electric lens (dianjing), they project images of the characters onto the stone, and then they lay on mucilage and print using an oily

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

ink. Millions of pages of books are not hard to do in one day, [all of them
printed] fine like an oxs hair and sharp as a rhinoceros horn.262
Like the book publisher Dianshizhai, the Commercial Press probably
started out with stone-based lithographic presses, attracted to their fine,
clear printing. By 1908, however, it had replaced them with lead-plate flatbed
lithographic presses. Using a Japanese advisor and the flatbed principle, the
Commercial Press increased productivity from a few hundred to 1,500 impressions an hour.263 At the start of the Republican period, the BAT in Pudong
acquired four-colour lead-plate presses that it used for printing advertisements.264 After the Commercial Press bought its Harris offset press in 1915,
it hired an American, George Weber, to supervise its operation. In 1922, the
Press also bought an English George Mann two-colour offset press.265
Summary and Conclusion
Based on what Shanghai printers and publishers of the 1920s and 1930s
wrote, it is clear that they regarded themselves as Gutenbergs heirs. Although Gutenberg was first identified for general readers only in the Cihai
dictionary of 1937, he had been known to Chinese printers, publishers, and
writers since at least the mid-1920s. All the writers would likely have shared
Yiwen yinshua yuekan/The Graphic Printers view that, even with the changes
and innovations during the centuries since Gutenberg, his general idea is
still like it was in the old days. At the same time, they were also aware that
printing had been reinvented in the nineteenth century. For this reason,
Chinas Gutenberg revolution must also be traced to the subsequent innovations of Senefelder (1796-99), Stanhope (1800), Knig (1814), Miehle
(1888), and others, including the manufacturers of these machines, such as
Hoe, Harrild & Sons, etc. Just as important were the efforts of both Japans
exporting printing-press manufacturers and Japanese printing technicians
who came to Shanghai at the end of the Qing. All of these factors combined
to set the stage for Chinas own printing press manufacturers, who will be
discussed in Chapter 3.
Chinas Gutenberg revolution started off far from auspiciously. The first
Chinese type cutter and letterpress printer, the shadowy Cai Gao, was banished from Canton to labour in Malacca for his involvement with the Protestant missionaries. Qu Yaang, the Christian convert and early Canton
lithographer, had a similarly obscure career. Not even the name of the Ningbo
official who approached the APMP to print a history book remains for the
historian who would trace the early history of Western-style printing. Among
these Chinese who stamped their imprints on the early history of Western
printing in China, the Shanghai-Hong Kong editor and publisher Wang
Tao, starting in the late 1840s, left the most articulate record. Even Wang,

83

84

Gutenbergs Descendants

however, was a marginal figure, stained by his involvement with foreigners

and by the alleged appeal to the Taipings that required him to leave Shanghai for what, in his eyes, was a repulsive exile in Hong Kong. In short, only
one of these figures, the Ningbo official, had any real stature within the still
viable nineteenth-century Chinese world of officials and Confucian learning, and the APMP had shunned his invitation to compromise its nonprofit
status by printing his book.
Estimating generously, by 1895 there were no more than another 250
Chinese print workers in a total of eleven Protestant mission presses scattered throughout China.266 Of that total, 126 were concentrated in Shanghai. Partly through the experience of these anonymous workers, other Chinese
began to see that they could benefit from Western printing technology, but
not before the chief Catholic technology, lithography, initiated the real
beginning of Chinese-mediated Western printing, that is, the large-scale use
of Chinese-owned industrial machines by Chinese printers.
The development of relief and lithographic media and presses for printing
Chinese was possibly the most important and lasting conversion ever effected by nineteenth-century Protestant and Catholic missionaries in
China.267 In the long term, only small numbers of Chinese turned enthusiastically to the Christian texts originally produced by Western printing along
the southeastern China coast from Macao to Shanghai. Hong Xiuquan (181464), the antiliterati Taiping leader who claimed to be the younger brother of
Jesus, was the most famous Chinese influenced by early Western-style printing, but, in light of the thirty million who died during his thirteen-year
rampage against the Qing state and Confucian culture, he might not be the
preferred model of someone influenced by a Christian text. The paucity of
genuine Christian converts aside, nonetheless, the technology that these
early law-breaking Christian missionary subversives brought to China eventually produced significant Chinese converts of its own. However, these
disciples turned Western technology to their own purposes.
Summarizing Tables 1.1 and 1.2 shows that various Western printing
technologies advanced into the Chinese heartland right along with Western
missionaries. Zhang Xiumin, Chinas leading scholar of printing history,
has written that imperialism coupled hard tactics with soft ones: cannons
and printing presses intersected and were each useful, intimately complementing each other.268 The early targets of the missionaries soft tactics
were Macao, Canton, and Hong Kong, followed by Ningbo, Fuzhou, and
Shanghai, and then other northern and inland ports. As the missionaries
advanced, it is clear, they experimented with a wide variety of Chinese
xylographic and European letterpress and lithographic printing techniques.
The tables also reveal the overwhelming centrality of Shanghai in this

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

technological diffusion from the West to China. By the end of the nineteenth century, Shanghai was the most important of over 100 treaty ports
acquired through both hard and soft tactics. In Shanghai, the tables show,
the Commercial Press was the single most vital enterprise, Chinese or Western, in advancing Chinas twentieth-century Western-style printing industry. Among Chinese firms, the Commercial Press was joined in the
technological vanguard by Wenming, Hushang and, after 1912, Zhonghua.
Unlike Englands Times and Japans Osaka Asahi, in China these comprehensive book publishers together, more often than not, acquired advanced printing technologies ahead of Shanghais newspaper and general printing
enterprises, suggesting the primacy of the book-publishing mentality among
the Chinese.
Of the nineteen kinds of relief, planographic, and intaglio media whose
genesis in China has been traced in this chapter, thirteen were first used in
Shanghai and seven of those by the Commercial Press. With regard to the
first recorded use of twenty-one kinds of printing presses and machines
(platen, cylinder, rotary, and lithographic), fifteen were first used in Shanghai, the citys relatively late arrival (and hence its total absence from the
platen category) on the printing scene notwithstanding. Of the sixteen
presses, six, even including printing machines typically used in newspaper
printing, were first adopted by the Commercial Press, founded only in 1897.
These tables focus on the first use of a particular technology. A larger
sample, presented in the following chapters, will confirm the general contours of these data, revealing the great importance of both Shanghai and
the Commercial Press throughout the nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury phases of Chinas Western-style printing revolution. Not shown in
the tables are the activities of missionary presses, such as the American
Board in Canton and the National Bible Society of Scotland at Hankou,
presses that, like most nineteenth-century Chinese, favoured xylography
over both letterpress and lithography for long periods.
The missionaries and early Chinese printers and publishers discussed in
this chapter contributed to the overall decline of Chinas xylographic craft
printing and its gradual replacement by industrialized lithographic and
letterpress printing and publishing. This evolution was not lost on later
Chinese commentators. Indeed, as Liu Longguang (b. 1913) of Yiwen yinshua
yuekan/The Graphic Printer pointed out in 1937, [D]uring the Tongzhi [r.
1862-74] and Guangxu [r. 1875-1907] eras ... Chinas door gradually opened.
The Wests new-style printing crafts were introduced, and, naturally, Chinas
old-style printing crafts could not compete ... So-called new-style printing
was nicknamed mechanical printing, and the so-called old-style printing
was nicknamed manual printing. The result of the contest between manual

85

86

Gutenbergs Descendants

and mechanical printing was that the [manual] frequently [succumbed] to

natural selection.269 In this context, however, one is struck by the fact that
the two earliest missionary printing operations, the London Mission Press
and the APMP, joined those that succumbed to natural selection when
they were bought out by Chinese publishers.
In the 1870s, Huang Sheng and Wang Tao converted Hong Kongs London Mission Press into their China Printing Company. Fifty years later, in
1923, the Chinese owners of the Commercial Press merged their old
employers firm, the APMP, into their own, symbolizing the thorough
sinicization of Gutenberg and his missionary descendants. By then, growing numbers of Chinese printers and publishers had come to regard both
relief and planographic technology as theirs. At the end of the Qing, reflecting themes of mechanization and modern processes first introduced by
Medhurst and Lowrie, and sustained by Wang Tao, a Chinese magazine
such as Shanghai tuhua ribao (Shanghai Illustration Daily) could write, Printing books by machine is really convenient. You can print a big pennant in a
flash, saving effort and money, and it is both exquisite and fresh270 (emphasis
added), suggesting that at least some heirs to Chinas literati culture had
embraced Western printing as a means of disseminating that tradition to
wider audiences.
Although both Hong Kongs China Printing Company and Shanghais
Commercial Press relied heavily on lead-type fonts made from matrices of
the sort that can be traced to Samuel Dyer on Penang, Richard Cole at
Hong Kong, and William Gamble at Ningbo, not one of those particular
Western Chinese fonts remained popular with twentieth-century Chinese.
The four major nineteenth-century Western-created fonts (Dyers, Coles,
Gambles, and Majors) were abandoned by Chinese printers, particularly
those at the Commercial Press and Zhonghua Books, as they began to
make their own decisions about an industrialized, Chinese typographic
aesthetic. Regardless of the fonts appeal to missionary printers, these fonts
never became attractive to Chinese, in part because they lacked calligraphic
qualities.
Consequently, from the vast array of Western printing technology (nineteen kinds of media, of which seven were available by the 1870s, and matching presses) that they encountered, Chinese printers and publishers searched
for alternative means to achieve their ends. Through their choices, lithography, not letterpress, became the first real step in Chinas embrace of Western printing technology. Contrary to received wisdom, nineteenth-century
Chinese were making constructive choices when it came to identifying the
Western technology closest to the literary and aesthetic culture that they

Transferring Industrialized Printing Technology, 1807-1930

venerated. Their choices were influenced by the range of literati values discussed in this chapter, particularly those concerned with calligraphy and
relevant to extending the life of calligraphic and manuscript culture.
As a result, and as we will see in the next chapter, culture determined
technology in the late Qing. By the 1920s, when the Commercial Press
absorbed the APMP, Chinese print capitalism, created through the synthesis of Chinese intellectual and cultural traditions and Western technology,
was already five decades old. As we will also find, it began with lithography,
not letterpress, which could be made more easily to reflect Chinese aesthetic concerns. While it unfolded, Chinese print capitalism revealed the
unexpectedly strong influence of Chinas own publishing culture on the
technological decisions taken by Chinese printer-publishers.
Just as important, by the time the flurry of international political events
overtook slow-moving lithographic printing, Chinese type makers would
find their own aesthetic in cast metal, allowing them to replace missionary
fonts with those of their own design. Those new fonts would then be used
to print the secularized works of a new generation of antidynastic political
activists and educational reformers, among others. Western printing presses
and machines, adaptable to new Chinese-designed fonts, would continue to
appeal to Chinese printers and publishers, just as they did to those in the
West. The nineteenth century had turned out to be, just as Lowrie and
Wang had put it, an era of metal, steam, and chemistry. By the mid1920s, Western-style printing, by then blending the calligraphic aesthetics
of the Chinese literati with the technology of the Gutenberg revolution,
would become an inseparable part of Chinas modern civilization.

87

2 Janus-Faced Pioneers:
The Golden Age of Shanghais Lithographic
Printer-Publishers, 1876-1905

For Chinese who lived through the period of transition from woodblocks to
Western-style printing, modernization and the growth of print capitalism
did not involve a clear break from the past. Only when the transition was
nearly complete did it occur to some of those involved to comment on the
process. Bao Tianxiao (1876-1973), a writer and editor, was one who recalled his first exposure to the new printed culture emanating from Shanghai in the mid-1880s. Bao wrote that, while still a student preparing for
imperial Chinas civil service examinations, he first became aware of the
modern world via exciting new Western-style Shanghai publications such
as the Dianshizhai huabao (Dianshizhai Pictorial, 1884-98). Shanghai, that
place! he commented, was where new styles began; new foreign inventions and new businesses were all first spread to Shanghai.1 Bao went on to
declare, Shanghai had printing shops [and] lithography,2 the latter being,
in his eyes, the most appealing among these sparkling new inventions and
businesses that were changing his mental world.
In 1897, approximately a dozen years after the period that Bao was describing, the well-known Qing literatus, writer, and reformer Kang Youwei
(1858-1927) visited Shanghai. The next year, thanks to his access to the
Guangxu emperor (r. 1875-1908), Kang would lead the doomed movement
known as the 100 Days of Reform (JuneSeptember 1898). In the meantime, though, Kang recorded his own, quite different impression of the citys
lithographic enterprise. While making the rounds of the citys lithographic
publishers, Kang reported, he was discouraged to learn that the only books
selling well recently were model examination essays (bagu wen) and novels.
Although undoubtedly marked by overstatement, Kangs anecdote suggests
that, rather than promoting the modernization and innovation outlined by
Bao Tianxiao, by the late 1890s Shanghais capitalistic lithographers were
stocking bookstore shelves with essentially the same texts as their competitors, the traditional woodblock printers.3
Although Bao and Kang appear to disagree about the creativity of
Shanghais lithographic business, both clearly suggest that lithography played
an important role in the citys cultural history. Surprisingly, in light of these

Shanghais Lithographic Printer-Publishers, 1876-1905

and other surviving comments and evidence, Western analysts of Chinese

printing and publishing have largely overlooked the need to reach an understanding of Shanghais nineteenth-century lithographic industry.4 The Western perception has been distorted by our awareness of the impact of letterpress
printing on post-Gutenberg civilization. The persuasive arguments of writers
from Lucien Febvre to Elizabeth Eisenstein have led us to overemphasize, at
the expense of alternative trajectories, those phases of modern printing in
non-Western parts of the world that conform to the central European narrative. Chinese experience with modern printing techniques makes passive
acceptance of the Eurocentric narrative untenable, however.
Simply put, Chinese history changed course when Shanghai publishers,
influenced by their own culture and history, began to place new demands
on Western printing technology. The phase of technological development
that distinguished Chinas, and especially Shanghais, early Westernized
printing industry was that involving lithography. Lithography provided the
means by which the Dianshizhai Pictorial as well as books mentioned by Bao,
Kang, and others were produced. At the same time, one must not lose sight
of the fact that Chinese printers had a wide array of options available to
them but chose to use lithography at the expense of other technologies.
Central to this chapter is the thesis that lithography was more than just a
random foreign transplantation on the banks of the Huangpu River. Lithography should be seen as a compromise technology that Shanghais Chinese
printer-publishers selected as appropriate for their goals. Late-nineteenthcentury Chinese publishers favoured it for three reasons: the relatively low
initial investment required, the aesthetic appeal of the texts printed with it,
and the limited changes in publishing outlook, particularly with regard to
industrialization and textual aesthetics, that it seemed to demand of publishers. At the same time that lithography provided these opportunities, it
helped to initiate industrialized print commerce and new forms of institutional organization in the Shanghai region.
Shanghais lithographic printer-publishers were the first Chinese to buy
significant quantities of foreign printing machinery, to set up printing plants,
and to seek out a broad-based clientele willing to turn away from woodblocked editions. The new technology enabled them to undersell woodblock publishers, to create a new market for innovative products, particularly
reduced-size editions of works important to degree candidates, and to preserve the calligraphic component of original texts. All these accomplishments are modalities that letterpress printing techniques had failed to achieve.
In this way, the Chinese lithographers supplanted Chinese woodblock
printer-publishers and promoted a mechanized, Western-style form of printing to a wider Chinese audience.

89

90

Janus-Faced Pioneers

Moreover, thanks in part to lithography, Shanghai began to emerge as a

distinctive cultural centre in its own right. As Chinese lithographic publishing developed, the groundwork was laid for a minor local printing industry
to become a major national publishing one. Most significantly, lithography
helped to foster the Chinese identification of Shanghai with the technological innovation that underlies modernity. This identification stemmed in
part from the lithographers publications, in terms of both technique and
content, but also from the new organizational and commercial forms that
the lithographic industry brought to Shanghais International Concession.
Although lithography was a worldwide industrial phenomenon in the nineteenth century, the conditions under which lithography was employed and
the forms in which it flourished in China were unique to Shanghai. Its
prosperity was closely related to the preponderance of reprints in Chinas
commercial publishing industry. A nearly insatiable market demand for works
deemed necessary for success on the triennial imperial examinations gave
impetus to the reprint industry on which Chinese lithography was based. In
addition, Viceroy Zhang Zhidong (1837-1909) called, in the 1880s, for
wholesale reprinting of large collections of traditional works, an appeal that
inspired both traditional and modern publishers. In an influential annotated bibliography, Zhang exhorted his contemporaries to public service,
pointing out that if a person can afford to do something worthwhile, but
lacks prestige and scholarship, the best way for him to win a lasting reputation is to reprint old works.5 Dependence on the reprint market also contributed to the economic and political vulnerability of the lithographers,
however. The abolition of the traditional educational curriculum and of the
civil service examination system in 1904-5 meant that, just as the necessary
adjustments had finally been settled into, Chinese modernity was redefined
with an emphasis on new-style learning and books that addressed political and social problems with reference to Japan and the West, rather than to
Chinas ancient greatness.
To establish the full spectrum of dynamics set in motion by Shanghais
Chinese lithographic printers, and to reveal the impact of the industry on
society, this chapter will provide profiles of the treaty ports most important
lithographic publishers of the late 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s: Dianshizhai,
Tongwen shuju (Tongwen Press), and Feiyingguan (Feiying Hall). By sifting
through the details of Shanghais forgotten lithographic golden age, from
1876 to 1905, one can get a sense not only of the process by which woodblock
printing disappeared from Shanghai but also of one of the ways by which
Western machinery and print capitalism were adopted by the Chinese printing industry.

Shanghais Lithographic Printer-Publishers, 1876-1905

However, because these Janus-faced pioneers unintentionally laid the social, commercial, and industrial foundations for Shanghais late Qing and
early Republican capitalist printing and publishing industry, the industrial,
social, and cultural history of lithography is just as important as the industrys
technological development. Much like the contrasting views of Shanghais
lithographic industry left by Bao Tianxiao and Kang Youwei, the lithographic
publishers faced forward and aft, effecting great socioeconomic changes while
remaining essentially traditional themselves. During the golden age of lithography, the ports lithographic printer-publishers, just as much as betterknown later Shanghai newspaper publishers such as Liang Qichao (18731929) and Yu Youren (1879-1964), initiated Shanghais bid to dominate a
new national market of readers, both high and low. From the 1870s to the
early 1900s, the lithographic publishers were both more numerous and more
influential than Shanghais letterpress printers. Retail outlets and factories
such as Dianshizhai, Tongwen Press, and Feiying Hall provided a beachhead for the Chinese printing industry of the twentieth century, and they
are the key to understanding the origins of print capitalism and modern
publishing in Shanghai.
Janus-Faced Pioneers: Shanghais Lithographic Printer-Publishers
Furthermore, unlike Shanghais nineteenth-century lead-type printing shops,
which were either foreign-owned and produced articles of limited appeal
to the Chinese reading audience or were run for state purposes, the citys
lithography shops, with one important exception, were Chinese-owned and
-operated private enterprises.6 These firms were also the forerunners, organizationally and technologically, of the comprehensive Chinese publishing
companies of twentieth-century Shanghai that produced later generations
of well-known magazines.7
For example, to publish its own magazine, a firm such as the Commercial
Press, which issued the Dongfang zazhi/The Eastern Miscellany, first had to
grasp the value of lithography and to open a lithographic printing department
along with its letterpress one. Without the social and technological background, it would be difficult to know why, or how, it did so. All Chineseoperated, early lithographic factories discussed here produced works that
were sold commercially throughout China. Through the mechanization of
their industry, the establishment of early printing factories, and the creation of a class of printing workers, these Chinese proprietors took the first
step in the Westernization of Shanghais Chinese printing industry.
Most people, when they think of the modernization of a national printing industry such as Chinas, naturally assume that lead-type printing must

91

92

Janus-Faced Pioneers

have been the only foreign technology of choice. Viewing Chinas adaptation of Western printing techniques under both the influence of the Western
narrative and the efflorescence of Shanghais post-1895 book-and-newspaper
publishing businesses, many have inferred that what came after had also
come before. However, the success of Shanghais letterpress industry in the
post-1895 period should not be allowed to obscure the fact that, in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, economically and socially, as well
as culturally, letterpress printing was much less significant to China than
lithography.
In light of the scarcity of sources for the pre-1895 period, a variety of
alternative sources, approaches, and informed speculation becomes especially important in ascertaining the extent of the industry. By combining
scattered information, we can make sound inferences about the importance
of Shanghais lithographers during the golden age from 1876 to 1905. In
what follows, the European background to Shanghais lithographic efflorescence will be reviewed to suggest continuities between the two. In the next
section, discontinuities between Europe and China, and between xylography
and lithography, both influenced by Chinese choices, will be highlighted.
An important industry, still largely ignored by researchers, underlay
nineteenth-century Europes well-known fascination with lithographic publications. Lithography arrived in France, for instance, around 1800, only a
year after Alois Senefelder finished inventing it and in the same year that he
gained a British patent for the process. By 1838, there were 262 lithographic
firms in Paris alone, including one founded by Senefelder, and 634 in the
provinces, for a total of nearly 900 firms.8 Almost immediately after its arrival
in France, lithography was put to work producing political journals, many
of them under the ownership of the radical republican, Charles Philipon.
Between 1800 and 1830, eleven new lithographed political journals appeared in France. Such publications came into prominence only during and
after the Revolution of 1830, when satirical journals such as the short-lived
but influential weekly La Caricature (1830-35) and its sister publication,
the long-lived daily Le Charivari (1832-1937), appeared. Both were partially owned by Philipon, who had a share in seven others as well. He employed some of the greatest illustrators of the age, including Honor Daumier,
and he also worked with Aubert, Pariss most prominent lithographic print
shop.9 In time, the visual potential of lithography led illustrators and artists
to strike out on their own, and lithography assumed the profile that it has
today as an artists medium, largely independent of printed textual matter.
Senefelder conveyed lithography to England at the same time that it was
expanding in France. Half a century later, in London alone, lithographers
made up the second most numerous category of print shops after general

Shanghais Lithographic Printer-Publishers, 1876-1905

printers; this situation prevailed until 1900. In roughly the same period as
Shanghais golden age of lithography, the number of London lithographers
grew from 412 (in 1876) to 488 (in 1896) and then declined slightly in
1900 to 462.10 As in France, in Britain lithographers put the stones to work
printing various categories of illustrated magazines and newspapers.
In Britain, however, such works never became as popular as they were in
France. The best-known early British illustrated magazines, such as the Illustrated London News (1842-present), Punch (1841-1992), etc., used woodcut rather than lithographically printed images, at least until photography
took over in the 1870s and 1880s.11 As a result, in Britain, and almost
simultaneously in America, instead of appealing to an elite of political radicals, as did French lithographers, lithographic publishers developed a broad
market for less explicitly political, occasionally humorous, lithographed newspapers.12 The earliest of such works was issued fortnightly in 1825-26 and
combined prominent illustrations with short textual passages, a layout that
directly anticipated Shanghais Dianshizhai Pictorial.13
In Britain and America, lithographed newspapers and pamphlets that
combined illustrations with text continued to appear until the end of the
nineteenth century. Just as notable, however, were individual lithographs
issued by magazines such as Vanity Fair (1868-1914) and, in particular, by
travel writers and publicists. One of the first travel writers to issue such
works was the Scotsman David Roberts who collaborated with the prominent lithographic illustrator, Louis Haghe, on Robertss Egypt, Syria, and the
Holy Land.14 This monthly work was issued from 1842 to 1849 to a select
list of 600 subscribers, thereby satisfying the yearnings of armchair travellers for lithographs of foreign lands, curiosities, and exotica.
In the United States, Currier and Ives of New York (1834-1907) was a
standout firm that filled a similar hunger for pictorial accounts of faraway
events. Indeed, Nathaniel Currier was one of the first to grasp the commercial value of linking illustrations and current events. Initially selling pictures of fires, shipping tragedies, and other local disasters, Curriers business
hit the jackpot in 1846 when his artists began to illustrate the MexicanAmerican War (1846-48), the first and last American war to be visualized
solely via lithographs.15 The firms success in what was then a highly competitive field enabled it to employ large numbers of recognized illustrators.16
After first working out the illustrations on lithographic stones, Currier and
Ivess artists passed their prints on to legions of young girls, deployed in
assembly-lines, to colour in the prints by hand. The New York firm, after
branching out into a variety of other illustrational fields, continued this
division of labour right to its end in 1907, when new printing technologies
and a change of personnel combined to put the firm out of business.17

93

94

Janus-Faced Pioneers

In addition to illustrating the news, lithography was used to print entire

books. In Britain, in 1863, Colonel Sir Henry James of the Ordnance Survey Office, Southampton, completed a thirty-five-volume reproduction of
the Domesday Book. Subsequent British antiquarian projects were so successful that, by 1880, lithography had become the technology of choice for
facsimile reproductions. In the view of Michael Twyman, five categories of
books now began to be created using lithography: (1) works produced in
limited numbers for noncommercial use, most of which were illustrated; (2)
in-house publications, particularly instructional or reference manuals such
as those used by the military; (3) works requiring considerable use of non[L]atin characters that were not available from letterpress printers; (4) collections of facsimiles of early printed books18 (emphasis added); and (5)
works that used lithography simply because of the excitement that the new
process fostered.19
With modifications, this set of five categories characterizes the books
produced by Shanghai lithographers. Broadly speaking, lithography in Shanghai was used to produce illustrated and instructional works, some of which
were new, most of which were reprints, and all of which employed nonLatin characters. In addition, the Chinese proprietor of Shanghais Tongwen
Press was one of those attracted to lithography thanks partly to his excitement over the new process.
Two missionary schools stand out as the cradles of Chinas first generation of Western-style printers. Chronologically, the first was the Qingxin
Hall School established in 1861 by the New York Presbyterian missionary
and printer-publisher J.M.W. Farnham (1829-1917). Of greater significance
for the growth of the lithographic industry in Shanghai, however, was the
impact of printing instruction at Xujiahuis Tushanwan orphanage run by
the Jesuits. Shanghais lithographic printing began in the print shop there
in 1876;20 it quickly spread to Nanjing Road, thanks to English merchant
Ernest Major (d. 1908).
Major, founder of Shanghais Chinese-language newspaper, Shenbao (1872),
initiated the commercialization of Shanghais lithographic publishing operations when he opened the publishing house affiliated with his newspaper,
Dianshizhai, which began publishing book reprints in 1877. Before Major
arrived in Shanghai in 1859, he had run a silk filature in Italy. Although
documentation is lacking, it is reasonable to suppose that, while in Europe,
Major probably encountered continental lithographed newspapers and journals of the sort that the French had been producing since early in the
century. Another influence on him would have been the lithographed journals and books of his native Britain. British publications possibly appealed
to the international entrepreneur for their relative lack of savage political

Shanghais Lithographic Printer-Publishers, 1876-1905

content and their emphasis on book reprints, current events, and exotica,
all of which must have suggested possibilities for Majors Shanghai publishing operations.
Among Majors employees, the lithographic artist Wu Youru (1840?1893?) was chief illustrator of the Dianshizhai Pictorial. Wus drawing of the
Dianshizhai print shop and its machinery was mentioned at the end of the
previous chapter. Wu, a native of Suzhou, may be regarded as the Daumier
of Shanghais lithographic illustration business. Wu embarked on his career
via an apprenticeship preparing inexpensive calligraphy and paintings for
sale to local peasants in his native citys Yunlange Mounting Shop.21 The
local painter Zhang Zhiying recognized the talent informing Wus sketches
and began to promote the young mans career. Local gentry quickly drew
parallels between Wu and the well-known Ming painter, Qiu Ying (c. 14981552), whose early life, like Wus, was overshadowed by poverty.
Thanks to a recommendation from Zeng Guoquan (1824-90), the younger
brother of Viceroy Zeng Guofan (1811-72), who had vanquished the Taiping
rebels at their capital of Nanjing in 1864, the Qing court granted Wu an
extraordinary honour, inviting the artist to Beijing to paint Zhongxing gongchen
tu (Images of Meritorious Officials of the Post-Taiping Restoration). Upon
his return to the Jiangnan region, Wu converted his imperial accolade into a
commercial opportunity when he took charge of illustrations for Shanghais
new lithographed journal, Majors Dianshizhai Pictorial. There Wu and Zhang
worked together. Like Daumier, who led a group of outstanding illustrators
working for the publisher Charles Philipon, Wu began his work for the
Dianshizhai Pictorial with a staff of eight assistant illustrators.22
The Dianshizhai Pictorial disseminated Wus illustrations to readers from
1884 to 1890, when Wu left the firm (the journal continued to appear until
1898 without his direction). Wu also got involved with other lithographic
publications, such as Shenjiang shengjing tu (Scenic Spots of Shanghai), mentioned in the previous chapter. Around 1890, he began to issue his own
Feiyingge huabao (Feiyingge Pictorial), a lithographed magazine that closely
resembled the Dianshizhai Pictorial. Wu hired his old patron and colleague,
Zhang Zhiying, to assist him with his new magazine.23
By August 1893, Wu had changed the name and format to Feiyingge huace
(Feiyingge Album) and devoted the short-lived new series to illustrations
alone, executed in the traditional format of line drawings (danxian baimiao).
Where the Dianshizhai Pictorial was characterized by illustrated and captioned news stories, Wus own Feiyingge Pictorial eliminated news and current events, catering instead to conventional Chinese interest in traditional
stories, pictures of famous beauties, and boudoir scenes with text.24 The
Feiyingge Album died with Wu in 1893.

95

96

Janus-Faced Pioneers

Gong Chanxing, in one of the most provocative of the short studies of

Wu Youru available, quotes from the Feiyingge Albums Foreword to explain
why Wu issued the new publications. Wu launched the Feiyingge Pictorial,
Gong says, to provide the Dianshizhai Pictorial with some competition. After three years of operation, however, in 1893, Wu changed his objective
and terminated publication of the Feiyingge Pictorial. The new Feiyingge Album, as an illustrated journal, was intended to provide Wu with an artistic
outlet rather than to stimulate competition with his former employer, and,
in Wus view, it was more closely aligned with the book world than with
periodical culture.
I received a kind letter from a reader of the paper which raises [the issue] of my
news illustrations. They [news illustrations] are like trying to write examination
poems. Even if you try really hard to hit the meaning, in the end you have to
drop it because of time limits, and it is very hard to hand them down [to later
generations]. But if you illustrate books, as with famous authors works, you
can reveal a new aspect [of them], yielding unique thoughts and providing a
[new] starting place. Why not start over and follow new tracks, discarding the
weaknesses [of illustrated periodicals], and adopt the strengths [of the Feiyingge
Album] assisting like-minded persons in their aims?25

Using an analogy that would have made immediate sense to his educated
audience, Wu compared the restrictions imposed by news illustrating to
examination writing. He also revealed his preference for unique thoughts,
an allusion to a literati fantasy of life unencumbered by official duties. Indeed, the artistic topics covered by the Feiyingge Album suggest that Wu was
seeking access to the Chinese reader who was concerned less with the print
commodities of news or entertainment than with traditional literati interests in brushwork and scenery.
Predictably, the Shanghai lithographers publications fell into two broad
categories, ephemera and books, that paralleled the French, British, and
American lithographic business.26 Periodicals such as the Dianshizhai Pictorial, although more durable than other forms of ephemera, such as newspapers, calendars, maps, brochures, pamphlets, and advertisements, were
short-lived unless they were outstanding examples of their genre. Lithographed newspapers, such as Liang Qichaos (1873-1929) twenty-page semiweekly Shiwubao (Chinese Progress, founded in 1896), have been preserved
thanks only to their political importance.27 Books, of course, were of greater
durability and longevity than either periodicals or ephemera,28 and it was
with books that Shanghais Dianshizhai had gotten its start.

Shanghais Lithographic Printer-Publishers, 1876-1905

Introducing Lithography to Shanghai

Between 1842, when Shanghai was first opened to Western traders and
missionaries, and the 1870s, Shanghais Chinese commercial printing industry was small-scale and dispersed throughout the Nanshi (old Chinese
city). Surviving sources do not describe it in detail.29 Just as earlier in the
Qing, technology was limited to woodblock duplication of texts that ranged
from the literary to the popular. There was also a thriving business, centred
on the Old Parade Ground (Jiujiaochang) inside the North Gate, involved
in the preparation of nianhua-style (New Years picture-style) playbills, a
genre that came to Shanghai from Suzhou probably during the dislocations
of the Taiping period.30
The duplication of books depended upon access to what are known in
the European manuscript tradition as exemplars, already-existing texts of
recognized and acceptable quality and accuracy.31 Along with access to ample
supplies of wood, ink, and paper, woodblock printers needed a sizable editorial library of accepted exemplary texts. The exemplar system persisted
with the arrival of lithography. The lack of supplies, both material and textual, as well as the vigour of nearby publishing centres such as Suzhou and
Hangzhou, limited the scale of Shanghais woodblock printing industry prior
to the Taiping Rebellion (1851-64).32
Even thirty years later, in 1894, in terms of both investment value and
the numbers of workers employed, Western-style printing and publishing
of all kinds were only a minor contributor to Shanghais economic activity.
Investments in the paper and printing industries, not including Majors
Shenbao newspaper, equalled only 1,250,000 taels, about 10 percent of all
investments in light industries.33 The number of workers employed in the
paper and printing industries was even less significant when compared to
other light industries such as brick-, tile-, or even ice-making, not to mention
woodworking and cigarette manufacturing.
Nonetheless, in Sun Yutangs view, there were 1,300 workers in seven of
Shanghais Chinese lithographic shops by 1894, 430 more than there were
letterpress printers in all of China (including Shanghai) in both Western and
Chinese firms.34 Suns figures do not include forty-five additional lithographic
publishers that I have determined were founded by 1894 but that Sun overlooked.35 If Sun is correct in assuming that each shop employed 150 to 200
workers,36 then a conservative estimate of 150 employees for each of the
undiscovered forty-five additional publishing firms would boost his figure
to 8,050, yielding a total of 7,180 more lithographic printing workers in
Shanghai alone than there were Chinese letterpress printing workers in all
of China, including Shanghai, in 1894. Conversely, it is highly conceivable

97

98

Janus-Faced Pioneers

that these forty-five additional shops either hired out their printing or had
only one machine apiece and employed only the three to eight workers
necessary to run it. In any event, there were at least 430 more workers in
the Shanghai lithographic industry in 1894 than there were in the entire
Chinese letterpress enterprise, a suggestive indicator of its economic importance at that time.
Given the fact that the lithographic shops, when they appeared in the
1870s and 1880s, were in direct competition with the xylographic printers
in the reprint business, one may conclude that lithographers, along with
letterpress printers in a later era, contributed to the displacement of the
woodblock industry. In fact, in this period, this displacement occurred in
two sectors, prices and employment, but it is still not clear how prices and
employment were related.
Regarding prices, Shanghais lithographic establishments, unlike the local
woodblock enterprises, were able to produce long runs of high-quality works
relatively quickly and cheaply. According to a January 1889 article in the
North China Herald, the extension of photo-lithographic [photographic projection onto stone] establishments in Shanghai, which have been pouring
out native books almost by the million, has been disastrous to the native
[woodblock] book trade ... after the autumn examinations many of the
[native] book stores had to close their doors.37 The article goes on to state
that inexpensive lithographic books were available throughout the empire
and that woodblocked editions could not compete in the markets patronized by examination candidates.
Five months later, in May 1889, the North China Herald printed a threecolumn article profiling Shanghais lithographic industry, leading off with
the comment that the printing of Chinese books in Shanghai by lithography is rapidly becoming an extensive branch of trade. One press could
turn out so many printed sheets, so rapidly, that Chinese capitalists [sic]
find it profitable to invest money in this enterprise. Whats more, the
cheapness of the books thus produced is a great recommendation in a country where reading is a very common accomplishment.38
In another instance, a North China Herald article records that the newspaper had recently acquired a very neatly got up map of the Shanghai
region produced in a Chinese merchants lithographic shop at 627 Hubei
Road and printed with English place names. The commentator goes on to
observe, That such an excellent work should be issued from a Chinese
lithographic establishment is a very convincing answer to those who assert
that the Chinese have made little or no progress in the peaceful arts of the
Western barbarians, for the work in question might have been, as far as
external appearance goes, issued with credit by any firm at home.39 The

Shanghais Lithographic Printer-Publishers, 1876-1905

newspaper reporter praises the draftsmans understanding of distances, directions, and the spelling of place names. This map, intended for foreign
sportsmen and travellers in the country around Shanghai, came in the wake
of a coloured map of Shanghais urban districts produced by the same shop
a month before. That earlier map would have been perfect if the names of
the streets had been added in English;40 that the publisher then accommodated the Heralds opinion by printing the second map in Chinese and
English suggests that the firm was seeking a more cosmopolitan clientele.
Half a year later, the newspapers tone had become less condescending.
By way of praise for the lithographers development of the miniaturization
market, the North China Herald observed that reduced-size lithographic publications appealed most strongly to examination candidates and students:
The buyers of these lithographed editions are students who have young
eyes and read fast. To them broad margins and large type are no advantage
and they prefer to have books in portable boxes suited for travelling. All
students have to travel and they like to take books with them ... Most of the
printing done is extremely small in size and the wonder is that so many
persons should be willing to buy what it needs magnifying power to read
with comfort. Yet at present these institutions [publishing houses] have the
appearance of busy prosperity.41 The lithographers successful exploitation
of the markets identified by the Herald eventually brought them to the attention of the missionary publishers, who were concerned with the issue of
prices as well.
In 1890, the Reverend Ernst Faber (1839-99), stationed in Qingdao,
shocked the General Conference of the Protestant Missions of China, held in
Shanghai, with his observation that Protestant publications were now inferior to those produced by Chinese publishers using Western technology:
[W]e have to acknowledge the fact that the printing done by some Chinese establishments is, by the use of modern processes, ahead of our mission presses ... Our illustrations are still very defective ... [O]riginal Chinese
pictures ... cannot be obtained before lessons in drawing ... are better attended to in mission schools. Block-cutting, wood-engraving, lithography,
zincography [i.e., photolithography], etc., should be taught to Christian
boys in connection with the mission presses.42 Faber went on to praise the
Roman Catholics for their superiority in producing block-cutters, lithographers, photolithographers, etc., that is, workers in the chief Chinese printing media of the day.
Fabers comments incited Gilbert McIntosh, a Scot, erstwhile superintendent of Shanghais American Presbyterian Mission Press (APMP) printing
plant, and at that time associated with the Society for the Diffusion of
Christian Knowledge (Chinese, Guangxuehui), to reply, I would like to

99

100 Janus-Faced Pioneers

refer to what Dr. Faber has said in his paper with regard to the printing by
some Chinese establishments being, by the use of modern processes, ahead
of our mission presses. I think this superiority is largely attributable to the
use by the Chinese of photo-lithography, which is well-adapted for many
kinds of Chinese works.43 McIntosh, himself a printer, directly attributed
the superiority of Chinese publishers work to their implementation of photolithography, which the Scotsman acknowledged was well-adapted to
the kinds of works that Chinese publishers wanted to print. Moreover, like
Faber, McIntosh believed that lithography placed Shanghais Chinese printerpublishers ahead of the missionary houses in some major fields of printing.
McIntosh went on to comment that the cost of photolithographing books
would have necessitated retail prices above missionary rates. At the same
time, profits gained from the sale of these works produced by photolithography made it possible for capitalistically inclined Chinese to import a quantity and quality of [printing] goods ... from Western lands ... so as to make
a missionary printer feel envious.44 The only lithographically printed works
not sold at prices unacceptably high in missionary eyes were those that
were for idolatrous and superstitious purposes, and those which [have] a
directly immoral tendency45 but were in great demand. In other words,
Shanghais capitalistic lithographic publishers were using the vast Chinese
marketplace of earnest civil service aspirants and other, more frivolous readers seeking sexual titillation to underwrite their purchase of foreign printing
technology.
The APMP, at this time still the most vigorous of the missionary publishers, quickly acknowledged the truths contained in Fabers and McIntoshs
comments. In the APMPs 1891 Annual Report, the editors commented that
printing offices and consequent competition have multiplied among the
Chinese, and ... photo-lithography has been much utilized.46 In the same
publication, the APMP complained of Chinese piracy of its works: A notable feature of the past year and characteristic of the growing desire for
light and the native endeavor to get some financial benefit from it, has been
the reproduction by the photo-lithographic process of a number [of] education works, originally printed at the [APMP] ... [S]uccessful attempts have
been made to restrain this unauthorized reproduction, [not from] desire to
limit the issue of good books, but to make it impossible for books to be
issued from native presses containing a large part of western learning with
the application left out.47 The reference to financial benefit is striking
confirmation that, by the early 1890s, Chinese printer-publishers were lithographing books of all sorts, whether Chinese- or Western-language, for profit;
at the same time, one is left wondering which Chinese lithographers reproduced what were probably textbooks at the foreign publishers expense.

Shanghais Lithographic Printer-Publishers, 1876-1905

In addition to textbooks, the Chinese lithographers issued semipornographic publications that led missionary publishers to the conclusion
that Western technology was being misused, possibly with the malfeasance
of Shanghais concession police. The missionary Reverend Ernest Box, for
one, lumped the periodical Dianshizhai Pictorial into the same class as a
journal called Qinglou huabao, known in English as the Illustrated Brothel
Newspaper. This latter paper was issued from a lithographic shop on Fuzhou
Road, close to the concessions Central Police Station and in the midst of
the citys entertainment district.
Boxs hostility to the lithographed magazines produced by Chinese residents of the International Concession was not representative of the Western communitys views, however. In fact, many Westerners, including other
missionaries of that era, had genuine respect for the accomplishments of
the Chinese lithographic craftsmen and actually did more to publicize lithography as a viable industry than did Chinese lithographers themselves. Even
Box, outraged by a few papers ... circulated chiefly, though not exclusively,
in Shanghai [that] depend for their success on the skill which they display
in pandering to the vicious tastes of a section, not small, we fear, of the
native community,48 must nevertheless be acknowledged for bringing these
papers to the attention of historians.
Inexpensive lithographic book pricing undermined Chinese xylographers
and even missionary letterpress printers. In 1889, the North China Herald
commented that a Kangxi Dictionary cost from $1.60 to $3 in lithographed
versions and from $3 to $15 in xylographed ones.49 The threat to xylographic
printers continued into the early twentieth century. A book catalogue, one
of the earliest surviving sources of its kind, issued by the woodblock and
lithographic publisher Saoye shanfang in 1917, reinforces views advanced
by the Herald and missionaries Faber and McIntosh that lithography lowered the selling prices of books relative to those formerly printed with
woodblocks.50 An ancient publisher from Suzhou forced by the Taipings to
flee to Shanghai about 1860, Saoye shanfang opened its new office on Caiyi
Street in Shanghais old Chinese city while retaining its head office in Suzhou.51
Around 1898, it acquired lithographic presses. By 1917, there was a second
branch of Saoye shanfang in Shanghai on Henan Road at the corner of
Canton Road, a third in the neighbouring city of Songjiang, and a fourth up
the Yangzi River in Hankou. The firm also did business by mail throughout
China and abroad. It survived until at least the early 1940s. In 1917, however, Saoye shanfang was printing and publishing some 490 titles lithographically. Some of the best known were collections and annotations of old
poetry, tales of wonder, novels, calligraphy models and manuals, compendia
of the epistolary arts, and medical works.52

101

102 Janus-Faced Pioneers

Prices for all categories of books listed in the catalogue are clearly recorded.
In the first section, which lists small collections containing from two to twenty
volumes (ce), prices start as low as fifteen cents (one mao five fen) at a time
when noodle soup in a cheap Fuzhou Road restaurant nearby cost forty
cents, wonton noodle soup cost sixty cents, a jin (1.3 pounds) of ham cost
four mao four fen, and a whole duck cost seven to eight mao.53 Most Saoye
shanfang prices did not reach even one Chinese dollar (yuan), and only a very
few went as high as five dollars; one or two items cost twelve or fourteen
dollars. Section two of the catalogue has a few more expensive items, but
prices such as thirty-two yuan for 204-ce sets were rare. The well-known lithographic illustrator Wu Yourus works were already being reprinted in 1917,
one finds, and were not cheap at sixteen yuan. Dianshizhai and Shizhuzhai
(Ten Bamboo Studio, a firm that recycled the name of the highly esteemed
seventeenth-century Nanjing art publisher) collections of illustrations were
also available (at two yuan five mao and one yuan two mao, respectively).
Woodblock editions in section three of the catalogue were uniformly more
costly than the lithographed ones listed in sections one and two. There were
almost no prices less than one yuan, and many cost from five to ten yuan.
The highest woodblock price was 160 yuan for a 480-ce collectanea (congshu),
and there were several others for ninety, sixty, fifty, forty-eight yuan, and so
on. From this price list, there is no doubt that lithographed books were
generally cheaper than woodblock ones. Still, neither traditional xylographic
works nor modern lithographic books were within the reach of the very
poor; Saoye shanfangs lithographers, like its woodblock printers, catered to
the reasonably well-off, especially to those with more than a passing traditional literary culture. Benefiting from reduced prices and mass production
made possible by mechanization, however, the lithographers were able to
undermine the traditional industry and widen their own market share with
this clientele.
Thus, it is clear, whether seen from the perspective of North China Herald
reporters or from that of a Chinese publisher heavily invested in both xylography and lithography, that, when it came to pricing, lithography benefited the consumer. In doing so, it also financially underwrote the expansion
of lithography. The second level on which Western lithographic processes
undermined Shanghais traditional woodblock printing industry was through
their effects on the labour force. Lithographers needed many of the same
kinds of employees as the xylographers and could pay them better. Calligraphers, for example, were needed by both. In its May 1889 article, the Heralds
longest on the lithographic industry, the reporter indicates at least one reason why calligraphers, practitioners of the literati art par excellence, may
have abandoned their former employers in the woodblock industry:

Shanghais Lithographic Printer-Publishers, 1876-1905

[An] advantage [of lithography] is that the beauty of good writing is better
preserved on stone than on carved wood. Writers exceptionally competent are
employed by the lithographers to write copy, as [they are employed] by the
wood engravers. But in xylography much of the smooth elegance of curves is
sacrificed. Notwithstanding this loss ... professional writers may, when they
have established a name, earn four or five taels a day by writing prefaces for
new books cut on wood ... In Chinese printing a main object must always be
to preserve as far as possible the beauty of writing. Consequently lithographers
must pay handsomely the writers who have good natural gifts allied to those
of the painter.54

By the time these articles were written, Shanghais lithographic business

was already mechanized and highly commercialized, and, in a curious juxtaposition of Western technological modernity and Chinese cultural tradition, calligraphers had become part of this capitalist, profit-oriented industry,
lured by both financial and aesthetic incentives.
In 1894, the year the First Sino-Japanese War intensified Chinas sense of
national crisis and enlarged the Chinese appetite for speedy publication of
international news, the Shanghai lithography shops clearly exceeded the
early Chinese letterpress print shops in scale, output, and number of employees. Under the impact of political and educational change after Chinas
disastrous defeat in the war (1895), however, the growth of Shanghais letterpress industry began to outpace the lithography industry.55 Although it is
possible, using bibliographic information, to identify another forty-five firms
established between 1894 and 1905 for a total of ninety-seven Chinese
lithographic firms active during the golden age from 1876 to 1905, conclusive information enabling us to ascertain with any certainty the total number of firms that ran their own printing shops has not come to light.56 We do
have such details for seven of the ninety-seven firms. Information is most
complete for the following three: Dianshizhai, Tongwen Press, and Feiying
Hall. In the absence of extensive documentary evidence, an intensive look
at these three establishments provides a microcosm of this industry that
shows how it developed and flourished between 1876 and 1905 and how its
impact was felt. This survey also suggests why lithography became relegated,
after 1905, to specialty publishing, employed for inexpensive works of fiction and also for illustrated works such as medical books, magazines, and
printed advertisements such as posters, calendars, packaging labels, and
cigarette trading cards.57
Perhaps as a result of the explosion of the letterpress industry that produced most of the thirty-two new Shanghai-based newspapers and thirtyfour new Shanghai magazines that appeared after Chinas loss to Japan in

103

104 Janus-Faced Pioneers

1895,58 already by 1897, as suggested by Kang Youweis statement, lithography had become stuck in a rut. Just as lithography had once replaced the
woodblock printing trade, it too was now being overwhelmed by Shanghais
new lead-type and letterpress industry. Where did the Shanghai lithographers
go, and why, in the eyes of many, did they seem to disappear? This question
can be answered only by looking more closely at the conditions of the time.
The Dianshizhai Lithographic Bookstore, Its Market, and Its Influence
The Dianshizhai Lithographic Bookstore and print shop, an offshoot of the
Shenbao newspaper operation, initially produced book reprints, a sensible
marketing decision in keeping with the traditional vein of the Chinese printing industry but one that involved a break with its ancestry in the newspaper business. Where missionary publishers had tried, with varying degrees
of success, to maintain their nonprofit stance, the printing technology that
they developed over the course of the nineteenth century was quickly put
to use by Western merchants investing in the profit-driven newspaper business. After purchasing Chinese fonts from the APMP or the London Mission Press, for instance, merchants set out to profit from them. At the same
time, they helped to adapt missionary printing technology to secular Chineselanguage purposes. Between 1815 and 1894, as one scholar has written
recently, about 150 foreign-managed, foreign-language newspapers were
created, along with 70 foreign-managed Chinese-language newspapers.59
Ernest Majors Shenbao was the leading light among the foreign-managed
Chinese-language newspapers that aimed to turn a profit from their Chinese fonts. At approximately the same time that Major and his compradore
Chen Huageng (Shengeng) founded Dianshizhai, he also opened a second
book-publishing firm known as Tushujicheng qianyin shuju (Tushujicheng
Metal-Type Publishing Company) and a calligraphy and painting shop known
as Shenchang shushi (Shenchang Calligraphic Studio) (for a view of both
the Shenchang and Shenbao buildings, see Figure 2.1).60 Dianshizhai, a SinoBritish hybrid, run, like the newspaper, by its Chinese staff, evolved through
several different stages before closing in 1898. It was one of the first casualties in the reorganization of the commercial printing and publishing business that took place in the wake of Chinas defeat in the Sino-Japanese War.
Shenbao, eventually sold to Chinese investors, remained one of Shanghais
leading newspapers until 1949.
Two contemporary illustrations suggest that Dianshizhai, at least architecturally, represented a fairly radical departure from traditional Chinese
publishing activities. The first (Figure 1.27), a line-drawing interior view
published in Wu Yourus album, Scenic Spots of Shanghai, depicts Dianshizhais
printing plant at the corner of Nanjing and present-day Xizang Roads. The

Shanghais Lithographic Printer-Publishers, 1876-1905

Figure 2.1 Shenchang Calligraphy Studio (left) and Shenbao newspaper office (right),
1884.
Source: Originally in Wu Youru, Shenjiang shengjing tu, juan xia (1884), reprinted from Zhang Jinglu,
ed., Zhongguo jindai chuban shiliao, er bian (Shanghai: Qunlian chubanshe, 1954), opposite 361.

purpose of the picture is obviously to show off the machinery. Five handrotated flatbed photolithographic presses are shown in exquisite detail, each
with a complement of six or seven male workers. Workers are also shown
unpacking and moving lithographic stones, preparing stones for printing,
and printing on small two-man presses. Altogether, over fifty Chinese workers can be seen.61 At least fourteen limestone tablets are shown piled on the
floor; in the lower right corner, five have been readied for printing and are
carefully stacked. Reams of paper and paper presses complete the work scene.
Despite the distorted perspective, scrutiny of the work site itself makes
clear that this is a spacious structure. The artist has paid much less attention to the buildings structure than to the machinery filling it. In fact, the
roof of the building seems to have been almost an artists afterthought, a
protective tarpaulin pulled up belatedly over the machinery. The large-paned
windows suggest that this building is essentially of Western factory-style
design. Interior pillars hint at a Chinese design, although such pillars were
also a common feature of Western commercial and industrial interior design in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The giveaway that
it is Western is the skylight in the right corner.

105

106 Janus-Faced Pioneers

Figure 2.2 Dianshizhai branch store (Hongqiang Western

Building), corner of Nanjing and Xizang Roads, Shanghai,
c. 1880s.
Source: Dianshizhai Pictorial (Canton: Guangdong Renmin
chubanshe, 1983), volume si, 73.

Another illustration (Figure 2.2), drawn by a different artist and originally published in the Dianshizhai Pictorial as a kind of advertisement, provides a frontal view of one of Dianshizhais retail branch outlets in Shanghai.
On the one hand, this picture reinforces the sense of a break with Chinese
tradition that one experiences when encountering Shanghais lithographic
publishers through the architecture that some of them chose to employ.
Housed in a three-storeyed, Western-style colonial building,62 the branch
store has two large display windows and a central entrance at the top of a

Shanghais Lithographic Printer-Publishers, 1876-1905

two-step threshold. Western-style transoms ventilate the store from the street.
The upper two floors are tightly shuttered.
On the other hand, above the door is a wooden tablet (fange) bearing the
shops name in Chinese fashion. The Chinese proprietor, seen through the
open doorway, is either wrapping up a purchase for an unseen customer or
consulting an old-fashioned string-bound volume; traditional Chinese-style
bookcases with horizontally stacked volumes are displayed to his right, left,
and rear. The obviously Chinese books on their shelves reinforce the viewers
sense that the building itself is an import. Well-to-do, and exclusively male,
Chinese customers, holding fans and wearing long gowns and Manchu-style
queues, complete the setting and undermine the viewers sense that this is a
drastically new world.
Turning to the illustrations inscription, one finds that it amplifies the
commercial messages framing the doorway. Phrased in the formal idiom of
nineteenth-century Shanghai commercial announcements, it declares, in an
appeal to the chief readership market of late Qing China, literati, but also,
strikingly, to merchants, This branch store specially provides lithographed
Classics, Histories, Philosophical works, and Compilations (jingshi ziji);
Chinese and foreign maps; Western-language books; tablet rubbings, painting manuals, pillar scrolls, painting and calligraphy albums, [all by] notables
and of various kinds. This firms entire price list is reasonable. Gentry and
merchants are invited to patronize it. Be aware [of this shop located at] the
southern corner of the sports ground in the three-storey building [called]
the Hongqiang [Red Walls] Foreign Building. So it is. This [announcement]
is for your information.
All in all, the advertisement combines the old and the new in an interesting way. In addition to recommending lithographed merchandise to literati
and merchants involved in traditional arts and intellectual pursuits, it promotes the firm Dianshizhai itself by emphasizing the firms Western-style,
three-storey edifice. This aspect of the advertisement is presented with the
clear intention of enhancing the appeal to its patrons,63 even to those clothed
in long gowns and queues.
Figure 2.3, like Figure 2.2 originally published as a Dianshizhai Pictorial
advertisement, depicts the branch store located on Hankou Road (Sanmalu),
south of the big foreign church, around 1890, and its multiple services to
the reading public.64 At the right of the advertisement can be seen an image
of the branch store itself. In contrast to Figure 2.2, Figure 2.3 shows a more
thoroughly Chinese environment. This illustration exhibits a Chinese-style,
galleried building with calligraphic store signs, piled sets of books, and other
printed publications along with painting scrolls. Again the patrons are exclusively Chinese men wearing scholars gowns and queues. The caption

107

108 Janus-Faced Pioneers

Figure 2.3 Dianshizhai advertisement for lithographic printing and publishing,

Hankou Road branch store, Shanghai, c. 1890.
Source: Don J. Cohn, Vignettes from the Chinese: Lithographs from Shanghai in the Late Nineteenth
Century (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1987), back cover.

over the picture of the building alerts readers to merchandise that includes
Dianshizhais familiar stock of books, stele rubbings, pillar scrolls, paintings, maps, and other printed matter.
Despite the modern, Western appearance of both the printing presses
and the printing plant, Dianshizhais retail environment and market were
clearly Chinese. Existing within the broader Chinese environment as they
did, those who worked among these presses and the sales inventory certainly brought their inherited worldviews to work. Merely having the presses
and the buildings did not necessarily Westernize or modernize the value
system of those active in this new world of foreign printing presses. Their
means of expression remained, in many if not all cases, firmly rooted in the
Chinese world from which Shanghais printers and publishers came. Having
one foot in each of two different worlds, such persons were typical of the
Janus-faced nature of the industry.
For example, Wu Youru, one of the most prominent beneficiaries of this
new lithographic publishing industry, conformed to the conventional literati predilection for writing poetry about everyday events as a means of
revealing his subjective response to the lithographic press. Drawing a picture in words, Wu anticipated the efforts of Ge Gongzhen (1890-1935) and
others in the 1920s to show how Western printing devices could be made

Shanghais Lithographic Printer-Publishers, 1876-1905

part of the Chinese mental landscape. Wu refers poetically to the place of

Western printing technology in Chinas historical literary civilization:
In olden times, texts of the Classics were all engraved on stone
[tablets or steles],
Meng of Shu [Sichuan] started to use wooden blocks [for printing];
Now, though, weve moved on to something even more amazing,
Again, based on the surface of stones, weve created a new model;
But [now] theres neither a need for polishing nor for cutting,
No need to engrave blocks or to carve pictures,
Red and black characters are imprinted in an instant,
With a supernatural workmanship that is completely effortless.65

Expressing an increasingly common viewpoint of his day, a time when Chinese were starting to become aware of the outside world, Wu seems to be
saying that the lithographers stone was not really something new in China;
it had been anticipated by numerous advances in Chinas long cultural history and was thus a technology with which the Chinese were already somewhat familiar. On this dubious basis, Wu deems lithography suitable for the
Chinese context.66
Even more striking, however, is the fact that Wu, with years of experience
in the lithographic illustrating and publishing business, resorted to a conventional poetic idiom to express his views on this new industrial process. A
veil of literati culture with its own poetic idiom seems to have been suspended between Wus eyes and the new, imported industrial process, leading Wu to conclude that it was essentially a Chinese process, not a foreign
one at all. Although he himself was a master of the process, it is as if the
language to enable him to present the process to readers as new, but acceptable, had not yet been invented.
Wus words also reveal the continuing cultural hegemony of the literati
view of commerce. Having presented his poem praising the lithographers
stone, Wu offers the following qualification in prose: Go hunt up the documents to hand over to the auspicious stone. Why reckon [the cost of] changing stone into gold [(dianshi chengjin) if] it can benefit a vast number of later
generations?67 Implicit in this comment is his awareness of the cost of setting up a lithographic publishing house. Although he provides no particular
details, it is clear that, in his mind, a publisher had to find some way of
balancing receipts from sales of books with the greater good namely, the
Confucian duty to promote social cultivation through the circulation of
texts. For Wu, the only acceptable answer to a rhetorical question that pits
cost against good is still the latter.

109

110 Janus-Faced Pioneers

The illustrations discussed here, which have been presented in an order

that transports us from the world of Western printing machines to a completely Chinese retail and consumption environment, suggest that, in the
twenty-two years of its existence, Dianshizhai displayed an architectural
adaptability indicative of its commercial, profit-driven nature. In spite of
Dianshizhais foreign ownership and its homes in buildings like those of
Figures 1.27 and 2.2, both of which look like direct transplants from England, an outlook more similar to Wu Yourus guided the firms publishing
philosophy. Dianshizhais first publications actually had no foreign pedigree whatsoever.
Dianshizhais first publication was a reprint of Shengyu xiangjie (Imperial
Edicts Explained in Detail).68 This reprint was followed by another in miniature characters of the Wuyingdian (Palace) edition of the Kangxi Dictionary
dating from 1716; essentially, three pages of the exemplar were printed, one
above the other, on one page of the facsimile,69 reducing the physical size of
the complete dictionary. Major and Chen initially printed 40,000 copies of
the miniaturized dictionary. Its retail price ranged from one yuan six mao to
three yuan. A comparable woodblock edition cost from three to fifteen yuan,70
a 50 to 80 percent increase.
The dictionarys first edition was distributed through retail outlets across
China and sold out within a few months, realizing a turnover of 80,000
yuan if one estimates a low average cost of two yuan per volume. Dianshizhai
promptly reprinted 60,000 copies suitable for the examinations. Customers
generally bought five or six [copies] ahead of time to prepare themselves
and to give to their friends and, for this reason, this printing [too] sold out
before a few months had passed.71
Not surprisingly, scholars disagree on the sizes of the print runs that could
be generated by xylographic publishers. In one widely cited view, woodblocks
could last for as many as 30,000 printings, and one man could print several
thousand copies of a block in a day. However, unlike the lithographed works,
these were low-quality works. A second estimate, for high-quality editions,
suggests that blocks became worn after several thousand copies. In this
view, one man could print 2,000 copies per day. A more recent calculation
argues that 15,000 copies could be struck off one set of blocks before the
blocks needed to be repaired, after which another 10,000 copies could likely
be printed.72 Thus, regardless of which category of quality and print-run one
selects as typical for xylography, it should be clear that the 100,000 copies
that Dianshizhai produced from one set of stones would have represented
unimaginable riches to Chinas woodblock publishers and would have helped
to convince Chinese entrepreneurs that publishing was now big business.

Shanghais Lithographic Printer-Publishers, 1876-1905

In addition to the dictionary and other preparatory materials, the

Dianshizhai print shop produced reprints of the standard collections of Chinese books (jingshi ziji) such as the Thirteen Classics, the early-eighteenthcentury literary encyclopedias Peiwen yunfu and Bianzi leibian, novels, maps,
stele rubbings, painting manuals, and even some Western books.73 Even
excluding these, with 100,000 copies of its miniaturized Kangxi Dictionary
sold, Dianshizhai would have grossed, at the very least, 200,000 yuan in
sales in that first year.
According to the May 1889 article in the North China Herald cited above,
Shanghais lithographic publishers took advantage of pre-existing national
book-marketing networks. They themselves were primarily wholesalers, with
retail branches situated throughout the Chinese empire, ranging from
Qingdao and Beijings Liulichang in the north to Chongqing in the west
and south to Canton. Less centrally placed market towns also carried Shanghai publications.74
In contrast to the widely dispersed centres of distribution, the editorial
and printing centre remained Shanghai, presumably because the industry
was still in its infancy, supplies and technology came largely from abroad,
and master lithographers were few. At this time, there were also significant
numbers of Westernized Chinese in Shanghai with experience working in
Western-style publishing firms for instance, in 1884, Wang Tao (182897), whose son-in-law Qian Zheng edited Shenbao, returned to Shanghai
from Hong Kong and worked as a Dianshizhai editor for the next few years.75
Wang also published at least one work of his own, an illustrated European
travelogue called Manyou suilu (Casual Record of Slow Travels), with
Dianshizhai. The lithographers could depend on such people for advice and
guidance.
Furthermore, since transportation to Suzhou and Hangzhou had improved,
Shanghai was now close to extant post-Taiping private book collections that
could supply exemplars for duplication within the relative safety and prosperity of Shanghais International Concession. A dispute between Dianshizhai and a Huizhou book collector illustrates both how heavily the industry
relied on the authority of its copying-libraries and the lengths to which it
would go to assemble them. According to the North China Herald, Shanghais
Mixed Court heard a case in late October 1884 involving the theft of a rarebook collection comprising upwards of 5,000 volumes (juan) from a private library in Huizhou. The unnamed work had been given to the owners
ancestor by a former emperor.76 On 8 July, the collection had vanished.
The court discovered that a Chinese broker living in the International
Settlement, after hearing of the collection, had approached Dianshizhai

111

112 Janus-Faced Pioneers

with the offer of a very valuable book. He wanted the sale price to be paid
up front, but the lithographers insisted on seeing the collection first. The
deal fell through at this point, but a Chinese underling of Dianshizhai accompanied the broker and two others to Huizhou, where, one dark night,
they stole the entire collection. After packing it up disguised as boxes of tea,
they shipped it downriver to Shanghai.
Five days later, the librarys owner went to the police. By that time, however, the collection had already been sold to Major Brothers, who intended
to bring out a reproduction of it at their [Dianshizhai] lithographic works.77
The ringleader quickly absconded, but the Shanghai district magistrate
arrested his brother in his place. Under torture in the Shanghai yamen, the
brother betrayed the conspiracy, and the plot was confirmed by the deposition taken from the Dianshizhai employee. The wild card in this trial was
the fact that the gentleman who appeared in court to mount the charge of
theft seemed not to be the collections original owner. Whats more, he
could neither prove his identity nor find anyone in Shanghai who knew
him. The case had to be postponed so that the original broker could be
apprehended. Until then, the books remained in the possession of
Dianshizhai, which presumably duplicated the collection.
In 1884, the Dianshizhai Lithographic Bookstore hit its stride with its
illustrated Shenbao newspaper supplement known as the Dianshizhai Pictorial. It was the fifth in a series of lithographic supplements to the Shenbao
newspaper and the only one to become a publishing success.78 In its fourteen years of existence, the Pictorial carried about 4,500 pictures, which
covered a vast range of topics from Chinas foreign wars to treaty-port life,
family conflicts, bordello life, and particularly foreign technology.79 With
this range of topics, the supplement proved so successful that today it is far
better known than its book-publishing parent company.80 Literary scholar
Yao Fushen has written that the Pictorial also directly inspired at least five
Chinese imitators.81
Much like the lithographed books, journals, and illustrated newspapers
issued in the English-speaking world, which focused on graphic images of
current events, especially war, along with travel, exotica, and humorous entertainment, Dianshizhais supplement to Shenbao was initially introduced
to provide pictorial coverage of the Sino-French War of 1884-85. Tens of
thousands of readers learned of the wars progress via the Pictorial, just as
Americans had learned of the events of the Mexican War through the prints
of Currier and Ives and other lithographers forty years before.82 A decade
later, Chinese readers were also informed about the Sino-Japanese War by
the magazine.

Shanghais Lithographic Printer-Publishers, 1876-1905

Unlike Western lithographs of the late nineteenth century that usually

tried to imitate the depth and complexity of oil paintings, the Pictorial communicated in a typical Chinese visual language. The line drawing was supplemented by an explanatory caption that closely resembled, in appearance if
not in content, the calligraphic colophons found on Chinese paintings. If
insufficiently attractive Western fonts were the downfall of letterpress printing in China in this period, lithographys facility with calligraphy was advertised favourably via the Pictorial. Lithographed books were just as arresting.
Lithography made possible the archaic appearance of a manuscript while
also offering reasonably rapid duplication accented by industrial precision.
Generally monochromatic, the Pictorial was sometimes illuminated with
red, green, or purple pigments applied by hand and was printed on a Jiangxiproduced bamboo paper known as lianshi.83 The magazine was issued every
ten days for about fourteen years and was sent free to Shenbao subscribers
with their paper, which cost ten cash per issue.84 From 1884 to 1895, the
Pictorial was also sold separately for five foreign cents (wu fen) in Shanghai
at newspaper vendors and at Major Brothers Shenchang Calligraphy Studio.85 From 1896 to 1898, the same vendors retailed it for fifty cash (wushi
wen), a common price for an illustrated magazine in that era.86
By the 1890s, along with both the traditionalistic and the innovative
products of its presses, Dianshizhai also created a new work environment
that helped to transform the social organization of printing and publishing
in Shanghai. With Dianshizhais workforce of 200 employees centralized in
its modern factory building, the firms original hand presses, many of them
replaced with more modern presses capable of photolithography, were now
all gas-driven. Updated technology helped reduce the size of what must have
been a larger original workforce. Dianshizhais owner, Ernest Major, remained
distant and nearly invisible, and the workplace was filled with Chinese workers publishing mechanically replicated products for distribution throughout
the Qing empire.
At the same time that Dianshizhai looked forward, via its Pictorial, to the
broader, more popular, patronage of the twentieth century, it continued to
appeal to the older tradition of literati painting and calligraphy that had
shaped the style and outlook of its illustrators. The firm also catered to
literati interests through its book-publishing operation. By approximately
1890, when Figure 2.3 was published, Dianshizhai was still printing and
selling a wide range of books and merchandise intended to appeal to the
mix of literati and merchants that it had been seeking since 1877.
In addition to featuring the Hankou Road branch store and an image of a
power-driven lithographic press probably intended to recommend the press

113

114 Janus-Faced Pioneers

to its literati clientele, the advertisements in Figure 2.3 announce a range of

works that still remained well within the boundaries of late Qing literati
culture. An edited, annotated, and miniaturized work by the anti-Manchu,
Ming-loyalist scholar Gu Yanwu (1613-82), Rizhilu (Record of Knowledge
Learned Day by Day, 1670), printed in four volumes and housed in an
elegant brocade case (tao) was available for two foreign dollars. A second
work by a Ming loyalist, Zhang Dais (1597-1684) Xiaoti Langxuan wenji
(Collected Langxuan Essays in Reduced-Size Characters), also revealed that
lithography had been enlisted to support the late Qing struggle against the
Manchu throne. Arranged in eighty chapters, this work, which had first
appeared in printed form only thirteen years before, in 1877, sold for five
foreign dollars. Finally, a twenty-volume set of the Song masterpiece, Ma
Duanlins Wenxian tongkao (Antiquarian Researches), bound in four separate
cases, very elegant and beyond compare, sold for ten dollars, with discounts to wholesalers.87
Throughout the period before it closed in 1898,88 Dianshizhais print shop
remained in its Western-style factory building, while its chief bookshop
occupied a site several blocks east at Henan and Nanjing Roads. At least
one retail branch was also housed in a modern Western structure near the
print shop; another presented a more typically Chinese countenance. From
1884 to 1890, Wu Yourus studio trained nearly twenty of what Gong
Chanxing calls the first generation of Chinese news illustrators.89 Just as
important, this Sino-British hybrid directly inspired a total of as many as
ninety-six other purely Chinese enterprises, including seven well-known ones,
that contributed to creating the golden age of Shanghais lithographic enterprise. Two of the most significant were Tongwen Press and Feiying Hall.
Tongwen Press, Feiying Hall, and Other Lithographic Printer-Publishers
Tongwen Press
The Dianshizhai Lithographic Bookstores success quickly inspired imitators. According to Yao Gonghe, writing in 1917, once the book industry
saw [Dianshizhai] acquire great profits with [such] ease ... the Cantonese
established the Tongwen Press90 in Shanghai. Already, by 1889, foreign
observers could estimate that millions of books had been produced by Chinese lithographers and the Sino-British Dianshizhai. Although Dianshizhai
had the distinction of having been the first commercial lithographic shop,
the largest, most prestigious, and first truly Chinese of them in this period
was Tongwen Press. Of all the Chinese publishers who responded to Zhang
Zhidongs call to reprint the Chinese literary past, Tongwens contributions
were the most outstanding.

Shanghais Lithographic Printer-Publishers, 1876-1905

Tongwen was started in 1882 by the Cantonese Xu Hongfu, Xu Qiuqi,

and their brother Xu Run (1838-1911), the latter one of Shanghais wealthiest Cantonese compradores. As Xu Run stated in his autobiography, after
his brothers made the initial investment, I strongly approved and added
some funds.91 Their firm was on Seward Road in the old American Concession, then still largely a residential area. Installing twelve lithographic presses
and employing some 500 workers, much like Dianshizhai, the brothers specialized in reprinting high quality old and rare books, the Kangxi Dictionary,
eighteenth-century encyclopedias,92 novels, and calligraphy and painting
manuals from the prestigious library, Peiwenzhai. Tongwens publications,
recognized as being of a higher quality than Dianshizhais, generally sold
for correspondingly higher prices. For instance, when Dianshizhais edition
of the Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian) sold for two yuan five mao,
Tongwens went for ten yuan. Parts of an 1885 catalogue reproduced by
Friedrich Hirth suggest that prices ranged overall from sixty cents (six mao)
for the Erya tu (Illustrated Erya Dictionary) to at least twelve yuan for a
copy of Qian Hanshu (History of the Former Han) in four tao.93
All told, Tongwen issued more than fifty-five well-known and widely praised
collections.94 The brothers were especially praised for their 1894 reprint of
the Palace (Wuyingdian) version of the Twenty-Four Dynastic Histories.
Again, in Xu Runs words, We set up the workshop and bought the machines and collected books to use as [exemplars]. From Beijings Baowenzhai
we sought complete white-paper Palace editions of the Twenty-Four Dynastic Histories, and a complete Gujin tushu jicheng [Tushu jicheng], and [we re-]
printed them one after another; [we reprinted] the Zizhi tongjian [Sima
Guangs eleventh-century compendium Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in
Government] ... and [produced] not less than 100,000 volumes (buxia
shishuwan ben). Not one [item in our library] was an imitation; all were
exquisite and peerless, all worthy to be lithographic exemplars.95
Xus words are permeated by an outlook that illuminates the continuing
vitality of Confucian literati culture. Like many men of means in his era, Xu
wished to reveal himself as a bibliophile. Simultaneously, however, he was
also a merchant concerned with self-promotion and the profit, whether moral
or pecuniary, to be made off his printed collection. Moreover, unlike Wu
Youru, who gazed serenely at lithography through the sandalwood-scented
slats of a literati fan, Xu indicated a keen appreciation of the technical
facility of lithography for his purposes: If you look [youll see] the lithographic printing of books started with the English merchants Dianshizhai,
which used machines to put a photograph of the original book on stone,
and the characters were distinct without being bound by the size [of the
original edition]; one could reduce or enlarge the size as one wished. I really

115

116 Janus-Faced Pioneers

admired it.96 One senses that Xu also valued the marketing technique that
had enabled Dianshizhai, thanks to miniaturization, to sell 200,000 yuanworth of the Kangxi Dictionary in one year.
Tongwen took important steps in laying a foundation for modernizing
Shanghais publishing industry. One of the milestones that Tongwen passed
with regard to advancing specialized textual knowledge was the establishment of its own editorial office, the first modern private Chinese publisher
to do so. Reflecting its character as a Janus-faced pioneer in the new industry, however, Tongwen combined modern processes with traditional Chinese literati culture; it staffed its editorial office with former Hanlin scholars
in supervisory roles. Provincial degree-holders (juren) and district-level ones
(xiucai) did the actual referencing, cutting, and pasting,97 reflecting their
impoverishment at the end of the century.
Tongwens heavy emphasis on hiring imperial degree holders suggests a
certain nonchalance about the technical demands of modern industrialized
publishing. However, the quality of lithographic reprints actually owed a
great deal to the competence of the printer. In 1885, for example, Friedrich
Hirth reported that Tongwen had had several important successes at reprinting. Nonetheless, the previous year, the brothers had failed to complete a miniaturized reprint of the Tushu jicheng in 10,000 juan. Because of
the immensity of the investment, Tongwen had employed the subscription
method, a common means of funding a noncommercial publication in China
or elsewhere. The publisher counted on advance deposits of half the final
cost (180 taels) for each complete set. Over two years, 1,500 supporters
were signed up.98 Still, with this project, Hirth observed, the press ran into
financial difficulties, apparently linked to mechanical ones, and had to suspend printing of the encyclopedia. Dianshizhai took over at this point and,
by 1888, completed the work in 1,628 volumes using lead type, presumably
after farming the work out to its sister firm, the suitably named Tushujicheng
Metal-Type Publishing Company.99
Rather than catalogue the publishers financial and technological difficulties related to publication, Qian Jibo (1887-1957), the well-known Republican-era literary historian, lampooned Tongwens lithographic printers and
editors in general. Qian suggested that running a lithographic shop was not
quite as easy as Xu Run claimed in his autobiography. In Qians words,
The apprentices that it [Tongwen Press] got did not originally print books,
and the tracing of their characters was illegible. But then [Tongwen] appointed people to trace the characters and make them clearer, making it
easier to reprint; again, the engraver [was] not well-read and could not [understand the words meanings]. Every time he changed [the text] to get at the
meaning, a hundred errors appeared.100 Qians hyperbolic sarcasm notwith-

Shanghais Lithographic Printer-Publishers, 1876-1905

standing, by the 1890s the Xus had recovered enough from their financial
stumble of the previous decade to garner a commission from the librarians
of the Forbidden City. In 1890, Zhang Yinhuan (1837-1900), the recently
returned Qing ambassador to the United States, Peru, and Spain and then
directing the Zongli Yamen (Foreign Office), memorialized the throne to
permit a reprint of 100 copies of the Tushu jicheng, with fifty to be used as
gifts to foreign governments.101 Like the Xus, Zhang was a native of Canton
province. He stipulated that Tongwen was to print them. Xu Run proudly
continues, In 1891, the Inner Court ordered a lithographed 100-set Tushu
jicheng [the same work that had caused trouble in the 1880s], and [this
time] we handled the job [with no problems]. In 1892, we started work,
and in 1894, it was completed and presented, and from this [success], our
reputation flourished.102 Each set of the final work contained 5,000 volumes and cost 3,500 taels, for a total retail price of 350,000 taels.103
In providing the throne with reprints of an esteemed imperial encyclopedia to be used both for domestic imperial purposes and in international
diplomacy, Tongwen Press was fulfilling the culturally conservative goals of
its owners, particularly those of the compradore Xu Run. By undertaking
the reprint for the emperor, Xu no doubt hoped to gain a national reputation as a patron of learning that his money-grubbing mercantile background
would otherwise have placed out of reach. In essence, Xu had taken a SinoBritish publishing innovation, the lithographic press, and deployed it in a
highly traditionalistic manner, moving it deep into the heart of Chinese
literary and social culture.
Despite Tongwens success in attracting an imperial commission, the risks
associated with combining considerable amounts of capital, industrial machinery, chemicals, and a valuable library became clear to the Xus in 1893.
A serious blow of a directly commercial and industrial nature that year provides details on the approximate costs of setting up a lithographic shop in
Shanghai but also suggests the necessity of acknowledging the dangers involved in a casual attitude toward industrial machinery. At dawn on 30 June
1893, reported the North China Herald, municipal firemen rushed to the
Tongwen lithographic plant to find it in flames.
Because of overcrowding and inadequate zoning regulations, fire was a
perennial danger to the International Settlements industry from its earliest
days.104 Tongwen, too, fell prey to the flames, a victim of its own negligence
when it came to industrial safety: Just before one oclock on Wednesday
morning information was received at the Hongkew Police Station that a fire
had broken out on the premises of the Chinese Lithographic Works [Tongwen
Press], at the corner of Seward and Yuenfong Roads ... The fire had originated in the engine room at the rear, and was caused by a defective flue. The

117

118 Janus-Faced Pioneers

premises containing the engines, boilers, and printing machinery were entirely destroyed, the whole loss, which is estimated at about Tls. 15,000,
being covered by insurance in the Hongkong Fire Insurance Co.105 Unlike
the Sino-British Dianshizhai, which conspicuously identified itself with
Westernization and Western commercial and industrial architecture,
Tongwen Press, a consciously Chinese firm, had located its workshop in a
one-storey Chinese building (pingfang). Only by a miracle and thanks to the
efforts of the fire brigade, a very valuable stock of books presumably including the exemplar library, did not suffer in the fire.
The fire of 1893 occurred in the midst of Tongwens imperial printing
project. Nonetheless, one more major publication, the Twenty-Four Dynastic Histories, was to come Tongwens way in 1894. Again this project was
undertaken using the noncapitalistic subscription system. A thousand sets
were to be prepared, with each to cost 100 foreign silver dollars. Although
the histories were claimed to date from Qianlong 4th year [1738], two
(the Ming and the Old Five Dynasties volumes) actually came from 1746
and 1763, respectively.106 It was extremely funny, writes Zhang Xiumin.
These printed words were very clear and [advertised the error as] a Tongwen
edition!107 And circulation of the blunder did not stop there. Another Shanghai publisher, Zhujianzhai, eventually reprinted this edition, using Tongwens
error-ridden edition as its exemplar.
Even before Tongwen took on the Twenty-Four Dynastic Histories project,
it seems that Xu Run and his brother had begun to contemplate withdrawing from the lithographic business. Over the next five years, the combined
pressures of overseeing the library collection, maintaining an unacknowledged but undeniably industrial plant, and managing its 500-man workforce
required the Xu brothers to act decisively. Their goals accomplished, their
philanthropic contributions to the imperial library and the Zongli Yamen in
place, they closed down their firm in 1898. Modern machinery had been
used by Tongwen for essentially old-fashioned purposes in a pre-industrial
work environment. In fact, the heyday of the lithographic industry was
already passing in Shanghai, the most prominent easterly outpost of the
worldwide diffusion of industrial lithography.108
Feiying Hall
There were other notable Chinese imitators of Dianshizhais success. Most
prominent among them was Feiying Hall, founded in 1887 by the Yangzhou
literatus Li Shengduo (1860-1937).109 Like Tongwen in being solely Chineseowned and -run, Feiying seems to have printed almost exclusively for the
educational and examination markets even as it negotiated necessary technical adjustments more successfully than Tongwen had done. In this sense,

Shanghais Lithographic Printer-Publishers, 1876-1905

Feiying represents a progressive counterpoint to Tongwens recidivist navet

in embracing the logic of industrial machinery.
One can identify Li Shengduo from an 1889 article in the North China
Herald. It offers a striking portrait of a highly talented and resourceful
individual:
Mr. Li [Shengduo], the proprietor of the Fei Ying Kuan photo-lithographic
works near the Horse Bazaar is a very rich and enterprising young man, the
son of a high official. He went up recently to Peking as a candidate for the
Hanlin examination, with very little hope of passing. He came out as one of
the first five ... In the final examination, which takes place before the Emperor
himself, with assessors, he came out first of all, to the great astonishment and
delight of his Shanghai friends, and [he] will now probably be promoted to
high office in Peking.110

Lis status as the son of a high official suggests that he was trading on his
familys connections with officialdom to print and market the types of works
required by aspirants to that world. We have already seen that the sale of
works to help prepare candidates for examinations had helped to underwrite Tongwens major objective, philanthropic publishing. Educational
publishing was a significant part of Dianshizhais trade as well. Paradoxically, Lis status as a scion of high officialdom permitted him to ignore the
philanthropic commissions pursued by Tongwens Xu Run in favour of the
commercial objectives of industrialized print capitalism.
In 1887, the Chinese-language, Major Brothers-owned newspaper Shenbao
published an advertisement describing the circumstances of Lis new Feiying
Hall establishment, which happened to be located at the same intersection
of Nanjing Road as Dianshizhai. In addition to printing books under private contract, the ad announced, the firm was willing to print all kinds of
works from private book collections. Feiying, like Dianshizhai, specifically
appealed to literati and merchants to come inspect its operation with an
eye on having their works printed there.111
More significantly, using its own money, on its own initiative, and under
its own imprint, Feiying issued reprints of Zhengxu zizhi tongjian (Orthodox
Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government), Sanxitang fatie (Calligraphy
Manual of the Sanxi Hall), an edition of the classical dictionary Shuowen,
etc.112 in short, much the same literati fare of histories, dictionaries, and
brushwork manuals as Dianshizhai, located across the street, and the other
lithographers with which it competed.113 And according to Shenbao, For the
most part, the printing is fine like silk, and it is also clear and incisive. There
is no need to mention the decoration, which is classically elegant, or the

119

120 Janus-Faced Pioneers

proofreading, which is refined; truly this is a wonderful sight in the world of

books [shucheng, literally book city] and a grand affair in the world of letters [wenlin, literally forest of literature].114
Feiying never did develop a noteworthy new line of commercially viable
printed commodities, however. Unlike Tongwen, it did not bother to secure
a diverse combination of high-level imperial and broad commercial patronage either. Instead, Feiying charged headlong into the dog-eared bookmarketing channels of the late Qing with the same kinds of products that
had filled them for decades, albeit now with Feiyings refined printing. In
the end, Li Shengduos narrow market fixation would render Feiying Hall
unable to survive the abolition of the examination system in 1904-5.
If Feiying Hall failed to go beyond publication of works for the expiring
world of late Qing literati and aspiring candidates before it closed, it did
succeed in demonstrating its owners willingness to embrace technological,
architectural, and industrial modernity. When it opened in 1887, Feiying
Hall already had several dozen book-printing fire-wheels,115 a translation
of the term for printing press suggestive of the firms power-driven machinery. Unlike Tongwens Chinese pingfang, Feiyings building was spacious and
was said to have been specially designed in the Western style, with high
ceilings, making it sound much like the buildings used by Dianshizhai.
Feiyings nearly twenty rooms, whose specialized functions amounted to a
modern division of labour, ranged from the accounts room, to the fire-wheel
(press) room, to library, photography, proofreading, and stone-rubbing rooms.
It was all very tidy and orderly,116 praised the Shenbao reporter. From contemporary reports, one finds that Lis printing and publishing enterprise
was physically large, and, like Dianshizhai, Tongwen, and other lithographic
firms of the era, it concentrated industrial and intellectual labour under one
roof. This propensity of Shanghais large firms to combine printing and
publishing operations in a single enterprise distinguished modern Chinese
publishers from most of their contemporaries in the Anglo-American West
and would remain a permanent characteristic of Chinese print capitalism.117
Symbolic of this age of lithographers, who straddled modernity with one
foot in traditional Chinese texts and publishing culture and the other in
that of steam- and petroleum-derived power presses, Feiying Hall achieved
a certain popular notoriety with its steam whistles. These whistles punctuated the work day in a raucous version of the time clock found in factories
today. Soon, however, the North China Herald reported that the steam whistles
have been so much complained of by several foreigners that the proprietors were ordered ... by the Magistrate of the Mixed Court to discontinue
the nuisance.118

Shanghais Lithographic Printer-Publishers, 1876-1905

Nonetheless, in the final analysis, Feiying Hall had revealed a Chinese

proprietors desire to implement modern retail and manufacturing architectural design to house his workers and his machines. In doing so, Li Shengduo,
while still reflecting the Janus-faced identities of Shanghais Chinese lithographic publishers, demonstrated his willingness to compromise with a new
architectural and industrial logic. Although still publishing for the mainstream traditional examination market, Li seems to have recognized that
lithography had renewed the old market, albeit without transforming it,
and thus required a new workplace.
Other Lithographic Printer-Publishers
In addition to Dianshizhai, Tongwen, and Feiying Hall, between 1876 and
1905, there were five other, less pivotal but still well-known, lithographers
in Shanghai. Like these three, most of them were established by out-oftowners. The Baishi shanfang was established by Ningbonese; beyond this
sketchy information, the sources are silent about it. There was Hongwen
shuju, established by Ling Peiqing, of either Zhejiang or Jiangsu origin.119 In
addition, there were Jishi shanfang, known for works of poetry, novels, and
editions of the Four Books; Hongbaozhai shiyinju, founded by He Ruitang,
which began with a mixed catalogue of examination aids and medical works
but relied on the latter to survive until at least 1920;120 and Saoye shanfang,
formerly of Suzhou.
In addition, bibliographic materials suggest the existence of two other
significant groups of lithographers, albeit with considerable overlap between the two.121 A survey of medical publications identifies thirty-one
other Shanghai lithographic publishers operating between 1876 and 1905
who may have contracted out their printing to these eight.122 Not counting
sixteen firms that figure among the medical publishers as well, another
thirty-seven firms, many apparently short-lived, are known to have published works of fiction in the same period, again, perhaps using the printing services of these eight.123 Although these numbers cannot be accepted
uncritically and require further research, when we compare lithographic
with letterpress printers, we find that documentary sources, as well as bibliographies of fictional works and medical publications, do suggest that between 1876 and 1911 as many as 149 lithographic publishers came into
existence in Shanghai, relative to only twenty-one lead-type shops between
1842 and 1911.124 Socially, economically, and culturally, the lithographers
were preponderant.
Many of the medical publishing firms that have been identified were, in
fact, general publishers who supplemented their backlists with marketable

121

122 Janus-Faced Pioneers

medical texts; some, of course, published only medical works. In addition to

the thirty-one active from 1876 to 1905 that is, during the golden age of
the Shanghai lithographic industry another sixteen leading Republicanera medical publishers were all founded before 1912.125 Regardless of when
they were founded, though, all relied heavily on lithography to reprint medical
texts. In this significant specialized market, Chinese publishers depended
far more heavily on lithographic than on letterpress printing well into the
twentieth century. It is very likely that the demand for illustrations, as well
as the time-honoured place of medical works in the traditional Chinese
publishing market, recommended the use of lithography for medical books
in particular.
Most medical publishers who successfully negotiated the transition from
the Qing to the Republic lasted into the late 1930s as independent imprints, and several of those made it into the 1950s. For these publishers,
medical publishing was undoubtedly fundamental to their survival after
1905. Similarly, among the lithographic publishers of literature, many
branched out widely. Included among them were comprehensive publishers
such as the Commercial Press, which issued the Dongfang zazhi/The Eastern
Miscellany. Added to them was the Liangyou Company, founded in 1925
and parent of the well-known magazine Liangyou. The acknowledged prosperity of these later years confers greater importance on understanding the
industrys formation and achievements that allowed it to dominate
Shanghais Chinese publishing sector from 1876 to 1905.
Conclusion
Western machinery that came into China partly in the form of the printing
press was unique in the way that it brought together the worlds of intellectual, manual, and industrial work. This chapter has probed the extant sources,
much as an archeologist sifts through layers of sediment and relics, to unearth a forgotten industry, lithography, that helped to lay the industrial
foundation for Shanghais twentieth-century printing and publishing business. By examining the introduction of lithography to Shanghai, and by
profiling that citys three most important lithographic publishers of the late
1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, this chapter has shown how the lithographers
established and identified themselves. Just as important are the questions
of how and why they declined in overall importance after 1905.
In a far from haphazard choice, Dianshizhai, Tongwen, Feiying, and the
other ninety-four126 firms with which they competed during the golden age
of Shanghai lithography selected it as a technology suitable for their needs.
Annual sales receipts on the order of at least 200,000 yuan per year, plus the

Shanghais Lithographic Printer-Publishers, 1876-1905

lure of being perceived as public-minded philanthropists who emphasized

learning and products for the learned, drew sojourning investors from Canton, Ningbo, Yangzhou, and elsewhere to Shanghai to invest for the first
time in Chinese history in printing machines and factories. Relatively low
investment, the aesthetic appeal of the finished books, and the minimal
changes in publishing outlook apparently necessitated by lithography all
recommended it to these publishers distributed along a social spectrum ranging from compradores to high officials. Among the larger, historically more
influential firms, printing operations were combined with those of publishing. The machines and their accessory equipment were, in turn, operated
either by men trained in Xujiahui or by printers who learned the trade in
Shanghais first commercial lithographic shops.
Like the letterpress industry that would eventually surpass it and is
misperceived as having been the first stage of Chinese-owned industrial printing, the lithographic industry, by the late 1880s, was mechanized and organized into production sites that more and more came to resemble modern
factories. Lithographers also mustered a sizable workforce inside the city
limits. Shanghais lithographic industry, which in 1894 included eight establishments that we know combined printing with publishing, then employed at least 1,300 persons. Although they were only a small number of
employees in the overall context of Chinas first stage of industrialization,
by 1894 these numbers considerably exceeded the numbers employed in all
of Chinas other modern printing sector, the letterpress industry. These
publishers and printers also prepared the ground on which the letterpress
industry would prosper by introducing mechanized printing to other Chinese employers and to their employees, deployed in factories within the
geographic limits of the International Concession.
Starting in 1895, the letterpress industry supplanted the lithographers,
just as the latter had, in the two decades prior, taken over from the woodblock
printers. Tongwens demise in 1898, for example, signalled its owners new
faith in letterpress printing. Yet lithographers had once grasped the initiative through robust investment, technological superiority, and product innovation. Willingness to take this opening step impressed both disinterested
foreign observers and self-perceived foreign competitors. Foreign accounts
of two types, journalistic and missionary, repeatedly attest, not only to the
success of Dianshizhai, Tongwen, and Feiying Hall, but also to that of the
Chinese-run lithographic shops in general. At the same time, these reports
provide a basis for understanding how the golden age of lithography ended.
In 1897, still trying to cope with the challenge of producing low-priced
lithographically printed religious items for a Chinese readership willing to

123

124 Janus-Faced Pioneers

buy them, the APMPs directors attributed their own failure to move with the
times to the space limitations in their printing plant. Extension is very desirable ... there is no room for development in such lines as photo-lithography,127
they wrote in that years annual report. Not until 1901, when Gilbert
McIntosh returned temporarily to Scotland, was APMP able to secure, for
Mexican $700, a lithographic hand press. At approximately the same time,
a new printing plant, erected at 145 Sichuan North Road,128 enabled the
APMP to move from its cramped quarters at 18 Beijing Road.129 Unfortunately for the APMP, as well as for the Chinese lithographic publishers with
whom it competed, lithography as a viable independent commercial activity was then undeniably under assault from the letterpress printing industry
symbolized by the newspaper trade.
Despite their failure to continue developing new products once they encountered across-town competition from letterpress printers, the lithographers set the industrial and organizational stage for the letterpress printers.
Appeals to a traditional readership enriched the publishers discussed here
but also accounted, in part, for their vulnerability. Cultural traditionalism
and, no doubt, sharp business acumen led them to reproduce much the
same range of works as had the woodblock industries of older printing centres. The Dianshizhai Lithographic Bookstore benefited when Major and
his compradore borrowed heavily from European publishing to create a series of Chinese versions of nineteenth-century European illustrated news
and novelty magazines that culminated in the Dianshizhai Pictorial. Paradoxically, the Pictorial turned out to be more successful than most European
papers of the same ilk. Thanks must go, without a doubt, to the ability of
Wu Youru and his co-illustrators to revise traditional illustration techniques
and, at the same time, to reshape the readerships sense of Qing culture and
world civilization. By refurbishing this old market, Dianshizhai looked backward, combining traditional illustrative idioms with a modern Western industrial medium. At the same time, the firm also pointed forward to the
Commercial Press and other Chinese publishers who responded to the changing milieu of late Qing China by translating and manufacturing Westernand Japanese-style modern books. With few exceptions, other major late
Qing lithographic publishers limited their success by their heavy dependence on the examination system, which would end in 1904-5, and the
occasional imperial commission.
Along with the tendency to flood the market with highly similar products, heavy reliance on foreign supplies undercut economic viability and
may have contributed to clouding the industrys future. The failure of
Tongwen Press and Feiying Hall in particular to define a new market is what
finally led to their downfall but not before each helped to transform the

Shanghais Lithographic Printer-Publishers, 1876-1905

artisanal printing and calligraphy businesses by bankrupting the first and

co-opting the second. At the same time, along with Dianshizhai, they were
all responsible, albeit unintentionally, for establishing Shanghais modern
printing and publishing supremacy.
The lithographers work sites combined editorial and manufacturing activities under a single roof for the first time in Chinese publishing. Lithographers also organized retail and wholesale services that enabled them to
tap into traditional distribution and marketing networks that extended from
the International Concession north to Qingdao and Beijing, south to Canton, and west to Chongqing, and they primed this market to begin to pay
attention to Shanghai-produced publications. Even as they destroyed late
Qing Chinas artisanal print production operation and exploited the marketing mechanisms of its book market, their industrys mass production
anticipated the next stage of Shanghai publishing, that of the letterpress
printers.
Having accomplished so much, then, how did the industry seem to disappear from the book-publishing market by the early 1900s? Work conditions
made the industry wasteful in the eyes of both contemporary Westerners
and Chinese commentators writing in the post-1911 period and did contribute to its vulnerability. To be sure, by 1890 industry leaders did substitute both kerosene (Dianshizhai, Feiying Hall) and steam power (Tongwen
Press) for human power; it is conceivable that the savings in wages were
significant, with an accompanying increase in output,130 but the sources are
silent on this issue as well as on the issue of wages in general (apart from
those paid to calligraphers). Furthermore, between 1877 and 1889, the larger
publishing houses had reduced the number of workers needed per machine
from eight to three.
Despite its frequent praise for Shanghais Chinese-run lithographic industry, the North China Herald, for instance, was not slow to criticize it for
what the paper regarded as wasteful expenditure on labour. In its May 1889
profile of the industry, the Herald noted that Shanghais lithographic printers were already using steam engines that could power four or five photolithographic printing presses at the same time. In spite of this use of steam,
however, workshops continued to employ from 100 to 200 workers, admonished the reporter. Apparently, although each printing machine required
only three attendants, one above to place the sheet on the cylinder, and
two below to receive it when printed ... [still] the preparation of the stone,
the writing of the text, its reduction in size by photography and various
additional processes occupy very many hands.131 It was for these specialized operations that Feiying Hall needed a physical plant of nearly twenty
rooms. The Herald reporter nevertheless concluded that too many workmen

125

126 Janus-Faced Pioneers

are employed, requiring the consumption of a large amount of capital. The

number of them should be reduced.132 Possibly for the first time in Shanghais
modern publishing sector, capital and labour were perceived as being opposed, rather than complementary, to each other.
The North China Heralds views of 1889 were echoed in later writings
seeking to explain the formative era of Shanghais lithographic publishing
business. From the perspective of 1931, but with a similar tone of exasperation, Commercial Press supervisor and print historian He Shengnai criticized the lithographic publishers for having been extraordinarily wasteful.
In an era when equipment and machinery worth 15,000 taels could go up
in flames in a morning, as happened to Tongwen, wastefulness was not
likely to have been tolerated for long, especially in under-capitalized smaller
firms.
Shanghais lithographic printing and publishing industry survived and
flourished well into the twentieth century.133 However, these publishers were
soon overshadowed by the output of the mechanized letterpress industry,
led by newspapers and current events journals as well as by the new general
publishers such as Wenming Books, the Commercial Press, and Zhonghua.
In the mid-1890s, the trend toward letterpress had already been discerned
by Xu Run and his brothers Hongfu and Qiuqi. At the same time that they
were considering closing their Tongwen Press, they were investing in a new
lead-type venture called Guangbaisong zhai.134
By the late 1890s, Shanghais Chinese-run letterpress industry, fostered
by the new journalism and newspaper publishers, as well as by the general
book publishers, started to overshadow the lithographic printer-publishers.
As the public appetite, whetted by the lithographers illustrated periodicals,
called for more news and faster delivery, printing speed temporarily gave
letterpress-printed newspapers and journals the upper hand. The Chinese
machine industry responded promptly to the flurry of activity from this
sector, first with repair shops and then with factories that could manufacture letterpress printing machines at costs lower than those of imported
Western ones. This manufacturing activity came too late to benefit the lithographic industry, a prodigy of the period from 1876 to 1905. Coincidentally, in New York, Currier and Ives failed in 1907, also a casualty of changing
technology and evolving fashions.
Along with new lithographed magazines that appeared in the 1900s and
1910s, a total of 188 lithographic publishers,135 many of them reprinting
medical texts and works of fiction, appeared in late-nineteenth-century and
early-twentieth-century Shanghai. Many late Qing firms survived well into
the 1920s and 1930s, and some even into the 1950s, and they were joined
by other firms formed after 1911. Of the total 188, 164 may be regarded as

Shanghais Lithographic Printer-Publishers, 1876-1905

Republican-era lithographic publishers, either because they were founded

in the Republic or because they were founded in the Qing and survived into
the Republic.136 Their collective energy, in the face of the 1904-5 termination of the civil service examinations, which had indirectly subsidized the
lithographers reviewed in this chapter, allows us to ponder the continuing
vigour of late imperial Chinas culture of learning (books, calligraphy, and
values propagated by them) after the breakdown of the formal bureaucratic apparatus.
In the final analysis, however, by 1905, lithography was being surpassed
by new technologies that could satisfy demands for time-sensitive news
and new-style, Western-, and Japanese-influenced books. Simultaneously,
under the impact of educational and political reform, starting in 1901 but
accelerating after 1905, the publics appetite for reprints was waning. Never
again would lithography capture the wider Chinese publics attention as it
had caught that of Bao Tianxiao and others during the Shanghai lithographic printer-publishers golden age.

127

3 Sooty Sons of Vulcan:

Forging Shanghais Printing Machinery,
1895-1937

The manufacture of machinery was essential to the development of print

capitalism in China. Events from the early 1930s illustrate the links that
welded the cultural and industrial sectors inseparably together, both in actuality and in the minds of contemporary Chinese observers. In the early
morning of 30 January 1932, in response to what they claimed were Chinese provocations related to Japans invasion of Manchuria the year before,
Japanese bombers took off from ships anchored in the Yangzi River to hammer northern Shanghai districts.1 Soon, six Japanese bombs struck the Commercial Press, one after the other.2 According to the North China Daily News,
apart from the huge conflagration at the Shanghai North Station, the largest and most important of these [fires] took place in the Commercial Press,
the leading publishing company in China ... The entire plant has practically
gone up in flames.3 Two days later, on 1 February, fire broke out at the
publishers Dongfang tushuguan (Oriental Library), the premier editorial
collection of its kind in China and Shanghais largest library. Although the
library was lost, a year later production at the Commercial Press recovered,
thanks in large part to the failure of Japanese bombardiers to destroy the
publishers machine shop.4
According to a 1933 in-house review of the Commercial Presss activity,
the plate-making and type-casting rooms, along with the letterpress and
lithographic printing shops, had suffered major losses. Still, the report pointed
out, it is interesting to note ... that the Japanese bombardment last January, although most methodically carried out, failed to spot the Machine
Shop. They damaged the companys machines but overlooked something
that could raise the dead to life.5 This passage is concisely eloquent testimony to the significance of machine shops even to cultural industries.
What was the nature of the relationship between machine shops and
publishing? What did Shanghais machine-makers do to launch Chinas
adoption of Western-style letterpress printing and to extend the life of lithographic printing well into the twentieth century? And what was the impact
of this process on Chinese social relationships? This chapter will address
these questions. Their importance is suggested not only by the experience

Forging Shanghais Printing Machinery, 1895-1937

of the Commercial Press in the 1930s but also by numerous historical accounts of late imperial and Republican Chinas literary and intellectual transformation that refer in one way or another to the expansion of modern
publishing.
Leo Ou-fan Lee and Andrew J. Nathan, for example, have observed that
In the first few decades of the great awakening that began about 1895,
political information and new ideas came to the people almost exclusively
through the press.6 Discussing the publishing situation in 1919, Chow Tsetsung has written that, between the months of May and December 1919,
400 new periodicals appeared, giving voice to Chinas anger over mistreatment by its Western allies at Versailles.7 The appearance of so many new
publications and so much previously unknown material so quickly was due,
only partly, to political and cultural need. Just as important, the dissemination of periodicals, books, and information was also made possible technically by the mechanization of Chinas publishing industry, a process in which
Shanghais Chinese machine shops played a vital role alongside imported
foreign printing presses.
Chinese did not begin to embrace letterpress printing until the period
between the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) and the subsequent 100
Days of Reform (1898).8 By then, the printing presses of Gutenbergs and
Stanhopes days had been considerably improved upon. Letterpress printing machines brought previously unimaginable speed to the nascent industry and could print in higher volume than lithographic operators. Although
no substitutes for unappealing old missionary fonts had yet appeared, both
speed and volume now became major attractions for the production of newspapers and other time-sensitive materials that held out the promise of a
large new audience of readers.
Soon Chinese typographers at the Commercial Press and elsewhere responded to the burgeoning new market with attractive fonts easily used on
the speedy new letterpress machines. Once this phase of Chinas Gutenberg
revolution got under way, Shanghais modern printers and publishers widened the distance separating themselves from other possible contenders in
Canton, Ningbo, Beijing, etc. (see Table 3.1). They also helped Shanghai to
seize primacy of place in late Qing and early Republican Chinas intellectual life. However, as the account of the Commercial Presss destruction
and recovery makes clear, that intellectual life depended on an industrial
technology purchased and deployed by modern business organizations.9
Starting in 1895, widening circles of lithographic and then letterpress printers provided opportunities for those who could repair printing presses and
machines. In turn, the Chinese printing machine industry grew out of the
fertile ground provided by the repair business. Chinese machine technicians

129

130 Sooty Sons of Vulcan

Table 3.1
Chinese-made type-casters, printing presses, printing machines,
and other machinery, 1900-1950s

Type of press

First recorded
maker in China

First recorded
maker
in Shanghai

A. Relief (Ch. tuban) (typography and letterpress)

Type-casters, printing presses, and printing machines
Manual or foot-powered
Cao Xingchang Machine
printing press
Shop, Shanghai, c. 1900
Copper matrices
Fuxing Copper Matrix Shop,
Shanghai, c. 1900
Chinese-language typeCommercial Press, Shanghai,
casting machine
c. 1913
Chinese-language typecasting machine
Ruitai, Shanghai, c. 1916
Full-page newspaper press
Mingjing, Shanghai, c. 1920
Small newspaper press
Mingjing, Shanghai, c. 1920
Self-Inking Printing Press
Unnamed, pre-1924
Monotype/Sinotype
Gui Zhongshu, Taiwan,
late 1950s

same
same
same
same
same
same
same
unknown

Cylinder printing machines (lunzhuan yinshuaji)

None
None
None
Rotary machines (lunzhuan yinshuaji)
Electric rotary press
Unnamed, 1929
same
Rotary paper maker
Gongyichang, Yongsheng,
Xinghua, all in Shanghai, 1926 same

B. Planographic/lithographic (pingban, shiyin) presses and machines

Lithographic (hand?) press
Gongyichang, Shanghai, c. 1900
Lithographic (hand?) press
Xieda Machine Shop, Shanghai,
c. 1904
Five-colour lithographic press Mingjing, Shanghai, c. 1920
Offset lithographic machine
Hujiang and New China machine
shops, Shanghai, c. 1924
C. Photogravure (aoban yinshua) machines
Banknote-printing
photogravure press
Mingjing, Shanghai, c. 1931

same
same
same
same

same

Forging Shanghais Printing Machinery, 1895-1937

soon mastered not only the art of repair but also the techniques necessary
to duplicate many, if not all, of the imported machines that they were repairing. From this beginning, Shanghai became the leading Chinese centre
for manufacturing the kinds of printing machinery that much of the Western world took for granted at the turn of the twentieth century.
In 1879, the Reverend W.S. Holt claimed that the American Presbyterian
Mission Press (APMP) had assisted publishers in China to secure presses
and printing material from abroad. Just as this dependence on imported
machinery had limited Cantons American Board Press, the London Mission Press, and the APMP, so too the Chinese printing and publishing industry remained heavily dependent on foreign-made machinery until the
early twentieth century. By then, Chinese foundry workers had mastered
the electrotyping techniques that William Gamble (1830-86) had developed to cast the type fonts that enabled the APMP to make itself independent of its Western font suppliers. More important, Chinese foundry workers
also learned to duplicate Western printing presses and other printingrelated technology. For this reason, Chinas modern printing machine industry may be accurately said to date from 1895 to 1900, the period when
Chinese machine makers surpassed missionary printer-publishers by starting to manufacture their own printing presses. They continued to manufacture presses domestically until 1937, even in the face of imported printing
machinery valued at many hundreds of thousands of yuan.
By 1894, despite the substantial achievements of the lithographic printerpublishers, in terms of investment and numbers of Chinese workers employed, the printing and publishing industry was still a minor economic
activity in Shanghai. Investments in the paper and letterpress printing industries totalled only about 10 percent of all investments in light industries
if one excludes Shenbao.10 Newspaper plants, including Shenbao, employed
only about 650 workers. The five or six foreign-run publishing houses in
China employed another 220 workers. In 1894, these 870 workers in the
letterpress trades made up less than 1 percent of all workers employed in
both foreign- and Chinese-owned heavy and light industry.11
However, the lead-type and letterpress industry grew rapidly in response
to bursts of political and educational change after 1895, 1905, 1911, and
1919. Just like the xylographers and lithographers before them, letterpress
printers and publishers responded to changes in the cultural world by
expanding their technological infrastructure. New markets opened for
rapidly produced, time-sensitive printed works. Printers and publishers
bought machines to meet these demands for new kinds of textual and visual
commodities.

131

132 Sooty Sons of Vulcan

In 1929, an article promoting the printing machine industry appeared in

the Gongshang banyuekan (Industrial and Commercial Biweekly). The author
described the achievements of Shanghai manufacturers in meeting the requirements of printers. Linking economic and cultural reconstruction with
industrial development, he declared growth in the printing machine industry to be a national priority, concluding that the rise of the nation depends
on the development of handicrafts and industry, which depend on machinery.12 In 1932, another economics writer, Yan Zhong, estimated that between 1912 and 1932, Shanghais printing machine industry had grown by
twenty times.13 In the case of the publishing industry, just as in national
revitalization, prosperity depended on the ability of Chinese machinemakers to supply printing presses and auxiliary machines.
History of the Book and Printing: Reorienting the Problem
The Chinese printing and publishing industry is conventionally thought
to include a spectrum of activity ranging from jobber printing of handbills,
business forms, name cards, and small-scale bulletins, to the vast commercial printing plants of comprehensive printer-publishers such as the Commercial Press and Zhonghua Books, and on to the high-turnover printing
departments of Shanghais daily, weekly, and monthly press.14 However, even
though Chinese print capitalism generally differed from Anglo-American
print capitalism in the tendency of its leading firms to combine printing
and publishing in a single enterprise, by the late nineteenth century, in
Shanghai as elsewhere, the continuum involving the publishing company
and the cultural world of reading and study did not actually begin in the
print shop. Modern print shops did not manufacture their own presses, as
they had in the age of wooden presses.
For this reason, to understand Shanghais printing and publishing industry, we must investigate the relationship between Shanghais cultural and
industrial worlds. To do so, we turn to the Chinese-owned and -run foundries and machine shops that helped to make modern Chinese printing and
publishing possible from a material or technological point of view. Reorienting our perspective is one of the objectives of this chapter and suggests the
need for corrected vision in many scholarly histories of the book industry.
A survey of the literature concerned with the history of the book reveals that, since the pioneering work of Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin appeared in 1958, historians have been divided into at least two
intellectual camps. Febvre and Martin themselves were aware of the importance of studying the history of invention and the interaction of humans and
machines.15 Since their day, however, antiquarian researchers have focused
on machinery and the evolution of technology but have invariably divorced

Forging Shanghais Printing Machinery, 1895-1937

it from its social context.16 The second, and larger group, made up of social
historians of the book and the book trade, has largely ignored both the
question of how the printing industry was supplied with equipment and
issues related to the dark underside of cultural advancement.17
Because of the semicolonial status of Shanghai and China in the decades
under review here, this study must adopt an interdisciplinary approach.
Indeed, the political conditions of Shanghai under which foreign printing
presses were sold there suggest that the successful imitation of Western
technology was more politically charged and complex than the process that
a later age mildly calls technology transfer might suggest. For this reason,
contemporary pride, both private and official, in the mastery of foreign
technology by Shanghais machine manufacturing industry is an element of
Chinese political awareness in the 1930s that should not be overlooked by
historians.
Moreover, the fact that Chinese publishers made the transition from
xylography to lithography and then to letterpress in a generation and a half,
rather than the four centuries needed to achieve printing modernity in the
West, suggests that there were high social costs to be paid along with financial burdens and incentives to rapid development. We already know that the
lithographers employed large numbers of print workers and calligraphers,
including many hired away from the xylographers. Because of the limitations of our sources from that period, however, we can know relatively
little about the workers themselves. This situation changes when we reach
the era of the printing machine manufacturers.
Just as Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin as well as Robert Darnton
have pointed out with regard to European printing industries, early use and
ownership of machinery by printers created working conditions that significantly polarized socioeconomic relationships.18 In fact, even a collateral industry such as printing machine manufacturing reveals signs of the brutal
abuse of employees by shop owners that underlay early industrialization in
Europe. The strife that resulted reminds us of the personal price paid by
machine workers and apprentices to produce modern print capitalism.
Therefore, we need to acknowledge that both employers and employees
in the Chinese machine-building industry supplied modern Chinese printers and publishers with printing presses and related machinery. How did the
system work? After presenting statistical information that documents
Shanghais and Chinas continued and undeniably heavy dependence on
imported machinery, this chapter will show that the printing industry was
also supplied in part by Shanghais own commercially responsive Chinese
machine manufacturers. They acquired mechanical skills in Shanghai and
passed some of them on to their apprentices. In turn, they and their workers

133

134 Sooty Sons of Vulcan

facilitated the mechanization of Chinas publishing industry. Exploiting their

niche between the high prices charged for foreign machinery and the attractiveness to Chinese printers and publishers of buying comparable locally
produced machinery, Shanghais printing machine manufacturing firms created what became one of Republican Chinas most viable industries. Both
business owners and employees also contributed to the mechanization and
modernization of another, the printing and publishing industry.
By isolating the printing machine manufacturing firms and their industry
from the wider machine industry, it will become clear that the former succeeded in concentrating on production, rather than on mere repairs, much
earlier than other machine industries. This development has been overlooked
by recent Chinese and Western scholars but was related to the early emergence of a group of manufacturers who may be called, following the suggestion of one of their number, foremen-capitalists.19 The early appearance
of these largely anonymous entrepreneurs, who then relatively quickly
passed on technical and industrial skills to their apprentices, positioned the
Chinese-owned printing machine industry to take advantage of the expansion of Shanghais cultural and commercial sectors during the citys period
of rapid growth from 1910 to 1925. This success was achieved by selling
both simple and sophisticated machinery to the growing Shanghai-based
printing and publishing industry, to inland Chinese printing concerns, and,
somewhat surprisingly, to printers in Japan and Southeast Asia. Along the
way, Chinese officials of the 1930s, who regarded a self-sufficient machinebuilding industry as a sine qua non of a modern nation-state, took pride in
the success of this industry.
In 1933, in terms of the overall value of the national Chinese machine
industrys manufacturing output, the printing and paper-making machine
industry ranked seventh largest out of sixteen categories.20 As outlined in the
1929 commercial report cited earlier, the five most successful printing and
paper-making machine firms (out of a total of twenty-two manufacturing
firms) produced a large variety of machines, ranging in cost from electric rotary presses selling for 7,800 silver dollars down to a 135-yuan hand-operated
lithographic press. The former could have been used to produce mass literature of the sort discussed by Lee and Nathan, and the report says that the
latter was used to print stationery such as name cards, envelopes, etc.21 This
lithographic hand press could also have been turned to printing political
bulletins of the sort mentioned by Chow. Yet neither awakening nor enlightenment came without financial or social costs. Those with capital, or access
to it, paid the former cost, and everyone who manufactured printing presses
or used them to print and publish helped to defray the latter expense.

Forging Shanghais Printing Machinery, 1895-1937

No other single Chinese locale could even approach Shanghais preponderance in this industry through the 1930s. As a result, no other place was
as intimately involved with the financial and social changes brought about
by it. According to a 1933 Nationalist government report celebrating the
successes of Chinas printing machine manufacturing business, among Chinese printing machine manufactories that were mechanized, and that employed more than thirty persons, 54 percent were located in Shanghai.22
The five firms mentioned above produced all-Chinese-made machines that
in many categories were considered to be equal in performance to imported
ones. Four of the five, including Mingjing jiqi chang (Mingjing Machine
Shop), which will be discussed extensively here, were started in 1914-15
and reached the peak of their commercial and technological growth during
and after the mid-1920s. Between 1914 and 1932, the Shanghai printing
machine industry reached its maturity and greatest profitability. In that
period, the five large specialty firms also contributed to the growing confidence of Chinese intellectuals and writers that Chinas modern media belonged to Chinese.23
The period from 1914 to 1932 may be brought into focus by examining
the history of one of the five leading printing machine manufacturers,
Mingjing Machine Shop. Its founder/owner, Zhang Jinlin, is one of the few
machine shop owners to slip through the curtain of anonymity that cloaks
most of these entrepreneurs. His activities reveal one of the most likely
paths by which personal success occurred in this industry and by which
Chinese printing machines came to be made and marketed and at whose
cost. Zhangs contributions will be elaborated after the following profile of
Shanghais machine industry.
Significance of the Machine Industry to the Printing and Publishing Industry
In the early 1930s, when the printing machine industry was praised by the
Chinese government for its growth and volume of output, Shanghai was the
recorded home of 456 Chinese-owned machine industry workshops.24 Altogether, these machine workshops employed 8,082 workers, about 18 persons per shop. Both in aggregate and on average, these shops, although not
insignificant, present a more modest image than that of the printing industry itself.25 The machine industrys total capital investment was less than a
quarter of that of the entire printing industry.26 Nonetheless, Shanghai did
produce half of the total value of the national machine output.27 The opportunities for this group of machine shops lay in the imbalance between the
technological needs of the expanding modern Chinese printing industry
and its ability or willingness to pay for foreign machinery.

135

136 Sooty Sons of Vulcan

Of the 456 shops, 32 (about 7 percent of the total) supplied machines to

the printing and publishing industry.28 What is most striking is that a high
proportion (about two-thirds) of the machine works supplying the printing
industry were manufacturers rather than mere repair shops. The high proportion of the latter, particularly in the spinning-and-weaving, silk-weaving,
shipbuilding, and cigarette-rolling industries, repeatedly exercised 1930s
Chinese government and commercial writers who longed to see a higher
degree of national industrial self-sufficiency. By contrast, the printing machine industry was a source of pride, with twenty-two of thirty-two firms in
1933 engaged in manufacturing for the Chinese domestic, Japanese, and
Southeast Asian markets. This ratio of manufacturing shops, relative to
repair shops, positioned the printing machine industry as the second highest in rank of eleven machine industries in 1933 when manufacturing was
compared to repair services.29
Despite its importance to industrial life through the printing shops that
purchased and used its machinery, as well as its impact on political/educational reformers and revolutionary groups, the workaday activities of this
new Chinese machinery industry have largely eluded historians.30 Although
most Chinese-owned machine shops were very small enterprises, particularly in the first stage of their development after 1895, they were nonetheless
a crucial component in the process by which the Chinese publishing industry was mechanized.31 They promoted, largely through the bargain-basement
prices they charged for their machinery, the mechanization of an industry
that provided some of the hardware for the late Qing revolutionary movement as well as the technological revolution that preceded and made possible the flurry of publications associated with the New Culture Movement
(starting in 1915 with the journal Xin qingnian [New Youth]).
Sustained by the machine industry, the development of the letterpress
printing machine industry, in particular, is related to the history of newspaper offices such as Xinwen bao, the Commercial Press, Zhonghua, and
other general publishers, but its history is distinct from these cultural organs. To a much more profound degree, the Chinese printing machine industry was noisy, dirty, and brutish. By relying on the limited records
available, however, we can see the process by which better-known Chinese
printers and publishers were supplied with the machines upon which their
success rested.
Initial Appearance and Growth of Manufacturing Shops, 1895-1913
Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, China was heavily
dependent on the imports of the machine industry. This reliance persisted
despite repeated efforts by private and government Self-Strengtheners to

Forging Shanghais Printing Machinery, 1895-1937

make the country more independent. Statistics appear only erratically until
the beginning of World War I, but the limitations of Chinas locally owned
machine industry are clear. Between 1862 and 1905, seven foreign firms
invested 3.9 million yuan in Shanghais nascent machinery industry; in the
same period, ninety-one Chinese firms invested no more than 87,000 yuan.
Even the Jiangnan Arsenal had been capitalized by the Qing government at
only 543,000 yuan in 1867.32
From 1914, Chinese machine import statistics that distinguish between
categories of machine (e.g., printing, agricultural, irrigational, etc.) start to
appear. Between 1914 and 1931, imports of printing and paper-making
machinery increased steadily from approximately 58,000-yuan worth in 1914
to a high of nearly 885,000-yuan worth in 1929 and settled out at about
631,000 yuan two years later.33 If 1914 is considered a base year, however,
the significance of the imports becomes clearer: by 1929, imports of printing and paper-making machinery reached nearly sixteen times the value of
the 1914 level.34
As one might expect, Shanghai was central to this import trade. Printing
and paper-making machinery never constituted more than 10 percent of
Shanghais imports over the 1914-29 period and averaged only 3.8 percent
per year,35 but this proportion still represented an average of 76 percent of
all printing machinery imported into China between 1923 and 1931, the
only years for which such figures exist.36 In four of those eight years,
Shanghais proportion of the imports was in the eightieth and ninetieth
percentiles. Yan Zhongs report from the early 1930s praised Shanghai merchants ability to manufacture printing machinery,37 but then it lamented
Chinese publishers lack of access to the most sophisticated imported machinery: Chinese merchants have the most of each type of imported printing machine, [but] the newest models of fine machinery go to the foreigners.
For example, in Shanghai now, there are offset machines, used mostly by
the British-American Tobacco (BAT) print shop; and Zhonghua, the Commercial Press, the Japanese-owned Shanghai Offset Company, and Shanghai Printing Company all take second place.38 Anecdotal accounts, too,
reinforce ones sense that the Chinese market was flooded with foreign printing machinery.
However, in spite of its small size, already by the time of the Treaty of
Shimonoseki (1895), Chinese investment in both the machine industry
and the printing machine industry, in particular, had begun to grow. Reminding us that possessing the motivation and the means to acquire the
benefits of technological expertise were nearly as important as having the
capital to pursue them, Marie-Claire Bergre points out that the essential
problem for Chinese modernisation in the early days was not so much one

137

138 Sooty Sons of Vulcan

of innovation or even of the accumulation of capital, but rather how to

acquire technological expertise.39 In 1899, a lengthy piece in the North
China Herald, intended to justify Western imperialism to its readers, took
an imaginary inland Chinese on a tour of a foreign machine shop and gloated
over the superiority of Western enterprise, but it also suggested how that
expertise might be acquired: By-and-by ... [our visitor] notices that amongst
the score or so of men at work, sooty sons of Vulcan as they are, there is not
a single foreigner. Every one wears his pigtail, and yet the foreign machinery
obeys his touch with promptitude and exactness ... This ... is but routine
work which any intelligent man can do when he has learnt it. The brain
work is done elsewhere, and for the moment mainly hails from the Clyde
[River, metonymous with Glasgow and the industrial west of Scotland].40
In addition to crowing over Western innovative genius, the article makes
clear that technological expertise was passed from the engineers of the Clyde
estuary to Chinese foundries on the banks of the Huangpu River. Apparently unknown to the Herald reporter, the same experience-based industrial
techniques that enabled foundry owners in Glasgow to execute engineers
blueprints there were already being employed in Shanghai not only to operate Western machinery but also to duplicate it.
The scene described in the North China Herald article indirectly answers
the question raised by Bergre: how did Chinese manufacturers acquire technological expertise?41 We cannot know the precise steps that they took. What
distinguished Shanghais printing machine manufacturers from other Shanghai machine shops of the sort described in this Herald article, however, was
their triumph over the difficulties involved in going beyond repairing to
replicating Western technology in the crucial decade following the Treaty of
Shimonoseki.
Between 1895 and 1913, eighty-six new Chinese-owned machine shops
were opened in Shanghai,42 seventy-four more than in the years between the
establishment of the Jiangnan Arsenal (1862) and the First Sino-Japanese
War. By 1913, allowing for closures, there were ninety-one such firms. They
produced machinery for six broad categories of industry, including printing.
Between 1914 and 1924, the overall number of Chinese-owned firms producing machinery in Shanghai more than trebled to 28443 and by 1932
registered 456 firms.
Tian Jiasheng (b. circa 1889), himself an important investor in Shanghais
printing machinery industry and one of a number of veterans of Shanghais
machine industry whose recollections were recorded in the late 1950s and
early 1960s, confirms something that we know from Chapter 1 namely,
that Britain and America produced most of the large printing machines
used in China before 1895.44 The bulk of small-scale machines came from

Forging Shanghais Printing Machinery, 1895-1937

Japan, he continues. Tian then adds that, around 1895, Li Changgen (b.
circa 1845), who had worked as a foreman in a natural gas piping installation firm, started the Li Yongchang jiqi chang45 (Li Yongchang Machine
Shop) with a 300-yuan investment.46 In the course of his piping installation
work, Li had often been in touch with print shops using kerosene engines
and, more important, with the newspaper printers. Over time, he had learned
how to repair their printing machines.
From the setup of his small one-bay shop on Jiujiang Road in the heart of
the International Concession, it appears that Li expected not only to repair
but also to forge printing machines. One side of his shop was organized to
take care of customers and to service kerosene-powered engines; the other
half was for repairing printing machines, which in the 1890s would have
included a vast range of equipment such as mechanized lithographic presses,
flatbed or platen presses, type-casting machines, stereotyping machines, and
so on. The same forge that Li used for repair work was soon turned to
manufacturing copies of the printing machines that he fixed; not for the
first time in the history of invention, the ability to repair was matched with
the ambition and ability to copy.47
Just as important to the advance of Lis craft, moreover, was the cultivation of a market for his machines. Not surprisingly, by 1900 or so, Li had
established a link with the fledgling Commercial Press.48 At this stage, its
print shop was still located in its original three-room site in Jiangxi Roads
Dechang Lane (see Figure 4.4), a short walk north of Lis workshop. The
Commercial Press contracted Li to service the ten machines (hand and footpedal presses, lever presses, and a Roman-letter type-casting machine) in its
print shop. By then, Lis shop had grown to ten workers and was manufacturing simple printing machines for sale to Chinese printer-publishers including, but not limited to, the Commercial Press.
In the same year, 1900, a second machine shop, also with a capital of 300
yuan, opened in Zhabei districts Haining Road. Like the Li Yongchang
firm, in addition to taking in repairs, it manufactured copies of foreign
machines, specializing in simple foot-powered letterpress printers. Along
the same street, and at about the same time, the Fuxing tongmu dian (Fuxing
Copper Matrix Shop) was opened. Essentially a foundry, it adapted Western printing technology to Chinese characters so that Fuxing could manufacture copper matrices49 sold exclusively to the Commercial Press. Then a
fourth entrepreneur began to manufacture lithographic printing presses. By
1904, a fifth, the Xieda Machine Shop, opened and supplied the Commercial Press with lithographic presses. In 1912, Shanghais sixth privately owned
machine shop was started up at the present-day intersection of Fujian North
Road and Suzhou North Road.50

139

140 Sooty Sons of Vulcan

In this way, an era of manufacturing entrepreneurs started its ascent via

the Chinese-run printing industry between 1895 and 1913. Of the ownerproprietors whose backgrounds are known, most fit the pattern that one
would expect. Having worked in related trades, in the course of their workdays they seem to have encountered conditions that made it possible for
them not only to identify a market niche but also to fill it. These sooty
sons of Vulcan were also cautious businessmen. As suggested by the fact
that at least three of the six printing machine manufacturers quickly established ties with the increasingly important Commercial Press, whose market
influence expanded considerably in 1903 when its capitalization grew to
200,000 yuan, they preferred to invest in a sure thing.
The precise number of machine shops aligned with the printing industry
in this first era of growth (1895-1913) is still difficult to ascertain. In this
period, at least these six Chinese-owned machinery shops specializing in
printing machinery repair appeared in a narrow industrial apron of the International Concession bordered on the south and north by Jiujiang and
Haining Roads, on the east and west by Henan and Fujian Roads, and bridging Suzhou Creek.51 Their average capital investment was 300 yuan.52 All of
the firms were invested in and started independently. Two of the ownerproprietors had been print-shop foremen; one had come out of a type-casting
shop; three were former machine shop foremen; and the most successful, Li
Changgen, had worked in the natural gas pipe installation trade. In short,
five of the six shops were started by onetime industrial foremen,53 whose
access to foreign machinery suggested to them how imitations could be
made and sold for less than the foreign-manufactured originals. Particularly
at this stage, as Bergre has written, direct or indirect exposure to Western
material civilisation was the determining factor in the setting-up of business concerns.54
In this stage, even Lis relatively successful company was a very modest
operation. Despite his contact with the Commercial Press, for example, his
shop was providing work for no more than ten persons55 by 1900. After
seven years and presumably still under contract to the Commercial Press,
his shop had added twenty more, all thirty workers manufacturing and
repairing printing machines56 on Lis four or five lathes and one planing
machine (a large collection of machines at the time, according to Tian
Jiasheng). Despite the relatively advanced technology in Lis shop, however,
Tian notes dryly that some workshops barely had a few old tiger clamps,
and no mechanical equipment [at all] that would convince customers that
repairs were their business.57
Slightly better-equipped but still nowhere near as well supplied as Li,
Anhui native and owner-proprietor Chen Zhaoqing, founder in 1904 of the

Forging Shanghais Printing Machinery, 1895-1937

Xieda Machine Shop, had had work experience in Shanghais Zhuyizhai

printing shop on Haining Road, Zhabei. According to his son, he worked
alone for the first few years after 1904, repairing all sorts of printing machines on his single piece of machinery, a foot-pedalled lathe measuring
four feet in length.58 By 1913, after nine years in business, he had only ten
workers, had purchased only two additional pieces of secondhand machinery (at least one British-made), and was finally using a kerosene engine for
power. Most important of all, Chen, like his Chinese competitors, was no
idler when it came to manufacturing. According to what Chens son could
recall about his fathers business forty-five years later, In addition to specializing in printing-machine repair, he also started to duplicate lithographic
printing machines, selling them in [Shanghai] and other ports, to the Commercial Press and others, but he couldnt sell many.59 Still, Chens sales
outside Shanghai aided in opening the hinterland to Chinese-manufactured
printing presses, just as had the sales of the printing machines, copper matrices, and lithographic presses produced by his five competitors.
In sum, the years from 1895 to 1913 witnessed the establishment and
growth of six printing machine manufacturers. These six formed the first
real beachhead in the process by which Western printing technology was
transferred and adapted for local Chinese use. In this industry, unlike others, early repair work rapidly promoted the manufacturing process. Perhaps
the relative simplicity of the machinery involved accelerated the transition,
but one must not overlook the ambition of these manufacturers to provide
machinery for Chinese printers eager to participate in the rapidly expanding market for printed matter identified by Lee and Nathan and Chow.
From this survey, it is clear that, even at this early stage, one small business loomed over the other six. The Li Yongchang shop not only moved
successfully from repairing machines to manufacturing them but also produced apprentices who in turn founded other manufacturing operations.
Most significant of these apprentices was Zhang Jinlin, who went on to
found the most singular of the workshops and factories supplying the printing and publishing industry with machinery. Zhangs experience indicates
that this industrial training or apprenticeship system proved central to
both individual successes and the success of the industry. Once the first
generation of foremen-capitalists succeeded in establishing the viability of
the industry, their apprentices were well placed to surpass them.
Zenith of the Foremen-Capitalists, 1914-32
Tian Jiasheng, who should be praised for his attention to the role of successive generations in advancing the industry in which he laboured, nevertheless incorrectly identifies the 1914-24 decade as the first in which most

141

142 Sooty Sons of Vulcan

new shops were started by foremen (lingban).60 As we have seen, the decades after the Sino-Japanese War had already exhibited the phenomenon
of erstwhile foremen turning investors to become what might best be called
foremen-capitalists. That this group emerged then suggests that a relatively
deep, two-generations-old industrial sensibility had already formed by the
time Tian began to take notice of his industry. For this reason, the period
1914-32 stands out not as the age of the foremen-capitalists but as that of
their zenith.
Still, Tian is correct to focus on the mid-1920s as a key phase in the
industrys history. Indeed, Tian was not the only commentator to cite this
period as one of consolidation in the printing machine manufacturing industry. For Yan Zhong, the economics writer who remarked on the growth
of the printing machine business from the standpoint of 1932, the year
1924 marked a key turning point in the development of the industry. In
that year, Yan says, because of the expansion of Chinese-owned cigarette
manufacturing, Chinese machine manufacturers developed the offset machines needed to print advertising images. The offset machine market continued to expand into the late 1920s, say Cao Jinshui and Zheng Xilin, two
former machine shop owners.61 Throughout the late 1920s and into the
1930s, the printing machine industry remained profitable, and levels of
technological innovation advanced, leading Yan Zhong to the conclusion
that the industrys capacity had increased fivefold over these years.62
In the third decade of the Chinese-owned printing machinery industry
that is, between 1914 and 1924 at least thirteen more printing machine
manufacturers fired up new forges and opened for business. One pre-1913
firm had gone bankrupt, and another converted to manufacturing lathes,
yielding a total of eighteen printing machine manufacturers. Four of the
five leading firms of the heyday 1920s and early 1930s were in fact founded
in 1914 and 1915.
To return to the question that Tian seeks to address, were the proprietors
of these grimy, clamorous workshops mostly erstwhile foremen? Of the thirteen new machine shops for which details are available, the founders backgrounds are fairly disparate; only three group together naturally, thanks to
their shared experience in machine foundries, which presumably trained
and encouraged them to think themselves capable of creating and supervising a workshop. Two others had been foremen in leading printing machine
shops (one in Mingjing itself and the other in Gongyichang). Hence, in this
1914-24 period, only these five of the thirteen machine shop proprietors
actually fit into Tians category of industrial foremen. Nonetheless, adding
them to the five from the earlier (1895-1913) era, one finds that ten of the
total of eighteen shops operating in this decade were indeed started up by

Forging Shanghais Printing Machinery, 1895-1937

what Tian might have agreed could be called foremen-capitalists. This term
suggests a close, virtually genetic, link between generations of machine workers. These figures also make clear that these individuals had stepped outside
the cycle of employment by others to become proprietors themselves.
By 1924, at the end of their third decade of business, Shanghais Chinese
machinists had established a self-sustaining machine manufacturing industry. Of the eight firms not started by industrial foremen, four were started
by veterans of printing- or machine-related work. Finally, two proprietors
were former small-time labour contractors, and the last had owned a small
shop. All thirteen firms were independently capitalized as in the pre-1913
era.63
During the early years of World War I, Tian himself laboured as a machine
repairman at the Commercial Press, but by 1916 he was able to start up the
Ruitai Machine Shop in Suzhou North Roads Dean Lane (see Figure 1.15).
Like his predecessors in the 1895-1913 era, Tian specialized in manufacturing. His shop produced type-casting machines that he sought to sell to his
former supervisors at the Commercial Press.64 Tian offers a persuasive, at
least partially cultural, explanation for the relatively rapid growth of the
industry in this era. His account also anticipates some of the observations
of Lee and Nathan and Chow: After the end of the First World War, and
[with] the outbreak of the May Fourth Movement [1919], the cultural enterprises had a newly reformed atmosphere, and if you add onto this that in
Shanghai businesses were started up one after the other, most of them using
printed materials, all spurred the printing trades to a temporary expansion;
because of this, the printing machine manufacturing trade was [also] invigorated for a while.65
Shanghais population and commercial growth after the war produced an
unabated demand for printed materials, but it took some time before Shanghai printers came to rely on equipment produced locally to satisfy the demand. A look at imports of printing machinery in this period shows that,
despite reductions in 1915 and 1917, the three years of 1916, 1918, and
1919 all witnessed increased imports. By 1920, imports had completely
rebounded, and they were nearly five times the 1914 rate; a year later, printing
machine imports were thirteen times their 1914 levels.66 The dependence
on foreign machinery promoted by nineteenth-century missionary publishers had reached astronomical proportions.
According to Tian, progress was slow in the Chinese-owned manufacture
of printing machinery and, until the mid-1920s, was limited to small- and
medium-scale production. Three types of printing presses and machines
(letterpress, colour proof presses, and type-casting machines) were produced.
Tian makes no mention of collotype machines, then very popular in Shanghai

143

144 Sooty Sons of Vulcan

for printing illustrations, or of mechanized typesetting machines of the sort

that had been common in the West since 1886.67 Before 1924, says Tian,
lead-type presses produced by the Chinese machine industry were nearly
all limited to hand-turned presses, self-inking machines, ... foot-operated
machines, and so on, down to extremely simple machines.68 Although the
quantities of machines produced expanded, Tian regrets that neither the
quality nor the complexity of the machines improved very quickly before
the mid-1920s.
Tians criticisms overlook the important advances of Zhang Jinlins
Mingjing Machine Shop. Unfortunately, Tians critical views have been
mirrored in recent writing by Chinese historians even when they are unaware of their source. Even those who have written otherwise well-balanced
general accounts of the machine industry in this era have largely overlooked
the vigour of this industry and its early escape from what they call the
repair-and-supply (xiupei) pattern. They report that, as late as 1924, of
284 machine industry firms, 85 (30 percent) were still repair-and-supply
shops, and they argue that this kind of ... business could not open up the
commodity market independently.69
Nonetheless, by no later than 1914, the specialized industry of printing
machine manufacture had begun to do just that, signalling its departure
from patterns characteristic of other machine-related industries in Shanghai. In the 1914-24 period, of the thirteen new shops, ten manufactured
printing presses, admittedly still mostly simple, foot-powered letterpress
machines. Two specialized in relatively simple type-casting machines. Zhang
Jinlins Mingjing Machine Shop, in this as in many other respects, broke
from the pack to produce a wide range of machines.
Zhang Jinlin and His Mingjing Machine Shop
To get a perspective on the scale of Chinese-owned printing and publishing
firms at this time, it is useful to note that Zhonghua Books, founded in
1912 and destined to become one of Shanghais two largest Chinese publishers by the late 1920s, did not establish its own specially designed printing shop until Shen Zhifang (1882-1939) succeeded in doing so in 1916.70
Like the lithographic pioneer Tongwen Press located in a residential Chinese structure (pingfang) in the 1880s and 1890s, Zhonghuas first two printing departments were in rowhouses (longtang) off Fuzhou Road and East
Broadway (now Daming donglu, close to Tongwens old offices). The Commercial Press lent the firm its first offset printing press. Before 1916,
Zhonghuas typesetting was hired out to Wenming Books and other shops
because its own facilities were inadequate. Into the 1920s, Zhonghua was
still buying secondhand equipment. Li Xiangbo, who entered Zhonghuas

Forging Shanghais Printing Machinery, 1895-1937

print shop as an apprentice in 1934, says that Zhonghua rarely even printed
in colour before the 1920s.71 This sort of hit-or-miss operation was changed
with the founding of Zhang Jinlins Mingjing Machine Shop.
Zhang Jinlins Mingjing Machine Shop is the most thoroughly documented
of all the approximately thirty-two Chinese-owned printing machine firms
known to have existed in Shanghai by the 1930s. One reason Mingjing
stands out sharply is that most Chinese-owned printing machine shops in
this period were small, even including the machine shop of the Commercial
Press.72 Even Shanghai publishing houses that would assume colossal proportions in the 1920s and 1930s were much more modest operations in the
1910s than has been generally acknowledged. In contrast, by the early 1920s,
Mingjing had over 100 employees and was producing approximately that
number of printing presses annually. Other reasons for Mingjings prominence will emerge below.
Zhang came to Jiujiang Road, apprenticed to the Li Yongchang shop, when
he was fifteen sui.73 Upon completion of his apprenticeship, he went to work
in the machine repair shop of his own masters chief client, the Commercial
Press. It is not known how long he worked at the press, but by the eve of
World War I he had risen to the position of assistant foreman and was
accumulating the stake that he would need to open his own shop. According to Hu Yunfu, owner-proprietor of a competing shop, in 1915, [Zhang]
... pieced together ... a small amount of capital and set up the Mingjing
Machine Shop at the intersection of Henan and Anqing Roads,74 one block
north of the Haining Road establishments mentioned above and that much
closer to his former employer, the Commercial Press.75
Contrary to what his colleague and future competitor Hu says, Zhang
started with nearly twice the earlier generations average investment of 300
yuan. Indeed, his 500-yuan investment enabled him to open his business
with ten workers.76 After a year, Zhang moved his enterprise to Henan North
Roads Pengchang Lane. He was already using motorized machinery to copy
an expanded range of hand-operated printing presses. By 1916 or 1917,
after two years of business, forty persons laboured for him.77
The Commercial Press connection was no doubt vital to Zhangs account
registers. Even more important in enabling Zhang to break from his job at
the Commercial Press was his exclusive contract with the Xinwen bao newspaper works (Xinwen bao baoguan, founded 1893), which, along with Shenbao,
was one of Shanghais leading Chinese newspapers. Although it was reputedly founded by Viceroy Zhang Zhidong (1837-1909) and Sheng Xuanhuai
(1849-1916), by the 1920s John C. Ferguson (1866-1945), the American
missionary, held a controlling interest in Xinwen bao, located on the north
side of Hankou Road between Henan and Shandong Roads.

145

146 Sooty Sons of Vulcan

While working as an assistant foreman at the Commercial Press, Zhang

heard of a faulty foreign-built rotary press in one of the newspapers printing departments. The supervising foreign engineer had not checked it upon
installation, and now it was malfunctioning. By working overtime, Zhang
not only got the press functioning but also gained the confidence of the
Xinwen bao management. Soon all of the newspapers machine repair work
went his direction, and Zhang took it all on, says Hu. Thanks to this
lucky break, Zhang was soon able to set up on his own. By the early 1920s,
several Mingjing apprentices report, the baoguan account was worth 2,000
to 2,500 yuan78 per year.
In 1920, Mingjing rented land on nearby Tiantongan Road, and Zhang
erected a factory structure on it. When Wang Shangen began work there as
a foreman in 1922, it seemed to be a very large plant, with over 3,000
square metres of space, divided into ten rooms.79 The staff had grown to
over 100 persons. The equipment was all top-notch; only a minority of the
lathes were made by Mingjing itself, with most of them coming from abroad.
Wang recalls that his boss Zhang Jinlins technical skills were very high
and that, except for a few high-level technicians, [the workers] were mostly
skilled apprentices.80
In addition to his maintenance contract with the baoguan, Zhang sold
machinery to it. Other steady customers of his Mingjing company included
the Shanghai shuju (a publishing company founded by the Japanese) and
Zhonghua Books. Each year, says Wang, probably with some exaggeration,
Mingjing was producing more than 100 new printing presses.81 They ranged
in price from the technically sophisticated, full-page, lead-type newspaper
press (quanzhang qianyin baozhi ji) retailing for 2,600 yuan and a five-colour
lithographic press for 2,400 yuan to a small newspaper press (750 yuan)
and a paper-cutting machine (400 yuan).82 Between 1916 and 1921, Zhang
sold 157,500-yuan worth of printing presses, largely to Japan.83 Over the
next eight years, between 1922 and 1930, probably chiefly at the Tiantongan
Road factory supervised by Wang Shangen, Mingjing sales of printing
presses climbed to 394,000 yuan,84 for an average of nearly 50,000 yuan
per year in sales. In these eight years alone, over 800 new printing presses
would have been produced for sale in Shanghai, inland, and overseas.
With sales of this volume, it is not surprising that other entrepreneurs
with mechanical backgrounds swarmed into the printing machine specialty.
In 1918-20, even the Commercial Presss affiliated machine shop, which until
then had been content to purchase many machines from its network of suppliers, expanded its manufacture of printing machinery. When it did so, however, the Commercial Press went straight to the institutional source of much

Forging Shanghais Printing Machinery, 1895-1937

of Shanghais nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century technical knowhow: the modernized military. According to Tian Jiasheng, the one behind
their designs was Rong Zimei, who came out of the Jiangnan Arsenal.85
Still, Zhang held the lead, and by the mid- to late-1920s Mingjing was
generally considered to be one of the top five printing machine manufacturers in Shanghai.86 During 1928-30, the industry remained prosperous and
then levelled out between 1931 and 1932. At that time, said Zhang Jinlins
son Yingfang,87 because gold was dear and silver cheap, not only were imported machines expensive, but, to make matters worse, you could not get
prompt deliveries,88 a situation that promoted sales of Mingjings presses.
Zhang Yingfang recalls that Mingjing benefited directly from the imported
machinery shortage by supplying big Chinese publishers with machinery
that they otherwise would not have bought: For instance, at that time,
the [Chinese-owned] Zhonghua Books wanted to add a set of banknoteprinting photogravure machines. Originally [Zhonghua] had planned to buy
them from Germany, but because the delivery date would have been too far
off, and the price was too high, [Zhonghua] came to Mingjing [to have]
them made.89
In sum, Zhang Jinglin and his Mingjing Machine Shop represent a critically important stage in the advancement of the Chinese printing machine
business. Not only did the firm advance from making simple and mediumscale machines of use to jobbers and small-scale printers but also, by the
early 1930s, after fifteen years of operation, it was providing sophisticated
photogravure machines used by Zhonghua to print currency for the Republican government. The significance of this achievement is emphasized by
Bergres observation that even an entire lifetime rarely sufficed to allow
one man to advance from working as an apprentice to becoming a capitalist
of great substance.90 With Zhang and his Mingjing firm, this technological
and financial leap occurred in just over a decade. The next section suggests
some reasons for Zhangs success in addition to those of hard work, pluck,
and good fortune.
The View from the Floor Up: Former Apprentices Remember
Zhang Jinlin and Mingjing
Given the scarcity of direct or first-person information from the owners of
machine industry shops and factories, the testimony of former apprentices
about them assumes considerable value. In the case of Mingjing Machine
Shop, this value is increased by the prominence of Zhang Jinlin91 in the
industry at large. A comprehensive study of machine industry apprenticeships is beyond the scope of this chapter. The importance of the apprentice

147

148 Sooty Sons of Vulcan

system in advancing the printing machine industry has already been mentioned, but its historical significance should not be permitted to obscure the
wretchedness of the apprentices lives. In fact, their misery was an important aspect of the industrys history.
Evidence from Zhangs former apprentices can be used to supplement
what is known about Zhang from the testimony of his colleagues and competitors. The former workers reveal in greater detail than is available elsewhere exactly how the apprenticeship system underwrote the printing
machine industry financially and organizationally. Yet the fact that these
interviews were conducted in the late 1950s and early 1960s requires that
these sources, collected by Communist Party historians, be handled cautiously. Forty years and an at least nominally proletarian revolution separated the interviewed machine industry workers from the apprenticeships
that they discussed. The interviewees vocabulary and bias often reflect the
influence of the speak bitterness (shuoku) sessions promoted by the Chinese Communists after 1949. Nonetheless, many of the particulars of their
accounts can be corroborated by comparing them with contemporary descriptions of apprenticeships in Shanghai and other Chinese cities, making
them a useful historical source.
For example, machine industry shops were generally staffed by underpaid, or unpaid, apprentices working for their keep and minimal instruction, and it would be surprising if Zhangs former apprentices reported
anything different.92 At the same time, the normal impoverished conditions,
dirt, and grease of an industrial workshop were made worse at Mingjing by
the fact that the bulk of the workforce ate and slept next to and beneath the
machinery; these details are not found in accounts of other shops, so they
provide important clues to conditions at Mingjing and about Zhang himself. For many, perhaps most, of Mingjings labourers, vocational rites of
passage expected in any apprenticeship served largely as thinly ritualized
humiliation emphasizing their subordination to Zhang.
Chen Zhaoquan (b. circa 1906), Yang Zhengyang, and Shen Zhizhang
were apprentices in the Mingjing Machine Shop in 1920. At that time, the
three recalled, there were over 140 workers in the shop (40 more than Wang
recalled having been there in 1922), and about 80 percent of them (110) were
apprentices.93 This heavy reliance on apprentice labour reflected the prevailing conditions in the broader Chinese-owned machine industry. At Dalong
Machine Shop, one of Shanghais best known, the proportion was the same
in 1920,94 with the added feature that half of the masters had served their
apprenticeships in Dalong (the other half had come from outside firms).
Other shops pressed even closer to full reliance on apprentice labour.95

Forging Shanghais Printing Machinery, 1895-1937

According to Chen, Yang, and Shen, the capitalist could ... get rich off
the bodies of the apprentices ... because [apprentices] got no wages.96 Eating usually occurred at the lathe and consisted of two meals per day of rice
porridge (zhou) and dried turnip. The three men say that they and their
workmates summed up three years of apprentice life as three years of
eating dried turnip meals.97 Twice a month, on the second and sixteenth
days, they ate some tissue-thin slices of meat or salted fish.98
In the early 1920s, even at a large, busy firm such as Mingjing, work
times were uncertain but usually involved eighteen or nineteen hours per
day.99 Each machine shop set its own rules, but in small or specialized ones
such as Mingjing young apprentices got up at 4 or 5 a.m. to do the housekeeping and accompany the masters wife to the market. When she returned,
the apprentices waited on the Zhangs and the masters while they ate.100
At Mingjing, new apprentices generally performed these domestic chores
for six months to one year; usually, in Shanghai factories with more than
twenty workers, such as Mingjing, these services were not expected. When
the next apprentice appeared, the first was relieved and would start delivering finished products to customers, making purchases at the hardware store,
etc. All heavy materials were carried to and from the foundry by apprentices, no matter how far the journey, say Chen and his coworkers. Now
[even though] we only recall the hardships of [our] former apprentice lives,
our hearts still have some lingering fear ... People who have not gone through
this kind of life simply have no way to imagine it,101 they recalled in the
early 1960s.
Ideally, by the third year, apprentices started to work with machinery.102
Although by then an apprentice had become the masters mate, when the
master stopped working the apprentice still had to clean the tools and tidy
up. These odds and ends of work shopping, hauling, cleaning dominated
the apprentices day; instruction, except at the large machine shops such as
Dalong in the 1930s,103 was conducted on an ad hoc basis.104 Relaxation,
conversely, was strictly controlled in the shop. Although the regulations at
Mingjing said that apprentices could rest on the nights of the second and
sixteenth of each month, their free time was not their own to organize. Even
when released from work, they had to ask permission to leave the shop,
suggesting that skilled and unskilled alike were captives of the master machine-maker, Zhang Jinlin.105
The shop worked late nearly every night, with masters and apprentices
not getting to bed until 11 p.m. or midnight. At that hour, the master or a
senior apprentice would pull out planks, dismantle the lathe belts, and put
the boards across the machines, making beds for themselves. The other

149

150 Sooty Sons of Vulcan

apprentices, no matter whether the ground was mud, brick, or oil, put a
straw mat over it and slept below the machines. Oil from the machines
dripped down onto the sleeping apprentices, with the result that our clothes
were always as oily as raingear.106 Because most apprentices had neither
money to buy soap nor time to wash their garments, clothes were never
changed from when they were first put on until they were in tatters.
Chen, Yang, and Shen say that between 1919 and 1921, when they first
entered Mingjing, they were given twelve copper cash per month for doing
the work of oxen. This stipend was to be used for haircuts, bathing, and
so on. From this discussion of their personal hygiene of that day, one can get
a good sense of their scale of values and discern a wry sense of humour
stimulated by the process of recollection:
At that time, you only needed six coppers to get a haircut. [Because of] daily
work, [your] whole body would be greasy. To wash your hands and face, you
needed to buy one bar of soap, and that took four coppers. In this way, you
only had two coppers left ... At that time, the cheapest bath house was twelve
coppers ... You only needed to save for six months, and you had [just] enough to
take one bath. So for the whole year we had no way to take a bath; sometimes
if we had two coppers we would buy a bowl of wontons and figure this was [at
least a way to] end our meatless diet (emphasis added).107

When Mingjing apprentices discuss precious moments of relaxation, their

comments are invariably laced with some grimly humorous or ironic reference to the austerity of their everyday lives. In spite of these conditions,
there was considerable competition for these apprenticeships. They were
highly coveted because of the shortage of employment elsewhere and, presumably, because some workers sought to become masters or proprietors of
their own shops, a phenomenon that had occurred many times between
1895 and the 1920s.
Chen Zhaoquan, for instance, came to Shanghai from Ningbo, his native
place. His father was a landless peasant unable to support his several sons. At
age fourteen sui, Chen was introduced to Mingjing by a relative/middleman
who was a friend of Zhang Jinlin. Zhang, however, took a dislike to Chen
because he was too short and small. At that time, apprentices were accepted
on six-month approval, and Chen says that it was only thanks to his relatives
intervention that he passed muster with Zhang.108
Yang Zhengyang, Chens workmate, went to Mingjing as an apprentice in
1921. Yang concedes that a foremans intervention with Zhang was a basic
aspect of the process of getting an apprenticeship but goes on to state that he
felt most wronged by having to pay a twenty-yuan security deposit (yagui)

Forging Shanghais Printing Machinery, 1895-1937

even before he began.109 The rationale for this payment was that the money
would pay for the apprentices copy of the factory rules. Yang says that
many apprentices were new arrivals to Shanghai and became ensnared in
this trap.
Just to gain him the opportunity to learn a trade at Mingjing, in Yangs
case, his father had had first to barter with relatives and plead with friends
(huanqin tuoyou). Obtaining the travel expenses to Shanghai had further
required him to borrow from the east and gather from the west (dongjie
xicou). Since coming up with this kind of training had been so difficult,
how could I bear to lose it? Yang asks rhetorically. Like innumerable others sent to Shanghai in search of employment, he now had no choice but to
send home for the security deposit. After many days of rushing around and
again imploring relatives and friends, Yangs father barely pulled together
the twenty yuan, which he sent to the Mingjing owner. Zhang, in turn, used
the boys yagui as long-term capital. When I was an apprentice, says Yang,
the factory had more than 110 apprentices; if you work it out, thats more
than 2,000 yuan.110
Even after having satisfied the deposit claims and after having been approved by Zhang, an apprentice and his family retained a quasi-familial
patron/client debt to the shop. Chen Zhaoquan goes on to say that his
middleman relative ordered [Chens] father [to appear at the shop] provided with joss sticks and candles, to enter the factory, and to acknowledge
the master [owner]. Accompanied by the middleman, Chens father had
first to kowtow and do obeisance to the owner, then do obeisance to the
owners mother, then to the God of Wealth, and to the Kitchen God. Lastly,
under the owners guidance, Chens father had to salute each old master,
finally completing the Master-Acknowledgment Ceremony (shifu xingli).111
The traditional apprentices training lasted from three to three-and-a-half
years.112 Around 1927, the Tongtie gongsuo (Copper and Iron Guild), to
which machine shops belonged, would stipulate a three-year training period. Nevertheless, apprentices were so vital to a shops operation that masters found all sorts of excuses to prolong the term. According to the former
Mingjing apprentices Chen, Yang, and Shen, in the early 1920s, in spite of
establishing contracts (guanyue) specifying three-year training periods, Zhang
Jinlin used holidays, injuries suffered while on the job, and sick days as
excuses [to force us] to make up work [time].113
In addition, most factories obliged apprentices to hold to the holiday expiration schedule, meaning that apprentices could graduate only during
the Spring, Dragon-Boat, or Mid-Autumn festivals. If ones term expired
just a few days after the end of a holiday, one would have to work for a few
more months, and only when the next holiday finally came around could

151

152 Sooty Sons of Vulcan

one complete the term.114 As a result, many machine industry apprentices

took four, five, or even six years to complete their terms; at Mingjing, upward of four-and-a-half years was not uncommon in the early 1920s.
Just as the apprentices entry into Zhang Jinlins shop was marked by a
ritual of subordination, so too was his final departure from it. Chen, Yang,
and Shen all agree that at Mingjing, if one did not perform the ThankMaster Toast (xie shi jiu), one was not considered to have bought ones
diploma or as having completed ones term. Even at this point, the three
men recall bitterly, the owner could resort to new tricks, such as extending
individuals terms, even up to six months, to get a large number of apprentices pooling their resources for the final send-off. When the big day arrived, Zhang was entitled to invite his friends and relatives to participate,
but the apprentices could not invite even a parent. No protests were raised
because the only persons entitled to complain were the apprentices guarantors; presumably, their interest was in seeing apprenticeships completed.115
At Mingjing, apprentices regarded themselves, with good reason, as beasts
of burden subjected to a life of austerity, filth, and violence. Corporal punishment was frequent. A punch or slap on the face was the very least ... It
was so natural that it was not ... taken as [anything] special,116 said eight
former apprentices of Mingjing and other shops. Hammer handles, wooden
sticks, ropes, whatever was at hand could become weapons if an apprentice
crossed a master or simply had the bad luck to run into him when he was
out of sorts. Chen Zhaoquan recalls the Mingjing apprentice Xu Xingkang,
sent to the Zhonghua falang chang (Zhonghua Enamel Works) one day to
repair a machine. In the course of his work, the machine somehow crushed
his foot. When Zhang Jinlin saw how seriously Xu had been wounded, he
told him to leave the factory for good. Because of the medical neglect brought
on by his unemployment, Xu ended up crippled for life.117 Former apprentices from other shops recall workmates having been beaten to death.
As suggested by the repair mission that led to Xus accident, however, and
in spite of haphazard training and the physical neglect or abuse of the 110
or so apprentices, in the early 1920s apprentices did glean enough skill to
turn themselves into valuable craftsmen whose labour Zhang Jinlin could
then farm out into the printing and publishing industry. Wang Shangen,
quoted earlier, recalled that the workers at Mingjing were mostly skilled
senior apprentices. The Chen, Yang, and Shen trio also recall participating
as part of a maintenance team of ten persons (eight apprentices, one old
master, and one just-graduated apprentice) sent one day to Xinwen bao. The
newspaper plant, when paying Mingjing for its expertise, did not distinguish technicians from apprentices and handed over thirty yuan per man
per month. Each apprentice continued to receive only his twelve-coppers

Forging Shanghais Printing Machinery, 1895-1937

maintenance, with at most a two-mao bonus tacked on. With board added
in, Chen and his coworkers calculate that Zhang cleared over 2,000 yuan
per year on their teams labour.118
From the testimony of these apprentices, it is clear that by 1919-21, when
Zhangs firm was selling an annual average of 31,500-yuan worth of printing machinery, Zhang had also gained at least 2,800 yuan of his long-term
capital from apprentices security deposits. He made another 2,000 yuan
per year from his account at the baoguan. Although we have no way of knowing
Zhangs profit margin on his sales, it is clear that 15 percent of his gross
income in this early period originated solely from his captaincy of a battalion of widely employable apprentices.
In her review of Chinese entrepreneurs in this period, Bergre states that
the technical success of these small workshops capable of reproducing foreign machinery ... was not rewarded by an equivalent economic and social
success.119 It is precisely this state of affairs that makes the anonymity of
these entrepreneuring foremen so difficult to penetrate. Still, from the testimony of his former competitors, colleagues, and apprentices, many of whom
probably had good reason to dislike him, Zhang Jinlins character emerges.
Zhang appears to have been a highly trained and energetic individual. In
the course of a twenty-two-year career, he stationed himself at the centre of
a web of professional obligations that ranged from supply firms, to his clients at the Commercial Press, and on to the Xinwen bao plant. Socially and
domestically, he directed a small army of knowledgeable but impoverished
apprentices and, at least as important, their families. A man whose own
status had risen thanks to technological and economic authority, physical
brutality, and ritualized subordination of his apprentices and their families,
Zhang was the primary beneficiary of familial patronage money, repair contracts, and sales of specialized printing machinery. But beyond these observations, even he remains as anonymous as his competitors.
The Impact of Other Chinese-Owned Printing Machine Manufacturers
At other firms, the 1920s were also a time of growth and increased manufacture of different kinds of machines. Up to now, attention has focused on
the manufacture of printing presses, but many firms were also busy developing other types of machines. Gongyichang, Yongsheng, and Xinghua, for
example, were actively attempting to produce rotary paper makers, which
first appeared in 1926 as a result of collaborative efforts at their Baoshan
Road factories.120 The lack of Western-style paper had been an impediment
retarding the Western-style letterpress industry since the era of the missionary publishers. The inability of Chinese-owned enterprises to produce paper in adequate quantities by 1900 obliged the Chinese letterpress industry

153

154 Sooty Sons of Vulcan

to use expensive imported paper. Interestingly, restrictions on the availability of foreign paper sustained the lithography industry, which relied on
Chinese-produced bamboo paper, and kept it viable well into the twentieth
century.
Efforts by Gongyi and others to achieve technological independence
through the manufacture of Western-style paper, however, were eventually
successful. By 1936, a government report observed in laudatory tones, In
the south [of China], all paper factories now use Chinese-manufactured
[paper-making] machines from Baoshan [near Shanghai] and Shanghai
[-proper]; in other places, most [factories] use foreign-produced ones.
Baoshan and Shanghai machines are all designed and manufactured by
Chinese, and the results are excellent.121 In spite of breakthroughs of this
sort, of course, not all efforts were rewarded with comparable market success. Offset printing presses, for instance, were first introduced by the Hujiang
and Xin Zhongguo (New China) machine shops. Hujiang responded to the
growth in cigarette advertising in 1926 by attempting to copy Germanmade machines imported for sale at 10,000 yuan each. Although Hujiang
did succeed in producing an imitation, its quality was so low that all the
examples were sold for scrap, and in 1928 Hujiang had to declare bankruptcy.
New China Machine Shop, alternatively, had started by imitating American cigarette-rolling machines. At the time, Japanese offset printing presses
were being sold for 8,000 yuan, and the Chinese shop endeavoured to copy
them and the German ones, with the intention, common to the Chineseowned machine shops, of underselling the foreign machines. Zheng Xilin,
then working for a Japanese firm installing offset presses at 100 yuan per
job, says that he helped the firm to test its new machine, but, despite whittling the price down, the printing machine could not compete in Shanghai
with the authentic foreign ones, presumably because of technical deficiencies. Finally, New Chinas investment was saved by the Shanxi warlord Yan
Xishan (1883-1960), who sent his purchasing agent to Shanghai to buy the
machines. Zheng states that, to get the two test models off their hands, we
started with the low price of 3,500 yuan for each.122 In this way, even design failure promoted the modest expansion of mechanized printing presses
to the hinterland.
The manufacture of printing presses and the sale of them outside Shanghai was supported by Chinese manufacture of other kinds of printing apparatus. Tian Jiashengs Ruitai Machine Shop specialized in making type-casting
machines, which in the post-World War I era were all Japanese imports.
Targeting the Commercial Press, his former employer, which, it will be recalled, opened its own machine shop to manufacture printing presses in the
period 1918-20, Tian eventually succeeded in gaining an account there. He

Forging Shanghais Printing Machinery, 1895-1937

soon attracted other clients, and after I got ... going, Japanese imports were
gradually reduced, he says proudly.123
Shanghai printing press and machine manufacturers had moved technologically far beyond the stage characterized by Li Changgens shop at which
the industry had started. In the middle of the industrys fourth decade
that is, by the 1930s successes such as the jointly invested rotary paper
maker, Tians type-casting machines, Mingjings newspaper presses, lithographic presses, and paper-cutting machines had all been achieved. The
manufacturers remained hampered largely by production capacity, which
itself may have been influenced by a lack of access to capital.
Regardless of these constraints, Chinese printing press and machine manufacturing was a creative and profitable industry, capable of countering Japanese manufactures, if not yet European and American ones, even at the
high end of the technology required by the printing and publishing industry. More successfully than any other Chinese machine industries, except
the knitting machine industry, Chinese manufacturers such as Mingjing
had moved to satisfy the demands of the Chinese market for locally produced machinery. Out of the thirty-two machine shops specializing in printing
machine manufacture, twenty-two were primarily manufacturers, with the
remaining ten focusing on repair.124 Praised by industry and government,
nonetheless, the printing machine industry was founded not on the sort of
circumspect intelligence characterized by Tian Jiasheng, but on the anonymous energy of proprietors such as Zhang Jinlin.
Beginning of the End
As noted earlier, in 1932, one observer commented that Shanghais printing machine industry had grown twentyfold in as many years. Of the 400plus machine shops that dotted Shanghais foreign concessions from 1895
to the early 1930s, this chapter has focused on the portion that supplied
the domestic Chinese and, to a lesser extent, Japanese and Southeast Asian
printing and publishing industries.
Of the thirty-two firms referred to here, six (Li Yongchang, Fuxing Copper
Matrix Shop, Xieda, Tians Ruitai, Zhangs Mingjing, and the semidependent
Commercial Press-owned Huada) can be shown to have been part of the
network of Chinese firms supplying the big Chinese newspaper plants and
publishing houses. Initially, they offered repairs but quickly thereafter began building copies of foreign machinery. The actual number of these machine producers was certainly much higher. Like a series of industrial nodes,
scattered throughout the International and Japanese Concessions, these shops
provided the native industrial base for the expansion of Shanghais printing
industry.

155

156 Sooty Sons of Vulcan

In addition, Tian Jiasheng, in his own view, dislodged the Japanese, who
had dominated Chinas type-casting machine market. In an interesting twist
on the theme of technological competition, Zhang Jinlins Mingjing Machine
Shop was patronized not only by Chinese printers and publishers but also by
the Japanese Shanghai publisher Shanghai shuju and by the Japanese home
market. When the Shanghai market proved to be unreceptive to locally
manufactured commodities, such as Chen Zhaoqings lithographic presses,
Tians type-casting machines, or New Chinas offset presses, Shanghai-made
machinery was sold in the Chinese hinterland and abroad and contributed
to the mechanization of both the national printing and the national papermaking industries.
Thus, no later than 1900 and much earlier than has been previously recognized, the Chinese-owned printing machine industry started to rise above
the prevalent pattern of heavy reliance on repair work characteristic of most
machine-related industries in Shanghai. Between 1914 and 1924, the industry produced small- and medium-scale printing machinery such as simple
presses and type-casting machines. By the mid-1920s, it had moved into
production of more sophisticated machinery such as offset presses. Even its
failure to compete well against foreign offset presses in the Shanghai market
facilitated the mechanization of the nonlittoral Chinese printing industry
long before the forced transfer after 1937 of industry inland brought on by
the war with Japan. The singularity of Shanghais printing machine business in breaking from the pattern more typical of the larger Chinese machine industry that is, of reliance on repair-and-supply work was
accomplished in part by articulate entrepreneurs such as Tian Jiasheng, but
more often by the the patronage, control, and energy of men such as Zhang
Jinlin who today remain little more than name entries on lists of pre-1949
factories.
In the Japanese attack on 30 January 1932, mentioned at the outset of
this chapter, bombs also rained down onto the machine-making firms that
studded the Zhabei, Hongkou, Nanshi, and Yangshupu districts and that
were so dependent on the Commercial Press and the rest of Shanghais
publishers for purchase contracts for printing presses and machines. During
the initial bombing and subsequent house-to-house fighting, most machine
shops in Zhabei were destroyed. Mingjing itself was nearly obliterated. In
Hongkou alone, more than 200 machine shops suffered destruction. Naturally, in light of their lack of access to corporate assets and their dependence
on larger firms for business, these small workshops recovered much more
haltingly than did the machine shop of the Commercial Press.
According to Bank of China reckoning, by 1934 there were only 204
machine shops left in Shanghai, the same approximate number as in the

Forging Shanghais Printing Machinery, 1895-1937

late 1910s.125 The machine industry grew smaller year by year and did not
begin to recover until the end of 1936. Dalong, for example, increased both
its investments and its sales by then. Mingjing, like many other surviving
machine shops, began retooling for the arms trade and government needs.
Its plant flickered back to life with the shift to military production and
machine tools intended for military products. When fighting related to the
Marco Polo Incident (7 July 1937) spread from Beijing to Shanghai on 13
August, however, the machinery industry collapsed again. Fighting destroyed
360 firms, and 66 firms moved inland.126 Dalong was soon occupied by
Japanese troops and was reorganized to support the Japanese war effort.
Mingjing drops out of the record until 1949, by which time Shanghai and
Mingjing were no longer the centre of the Chinese-owned printing machine
industry. In that year, only 9 of 308 printing presses produced in China
bore a Shanghai trademark.127
Conclusion
This chapter began with the question of how letterpress and lithographic
printing commenced, technologically speaking, in Shanghai and, by implication, in the rest of China at the end of the nineteenth century. The gradual
spread of Western-style lithographic and letterpress printing up the China
coast after 1814 by means of missionary publishers such as the Jesuits,
American Board Press, London Mission Press, and the APMP presented
numerous technical challenges. Missionaries themselves came up with innovative solutions to these problems on the spot or brought in technical
personnel, such as William Gamble, to assist them. One obstacle that the
missionaries did not manage to overcome by the end of the nineteenth
century was their dependence on imported printing presses and printing
supplies. They passed this dependence on foreign-made machinery and supplies on to the small number of Chinese printers and publishers trained in
their publishing firms. Shanghais modern printing industry overcame the
limitations of the missionary supply system and gradually mechanized itself on the bases of imported machinery and, historically more significant,
Chinese-made printing machinery.
As indicated by Table 3.1, by 1900, five years after Li Changgen opened
his machine shop, Shanghai had distinguished itself from other potential
competitors in printing press and printing machine manufacture. Whether
we are discussing early manufacture of manual relief presses or lithographic
hand presses, Chinas important breakthroughs were made by Shanghais
machine shop proprietors and their workers. The same can be said of the
manufacture of matrices and Chinese-language type-casters. In the Chinese
manufacture of rotary presses, which did not appear until the late 1920s,

157

158 Sooty Sons of Vulcan

and in the creation of advanced photogravure presses, Shanghais tradesmen played the same prominent role. Somewhat more significant, of the
nine technologies created or imitated on the Chinese mainland after 1915,
when Zhang Jinlin founded Mingjing, his firm could claim credit for the
first viable models of four of them. And within six years of the establishment of the firm, Zhang and his apprentices were manufacturing an average
of 100 presses and machines per year. By contrast, Tian Jiashengs Ruitai
could claim breakthrough success only in type-casters, an area that nonetheless advanced Chinas Gutenberg revolution by putting lead type into a
widening variety of Chinese hands.
By shifting attention away from imported technology, this chapter has
brought into view the process by which the initial seven Shanghai printing
machine shops, within less than a decade after 1895, laid the foundation for
self-sustaining manufacturing firms. Starting with the Li Yongchang shop,
which, like its competitors, was initially little more than a repair-and-supply
shop, these firms were led by persons who may be called foremen-capitalists.
Although of relatively minor economic importance, these few scattered firms
are of historical importance and interest because of their role in creating
conditions suitable for the economically more significant manufacturing
firms, such as Mingjing. Contrary to the prevailing view, we have seen that,
in the first crucial decade of the printing machine industry and more likely
between 1895 and 1900, erstwhile industrial foremen had already remade
themselves as manufacturers. At the same time, they created their own successors through an effective, if exploitative, apprenticeship system. Even
before World War I, the Chinese printing machine industry was concentrating on manufacture, rather than repair, thanks to their efforts. By reorienting the standard paradigm prevailing in the history of the book to include
the history of technology and industrial manufacturing, this chapter has
shown that Shanghais Chinese-owned modern printing and publishing industry was grounded in part on its Chinese-owned foundries and machine
shops. For this reason, histories of the modern book industry, which itself is
key to the development of Chinese print capitalism, are incomplete unless
they include attention to the history of industrial manufacturing.
Indeed, the most successful of these foremen-capitalists, Mingjings Zhang
Jinlin, started out as an apprentice in the most flourishing of the late Qing
Shanghai workshops. At least as helpful to his fifteen-year climb as his own
diligence and training was the range of business connections that he picked
up as he manoeuvered through Shanghais industrial sites, starting from the
Li Yongchang shop on Jiujiang Road, moving north to the Commercial Press,
heading south to the Xinwen bao newspaper works, and finally coming to
rest in his own vast manufacturing plant. Just as important, the more than

Forging Shanghais Printing Machinery, 1895-1937

1,100 presses that Zhangs firm can be shown to have produced between
1916 and 1930, the years for which such twenty-one Chinese-owned competitors were important for putting modern Western-style printing within
reach of Chinese print capitalists both in Shanghai and inland. By the 1930s,
the productivity of these manufacturers presented government commentators with a model of industrial success.
The printing machine manufacturing business witnessed the early emergence of foremen-capitalists who, despite the limitations of the industrial
training system, did produce their own successors. The fact that certain
prominent firms, such as Li Yongchang and Mingjing, cultivated the sale of
their machines to one of Shanghais largest industrial markets, the Shanghai printing industry, implies that less well-known firms had much the same
intention but searched for less competitive markets inland and overseas.
For all of them, technological expertise, commercial acumen, and good
fortune combined between the early 1900s and the 1930s to enable a total
of twenty-two firms to move rapidly into the manufacture first of simpleand medium-scale printing machines and then of highly sophisticated ones.
The early success of the printing machine firms in moving from repair services to manufacturing was related not only to the ability of these manufacturers to produce machinery at a marketable price but also to the increasing
demand for printed commodities of all kinds between 1895 and the mid1930s. In the end, however, war, not technological or commercial competition, brought a lasting halt to the proliferation of Shanghais Chinese printing
machine manufacturers. The 1932 Japanese bombing of Shanghai had a
profound effect on the printing machine industry, dealing it a setback from
which it very slowly recovered in the mid-1930s, only to be decimated in
August 1937 when the Japanese military again attacked Shanghai. Indeed,
the second Japanese assault dealt the citys printing machine manufacturers
a blow from which they never recovered in the Republican period, highlighting the importance of machinery to Chinese print capitalism.
From Mingjings modern plant down to the smallest and rudest of workshops, these grimy, noisy, violent shops, much more fundamentally than the
missionary publishers or any of the large Chinese publishers at the highstatus end of this cultural industry, were responsible for the extensive mechanization, as well as the spread, of both letterpress and lithographic technology
throughout Shanghais and Chinas printing industry in the early twentieth
century. Without the appearance and multiplication of these Chinese sooty
sons of Vulcan, labouring over their forges and sleeping under their lathes,
Shanghai printers and publishers would have remained permanently dependent on the same imported supplies as the missionaries who had trained
nineteenth-century Chinese printers in Canton, Hong Kong, and Ningbo.

159

160 Sooty Sons of Vulcan

Fewer Chinese printers would have been able to afford to buy modern printing
machinery, and Western-style printing would have required much more time
to become the Chinese norm.
While acknowledging the importance of proprietors such as Zhang Jinlin,
a balanced account of this industry, which contributed in a material, if indirect, way both to the post-1895 general awakening and to subsequent
expansions of the modern, mechanized, market-driven Chinese press in the
early twentieth century, requires that we recognize the social cost of enlightenment exacted from Zhangs and others employees. Through physical and
patriarchal domination, machine shop owners such as Zhang controlled access to the narrow passageway that provided a relatively small proportion of
machine-building apprentices with the skills they needed to succeed on their
own. The exacerbation of these social relations in a radically new industrial
environment harkens back to issues raised in Chapter 2s discussion of the
lithographic industry, particularly the observation that the minds and values
of those who owned modern machinery often failed to keep pace with technological innovation. In fact, industrial technology seems to have coarsened
life for many even as it granted hope to a handful.
Although there is little evidence of the emergence of mature and selfconscious class relationships in the lithographic industry of the late nineteenth century, by the early twentieth century it is clear from the machine
industry that the same growing polarization discussed by Febvre and Martin and Darnton with respect to France was under way in Shanghai. This
process was exacerbated by the existence of technology and access to it even
if the situation did not yet manifest itself in specific acts of rebellion. Thus,
a question arises as to how Mingjing and other apprentices addressed their
misery at the powerless end of Shanghais industrial workplace relations.
The success of many of their masters in opening their own shops hints
strongly at some apprentices faith in their ability as individuals to get ahead.
Others, perhaps under the influence of printed materials that began circulating in the 1920s, gradually turned to collectivist solutions in opposition
to the master/apprentice system studied here.

4 The Hub of the Wheel: Commerce,

Technology, and Organizational
Innovation in Shanghais New-Style
Publishing World, 1876c. 1911
Up to this point, the dispersal of Western-style mechanical and industrialized printing has been set against the background of late imperial Chinese
print culture and print commerce. Unlike many other countries, empires,
and regions of the world that experienced the Gutenberg revolution as part
of the expansion of European imperialism in the modern period, Chinas
homegrown, centuries-old tradition of learning and book production has
been shown to have profoundly influenced its reception of Western printing technology. The objective of this chapter is to show how traditional
Chinese print culture and print commerce, both with ancient origins, took
on the character of modern Chinese print capitalism.
Much like the Chinese adoption of Western technology, the Chinese response to the exigencies imposed by that technology necessitated blending
the inherited Chinese value system with the Western-influenced present.
Both this chapter and the next will highlight the economic, organizational,
and social effects of this new industry based on Western-style printing technology. A sharpened business sense was an important part of the new beginning in the long history of Chinese print culture undertaken at Shanghai. In
particular, in the period from 1876 to approximately 1911, along with expanding the industrial production of books, Shanghais printers, publishers, and booksellers will be shown in this chapter to have demonstrated
growing concern with just, adequate, or fair compensation to those who
invested in the machines on which print capitalism rested. At the same
time, vestiges of an inherited past continued to influence the decisions made
by those who owned and directed the use of those machines.
In addition to restoring the commercial viability of the traditional publishing industry after the devastating Taiping Rebellion (1851-64), Shanghais
printers, publishers, and printing machine manufacturers surmounted the
limitations of that business by helping to establish Chinese publishing on
an industrial foundation. Once Shanghais publishers adopted mechanical
printing technologies and industrialized the Chinese publishing industry,
they and the citys printers and printing machine manufacturers transformed
the social basis of knowledge production and distribution in the Chinese

162 The Hub of the Wheel

empire. Deeply influenced by this change, contemporary reformers and revolutionaries continued to exhibit many inherited characteristics but also created new ones through the interaction of Chinese values with Western
machinery.
After 1876, private, nongovernmental, and Chinese-owned industrial printing and publishing firms tapped new resources from the relative security of
Shanghais International Concession. From then on, attempts to return to
old-style, relatively genteel, craft-based xylographic printing would be only
sporadic and limited in scope. Even traditional Chinese literature came to
be produced using modern machines, as we saw when describing Wu Yourus
(1840?-1893?) illustrated journals issued alongside those of the Dianshizhai.
Generally speaking, though, new-style books (xinshu), a term frequently
encountered in the sources of the period, should be understood to refer to a
manufacturing process, to the physical appearance of those books, and to
their contents.
Shanghais printers, publishers, and printing machine manufacturers effected the leap to print capitalism between 1876 and about 1911. Already
by the early 1880s, Chinese firms such as Tongwen Press started printing
what were for the Chinese new kinds of intellectual products, the industrially produced book and journal. There is little explicit evidence of the Tongwen
proprietor Xu Runs concern with adequate compensation for his effort.
Within the three decades covered by this chapter, however, the machinebased mode of production pioneered by Tongwen and others developed to
the point where adequate compensation and access to investment and operating capital became foremost in publishers minds. Their publications also
began to contain startling new-style that is, Western- and Japanese-style
ideas about science, democracy, and state and society. Key notions such as
these, which would animate Chinese politics and social life throughout the
twentieth century, were now delivered largely via the Western-style printing
press, harnessed to the new goal of mass-producing books for sale throughout China and abroad.
At least as important as technology and ideas were organizational models
that successive Shanghai printers and publishers appropriated and adapted
to what they believed were the needs of Chinese society between the two
wars with Japan (1894-95, 1937-45). The sustained, if sometimes unsteady,
prosperity of the modern publishers was eventually expressed, organizationally, in a booksellers guild and a trade association. However, such
industry-wide organizations developed concurrent with the adoption of
Western-style business models, such as individual proprietorships, partnerships, and, crowning the multitudes of proprietorships and partnerships, the
joint-stock limited liability corporation (gufen youxian gongsi). Chronologically,

Commerce, Technology, and Organizational Innovation, 1876c. 1911 163

Shanghais publishers were among the first in China to adopt the limited
liability corporate model; historically, they were also among the most successful in doing so. In their own view, the corporation offered them financial and organizational flexibility.
Under Alfred Chandlers influence, historians have argued that the
Western-style corporate model succeeds by establishing impersonal bureaucratic order at the expense of social networks and family ties. Scholars
extending the argument to China have tended to fall into two groups. The
first group has maintained that corporate hierarchies and economic rationality prevailed or were imminent in nineteenth-century and twentiethcentury China. Their conclusions have been challenged by a second group,
which, in its study of the structure of Chinese capitalism, emphasizes informal social networks that relied on family, local origin, etc.,1 all of which,
in the view of the first, should have undermined the firms chances of
success.
Like Shanghais Shenxin Cotton Mill and China Match Company between 1915 and 1937, the period upon which Sherman Cochrans study of
these firms concentrates, Shanghais corporate Chinese publishing companies such as the Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books
took serviceable parts of the Western corporate model and adapted them to
Chinese circumstances. Just as the nineteenth-century lithographic printerpublishers had selected the technology appropriate to their needs, Shanghais
twentieth-century corporate publishers borrowed what was useful from
Western business organization and applied it against a background of values that their owners had inherited from Chinas pre-industrial print culture and commerce. At the same time, in the view of Lin Heqin (active 1930s),
a printer and the publisher of Shanghais Yiwen yinshua yuekan/The Graphic
Printer, only the formal structure of the Western-style corporation could
endow Shanghai printing firms with longevity. The records of those Chinese publishing firms that did adopt elements of the corporate model suggest that their adaptation of it was an essential part of their success story.
Ultimately, however, what is important here are not the formal elements
of business organization, whether borrowed or indigenous, but the dynamic
role of the joint-stock limited liability corporation in achieving what Chinese printers and publishers believed it accomplished: namely, providing
them with a means of organization useful for raising capital from other
corporate organizations such as modern banks and for providing long-term
safeguards for corporate property. Relatively anonymous financing, of a sort
beyond the experience and know-how of Shanghais traditional banking
institutions (qianzhuang),2 enabled them to purchase foreign machinery. At
the same time, native-place ties, familial concerns, literati values, and even,

164 The Hub of the Wheel

in the case of the Commercial Press, religious affiliations influenced the dayto-day operation of these firms.
Expensive Western-style machinery seems necessarily to have channelled
publishers public service ideals into industrial profit-seeking and toward
the corporate model. The social mingling of scholars, merchants, and technicians involved in creating the modern book-publishing corporation occurred in the context of this expanding mechanized economy. Successful
Shanghai publishers tried to unite under the corporate roof the multiple
groups seeking their fortunes in this innovative business. At the same time,
Qing reform legislation covering education, industry, and intellectual property was written as if tailored for the Shanghai publishing world. It legitimized many modern business practices already being implemented in
Shanghais publishing world by the scholars and merchants running it. All
these innovations also positioned aggressive, well-connected firms such as
the Commercial Press to transform a marketplace formerly provisioned by
decentralized, late imperial, Chinese print merchants into one dominated
by Shanghai-based, technology-driven print capitalists.
Post-Taiping Chinese Social and Educational Groups and Shanghais
Late Imperial Publishing World
As Chung-li Chang and others have shown, the meritocratically based civil
service system of the period prior to the 1850s was radically altered by the
social and political impacts of the Taiping Rebellion. One of the targets of
the rebellion, which claimed thirty million lives before it was suppressed in
1864, was the literati culture and shuyuan (academies) upon which the social legitimacy of the hated Manchu dynasty rested. The rebellions effects
reverberated far beyond the immediate destructiveness of the Taipings. Not
surprisingly, given literati prerogatives to act as the intellectual conscience
of China, the reconstituted gentry included many drawn to educational
reform and its supporting field, publishing.
During and after the Taiping Rebellion, as a means of raising revenue,
Qing authorities remade the Chinese gentry in important ways. Although
policies involving the sale of civil service degrees formerly won through
competitive examinations increased the size of the literati with respect to
their overall percentage of the total population (from 1.3 percent to 1.9
percent), the most important changes were social and educational rather
than purely demographic.3 In the four decades between the suppression of
the Taipings in 1864 and the abolition of the civil service examinations in
1904-5, two-thirds of all officials gained their status thanks to purchased,
rather than earned, degrees as compared with about half prior to 1850.4 As

Commerce, Technology, and Organizational Innovation, 1876c. 1911 165

the balance shifted decidedly in favour of irregular officials and degreeholders, the prestige of literati learning, formerly heavily oriented toward
the winning of degrees and official positions, was further eroded.
Literati culture itself was redefined. Those for whom book culture and
higher learning had formerly provided both a means of self-cultivation and
an avenue to public service now found themselves in a world in which status and service were no longer fixed entities. The rules governing status and
public service were increasingly open to negotiation. Among the outcomes
of this new climate was unprecedented social mixing of literati and merchants in both revived traditional and newly founded organizations. Educational reform, too, soon embraced the legitimate pursuit of and involvement
in education by those with modern business interests.
Social changes emphasizing the importance of trade in the post-Taiping
Jiangnan political-economic structure have led recent scholarship to highlight sociopolitical phenomena that also remade local elites and their networks. Going beyond the familiar old categories of merchants and literati,
many scholars have identified gentry-merchants (shenshang), gentry-managers
(or elite managers [shendong]5), and a Westernized urban reformist elite6
with its roots in late Qing social changes. Although historians still find it
difficult to agree on the most appropriate terminology for these new social
groupings, they tend to concur that the old Confucian-endorsed hierarchies7
were no longer applicable to the actual social reality of late imperial China.
Many scholars now believe that both literati and merchants had in fact
been influenced and increasingly united by the commercial upsurge in the
Chinese economy developing since the sixteenth century.8 Building on this
long-term momentum of commercialization and urbanization, the Taiping
Rebellion both opened room at the top of the imperial structure and led
some members of the Jiangnan elite, particularly those from Zhejiang and
Jiangsu provinces, to seek refuge in Shanghai from the 1860s onward, a
process that continued unabated into the twentieth century. In the treaty
port, such newcomers joined various business circles, many of them with
links to education.9
The current lack of agreement among historians regarding suitable terminology for the social structure of the late Qing may reflect the actual complexity of the social situation at the turn of the century. This possibility is
underscored in the lexicon employed by late-nineteenth-century Chinese to
discuss commerce and industry, for instance. According to Wellington
K.K. Chan, the Chinese terms shangren (merchant) and jingshang (to engage in mercantile activities) had broader connotations than the standard
English translations suggest. To speak of (jingshang) is to speak essentially of

166 The Hub of the Wheel

the whole non-agricultural economy, just as (shangren) can include traders,

brokers, manufacturers, bankers, financiers, and managers in the service
and transport industries,10 he writes.
Starting in 1872, when Chinas guandu shangban (official-supervised and
merchant-run) enterprises were first set up,11 the Qing monarchy and many
of its scholar-officials came to accept the need to expand the role and status
of commerce and industry in Chinese society. The dynasty also created a
new set of hierarchies that privileged certain kinds of merchants and
disfavoured others. By the 1890s, for instance, Chinese began to distinguish between shangye (commercial enterprises), gongye (artisanal industry),
and shiye (industrial enterprises). The term shiye was borrowed from the
Japanese to emphasize modernity; the earlier terms shangye and gongye were
retained for old-style merchant and artisan activities. Despite official edicts
commanding imperial bureaucrats to minimize the gap between themselves
and merchants, however, officials still held to the ideals of the moral economy
and tended to look down on merchants and artisans. They were willing to
embrace only industrialists. Book printers and publishers, particularly those
in larger industrial firms, were influenced by and benefited from this new
set of hierarchies thanks to their claim on the literary tradition and access
to modern machinery.12
Because late-nineteenth-century Chinese society experienced sociological
and cultural realignment, leadership for educational reform sprang from
many sectors of post-Taiping society, including both national and local elites.
In the period of Self-Strengthening (1860-95) that followed the Taipings,
famous national figures such as Viceroy Zeng Guofan (1811-72) promoted
a conservative brand of Confucianism known as the Tongcheng School.
Others, including Viceroy Zhang Zhidong (1837-1909), called for the inclusion of Western subjects such as modern scientific and technological
fields in a revised national curriculum. A more generalized response was to
call for revival of Confucian learning via shuyuan, the institutions that since
the Tang dynasty (618-907) had been among the most important elite producers, consumers, and conservers of books in the Chinese world.
The new academies, in the view of one modern scholar, were a response to
the growth of irregular officials in the wake of the Taiping Rebellion but also
a means of securing employment for these officials who had risen thanks to
commercial wealth. In Zhejiang, between 1850 and 1900, academies were
founded or re-established at the rate of almost seventeen per decade. In
Jiangsu, the rate was about sixteen per decade for the same span of time.13
Inexorably, these new establishments were influenced, positively or negatively, by the merger of the moral and the monetary economies reflected in
their directorships.

Commerce, Technology, and Organizational Innovation, 1876c. 1911 167

Just as Zeng Guofan and Zhang Zhidong took action on educational reform at the curricular level, so too nationally known officials actively sponsored new academic institutions as part of their Self-Strengthening industrial
programs. In 1896, for example, high official Sheng Xuanhuai (1849-1916)
founded Shanghais reformist Nanyang Public Institute (Nanyang gongxue)
to advance Western learning in Shanghai. Shengs patronage placed the
school firmly within the bureaucratic but reformist camp that regarded both
educational change and industrialization as critical to Chinas national recovery after the disastrous losses to Japan in 1894-95. Nanyang was considered the best-equipped modern institution of higher learning in China prior
to the establishment of Beijings Imperial University in 1898. Even after
the development of that northern institution, Nanyang remained important as the home of Chinas first modern normal school and was the precursor of todays Jiaotong University. In addition, as Commercial Press
textbook editor Jiang Weiqiao (b. 1874) noted, Nanyang had produced
Chinas first modern textbooks in 1897, printing them, sans illustrations,
using movable lead type.14
Nine years after Nanyangs founding, Fudan and China (Zhongguo
gongxue) colleges were set up in Shanghai under the aegis of Jiangsu natives. Guanghua College was also part of this movement. Reform institutions such as these opened the doors of higher-level Westernized education
to middle- and lower-middle-class students.15 Likewise, the Jiangsu Provincial Educational Association promoted vocational education at the secondary school level. Founded in 1906 by local literati leaders such as Zhang
Jian (1853-1926), the association advocated educational modernization
as a function of industrialization and economic reform,16 in the view of one
scholar.
If Sheng Xuanhuai was an outstanding example of a bureaucratically based
founder of a modern reformist school, Zhang Jian provided a contrasting
example of a onetime official drawn first to private industry and then to
school reform. After repeated attempts, lasting from 1868 to 1894, to pass
the three levels of civil service examinations, Zhang finally succeeded as the
zhuangyuan (valedictorian in the Palace examination) of 1894. In the same
year, he was appointed to the prestigious Hanlin Academy, an imperial research institute of great antiquity. The following year, however, Zhang
abruptly terminated his official career. Responding to Chinas disastrous
military loss to Japan, Zhang left officialdom and returned to his native
district, Nantong, near Shanghai.
By 1899, Zhang had founded what would soon become a personal industrial empire comparable to the one Sheng Xuanhuai ruled as an official.
Zhangs business interests would eventually include Dah Sun Cotton Mill

168 The Hub of the Wheel

(the most successful privately financed Chinese mill prior to World War I),
a flour mill, oil mill, distillery, silk filature, and, not surprisingly, machine
shop. In 1902, reflecting the social values inculcated not only by his own
offical background but also by those of fin-de-sicle reformism, Zhang even
established a normal school as part of his effort to effect improvement at
the local level. Soon afterward, he helped to found the Jiangsu Provincial
Educational Association.
Just as Sheng Xuanhuai represented the post-Taiping reformist official
working within the bureaucracy to reform education and Zhang Jian the
post-1895 literati reformist active outside officialdom, a third figure, Zhang
Yuanji (1867-1959), symbolized a middle path between the two alternatives. This middle path led Zhang from the heights of officialdom to Nanyang
and to the Commercial Press. Arguably, his route also paralleled developments in both education and industry in which initiative passed from the
government and its bureaucracy to private efforts.
Like Zhang Jian, to whom he was unrelated, Zhang Yuanji represents a
striking phenomenon appearing at the end of the Qing namely, the downward mobility of high officials into new fields that combined, albeit in different ways, education with industry. The two Zhangs both served at the
highest level of the imperial administration in approximately the same time
period; in fact, their careers in the Hanlin Academy overlapped. Likewise,
three years apart, each left the government to pursue a new career, the first
in private industry and then in education and the second in education and
then in private publishing.
Zhang Yuanji was born in Canton after his father, a substitute magistrate,
had fled south to escape the Taiping-related devastation of northern Zhejiang.
In 1880, the younger Zhang returned to the ancestral home. After four
years of preparation, Zhang won the district-level degree (xiucai), followed
by the provincial degree (juren) in 1889 (the same year as Liang Qichao, the
Cantonese father of Shanghai journalism, with whom he became close
friends). Three years later, in 1892, Zhang ascended to the capital, aged
twenty-six, to win the Palace degree (jinshi). In the same year, he and his
friend and co-provincial Cai Yuanpei (1868-1940) were appointed to the
Hanlin Academy.17 Zhang was appointed concurrently to the Board of Justice and to the Zongli Yamen.
Like many literati, both high and low, actual and fictional, ranging from
Zhang Jian to Bao Tianxiao (1876-1973) and even to Wu Woyaos (18861910) fictional Wang Boshu, Zhang Yuanji believed that Chinas loss to
Japan in 1895 awakened [him] from his dream.18 In response, Zhang began to study English early in 1896.19 Also, considering new-style schools
with a Westernized curriculum and foreign languages as the best remedy for

Commerce, Technology, and Organizational Innovation, 1876c. 1911 169

Chinas apparent national illness, Zhang started a modern academy, named

Tongyi xuetang (College of Liberal Arts) by his friend, the well-known translator Yan Fu (1853-1921), after a passage in the writings of Confucius. The
school was provisioned by another of Zhangs famous friends, Wang
Kangnian (1860-1911), who sent Zhang all kinds of Western-style learning
aids, including world atlases, general science textbooks, star charts, charts
of birds, charts of flowers and plants, and books on Japanese grammar.20
Significantly, from Beijing, Zhang also requested newspapers and catalogues
from various new-style Shanghai bookstores as a means of keeping abreast
of potential curricular changes.
Tragically, Zhangs appointment to the Zongli Yamen and his foreign studies
soon contributed to his demise as an official. Early in 1898, the Guangxu
emperor (r. 1875-1908) requested that the Zongli Yamen supply him with
modern books on various reform-oriented subjects. Apparently, only Zhang
was familiar enough with what was available to supply the emperor. By the
end of autumn that year, following the 100 Days of Reform, Zhang would
be tarred by the brush of reform, stripped of his official rank, and banned
for life from holding any public office.
The 100 Days of Reform began on 11 June 1898 with an imperial edict
stipulating reforms meant to modernize China. Led by constitutional monarchists and imperial advisors Kang Youwei (1858-1927) and Liang Qichao
(1873-1929), the movement ended on 20 September when the dowager
empress, Cixi Taihou (Yehonala, 1835-1908), intervened and terminated
the reform efforts of her nephew, the emperor. The next day, the emperor
was placed under house arrest, and, the following week, six of the leading
reformist officials appointed by the emperor were executed.
From the start, Zhang Yuanji had seriously doubted the emperors ability
to carry out a reform program.21 Zhangs skepticism notwithstanding, however, on 5 September, he submitted a memorial of his own regarding needed
administrative changes.22 Reflecting the social and cultural changes of the
past three decades, Zhangs fifth and last proposal called both for a commercial code and for elevating the status of merchants, permitting them
directly to memorialize the throne. In fact, his own memorial anticipated
the career to which he would turn once he was forced to leave government.23
Cashiered on 10 October 1898, Zhang moved to Shanghai shortly afterward, leaving his school in the hands of the reformer Sun Jianai (18271909), who was also the founder and first president of Beijings Imperial
University.
Zhang had not been in Shanghai very long before he began work as head
of the Translation and Editing Bureau at the Nanyang Public Institute.24
By then, the higher-level educational initiative had already shifted from

170 The Hub of the Wheel

revived or newly established shuyuan25 to bureaucratically sponsored modern institutions such as Nanyang. As a refugee from Beijings lethal political
scene, Zhang had landed in an ideal setting for one with his bureaucratic
credentials.
During the four years that Zhang worked at Nanyang, he distinguished
himself by issuing numerous influential, broadly educational works. In particular, Zhang bought the naval officer and irregular degree holder Yan Fus
translation manuscript of Adam Smiths Wealth of Nations (Chinese, Yuanfu)
for 2,000 yuan and published it in 1901-2 under the Nanyang imprimatur.26 It would become one of the most important of a series of monumental
translations from European languages undertaken by Yan Fu. Building on
this and other experience, as shown later in this chapter, Zhang also joined
the Commercial Press, first in 1902 as an investor and then in 1903 as an
editor. In the same way that Zhang used the bureaucratically sponsored
Nanyang in 1898 to cushion his drop from very high officialdom to semiofficialdom, in 1903, he finalized his move to private industry (shiye), sidestepping both purely artisanal (gongye) and commercial (shangye) publishing.
The Shanghai career of Sheng Xuanhuai and the post-Beijing careers of
both Zhang Jian and Zhang Yuanji reveal the willingness of late Qing reformist literati to cross sociocultural borders as well as their tendency to
regard industrial modernization and educational reform as complementary
activities. The latter two men are also outstanding examples of late Qing
downward mobility. Zhang Jian became one of the Shanghai areas leading
advocates of industrial advance and educational reform after his own highlevel official career, nearly thirty years in the making, ended. Similarly, Zhang
Yuanji anticipated the growing importance of Shanghais modern publishing sector, initially at Nanyang and then at the Commercial Press. None of
these modified career trajectories would likely have occurred without social
and cultural readjustment among the Chinese literati after the Taiping era.
The establishment of modern colleges and normal schools, as well as vocational secondary schools, by important national and local literati helped to
enlarge the market for modern textbooks and publications of the sort pioneered by Nanyang. Such works, initially issued by reformist bureaucratic
publishers, were easily picked up and imitated by other Shanghai publishers such as the Commercial Press.
Thanks to the efforts of these largely Shanghai-based publishers, by the
time the ruling house itself got directly involved in educational reform in
the early 1900s and abolished the centuries-old civil service examination,
reform initiative had actually passed out of the dynastys hands. Just as
nonofficial efforts to found institutes of higher education were concentrated
in Shanghai in the 1900s,27 so too nonofficial private publishing houses that

Commerce, Technology, and Organizational Innovation, 1876c. 1911 171

could draw on the Western technology of Shanghai took off in the early
1900s. From this point on, all the dynasty could hope to do was to adjudicate between the new firms.
In summary, the Taiping Rebellion, long recognized by historians as a
social and political watershed for having undermined and, in many locations, destroyed much of the southern literati-based culture of the Qing
dynasty, can also be acknowledged for having alerted some high officials to
the importance of unofficial industrial and educational reform. Because there
were no restrictions against officials working for modern, Western-style firms,
the expanding cultural industries analogous to those that already existed in
the bureaucracy28 became appealing berths for those looking for alternative
employment, either because they failed to gain an official position or because they had lost such a position.
Just as post-Taiping educational reform attracted bureaucratic empirebuilders such as Sheng Xuanhuai and expansive industrialists such as Zhang
Jian, so too the allied industries of printing and publishing lured those, such
as Zhang Yuanji, who had lost a bureaucratic position. Against the backdrop of changes in late Qing society, with its widespread renegotiation of
status, both officials and former officials were well placed to start new schools.
New schools needed new books, of course, and in Shanghai at the turn of
the century former officials with links to Westernized industrial publishing
operations were also sometimes the best placed to supply those books.
Western Technology and Its Impact on the Reorganization
of Shanghais Booksellers
Among the major reasons why Chinese printer-publishers did not embrace
Western printing technology more rapidly between 1807 and 1876 was its
cost. Once the initial period of Chinese adjustment to Western printing
technology ended, however, increasing numbers of potential printerpublishers adopted not only lithography but letterpress printing as well.
Soon, however, the cost of Western-style printing technology, whether imported or locally produced, obligated Chinese publishers to seek some means
of protecting their investments by securing their markets. Efforts included the
organization, first of a guild in 1905, then of a trade association in 1905-6/
1911, and the adoption of the corporate model as early as 1902. All were
responses that book publishers felt were needed to protect their investments
in technology and prospective market share. Although traditional Chinese
booksellers guilds had also been concerned with safeguarding markets for
their members, the relatively low cost of traditional technology meant that
protection of members technological investments had played a relatively
minor role in guild affairs. Moreover, compared with that of the modern

172 The Hub of the Wheel

period, the traditional guild system was loosely organized and operated in a
decentralized marketplace.
In the late nineteenth century, Shanghai was home to nearly one hundred
artisanal and commercial guilds,29 many of them quite small. Several of these
guilds were affiliated with the old-style artisanal publishing industry. The
first Shanghai guild related to publishing seems to have been the Zhiye
gongsuo (Paper Guild), founded in 1872. Two and a half decades later, in
the late 1890s, the Ziye gongsuo (Block-Cutters Guild), Kezi gongsuo (Engravers Guild), and Yinshuaye gongyihui (Printers Charitable Association)
appeared. Each industry belatedly sought to define its activities, markets,
and interests just as history and technological change were about to redefine the meanings of the terms printer, publisher, and bookseller
and to eliminate the traditional occupations that the guilds were organized
to protect.
More important, both occupationally and historically, than any of the
guilds of these subsidiary trades was that of the publishers and booksellers
themselves. From the start, these groups took a more comprehensive view of
the industry than had the craft guilds. Recognizing that book production
and selling was a branch of learning, unlike trades such as block-cutting and
paper-making, the publishers and booksellers sought to promote and teach
understanding, if only to those within the same field, of the intellectual
content as well as physical makeup of the product that they handled. This
quasi-educational thrust in the history of the Jiangnan book industry had
appeared as early as the seventeenth century and was inherited by the latenineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century printing and publishing
industry that developed in Shanghai.
Jiangnans Qing-era Chongde gongsuo (Venerate Virtue Guild), to which
Shanghais modern bookmen traced their origins, was founded in 1662 in
the northern part of Suzhou, near the Lisan districts (tu) Wang Family
Cemetery. Six years after it was established, the guild itself founded the
Chongde Academy (shuyuan) to promote general learning.30 Not surprisingly, the shuyuan also provided those in the book business with a location
for pursuing the central academic requirements of their calling that is,
editing, collating, and discussing the merits of various editions. The role of
technology and its role in their business does not seem to have been high on
the guilds list of concerns.
The Taiping rebels seriously disrupted the serene activities of the Suzhou
publishers and booksellers. The rebels reached Suzhou in 1860 and occupied the old cultural city until 1864. During this period, the guildhall, which
had promoted book production from its location in Lisan district for about
200 years and had helped to maintain Suzhous millennium-old reputation

Commerce, Technology, and Organizational Innovation, 1876c. 1911 173

as a national cultural and intellectual centre, was burned down. Not until
1874 did three individuals re-establish the guildhall as the Chongde shuye
gongsuo (Chongde Booksellers Guild) in nearby Lisi districts Shitong Lane.
As one might expect, their solicitation of the guild members for funds appealed to the elite service ethic of the book business and promoted a selfimage of culture and cultivation:
The Chongde Guild was founded in the first year of the Kangxi emperor [1662],
but was damaged by fire in the tenth year of the Xianfeng reign [1861]. For
200 years it maintained the same course of research and discussion, and the
same determination to be good and refined, with the air of an ancient society
(she). It must not be abandoned, and for this reason we have reassembled ...
This is a [new] beginning. Our funds must come from the combined help of
those in this same business. There is no [valid] reason to be cheap or to appear
to prevent [this re-establishment].31

In a commemorative speech given in 1915 to the Shanghai shuye gongsuo

(Shanghai Booksellers Guild), a speaker stated that those in our trade fled
to Shanghai [in 1860 when] Suzhou was overrun by war.32 When the
Taipings occupied the city, Suzhou booksellers such as Saoye shanfang and
artists such as Wu Youru fled to Shanghai along with thousands of others.
However, both publisher and illustrator were part of a much broader trend
throughout the nineteenth century that involved the resurrection of the
Jiangnan publishing industry behind the protective cordon of Shanghais
foreign soldiers and policemen. Seizing on the security of the concessions
and the opportunities for easy access to Western technology, many Suzhou
book traders stayed on in the colonial enclave of Shanghai after the Taiping
insurgency and set up residences there.
By 1884, Shanghais Chinese publishers and booksellers had already come
to the attention of the Chinese authorities. At that time, their collective
business was dealt with at meetings known as tea-drinking sessions (chaxu).
Commanded by the magistrates office to prepare funds to relieve afflicted
areas near Beijing and in neighbouring Zhili and Shandong provinces, the
important Shanghai book firms of the day (Saoye shanfang, Wenyutang,
and Zuiliutang) convened a chaxu to formulate a response to the order. Apparently seeking to avoid making contributions to the relief of these distant
places, few other publishers sent representatives. As a result, the three leading firms had to issue an in-house threat to their colleagues, indicating that,
if the laggards did not send a representative to the Simei xuanchashi (Four
Beauties Teahouse) on the afternoon of the second day of the lunar month,
the leadership would have no choice but to report them to the authorities.33

174 The Hub of the Wheel

In the same year, perhaps in response to the magistrates claim on their

income, three leaders34 from the still-modest Shanghai publishing world
reached the conclusion that their adopted city needed a booksellers organization on the order of Suzhous old Chongde Guild. After 1864, reports our
speaker from the vantage point of 1915, the expanded junk-trade had brought
book business to Shanghai from every province, giving Shanghai the access
to the national book market that had formerly been enjoyed by Suzhou.
Calling for the establishment of a Chongde Hall, the three book publishers
invited everyone in the trade to contribute. Twenty-five firms, including the
Anglo-Chinese Dianshizhai and the Suzhou-based Saoye shanfang, and five
individuals contributed more than 1,000 yuan.35 Unfortunately, after purchasing a lot and a building at Xin beimen (New North Gate) inside the
Nanshi (old Chinese city), they discovered that their funds were insufficient to renovate the hall.
In 1888, the sudden prosperity and wide scope of the lithographic industry revived interest in the hall renovation project, says the speech-maker. It
was very inconvenient not to have a forum to deal with the issues raised by
the new technology, but still no progress was made on building a guildhall.
Again, between 1895 and 1900, when the machine industry, along with
both the book- and newspaper-publishing industries, were passing out of
their infancy, attempts were made to raise money. To assist communication
between the various members, a facility was opened in Dingxin Lane in the
International Concession, but it closed in 1902, having failed to raise enough
funds to build a guildhall.
Finally, in 1905, after these three false starts, nine book dealers36 managed
to overcome the setbacks of the previous two decades. The nine borrowed a
spare room at the Mengxuebao (Elementary Studies) newspaper plant
(Mengxuebao baoguan) on Nanjing Road and planned every facet of the
project. In 1906, Xi Zipei37 (Yufu) garnered forty-eight votes and was selected as the organizations general director.38 Xi, who was closely connected
to Zhang Jian, had been Shenbaos compradore since 1898 and owned
Shanghais best-capitalized publishing operation, Zhongguo tushu gongsi
(Chinese Library Company). For help in running the fund-raising, Xi appealed to Zhu Huailu, who had helped to conduct the first campaign to
establish a guildhall back in 1884.
Together Xi and Zhu rewrote and caused to be passed bylaws to establish
the Chongdetang gongsuo (Chongde Hall Guild), also known as the Shanghai shuye gongsuo (Shanghai Booksellers Guild). Xi Zipei and Xia Ruifang
(a.k.a. Xia Zuifang [1871-1914], like Xi a native of nearby Qingpu), along
with Xia Songlai (Qingyi, of Jiading, just northwest of Shanghai), were also
selected as trustees.39 Relying on the rent received from the New North Gate

Commerce, Technology, and Organizational Innovation, 1876c. 1911 175

property and monthly subsidies (of two, four, six, or eight yuan per firm,
depending on the volume of its business) from the membership, the three
directors then leased an office at 12 Xiaohuayuan Lane, off Zhejiang Road
in the International Concession from which to run the guilds affairs.
From the start, the guild endeavoured to include all firms engaged in
Shanghais book business, whether as printers, publishers, or booksellers.
According to the first draft of the guild bylaws, membership was open to
all merchants (shangjia) in Shanghais book business, no matter whether
they are woodblock, lithographic, copperplate, [or] lead-type [printers],
depots (zhuangju) or sales shops (fangdian), as well as newspaper plants and
scientific instrument [firms] that also sell books, which are all acknowledged
to be part of this same business.40 Of the twenty-seven firms that joined,
eight were clearly lithographic publishers, two were letterpress publishers,
and the activities of the rest cannot be determined with any precision.41
Likewise, both new-style and old-style (xinjiushu) book dealers were invited
to join. This time, unlike in 1888, foreigners were not welcome; any firm
co-invested by foreigners had to be represented by a Chinese manager in all
its guild dealings.42
In addition to handling the business affairs of the members, the guild
took on two social responsibilities that indicated its cultural continuity with
the old Suzhou guild. It announced that it would immediately begin to hold
evening classes for book-business apprentices. Also, once the guild was financially secure, it would start a training school (shuye xuetang). In this way,
the Shanghai Booksellers Guild sought to revive the service tradition aimed
at educating its own members, just as had the ancient Suzhou one. Unlike
more obviously commercial enterprises, the Shanghai publishers, from their
earliest days, stressed the importance of learning and study to the guild
membership.
Before long, the guilds funding dried up again. At this point, the guild
itself went into publishing. It issued a work called Guanshang kuailan (Brief
Look at Officials and Merchants), apparently a sort of business directory,
that made a regular profit of 400 percent and was used by the guild for
annual expenses.43 It was probably sold through the members exhibition
hall,44 located in the temporary guildhall off Zhejiang Road.
What had finally forced Shanghais publishing industry to coalesce on an
institutional level? According to the 1915 speech already mentioned, the
abolition of the civil service examination system in 1904-5 and the sudden
proliferation of new-style schools (i.e., those with Western subjects in some
form) stimulated the industry supplying those schools: After 1900, the
examination system was ended. Starting new-style schools was the fashion.
Circumstances had changed, and it all had a major impact on our book

176 The Hub of the Wheel

industry. Now book industry people all got the freedom (ziyou) to reprint
without regard for earlier copyrights. After this, the flood gates opened
(yinghai kaitong). New studies and new principles [produced] infinite prosperity through writing and translating of books.45
The speakers forthright stress on commerce and moneymaking contrasts
sharply with the more high-flown aspirations of the old Suzhou guild quoted
above. In the four decades that separated the speaker and the Shanghai
Booksellers Guild from their putative Suzhou ancestor, the southern book
business had in fact been transformed. In Shanghai, a cultural business
formerly based on low financial overhead involving a high premium placed
on learning and exemplar libraries had rapidly evolved into a Western-style
mechanized one.
The extended process by which book culture was removed from Suzhou
to Shanghai had involved much more than merely the migration of personnel from an elite Chinese cultural centre to what remained in the mid- to
late nineteenth century a cultural backwater. It also necessitated varying
degrees of accommodation to what Bao Tianxiao would remember as Shanghai, that place! the source of modernity. Although the Shanghai Booksellers Guild represented an effort by Shanghai-based bookmen to resurrect
the air of the old she that the Suzhounese themselves had lost in the rebellion and fire of the 1860s, their attempt was made by an organization that
now appealed to an expanded set of aspirations among its membership.
Those ambitions included not only the traditional emphasis on elite public
service associated with educational institutions but also on a modern concern with mechanization, specialization, and adequate compensation.
These conflicting ambitions are revealed in a late Qing document that
compared modern publishers unfavourably with those of the past, both
distant and more recent. Its writer argued that the publishing field, which
dated from antiquity, really came of age during the Song and Yuan dynasties when block-printed books were characterized by classic beauty and
elegant taste. Back then, the writer believed, people in the publishing
field were gentle and cultivated, honest and not cheaters. Although they
were common men, they were indeed men of letters. Even as recently as
the Daoguang (1821-50) and Xianfeng (1851-61) reigns, he said, people
in our publishing field ... never failed to be gentle and cultivated.46
Then the Taipings and new technologies appeared, almost simultaneously,
said the writer. Along with the stereotype printing business there came
copperplate and lithographic printing, resulting in flourishing business
opportunities but also people with a different moral standard. Moral models
handed down by the bookmens ancestors in the business were lost. New
types of publishers no longer took the interests of the whole group into

Commerce, Technology, and Organizational Innovation, 1876c. 1911 177

consideration before they acted. Books were published anonymously, without concern for either the good of society or that of the guild. Some representatives infringed on the rights of others by ignoring copyrights or by
dumping books at lower than legitimate prices.47
Clearly, in this writers view, technology and the expense of mechanization had debased the way in which early Shanghai publishers conducted
their operations. The tumultuous administrative and legal environments
were held to have had just as significant an impact on the publishers. Bemoaning the disappearance of the freedom that they had enjoyed as recently as the early 1900s, the 1915 guild speaker went on to cite the most
likely reason for the successful but belated establishment of the guild: Then
the authorities decided we needed a copyright law.48 As a result, we in the
business sometimes developed legal squabbles and other problems. Day after day, affairs became ever more snarled, and so people started to want a
consolidated body to protect the copyright privileges of those in the industry.49 The speaker suggested, and in fact history demonstrated, that before
the copyright law there were no squabbles, at least none grave enough to
have required the formation of an association that would live solely off the
contributions of its membership.50
Copyrights and copyright protection were, in fact, a major activity of the
Shanghai guild. In part, the guild was organized to adjudicate copyright
infringement issues. It discussed penalties against those who pirated copyrighted works and it dealt with problems arising from those books that were
not copyrighted.51 Specifically, if works that were generally acknowledged as
belonging to particular firms were reprinted without permission, the guild
would take steps to regulate the situation.52 Members were put on notice
that all future publications had to feature the name of the printer or publisher on the first and last pages, or on the central signature, to avoid confusion. Along with mechanization had come a degree of specialization that
acknowledged the necessity of claiming adequate compensation for those
who owned the means and right to print and reprint texts. Balancing the
divergent claims of service and adequate compensation soon became a primary goal of the Shanghai guild. To enable the guild to sort out copyright
disputes, each member was also expected to report on the details of its
backlist of publications and to indicate to the guild whether copyrights had
been secured.
In short, what we today would call intellectual property had become an
issue in a cultural and commercial enterprise that was being transformed by
industrialization and modernizing legislation. The growing overhead brought
about by industrialization challenged this industry, originally based, at least
in its own view, on public service, now consciously to stress financial issues.

178 The Hub of the Wheel

Shanghais printers and publishers now had to deal with the challenges of
owning, controlling, and disseminating knowledge using expensive new
machines. Insofar as we can view the industry through its guild records,
industrialization and government decree had coalesced to create a posture
of relative unity.
Once the guild was formed, it seems to have successfully performed its
intended function of enforcing compensation. According to the speaker,
whenever something concerning protecting copyrights or protecting public welfare or [if] cases [came up] involving confused and disorderly debts,
these cases were all peacefully dealt with ... in an equitable way.53 In May
1911, when the gongsuos chairman Xi Zipei petitioned the Qing court to
register the guild with the government, it had well over 100 members.54 Of
these, 58 were publishers and 72 were binders. Regardless of calling, most
were likely drawn by the mutual advantages of membership, which included
an in-house, nonjuridical means of resolving copyright infringement issues
for publishers.
Unexpected noncommercial events were also handled intrepidly by the
guild, suggesting that the relative harmony in guild affairs attributed to the
past still prevailed to some degree. In 1910, during social disorder leading
up to the Xinhai Revolution, says the writer, We book merchants organized the first single-industry merchants militia to maintain law and order.
This was really outside the scope of a guild [s normal activities, but] other
industries followed suit after us, and no fewer than several dozens of [such]
groups were formed.55 In fact, twenty-seven Shanghai publishers, as well as
the guild itself, mustered sixty-two of their employees into the Booksellers
Self-Protection Corps (see Figure 4.1), eventually awarding them certificates for their heroism.56
The origins of the militiamen mustered in defence of the guilds publishing enterprises reveal the large influx of outsiders into Shanghais publishing
world at this time. Furthermore, the high degree of common cause shared
by the book businesss proprietors, managers, and employees at this time is
striking.57 In addition to the founders of the guild, whose own native places
lay mostly outside Shanghai, of the sixty-two militiamen organized by the
booksellers guild, only four were actually natives of Shanghai. Among the
forty-five who listed surrounding Jiangsu province as their home,
Shanghainese were outnumbered by the eight men from Wuxian (Suzhou),
six Wuxi natives, and five Jingui (Jiangsu) men. There were also nine fewer
Shanghainese than there were Zhejiangese.58
In 1914, after the revolution, the guild administration moved back to the
Nanshi property bought in the mid-1880s. Signalling their break with Suzhou
and their newfound self-confidence as Shanghai publishers, new directors

Commerce, Technology, and Organizational Innovation, 1876c. 1911 179

Figure 4.1 Shanghai Booksellers Self-Protection Corps, 1910.

Source: Shanghai Municipal Archives, S313.1.51.

Gao Hanqing, Tang Ziquan, and Ye Jiuru (b. circa 1871) also dropped the
appellation Chongdetang, now calling the organization simply the Shanghai
shuye gongsuo (Shanghai Booksellers Guild). By this time, as part of the
urban renewal undertaken by the new government, the old city wall circling
the Nanshi had been demolished, and the new access resulting from the
construction of Zhonghua Road turned out to be beneficial to the guilds
activities. In 1915, ten years after the establishment of the gongsuo and with
no hint of the ambivalence regarding commercial matters that had characterized the hushed reverence of the Suzhou guild when trying to re-establish its hall, the Shanghai speaker exulted, our business has been
expanding.59 By the mid-1910s, then, it would appear that the booksellers
had found common cause in their shared pursuit of profits and influence via
new-style publishing.
In 1917, the Shanghai Booksellers Guild undertook a survey of its membership, including publishers, printers, and retailers. The survey reveals not
only the breadth that resulted from the rapid growth of Shanghais printing
and publishing industry but also its nearly exclusive reliance on expensive
Western technology. Of the 132 members, 46 had not even existed in 1914,
the last time the guild had conducted such a survey.60 In 1917, most (74) of
those involved in the book business and registered with the Shanghai Booksellers Guild were general retail outlets. Not surprisingly, given their prominence in the early days of the guild, the second most important category

180 The Hub of the Wheel

Figure 4.2 Shanghai Booksellers Trade Association

(Shuye shanghui), 1917.
Source: Shanghai Municipal Archives, S313.1.29.

was that of lithographers (24), followed by general printing firms (7) and
lead-type printers (5). One guild member identified his firm as a wholesaler
only, one was a warehouser, three specialized in epigraphic rubbings and
calligraphy, five in rare and antiquarian woodblock books, one in rare Confucian classics and religious works, and four in novels. Seven of the firms
listed refused to indicate their specialty.
Apart from the general retailers, the most striking separate groups are
those defined by their access to Western technology (i.e., lithographers,
followed by general printers and then by lead-type printers). Only 6 firms
out of more than a 100 actually specialized in rare, antiquarian, or woodblock
books, not counting the 3 specializing in calligraphy and rubbings. These
figures indicate that at this time Shanghais antiquarian and old-style book
trade was tiny, relatively speaking. 61 Two Beijing-based antiquarians,
Zhonghou shuzhuang and Gushu liutong chu,62 which had come to Shanghai by 1916, immediately joined the gongsuo. Although they were outnumbered by the seven firms started locally, their access to the Beijing-dominated

Commerce, Technology, and Organizational Innovation, 1876c. 1911 181

antiquarian book market may have given them an edge over locally started
firms. Generally speaking, however, it is clear that the emphasis of Shanghais
book industry, insofar as it was defined by gongsuo membership, was on
Western technology for the production of new-style books that is, books
manufactured using Western processes also intended to satisfy the public
craving for foreign knowledge, whether direct from the West or filtered
through Japan.
In 1905-6, at about the same time that the Shanghai Booksellers Guild,
heir to Suzhous Chongde Guild, was finally being established, the Commercial Press and other self-described new-style publishers were busy planning a separate Shanghai shuye shanghui (Shanghai Booksellers Trade
Association). In the sixteen years between the loss to Japan in 1895 and the
Republican Revolution of 1911, Chinese merchant organizations in many
places evolved from the old-fashioned guild, which regulated trade in the interests of business proprietors, to the modern trade association, devoted to
promoting trade. This evolution was encouraged, to some degree, by the
courts authorization, in January 1904, of the creation of chambers of commerce.
Unlike the guild, whose betwixt-and-between identity is suggested by its
frequent moves between the Chinese Nanshi and the International Concession, the new Booksellers Trade Association would be permanently located
on Wangping Street (now Shandong Road) in the International Concession
(see Figure 4.2) between 1911, when it finally opened, and 1920, when it
merged with the guild,63 presumably out of recognition that each group would
benefit from a unified voice.64 By 1914, its membership included more than
forty new-style publishers, ranging from well-known firms such as the Commercial Press, Yu Fus (Zhonghuan) Wenming Books, Wang Licai and Xia
Songlais Kaiming shudian,65 Feng Jingru and He Chengyis Guangzhi shuju,
Changming gongsi, Wu Qiupings Xinzhishe and on down to others largely
forgotten today. The fluidity of the industry in this early period is suggested
by the fact that at least five of those prominently involved with the guild
were also leaders of the trade association. Like the guilds directorate, the
trade association officers (see Figure 4.3) were non-Shanghainese (e.g., Yu
came from Jingui, Jiangsu; Feng from Nanhai and He from Xiangshan, both
in Guangdong; Wu Qiuping from Suzhou; Lufei Kui [1886-1940], who represented Changming, hailed from Tongxiang, Zhejiang). Only the bookkeeper
had been born in Shanghai.66
After more than ten organizational meetings held in the Hujiazhai
Wenming Primary School, Changmings Lufei Kui wrote the regulations
upon which the trade association was founded.67 Yu Fu was selected as director and was aided by assistant directors Xia Songlai and Xi Zipei. Xia Ruifang

182 The Hub of the Wheel

Figure 4.3 Officers of the Shanghai Booksellers Trade Association

(Shuye shanghui), Wangping Street (now Shandong Road) between
Hankou and Fuzhou Roads, figures unidentified in the original
(President Yu Fu sits in the middle of the first row, with Lufei Kui
to the far left and Shen Zhifang to the far right), c. 1911.
Source: Shanghai Municipal Archives, S313.1.3.

of the Commercial Press and Lufei Kui, among others, were appointed to the
executive board. Lufei was concurrently appointed association secretary.
Where the guild had been forced into existence by the ramifications of
both technological and legal innovations, the trade association seems to
have come about as a direct result of the new-style publishers own selfconsciousness. As new-style publishers, they deliberately defined themselves
through new technology, forms of knowledge, and business practices. According to an association history, founders set out to develop the business,
promote culture, protect profits, [and] promote mutual aid.68
Nonetheless, many of the same themes that had accompanied the birth
of the guild also appear in the history of the trade association. Indeed, the
trade association was probably influenced by the same change in official outlook undertaken by the Qing government. In 1906 and 1907, for instance,
in official documents that it communicated to the incipient trade association, the Qing government itself stressed the complementarity of public
service and compensation. Unlike the Suzhou guild in 1875 which, reflecting conventional social values, had completely sidestepped the question of
compensation, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the dynasty itself
was consciously attempting to embrace the new business enterprises in its

Commerce, Technology, and Organizational Innovation, 1876c. 1911 183

realm. In so doing, the authorities tried simultaneously to reinforce the

contrast between service and compensation and to smooth it away.
On 4 August 1906, the Qing Ministry of Commercial Affairs69 (Shangbu)
approved the registration application of the Shanghai Booksellers Trade
Association by acknowledging that books, education, and trade were essential for the prosperity of China. The approval stated: As per the petition to
establish the Book Association and all its regulations, all is comprehended.
Now the Court is promoting prosperity. Assistance for academic affairs and
books is developing ... Education is at the crux and is the most important.
[Your] trade association plans to set up [an entity] for publishing and will
itself investigate and prevent wicked organizations that edit and print [others material] ... [Your] thirty-five regulations are fairly comprehensive and
harmonious, and therefore we proceed to approve.70 The new Qing Ministry of Education (Xuebu) responded just as enthusiastically six weeks later.
Like the Ministry of Commercial Affairs, the education officials believed
the advance of publishing would benefit both commerce and education:
This trade association has been prepared by the book trade. The advantage to education is truly not shallow or small. The proposed regulations ...
should be carried out at once. They are effective, and [when] put into operation will mean ... the printing arts ... will gradually develop and help
culture and spread education. This bureau truly has great hope [for the
association] ... Request approved.71 Gaining approval from the Nanyang
Great Minister, Liangjiang Viceroys Bureau, Liangjiang Academic Affairs
Office, Jiangsu Governors Office, Suzhou and Wusong Great Circuit Department, and Shanghai County Magistrates Office all took time, however,
and the Booksellers Trade Association was not able to open until 1911.
Just as important to the book merchants themselves as this official approval of their organization was the official qualification of their activity:
they were not mere merchants but merchants of culture and education.
Whats more, the official endorsements recorded the symbiotic relationship
between the advance of China and the merchandise found on their bookshelves. In President Yu Fus opinion in 1924, back in 1902, when Yu had
come to Shanghai from Wuxi to start Wenming Books, the Shanghai printing and publishing industry was still undeveloped compared with what it
would become later. Even printing was not very advanced, he believed, with
many lithographed books of dubious quality appearing and, except for those
published by Christians, few books of any sort printed with metal type. In
Yus view, the key to the Shanghai publishers success since 1902 had been
textbooks, his own among them, which provided the material foundation for
what came later. Underlying and reinforcing the Shanghai publishers success

184 The Hub of the Wheel

in educational publishing had been the formation of a trade association

devoted to copyright protection:72 The Booksellers Trade Association was
formed to protect the copyrights of each member and, at the same time, to
thwart [efforts by] the outside world to steal our copyrights. Each year, we
had to negotiate with Japan, England, and America, but in the end we won.73
Although Yu does not spell out why copyright protection was important to
the Chinese publishers, clearly the reason was the same as that for foreign
publishers: protection of intellectual property.74
Reflecting the government line on the reciprocal relationship between
education and business, Yu also claims that the publishers and their association promoted a kind of cultural industrialization (guan shu wenwu xing
gongye) for China. Just as editors and the sale of their books promote culture, he says, so too the printing side of the publishing industry supports
workers. Both are indispensable and, in Yus view, reflect the complementarity
of Sun Yat-sens notion of peoples livelihood.75
Nonetheless, in the early 1900s, the legal and industrial pressures on
publishers had been influenced by larger social and political changes taking
place throughout Jiangnan society. From this survey of guild and trade association activities, we can see that Shanghai provided a sanctuary, shielded
by Western gunboats and the various foreign constabularies, for Chinese
entrepreneurs such as those who joined the guild and trade association. As
suggested by the organization of a guild and a trade association dedicated
to adjudicating issues of intellectual property and fair compensation, and a
trade association finally founded on the eve of the Republican Revolution
that portrayed itself as a voice of cultural commerce, Shanghais publishers
were leaving the age of elite patronage behind. Popular patronage became
the financial bedrock of public service as they redefined it in the industrialized, mass-oriented environment of the late Qing and early Republic.
Although government policies sometimes supported the goals of the booksellers, the publishers also had no choice but to oppose government decisions that seemed to restrict their trade. To this end, both guild and trade
association formally but unsuccessfully opposed the Qings 1906 publications law, successfully lobbied against increased postal fees in 1911, tried
but failed to overturn the Republican governments transit fee taxes in 1915,
and intervened in over fifty copyright disputes, both local and national.76
All of these endeavours, along with the organization of the guild and trade
association, involved group efforts designed to secure the property rights of
Shanghais publishers. On the level of the individual firm, many publishers
also adopted the joint-stock limited liability model of corporate organization to protect their assets and extend their lifespans.

Commerce, Technology, and Organizational Innovation, 1876c. 1911 185

The Chinese Joint-Stock Limited Liability Firm:

Its Influence on Shanghais Publishers
In addition to the development of the booksellers guild and trade association, both of which provided common cause and an intra-industry forum
for sorting out conflicts between firms, a third element enhanced the vigour
of the modern publishing industry in Shanghai. That was the growth of
the Chinese-owned joint-stock limited liability corporation after 1903. In
that year, as part of a general effort to reclaim economic control from the
provinces, the Qing government established the first Ministry of Commerce (Shangbu). For a while, it seemed that the new ministry would assume great importance. In a description of the impact of the reforms that
hints at the specific opportunities they would open up for the new-style
publishing industry, Wellington K.K. Chan writes, There were reports of
officials scurrying and lobbying for positions. It seems that all the [Beijing]
bookstores were stripped of any books on international trade, industry,
geography, and accounting [suggesting that] many persons were apparently cramming for the entrance examination given by the new ministry.77
In fact, however, between 1903 and 1906, the new ministry never managed
to claim its own bureaucratic turf. It remained submerged in jurisdictional
battles between old and new central ministries as well as with viceroys in
the provinces.
Even as it foundered, though, the Ministry of Commerce contributed
indirectly to the creation of other reformist bodies at the political centre
that themselves reflected the demands of merchant spokesmen. Such bodies included the Commercial Law Office (which actually predated the Ministry of Commerce); Patent Bureau (1906); Commercial Newspaper Office
(1903); and, perhaps most important, Company Registration Bureau. Established in 1904, this latter bureau was stipulated by Article 22 of the
Gongsi shangl (Company Law) of January that year. The Company Registration Bureau recognized five types of firms eligible for registration, three
of which were limited liability organizations based on Western models.78
The appeal of joint-stock firms of limited liability had in fact been clear to
Chinese merchants since 1872, when the first Chinese limited liability corporation had been formed and, since 1875, when Britain had legalized the
establishment of such firms in Shanghai. By 1900, 130 leading Chinese
merchants were directors of such firms.79
The practical effects of these early-1900s governmental guarantees have
been much debated by historians.80 However, both the guarantees and the
merchants willingness to register are symbolically important for suggesting
substantial shifts81 in the mind-set of Chinese merchants. They also suggest

186 The Hub of the Wheel

that the reformist groups active in fin-de-sicle Shanghai were familiar with
principles of Western commercial organization, whether or not they were
always able to carry them out in practice.82
The views of printers and publishers concerning the new commercial organizations being promoted in the early 1900s are unknown. However, in
an article published in Yiwen yinshua yuekan/The Graphic Printer in 1937, Lin
Heqin, a graduate of the Carnegie Institute of Technologys printing program, the owner of Shanghais Yiwen Printing Plant, and the journals publisher, spelled out in detail what he regarded as the importance of the
limited-liability corporation to the printing industry. In Lins view, three
main types of modern business organization could be found in the Chinese
printing world of the 1930s. The simplest, most private, and shortest-lived
firms were the individual or sole proprietorships (duzi jingying).83 Because
their capital was limited, individual proprietorships found it difficult to
expand. They were also hard-pressed to support themselves over slow periods, says Lin.
The partnership (hezi jingying), in which two or more persons co-invested
on a contractual basis, was slightly more complex than the individual proprietorship. Although management was still relatively easy, Lin maintains,
the partnership placed more capital, hence technology, at the disposal of the
firm than did the former. Still, like the sole proprietorship, each time there
is a change of personnel (e.g., through a death), it has an influence, so the
partnerships durations tend to be short.84
In Lins experienced view, the corporation (gongsi) was by far the most
complete in organizational terms. Capital was abundant, personnel and technology superior. Capital could be increased easily,85 and most important,
because there are limits on the responsibilities of the shareholders, a change
in personnel need not have an impact, so the company can survive longer
than either the individual proprietorship or the partnership. Likewise, in
business, this kind of organization uses the corporation itself as the principal, and it has the legal identity, not the investors.86
To Lin, the ability of the corporate organization to outlive the individuals
investing in it was clearly its chief value. Of nearly equal importance was its
ability to raise large sums of operating capital (liudong zijin), the lack of
which, in his view, historically had been the single greatest obstacle to the
expansion of Shanghais Chinese printing (and publishing) firms.87 Lacking
this access to capital, the 90 percent of our firms [that] are individual
proprietorships or partnerships88 find it hard to expand and, even worse,
sometimes because of external factors ... cannot get credit (sheqian) or a
secured loan (diya jiekuan) ... you simply have no way to buy supplies and
run the risk of having to close down.89

Commerce, Technology, and Organizational Innovation, 1876c. 1911 187

Although Lins description dates from the 1930s, evidence illustrating his
main points can be found in data from earlier periods. The publishers growing
acceptance of the corporation as an organizational form is indicated by
guild records. In 1917, for instance, of the 132 firms recorded as members
of the guild, 77 were registered as individual proprietorships. Thirty-five
were partnerships, and 13 were joint-stock corporations; 7 did not report.
The joint-stock firms were:
1 Commercial Press (the comprehensive publishing and printing corporation founded in 1897 by Qingpu [Jiangsu] natives Xia Ruifang and Gao
Fengchi and six Ningbo [Zhejiang] partners, all relatives, including the
brothers Bao Xianen and Bao Xianchang90)
2 Commercial Press Print Shop
3 Zhonghua Publishing and Sales Company (the comprehensive publishing company founded by Tongxiang [Zhejiang] native Lufei Kui in
191291)
4 Zhonghua Print Shop
5 Zhongguo tushu gongsi (Chinese Library Company, a third comprehensive publisher), started by the Qingpu native Xi Zipei in 190692)
6 Chinese Library Company Print Shop
7 Wenming Books (Wenming xinji shuju, a general publishing firm established in 1902 by Wuxi [Jiangsu] natives Yu Fu and Lian Quan93)
8 Wenming Books Print Shop
9 Yadong tushuguan (a map- and novel-publishing firm moved to Shanghai from Wuhu [Anhui] in 1913 by its founder, Wang Mengzou)
10 Wenbao gongsi (a lithography studio)
11 Yinyinlu (an antiquarian dealer)
12 Xiaoshuo congbaoshe (a publisher of novels)
13 Bowen yinshua gongsi (a printing firm).
Four (Commercial Press, Zhonghua, Chinese Library Company, and
Wenming) of the thirteen reveal the predilection of the owners, once they
understood the principles of limited liability, to separate their printing and
publishing operations legally if not actually. Of the thirteen joint-stock
corporations, seven were located on either Henan or Fuzhou Road, two
were on Hankou Road, and one was on Jiujiang Road. Thus, by 1917 ten of
Shanghais leading corporate publishers, those with the greatest access to
capital, the greatest managerial flexibility and, presumably, the greatest survivability had made what would become known as Wenhuajie their base of
operations. The origins of the district itself lay in the individual proprietorships that had first flourished along Henan Road. Their success in attracting

188 The Hub of the Wheel

large clienteles of book-buying consumers to Henan Road may have been

what drew the large corporate publishers to the district. As Chapter 5 will
show, this concentration of corporate publishers actually dates from 1916,
when Zhonghua opened its headquarters at the corner of Fuzhou and Henan
Roads. With the intention of breaking Zhonghuas control of this busy intersection, the Commercial Press opened its sales department next door. Thus
convened the assembly of booksellers on or near to Fuzhou Road that has
survived, in one form or another, to the present day.
These publishers and printers embrace of the potential economic viability of the limited liability corporation gave Shanghais modern publishers
prospects of longevity, of needed access to capital, and of proximity to modern banks and bankers in the International Concession. At the same time,
as the next section will disclose, national educational reforms also gave the
Shanghai publishers a market that traditional publishers had been unable
to generate on their own. Finally, Western-style mechanization gave
Shanghais printer-publishers the means to saturate that market, and their
trade guild and association provided methods to resolve disputes over intellectual property.
The Commercial Press: Promoting Useful New-Style Books
Late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century educational reform,
in addition to delivering a death blow to the many publishers who relied for
their business on supplying material for examination candidates, also provided new-style publishers with unprecedented opportunities. Meeting the
needs of students in newly established primary and secondary schools as well
as in colleges and universities became the raison dtre of early-twentiethcentury mechanized publishing firms such as those that organized the booksellers guild and the trade association. Such firms benefited from the
remarkable social fluidity of the late Qing. At the same time, Shanghais
publishers also profited from the widened range of potential employees willing
to work in industrialized, commercially driven corporations dedicated to
making money while simultaneously manufacturing books deemed useful
by scholars and students.
As seen earlier, Zhang Yuanji was an outstanding representative of the
new-style, Western-technology-based publishing worlds shift from bureaucratic, noncommercial control and orientation to private, profit-seeking control and management. At the same time, Zhangs career at the Commercial
Press, and particularly his collaboration with one of the firms founders, an
ill-educated common printer named Xia Ruifang, reveal the high degree of
social mingling that occurred in Shanghais printing and publishing world,
especially in corporations, at the turn of the twentieth century. After all, the

Commerce, Technology, and Organizational Innovation, 1876c. 1911 189

paths of Zhang Yuanji and Xia Ruifang, the most important of the entrepreneurs who founded the firm in 1897, first crossed via the Commercial Press,
which soon thereafter became one of the earliest corporations.
The roots of the company lay in the Presbyterian Qingxin Hall school,
located in Shanghais Nanshi. Xia Ruifang had come into Shanghai by canal boat from nearby Qingpu at age eleven sui to stay with his mother, who
worked as a baomu (a combination nurse and housemaid) for the family of
J.M.W. Farnham. Farnham served as the schools director and was also a printer
in his own right. Farnham himself decided that young Xia needed an education and a profession. In 1885, Xia registered for the Presbyterian schools
four-year course, where he met the two Bao brothers (Xianen, d. 1910,
Xianchang, 1864?-1929). The three students education at Qingxin followed
a work-study model and included printing instruction and practice.
The three young men graduated in 1889. By then, all had gained some
experience working in Shanghais American Presbyterian Mission Press
(APMP) and had witnessed how the Americans blurred the line between
philanthropic and commercial publishing by taking jobber orders for business stationery, receipt books, etc., to underwrite their noncommercial religious printing. All accounts, both first-hand and scholarly, agree that none
of the founders had received much traditional Chinese education. Although
marginalized intellectually within late imperial China, they would quickly
succeed in establishing a new educational standard that would outlive the
Qing dynasty.
Xia Ruifang soon went to work as a typesetter at Wenhui bao, a Chinese
newspaper, and then moved on to the English-run North China Herald. One
Sunday morning, after church, Xia and his old schoolmates, the Baos, met
at the Five-Star Teahouse in Shanghais City Temple and began commiserating with one another about their work lives. Xia was particularly unhappy
about the vile temper of the supervisor in the Heralds print shop. Mr. OShea,
as the sources identify him, apparently often mistreated his employees, especially the Chinese. That Sunday morning, together with the Baos, Xia
dreamed up what would become known as the Commercial Press.94 A fourth
Qingxin friend, Gao Fengchi, then working as a clerk at the APMP, decided
to combine his money with theirs. In an era of tentative experimentation on
many levels of society, extending from the Guangxu emperor to his Hanlin
tutor, Zhang Yuanji, to the zhuangyuan Zhang Jian, and on down to Shanghais
leading Cantonese compradore, Xu Run, these four veterans of a humble
missionary work-study program decided that the market was ripe for newstyle books of all sorts.
Xia Ruifang was the one who got the idea of translating a textbook meant
to teach Indian students how to read English. After having it rendered into

190 The Hub of the Wheel

Figure 4.4 First print shop of the Commercial Press, Dechang Lane
off Jiangxi Road, 1897.
Source: Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei dangshi yanjiushi and Shanghaishi
zonggonghui, eds., Shanghai Shangwu yinshu guan zhigong yundong shi (Beijing:
Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 1991), 192.

Chinese,95 the four men released their new textbook onto a nearly virginal
market, selling some 3,000 copies within the first week.96 No doubt exhilarated by their success, they used their profits to purchase printing machines
in Japan and opened their own modest printing firm (see Figure 4.4) in a
three-room shop on Dechang Lane off Jiangxi Road, well within the International Concession.97 The firms uninspired name, Shangwu yinshu guan
(Commercial Press), was created by one of the Bao sisters. According to
Hu Yuzhi (1896-1986), she had little choice but to use the term yinshu
guan (book-publishing office) in spite of the fact that the Press did not yet
edit books of its own. The neologism yinshua chang (meaning, more prosaically, printing shop, had not yet been borrowed from Japanese) would
have been a better description of the firms actual activities, Hu says.98 Although the Commercial Press translation was not the first modern textbook
to appear on the Chinese market, it did alert Xia and his partners to the
markets receptiveness to this new type of industrial commodity.
In 1898, relying on the mediation of the owner of a Zhabei-district cotton mill, Xia and his partners were able to buy out the pioneering Japaneseowned printing house Xiuwen yinshuaju.99 At the same time, they moved to
bigger quarters, a twelve-room structure in Beijing Roads Shunqing Lane.
According to most accounts, Xia was the brains of the group and took on

Commerce, Technology, and Organizational Innovation, 1876c. 1911 191

the job of securing customers for the new printing house.100 The Baos did
the actual printing, most of which continued for some time to be jobber
orders much like the APMPs. Gao remained in his job at the APMP.101 In
the next few years, however, the Commercial Press brought to the market
five more volumes in its Huaying jinjie (English-Chinese Primer) series despite losing the Xiuwen equipment to fire in 1902.
Although Xia Ruifang was then nominally the manager of the Commercial Press, in fact he doubled as proofreader, bookkeeper, and purchasing
clerk. When the press needed paper, for instance, he personally crossed the
river to the supplier in Pudong to get it. Also, at the end of each month, he
made the rounds of client after client to collect their debts. Unable to survive on his meagre twenty-four-yuan monthly salary, he even moonlighted
as an insurance salesman.102
At about the same time, up the Yangzi River in Nanjing, Bao Tianxiao,
the xiucai, diarist, and litterateur who first appeared in Chapter 2, was translating new-style books for a firm set up by a retired official and relative of
Viceroy Li Hongzhang (1823-1901). Already at this early date, the business
of publishing had been transformed by deadlines and the necessity of pushing ones publications onto the market earlier than ones competitors got
theirs out. Although Baos office was located in the provincial capital, also
the site of the triennial provincial examinations, the citys relative isolation
worked against his firms meeting the deadlines that new-style books imposed on the industry. Referring to this urgency, Bao observed, [My employer] got a large number of Western and Japanese [into Chinese]
translations from Yan Youling [Yan Fu] and Ye Haowu, but what could he
do with them? New-style literature had an expiration date and could not be
compared with old Chinese books that were bundled up in a tall pavilion or
hidden away on a famous mountain. The best thing was to get the ball
rolling and publish them without losing any time at all. This was what was
behind his opening the translation bureau [in the first place], but he still
wanted to print [original] books.103 Bao then added a comment that echoes
the guild speaker on just how central to the publishing and bookselling
industry Shanghai had already become by the turn of the century: At this
time, the only fairly convenient place to [print or publish] was Shanghai.
Whats more, after you published, you still had to look for a market, and to
do that you had to go to Shanghai. Shanghai was the hub of the wheel
(Shanghai sitong bada). Book buyers from all over the country went to Shanghai to select [their books]. And book merchants (shushang) from all over the
country went to Shanghai to sell (pifa; literally, wholesale) their books. For
this reason, [my boss] decided that [we should] go to Shanghai to start a book
translation business.104

192 The Hub of the Wheel

In about 1900, Bao moved to Shanghai with two colleagues to take charge
of his firms editorial, printing, and proofreading responsibilities in the city.
He and his two colleagues opened a new translation bureau in a lane off
Nanjing Road105 and, as directed by their employer, called it the Jinsuzhai
(Golden Millet Hall, a name, he says, that had Buddhist connotations).
Having recently operated as a translation firm, they now recast themselves
as publishers of modern books.
Because Bao then knew little about the commercial or industrial sides of
publishing, he was put in charge of reconnoitring with printing firms. Modern books called for modern printing methods, but, anticipating Yu Fus
1924 comments as head of the Booksellers Trade Association, Bao reports
that, around 1900, there were still not many choices, even in Shanghai, for
suitable Chinese-language publishers. His search led him straight to the
Commercial Press,106 which he discovered to be rather small but well equipped
with Western machinery. Like Tongwen in the 1880s, the press was then
located in a Chinese residential structure (pingfang). Far smaller than
Tongwens staff of 500, though, the Commercial Press had no more than 30
employees in 1900, according to Bao.
Bao Tianxiao found Xia Ruifang, the manager, to be very amiable (ren ji
heqi) and immediately signed an agreement (hetong) with him to print Yan
Fus translation of T.H. Huxleys Evolution and Ethics (Tianyan lun).107 The
printing and publishing work was very time-consuming, and Bao, with the
help of his associate, proofread the galleys four times, searching for misplaced characters, faulty expressions, etc. He went daily to the Commercial
Press, doing the work in its offices, and so came to spend a lot of time with
Xia. In the following passage, Bao contrasts Xia with learned old-style Chinese booksellers:
Xia Ruifang was not [like the] booksellers of old China. When young, he
lacked education [Bao here refers to the fact that Xia was educated by foreigners and his knowledge concerning Chinese literature was quite limited]. He
deeply wanted to publish some books of his own but did not know what kinds
of books to print and what kind to avoid. He was a very open-minded and
modest man. He often came to me with books that people had assigned him
to print, and asked me what kind of books they were, and to which kind of
customers they could be sold. Of course he was concerned about his business;
he wanted to open his eyes to [new] business [because he] was very true to his
firm ... Although he was not a man of culture, still Xia started a cultural business. He had a sharp mind and a sincere disposition and could recognize talent when he saw it.108

Commerce, Technology, and Organizational Innovation, 1876c. 1911 193

Bao paints a portrait of a keen entrepreneur, aware of his need to learn the
fine points of his business from all who would teach him.109
Bao also makes one aware of how topsy-turvy and fortuitous social and
professional life was in fin-de-sicle Shanghai with his apparently apocryphal, but still suggestive, story that Xia had once served in the International Concession as a policeman for the British. Patrolling in front of an
English-language printing shop, Xia had, according to the story, bumped
into one of his future partners, Bao Xianchang. Bao had turned him away
from a career as a policeman, reminding him that the concessions Sikh
constabulary was unfairly paid much more than its Chinese police.110 Why
do you want to be a policeman? ... Its not as good as getting involved in the
printing business, Bao Xianchang had lectured Xia. When I knew [Xia],
says Bao Tianxiao, whenever it got very busy, he would roll up his sleeves,
peel off his shirt, and start working at the type rack.111
Xias familiarity with the foreign legal customs and political privileges of
the International Concession put Bao Tianxiao in good stead at least once.
While supervising the printing of Yan Fus and Ye Haowus books, Bao
received a copy of Tan Sitongs Renxue (A Study of Benevolence) from a
friend in Japan and seized on a plan to print it. Bao knew that there would
be no problem with copyright restrictions since Tan, one of the six martyrs
whose execution by the Qing court had ended the 100 Days of Reform, was
already dead. He was concerned, however, that the political danger associated with reprinting the martyrs treatise might deter a printing house from
undertaking the project.
As far as Xia and the Commercial Press were concerned, Baos fears were
unfounded. Even after Bao explained to Xia who Tan Sitong was and what
his book was about, Xia replied that it was just a business deal as far as he
was concerned. To drive the point home, Bao then added, This book has
been banned. Xia continued, Who cares? Were in a treaty port, we dont
fear the Qing court. What we will do, though, is, on the back page where the
copyright should go, we wont print the name and address of the printer.
Thats enough! With this flourish of bravado and a snub of his nose at
both the booksellers guild and the trade association, in the organization of
which he had taken a leading role, Xia took the original and, as per Baos
instructions, affirmed that he would print 1,000 copies on pure white paper. He would even include a copperplate image of the martyr in the book.
Bao also made it clear to Xia that he did not intend to earn a profit on the
book, regarding its publication as a public service. Xia estimated that Baos
total investment, including paper and labour, would not exceed 100 yuan,
and this was the amount they agreed on. Since Bao did not have the money
to pay Xia in advance, he had to borrow it.

194 The Hub of the Wheel

When the book was fully proofed, printed, and bound in the still-prevalent
Chinese string style, Xia gave Bao some surprising news. Still not really
grasping the contents of the book, but knowing that it was a newly published forbidden book outside copyright protection, Xia had printed an
extra 500 copies on his own initiative and had priced them differently. When
Bao let him know that he should not have taken this liberty, which would
make the boss he was fronting for (houtai laoban) unhappy, Xia replied
with something to sweeten the deal: Okay, okay, lets do this (Zheyang ba)!
Ive printed 500 extras, and so Ill give you a 10 percent discount on the
printing fee. Whats more, you yourself slaved over the proofing of this
book, so this is just a little reward. When Bao later asked Xia where he had
sold his copies, Xia responded with a cunning smile, I sold very few! Very
few!112
Although Renxue was technically a forbidden book, it was also an important landmark in modern Chinese thought. In this sense, it can be termed a
useful book of the sort that Wu Woyaos character Wang Boshu would
soon call for. Seeking to capitalize on the vogue for other useful books on
practical subjects, foreign languages, and Western ideas, the early Commercial Press also produced, in addition to Tan Sitongs book and its English
textbooks, many dictionaries, elementary readers on Asia, and so on. At the
same time, Xia found a way to reduce paper costs by a third,113 and he began
to market his own discount paper after other Shanghai publishers took notice of his method.
By the turn of the century, one of Xias chief competitors, Guangzhi shuju,
had already begun to translate, print, and market Japanese works dealing
with New Studies. Works covered topics such as politics, law, modern
administration, etc.114 In keeping with the herd mentality (yiwofeng) with
which we are familiar from Shanghais lithographers of the 1880s, Xia plunged
into the Japanese translation business. This time his impetuousness cost
him dearly. After paying to have over ten Japanese works (apparently selected indiscriminately) translated into Chinese, set in type, and then marketed, he discovered too late that the translations had been done in a slipshod
way. The books sold so badly that the project nearly bankrupted the fledgling publisher, costing it 10,000 yuan.115 Xia began to learn what the Suzhou
booksellers guild had known since the seventeenth century selling books
was not like selling cabbages and required some knowledge of the texts.
At this point, Xia Ruifang tried to recoup his losses. One day he approached
the head of the Nanyang Public Institutes Editing and Translation Bureau,
Zhang Yuanji. Xia had met Zhang while making his rounds of the city, and
Zhang had occasionally engaged the Commercial Press to do some printing.116 As already shown, Zhang came from a very different background than

Commerce, Technology, and Organizational Innovation, 1876c. 1911 195

Xia, although one senses that it would not have deterred Xia from his mission. Xia asked Zhang to find him someone to rework the translations. Even
after a long period of revision, sadly, neither the project nor Xias capital
could be salvaged. From this mishap, Xia concluded that, before embarking
on any more translation or editorial schemes, the Commercial Press would
have to establish its own editorial office (bianyisuo),117 a critical first step to
becoming a modern publisher of note.
Tongwen had been the first of the modern Chinese publishers to set up its
own editorial office. By the early 1900s, in-house editorial offices had grown
more common. Xia went back to Bao Tianxiao, asking him, Recently there
have been a lot of people setting up editorial offices; how should one set up
these editorial offices? Bao replied that, if Xia wanted to expand [his]
business, and prepare to publish [his] own [books], [he] must organize an
editorial office. In a comment that reflected the continuing influence of
the literati tradition, Bao said that Xia should invite a learned and famous
person to run it, and [he him]self should then concentrate on the business
end. Xia nodded his head and sighed, It is a pity that we have so little
money. All we can do now is wait.118
In fact, just as Bao Tianxiaos employer had not had the luxury of waiting
at all, Xia Ruifang could not afford to wait for long. He was under pressure
to move quickly; the book market was heating up. There was money to be
made, but as usual he needed some money to make more money. To get this
money, the half-educated typesetter and cofounder of the still fairly modest
commercial printing and publishing firm went back to the Nanyang Public
Institute in 1901. He had decided to invite Zhang Yuanji, the cashiered
Hanlin scholar and former imperial tutor, associate of Viceroy Li Hongzhang
and of Sheng Xuanhuai (by now one of the richest men in Shanghai, patron
of Shanghais modern enterprises and schools, and archfoe of Tongwen owner
and compradore Xu Run), to invest in his company. Amazingly, Zhang agreed.
Open to a good opportunity, Zhang even convinced an associate to join
him.
Following this infusion of capital, the Commercial Press converted from a
partnership to a joint-stock limited liability corporation, changing its legal
name to the Commercial Press, Limited (Shangwu yinshu guan gufen youxian
gongsi). Its original capitalization increased from 3,750 to 50,000 yuan.
Although Xia stayed on as general manager, an important watershed had
been achieved in the history of the printing organization as well as in the
history of Shanghais modern printing and publishing industry. From this
point on, the Commercial Press would have the capital to publish books
that it had itself conceived and edited. Just as important, thanks to the
perspicacity and flexibility of both Zhang Yuanji, the cultured jinshi from

196 The Hub of the Wheel

Zhejiang willing to cross from the bureaucratic and academic side of Chinese society to the industrial side, and Xia Ruifang, the uncultured but
enterprising former missionary printer from Jiangsu, the formal apparatus
of the limited liability corporation was now adapted most successfully to
Chinese publishing needs.
In 1902, after using rented retail space on Fuzhou Road, the Commercial
Press erected a retail outlet on Henan Road. Xia Ruifang also purchased
property on Fujian North Road, where he erected a new workshop.119 In
Tangjia Lane across the way, he founded the Commercial Presss first editorial office with four or five employees recommended by Zhang Yuanji.120 Xia
probably knew that the earlier lithographic firms had made similar editorial
arrangements, employing xiucai and juren under the supervision of Hanlin
scholars. Perhaps for this reason, he believed that his editorial office too
should have a Hanlin official supervising its activities. Relying on his new
business partners connections, Xia asked Zhang to invite his friend and coprovincial Cai Yuanpei, then also working in the Nanyang Public Institute
and concurrently director of Shanghais Aiguo she (Patriotic Institute), to
serve as supervising editor.121
As the Commercial Press now united, for the first time in modern Chinese publishing, departments of creative editing, original printing (as opposed to reprinting), and retailing, it also brought under one roof two very
disparate personnel factions. The makeup of the printing houses major
shareholders underwent a change when Zhang Yuanji and his group joined.
One group, led by the Baos, came from a largely Ningbo Presbyterian background and was called the Church Band (jiaohui pai). The second group,
old-style Chinese intellectuals and literati from chiefly Jiangsu, Zhejiang,
and Fujian origins, was known as the Scholars School (shusheng pai).122
Xia himself came from the Church Band but, because he had invited the
Scholars School to join, there was no conflict between the two while he was
at the centre of the corporations activities.123
Soon the Qing court called for the establishment of schools with Westernized curricula. The reform tolled the end for the educational culture of
the shuyuan. They had been resuscitated throughout Jiangsu and Zhejiang
by an activist elite in the late nineteenth century as part of the SelfStrengthening Movement, and their replacement now signalled the growth
of a wholly new educational culture. It would feed students into new or
soon-to-be-established normal schools and universities, including those in
Shanghai.
For this reason, Cai Yuanpei responded favourably to Zhangs invitation
to join the firm, apparently seeing in it the opportunity to influence the
nations reformist education system. After taking up the reins at the Com-

Commerce, Technology, and Organizational Innovation, 1876c. 1911 197

mercial Press, Cai turned the editorial office in a new direction. Instead of
continuing to work on translations, he decided, it should concentrate on
textbooks. Cai soon selected Nanyang Public Institute instructors Jiang
Weiqiao and Wu Danchu to edit textbooks in Chinese literature (guowen,
literally national literature), history, geography, etc. Jiang and Wu were
paid one yuan for each two lessons they composed.124
Before long, however, the infamous Subao newspaper case, involving antiManchu journalists prosecuted for sedition, broke open. To dodge the authorities seeking his arrest, Cai was forced to flee Shanghai for Qingdao.
Fearing that his own plans would collapse, Xia turned to Zhang and asked
him to take over the editorial office and its current textbook project. Zhang,
still employed at the Nanyang Public Institute, by 1902 as its director,125
had added modern printing experience to the editorial knowledge that he
had brought to the job.126 Zhang had also been involved in producing teaching materials both in Beijing and in Shanghai.
In 1898, though, while Zhang Yuanji was still working in the Zongli Yamen
in Beijing, the textbook impetus had moved up the Yangzi River to nearby
Wuxi. There Yu Fu and several colleagues had opened a modern school,
creating textbooks as they went along, writing the lessons in the morning
and having their students copy them later. Like Bao Tianxiao, Yu Fu would
soon move to Shanghai and found Wenming Books to print and market
these textbooks to a wider audience. Unlike Nanyangs textbooks, Wenmings
were printed using lithography, which enabled the publishers to include
illustrations. These textbooks were so well received that Wenming reprinted
them ten times in three years.
As a major new investor in the Commercial Press, Zhang Yuanji now had
a material interest in seeing the fledgling firm succeed against competition
from Nanyang, Guangzhi, and Wenming. When Xia asked him in 1903,
Zhang decided to join the Commercial Press as director of the editorial
office.127 Zhang immediately renewed the appointment of Jiang Weiqiao as
permanent editor. Jiang in turn introduced Zhuang Yu and Xu Quan to the
firm. They were soon joined by Yao Sujin. By the end of the year, Gao
Mengdan (1870-1936),128 a Fujianese xiucai and a close friend of Liang Qichao,
took over the Chinese literature section. Gao would contribute to an editorial program that would lift Chinas and the Commercial Presss textbooks
onto a new plane.
One other event contributed to the success of the presss new textbooks.
Manying Ip has conducted painstaking research into the early business history of the Commercial Press and has shown convincingly that, when in
1903 the press expanded its capital to 200,000 yuan, the money had come
from a Japanese publishing company, Kinko-do- (Chinese, Jingangtang). From

198 The Hub of the Wheel

1903 to 1914, she has determined, the Press was in fact a Sino-Japanese
Company.129 Her view is supported by the Commercial Press editor and
writer Mao Dun (Shen Yanbing, 1896-1981), who says that the Japanese
held half the shares.130
Kinko-do- had been established early in the Meiji period and by the late
1880s ... was already Tokyos most eminent bookseller specializing in textbooks.131 However, in 1902 Kinko-do- was implicated in a national textbook
scandal in which 152 people were indicted, including Nagao Shintaro, Kotani
Shigero, and Kato Komaji from Kinko-do-. After the three served short prison
terms, Kinko-do-s founder enabled them to continue earning their livings by
sending them to exile in Shanghai. In the treaty port, Yin Youmo (d. 1915)
introduced them to Xia Ruifang, and they invested 100,000 yuan in his
recently expanded firm. They also seem to have been encouraged to use
their experience in compiling textbooks in Japan on behalf of the Commercial Press.
Jiang Weiqiao, one of the participants in the editorial meetings in the
offices on Tangjia Lane off Fujian Road, recalls the roundtable system
(yuanzhuo huiyi) of editing in some detail, but his memoir pointedly ignores
the influence of Kinko-do-s experience in Japan. According to Jiang, those
present at the roundtable usually included Zhang Yuanji, Gao Mengdan,
Jiang himself, Zhuang Yu, and eventually the well-known science editor Du
Yaquan (1873-1934).132 In fact, their Japanese partner, Kinko-do-, was represented by Nagao, Kotani, and Kato. Liu Chongjie, a Fujianese returnedstudent from Japan, acted as interpreter.
The roundtable meetings were first implemented to reassess the ten-part
textbook initiated during Cai Yuanpeis captaincy. After Zhang took over,
any one of those in a roundtable meeting could raise an issue such as content, vocabulary, relevance to modern life, and, a distinctly Chinese concern,
the number of strokes in the characters used. The goal was to provide a
graduated study program, allowing students to progress from the simple to
the complex with constant repetition. Sometimes the editors debated such
issues for half a day, occasionally for a whole day.
In the end, following these and other principles, which Jiang acknowledges were often compared in spirit if not in detail to Western-language
textbooks and which Manying Ip argues were influenced by Kinko-do-s Meijiera experience, the Cai-initiated textbook series was deemed unacceptable.
The editors were sent back to their desks to re-edit the series that would
eventually appear in 1904 under the Qing-court-stipulated title, Zuixin guowen
jiaokeshu (Modern Chinese Textbooks).
When these new textbooks appeared in 1904, they established the supremacy of the Commercial Press financially and otherwise. A hundred thousand

Commerce, Technology, and Organizational Innovation, 1876c. 1911 199

copies sold in a matter of months,133 completely surpassing the publication

record of Wenming, which had dominated the textbook market before 1903.
Millions were sold over the next decade. According to Jiang, all other textbook publishers began to imitate the presss textbooks, signalling the true
mark of retail success.
From 1903 onward, the Commercial Press also began its experiments with
letterpress and advanced photographic printing introduced in Chapter 1. In
1907, the firms printing and editorial operations moved outside the International Concession into a new eighty-mu (thirteen-acres) site on Baoshan
Road in the Zhabei district.134 Departments using techniques such as matrixcutting in boxwood, colour lithography, and copper engraving that the firm
had been acquiring via foreign consultants since 1904 now moved to the new
site. Collotype was added in 1907 and three-colour copper engraving began
in 1909. The same year, Chinese letterpress printing took a giant leap forward
when the Commercial Press successfully manufactured Kaishu type. As a
result, one can say that Gutenbergs revolution was now thoroughly sinicized.
Between 1904 and 1911, the Commercial Press became unstoppable. It
utterly dominated the previously unmined and indeed largely undiscovered
textbook market. Textbooks on a wide range of topics, including specialized
books for normal schools and girls schools, followed.135 The Sino-Japanese
editorial office may have been just as vital to the strength of the Commercial Press as had been its reorganization as a joint-stock limited liability
company. Just as strikingly, this newly formed corporation became an arena
in which the representatives of the highest levels of late Qing society, personified by Zhang Yuanji, and those widely regarded as the dross of that
society, the treaty-port Chinese represented by Xia Ruifang, came together
with a shared purpose, the production of useful books.
Conclusion
Between the 1880s and 1911, then, a large number of important steps were
taken to put modern Chinese education and the print capitalism that supplied it on a firm footing. Social regrouping and redefinition (post-Taiping
onwards), educational reform and the abolition of the civil service system
(post-Taiping to 1905), an early commercial law (1902), the development
of a privatized corporate model of organization (from 1875 on), and the
founding and then reorganization of the Commercial Press according to the
principles of that model (1897-1903) all pointed toward and contributed
to creating the conditions for the new era of print capitalism born within
the confines of Shanghais International Concession. In light of this background, it is not surprising that the booksellers guild and the trade association were finally organized in 1904-5 to secure both the cultural values and

200 The Hub of the Wheel

the financial interests of Shanghais publishers. The guild reflected technological changes and the association responded both to technological and to
marketing innovations. Furthermore, it was in this period that Shanghais
booksellers district began to emerge along Henan North Road as the citys
publishing houses competed to meet the curricular needs of the citys modern schools and universities as well as those of the empire as a whole. Along
the way, these publishing houses contributed to remaking Shanghai as Chinas
new intellectual centre.
Most interesting of all, in the same period, Xia Ruifang, a trustee of the
booksellers guild and a member of the trade association struck it rich with
his modern textbook series compiled by an assembly of Shanghais most
progressive urban gentry reformers and printed on modern Western printing presses, some of them supplied by the Chinese machine makers profiled
in the previous chapter. Just as the biography of Zhang Yuanji illustrates the
success of Shanghais modern publishing industry in absorbing the downwardly mobile imperial official, so too the story of Xia Ruifang illustrates
this new industrys allure for the late Qing, upwardly mobile Shanghai entrepreneur.
For all these reasons, in addition to explaining Shanghais intellectual and
cultural prominence by reference to schools and universities, one must trace
it also to Shanghais business and industrial institutions as they made themselves felt in the printing and publishing industry from the period 1904-5
onward. Set against the adventurously experimental mood of the late Qing
and early Republican years, new vocational identities and legally inspired
and defined organizations such as the guild, the trade association, and the
Western-derived corporate model clearly enabled industrial entrepreneurs
and degree-holding scholars to achieve prominence together in Shanghais
printing and publishing world. In the process, Chinese print culture and
print commerce were transformed into print capitalism. Motivated by the
public service ethics of the progressive urban gentry and by the technologybased, profit-seeking outlook of modern capitalists, these groups also began
to influence national intellectual and educational goals.
After 1904, the Commercial Press was one of the main industrial beneficiaries of the reform-oriented transformation of the Jiangnan economy and
the print culture and print commerce within it. Its leadership was both
inspired and pushed along by changes in social values that had been surging
since the Taiping Rebellion and that are reflected in Vignettes from the Late
Qing, published by one of the Commercial Presss leading competitors. Likewise, the Commercial Presss leadership, as well as Shanghais other book
publishers, benefited from reforms of commercial organizations that originated in Shanghai in the 1870s and were then legitimated by the Qing

Commerce, Technology, and Organizational Innovation, 1876c. 1911 201

court in the early 1900s. Organizational reforms such as incorporation

enabled Shanghais book publishers to pay for technological innovations
introduced from abroad but increasingly manufactured locally.
Social changes, identified at the time by novelist Wu Woyao, who replaced the conventional scholars of fiction with merchants, and more recently by historical scholars, set the stage for former imperial officials and
degree-holders to join in a new-style cultural business such as publishing.
This new-style enterprise, unlike the old-style book trade based in Suzhou
or Beijing, brought together open-minded but shrewd entrepreneurs such as
Xia Ruifang, well-trained technicians such as the Bao brothers, and intellectuals such as Zhang Yuanji and his editorial team with the parity of shareholders. The corporation, then, was an important new organizational form
adopted by the Commercial Press and others that enabled these firms to
finance themselves and their operations over an extended period.
In many respects, publishers drawn early to Shanghai were served by a
hodgepodge of technologies and forms of business organization. All that
began to change following the Sino-Japanese War, however. Under the protection of the concession authorities, Shanghais Chinese publishers responded to the ideals of the 100 Days of Reform. The variety of their
publications now increased and began to reflect the influence of Western
ideas on the unsuccessful imperial reforms. Indeed, Shanghais publishers
and booksellers served as major pipelines for Chinese intellectual adjustment to the Western political ascendancy of the 1890s.136
All told, before 1915, twenty-seven transitional firms were located on
Henan Road or Canton Road near its intersection with the north-south
artery. In the same period, six relatively minor Chinese bookshops137 were
found along Fuzhou Road or near the Fuzhou Road-Henan Road intersection. Jumbled together with the six was the Chinese Scientific Instruments Company, founded by Englishman John Fryer (1839-1928), former
director of the Translation Bureau in the Jiangnan Arsenal and of the Chinese Scientific Book Depot; all seven firms sold various educational items.
Other shops opened here included Changming gongsi, the new-style publisher that gave Lufei Kui, the future founder of Zhonghua Books, his start
when he first came to Shanghai, along with Hanwenyuan shusi which handled
woodblocked and lithographed books.
In the final decade of the Qing dynasty, tentative moves to reform the
education system sparked interest in modern Western-style educational
commodities. Just as the newspaper and lithographic magazine had excited
the interest of the already literate, so too the modern textbook now appealed to those who sought literacy. Indeed, the most profitable new-style
book commodity to emerge in this period after the heyday of the lithographed

202 The Hub of the Wheel

examination text was the modern textbook. As time went on, thanks to the
productivity of Chinese print capitalism, such works became cheaper and
more widely distributed. Simultaneously, the textbook market became, in
historian Ji Shaofus words, the chief battlefield of modern Shanghai publishers,138 particularly those known as the three legs of the tripod: Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books.

5 The Three Legs of the Tripod:

Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books,
and World Books, 1912-37

The goal of the literati life had been leadership and service, both of which
were closely tied to the mastery of linguistic, literary, and, by extension,
book culture (wen). In the early twentieth century, linguistic borrowing from
the Japanese language added a new dimension to this practice through broad
adoption of the neologism wenhua, loosely translated into English as culture. The term wenhua actually has a broader connotation in Chinese than
in English. Wenhua refers not only to the literary arts and methods associated with them, but also to broad education and learning and to their
acquisition, whether for purposes of public service or not.1 For many latenineteenth-century gentry-managers (shendong), gentry-merchants (shenshang), and elite urban reformers, the public service aspect of education and
learning came to be extended beyond imperial administrative service to the
printing and publishing of textbooks and reference works.
Just as wen evolved into wenhua in the early twentieth century, so too
traditional Chinese print culture entered a new stage between 1912, when
the nominal Chinese republic at Beijing replaced the feeble Qing dynasty,
and 1928, when the Guomindang (Nationalist Party) finally established a
unified government at Nanjing. During this sixteen-year period, Shanghai
publishers produced and marketed machine-printed and -bound works in a
spirit of cutthroat print capitalism. From 1912 to 1928, the only constant
in Shanghai publishing circles was fierce entrepreneurial and corporate competition brought on by the ambitions of publishers, which in turn reflected
the costs of mechanization necessary to reach a national market. Publishing
company monopolies, mergers, and alliances were effected to protect market share. Conquests and buyouts often obliterated once-honoured companies.
This chapter focuses on the second generation of new-style publishers,
arguing that the Republican publishing corporation and its marketplace attracted a generation of would-be scholars, particularly Wang Yunwu (18881980) of the Commercial Press, Lufei Kui (Bohong, 1886-1940) of Zhonghua
Books (Zhonghua shuju), and Shen Zhifang (1882-1939) of World Books
(Shijie shuju), and transformed them into hard-nosed businessmen whose

204 The Three Legs of the Tripod

merchandise happened to be books. If the cultural underpinnings of modern Chinese print capitalism lay in Chinas ancient print culture, and if the
technological foundation of Shanghais print capitalism may be said to have
been established in the 1880s and 1890s with disenfranchised literati doing
a little business on the side, all that changed with the discovery of the
remunerative modern textbook market between 1900 and 1905. After 1912,
the new textbook-oriented industry evolved rapidly via Chinese merchantindustrialists who now did a lot of business with a little culture on the side.
Between 1928 and 1937, those merchant-industrialists also added national
politics to their list of activities, often out of business necessity.
In this chapter, the second generation of new-style book-publishing print
capitalists is viewed through the history of the three leading corporate enterprises2 of the 1920s and 1930s (Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books,
and World Books) and the circumstances that permitted each to scale the
heights of Shanghais modern book-publishing industry. Just as important
as these firms dates of establishment in 1897, 1912, and 1921 were the
years (1902, 1915, and 1921) in which they became joint-stock corporations. Their departures on marketing, organizational, and financial levels
enabled them to distinguish themselves from the dozens of small individual
proprietorships and partnerships that crowded around them up and down
Henan, Fuzhou, and Shandong Roads and the small alleys linking the
Wenhuajie district. These three publishing firms generally vied separately
against the others, but, for at least one important period, two of them united
against the third. During this second phase of entrepreneurial Chinese print
capitalism, what might be called the Chinese textbook wars erupted intermittently from 1912 to 1928, intensifying greatly between 1924 and 1928.
Despite the potential size of the domestic market that they sought to
develop, generally speaking, Chinese industrialists in all sectors of the
economy of the 1910s and 1920s were undercapitalized and vulnerable to a
multiplicity of difficulties common to immature market economies and decentralized, overpoliticized states. Chinas industrial publishers were not
exempt from these difficulties and struggled to overcome them. The ruthlessness of the competition involving the three publishers from 1912 to
1928 actually obscures the general fragility of the industry itself, a weakness reflected in their constant courtship of various forms of government
patronage in the textbook market that underwrote all their other activities.
In the modern era, in the absence of an interventionist state, large-scale
mechanization and mass production have rarely succeeded without the funding mechanisms and bureaucratic organization of the private corporation.
Historically, the quest for monopoly has resulted from the need to keep
the productive capacity of the firm active. The expansion of education in

Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books, 1912-37

the weakly centralized Republican era that began in 1912 necessitated the
development of mass-oriented, mechanized publishing companies. However,
it also placed the Shanghai publishers, who had created a working relationship with the late Qing Ministry of Education, in an environment with no
clearly defined lines of command. In China, too, monopoly was the objective that Chinese publishing corporations sought in the broad potential
market of post-Qing China. The by-product of each firms scramble to secure monopoly was fierce competition among these corporations between
1912 and 1928.
The year 1928 was a turning point. That year Chiang Kai-sheks (18871975) Northern Expedition (1926-28) united the country under his Leniniststyle Nationalist Party with its new capital at Nanjing, a few hours by train
from Shanghai. Chiangs relatively interventionist state was particularly active
in the realm of ideological control. By imposing, both economically and
politically, a degree of order that had been absent between 1912 and 1928,
the new state altered the business environment in which the three corporations as well as the rest of Chinese publishers had grown accustomed to
competing.
Just as the Shanghai publishers heavy economic reliance on the market
for modern textbooks, their first best-sellers, led them into multiple opportunistic and awkward liaisons with post-Qing national and regional warlord
governments, they now embraced the semiregulated marketplace and patronage of the Nationalist Party-state. An era of entrepreneurial and corporate Chinese print capitalism that had begun with lithography in 1876 now
turned in the direction that would eventually lead, after 1937, to state-run
publishing. The publishers post-1928 settlement with the Nationalist state
released publishing capacity formerly wasted in destructive competition and
made possible the plenitude found on the shelves of Wenhuajie bookstores
in the 1930s. The relative security of the textbook market also made possible the diversification of publishing companies into fields only tangentially related to printing and publishing, adding new polyvocalities to the
meanings of wenhua and cultural business.
The range of meanings contained in the modern term wenhua, which gave
its name to the Fuzhou Road district from 1916 onward, was reflected in
the ambivalence that those working in the district felt about themselves
throughout the period covered in this chapter. At the time of the Republican Revolution in 1911, Chinese bookmen still regarded themselves as cultural merchants even though many already controlled industrial publishing
companies. Wishing to present an image of public service and to regard
themselves as an extension of academic life, those who made up Shanghais
Wenhuajie were scholars, merchants, and industrialists simultaneously. As

205

206 The Three Legs of the Tripod

time went on, however, the actual number of scholars declined, while the
variety of merchants and industrialists increased. Nonetheless, the bookmens
self-perception only occasionally reflected these changes. For this reason,
many remained psychologically dependent on the ideal of public service despite the absence of a unified state from 1912 to 1928. Following the establishment of the Nationalist government in 1928, they quickly accommodated
themselves to it, reflecting a residual mentality of state dependence typical
of many Chinese intellectuals in the late Qing and Republican eras.
When Chinese of the 1930s discussed the three leading Shanghai corporate publishers, they sometimes referred to them as the three legs of the
tripod (sanjia dingli). This Chinese phrase describes a tripartite confrontation or balance of forces. At the same time, it alludes to the importance of
each of the three legs in supporting the large ritual pot above, which here
can be interpreted as an indirect reference to the Chinese state. The phrase
suggests that publishers had become industrialists acknowledged by the state
for their importance in ideological and cultural struggles against the regimes
main opponents: critics within society, both on the left and on the right,
and foreign military opponents, particularly Japan.
These three publishers the Commercial Press, venerable survivor of the
imperial era; Zhonghua, the initially bold but then increasingly staid educator of the Republic; and World Books, the crafty double-dealer of Wenhuajie
remade the Chinese publishing world before and after the 1911 Revolution. Like Chinese literati of the imperial era, however, they were also frequently dependent on political authority exercised by claimants to the central
government. Protected against many bitter political and military struggles
of the era thanks to their having located their headquarters within or very
close to the International Concession, the Shanghai publishers were nonetheless also at the mercy of Chinese educational policies that they tried to
influence with varying degrees of success. Particularly after 1916, as northern warlords vied for control of the national government at Beijing, cabinets changed often, and with them came and went new ministers of
education. Each time a minister was changed, textbook publishers ambitions altered. Each was forced to seek means to establish a close connection
with the new minister.
Likewise, once the capital was established at Nanjing in 1928, litmus
tests of each publishers loyalties to the new regime became common currency. Regulating the industry that had grown up around an erstwhile peripheral technology became an overriding concern of those who controlled
education and ideology for the Nationalist Party-state. A copyright law
was promulgated in 1928 that benefited the publishers.3 Each publisher, in
turn, reached a different settlement with the new government, using the

Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books, 1912-37

perception of its importance in supporting the governments educational

and cultural policies to further both corporate and personal agendas. As
censorship increased, so too did book production. Between 1928 and 1937,
ever greater numbers of publications rolled off the Shanghai presses of publishers who had learned to live together with each other. By 1937, an overwhelming 86 percent of all books published in China appeared under a
Shanghai imprint.4
In spite of economic diversification, from 1928 to 1937, the Commercial
Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books, using printing plants scattered
throughout Shanghai, together continued to produce between 61 and 71
percent of Chinas total book output.5 The Commercial Press generally
outproduced the others three to one and five to one, respectively.6 The mutual tolerance of each for the others was made possible by a state system
that shuttered the window of savage capitalism that had been opened during the late Qing era. Seen from one perspective, a direct major benefit to
China of competition had been the provisioning of Chinas schools, universities, and libraries with the modern textbooks and reference works that
opened onto the world of wenhua. From another angle, unintended sideeffects of this cost-driven competition were personal betrayal of colleagues
for the sake of organizational supremacy as well as a drastic commercialization of intellectual life. The Nationalist Party-state offered the corporate
publishers markets with minimized conflict in exchange for relative ideological conformity, with the result that other, smaller publishers that do not
figure in this book inherited the adventurous, risk-taking outlaw spirit of
early Chinese print capitalism.
Republican Shanghais Wenhuajie
Chapter 4 suggested that one can first begin to speak of Fuzhou Road as
Wenhuajie around 1916. By that year, the two leading corporate comprehensive publishers, Zhonghua and the Commercial Press, had established
their bases along Henan Road, the approach to Fuzhou Road (see Figure
5.1). Dadong shuju (Great Eastern Books), founded by L Ziquan (b. circa
1881) and Shen Junsheng, also opened on Fuzhou Road in 1916.7
However, it was not until 1917 that the third of the Big Three Shanghai
publishers, as identified by Chinese of the Republican era, appeared in
Wenhuajie. Joining the Commercial Press and Zhonghua, an early incarnation of World Books was founded in 1917 in a Fuzhou Road alley. By 1921,
when World Books was officially founded, that alley would become known
as World Lane. World Books, along with Dadong and, after 1926, former
Commercial Press editor Zhang Xichens (1889-1969) Kaiming shudian
and dozens of others, encouraged book patrons to step over the threshold

207

208 The Three Legs of the Tripod

Figure 5.1 Commercial Press and Zhonghua

Books retail outlets (left to right), corner of
Henan and Fuzhou Roads, 1932+.
Source: Chuban shiliao 8 (1987: 2): back cover.

defined by Zhonghua and the Commercial Press onto the expanding stage
of Republican Chinas intellectual and publishing life (see Figure 5.2). In a
district that at one time or another attracted over 300 bookstores and publishers (see Appendix for the scores of firms in Wenhuajie in the 1930s),
World Books became an inextricable influence in the establishment of Fuzhou
Road as the Wenhuajie of China, precisely because it contributed so heavily
to the pronounced commercialization of Republican intellectual life.
If World Books fostered the new image of Wenhuajie in a way that neither the Commercial Press had nor Zhonghua could have at this point,
Shen Zhifang, founder of World Books and of an estimated ten other Shanghai book-publishing or -retailing operations, is best identified as the source
of the spirit prevailing on Wenhuajie by the 1920s. No other prominent
book merchant epitomizes the plenitude, crass materialism, and combative
opportunism that came to be so thoroughly identified with Republican
Fuzhou Roads brand of book culture as this many-sided prodigy of
Shanghais publishing world.
According to Bao Tianxiao (1875-1973), himself an employee of the new
world of corporatized publishing firms, the Fuzhou Road district came, by
the 1920s, to be so thoroughly identified with publishing that it was known

Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books, 1912-37

Figure 5.2 World Books retail outlet (with Dadong shuju and
Kaiming shudian), corner of Fuzhou and Shandong Roads, late
1920s.
Source: Chuban shiliao 8 (1987: 2): back cover.

as Culture Street (Wenhua dajie). This phase of cultural and commercial

modernity was reached, Bao says, only after the emergence of the Big Three
and Dadong. In his words, If you take the Commercial Press and Zhonghua
Books as Shanghais first-order book merchants at that time, then World
and Dadong were Shanghais second-order book merchants. At the time,
along Fuzhou Road (popularly called Simalu), starting from Shandong Road
(then Wangping Street) and going along to Henan Road (then Qipan Street),
it was all newspaper plants and bookshops. The Commercial Press, Zhonghua,
World, and Dadong were all in there, and for this reason everyone called
this strip Wenhua dajie (Culture Street).8 Quite apart from Baos testimony about the importance of this district by the 1920s, what is striking in
this view of Wenhuajie is his failure to comment on its harshly materialistic
side. Baos exultation over this assemblage of shops and publishers effectively blots out the details catalogued elsewhere in his memoirs that enable
one to observe that Shen Zhifang was less the exception and more the rule
among the clashing personalities on Wenhuajie.
Baos friend and junior colleague in the Wenhuajie district, Zhang Jinglu
(1898-1969) had had over twenty years of work experience in the district
when Bao and the writer A Ying (Qian Xingcun, 1900-77) finally convinced
Zhang to write his memoir.9 Penning his reminiscences in Hankou in 1938
after the evacuation of Shanghai, Zhang recalled that even before he had
begun working in Wenhuajie around 1918, he had been roaming Henan
Road as a consumer. He had started window-shopping there in 1911 to ease

209

210 The Three Legs of the Tripod

the stress of an apprenticeship in a Tiantong Road grog-shop. In those

days, he says, all the bookstores, big and small, were concentrated on
Henan Road. Zhang had visited the shops every evening after stoking the
fire in the bar, walking the entire distance back and forth. His hooting
(huxiao) colleagues even gave him the nickname Henan Road Inspection
Commissioner (Qipanjie xunyue shi).10
Calling himself a publisher who began life as a reader,11 Zhang opened
Guanghua shuju on Fuzhou Road in 1921,12 the first purely new-style bookstore in Shanghai. In his memoir, Zhang discusses the changes wrought in
Fuzhou Road since the early 1920s, the period when Bao believes Wenhuajie
came into its maturity: [Fuzhou Road] was not [then] a place where bookstores crowded together ... If you look over todays [1938 Fuzhou Road]
that suddenly became Shanghais famous Culture Street, think back to
those days [when] there were only solitary beat-up old market stalls. It was
hard to run across [even] a few friends selling books. It certainly did not
equal the feeling of yesterday and today!13 Justifiably claiming part of the
credit for creating what became Wenhuajie, Zhang describes a history in
which publishing kingdoms, founded in shops and offices either at the Fuzhou
and Henan Roads intersection or along the sidewalks of Fuzhou Road itself,
established the rules by which the contest for mastery of the heights of
Chinas Republican book market was carried out.
Zhangs memoir reveals that, in 1938, at least as important as the social
history of the district was the feeling of abundance that it passed on to
consumers whenever they visited it. That feeling was what they carried away,
and it was part of the reason that they came back to Wenhuajie. Just as
effectively as Baos, Zhangs memoir discusses the wide array of scoundrels
and cheats infesting Shanghais Wenhuajie, but it was the districts embrace of modern ideas and innovative ways of disseminating them that made
Wenhuajies hold on Zhang permanent. More judgmental than Bao, Zhang
stared hard at the dichotomies of Wenhuajie. In the end, however, he favoured
the progressive and constructive, mentioning but not dwelling on the mercenary and the negative. Nonetheless, due to figures such as Shen Zhifang
and because of the nature of the corporations that played a major part in
the history of Wenhuajie, the rough, competitive, capitalist facets of
Wenhuajie are inescapable.
Each of the Big Three sought hegemony over the markets that it pursued.
Key resources in the efforts of each to seize those markets included managerial and editorial supremacy. Organizational and leadership structure also
influenced access to capital, which in turn had an impact on a firms ability
to develop a printing plant as well as to gain access to new machinery. Marketing tactics, simple luck, and long-term strategy vis--vis the governments14

Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books, 1912-37

in control of relevant markets contributed to success. In this way, economic

reality rubbed its broad, muscular shoulders up against the weak, rounded
ones of culture along Wenhuajie in a way that would not have been possible in China a century before. Most important historically, books sold in
this environment were not produced in the same way that they had been
earlier.
In 1930, when the new Nationalist government-mandated Shanghaishi
shuye tongye gonghui (Shanghai Booksellers Same-Industry Association)
was formed with 83 member firms, the assets of the publishing industry
totalled about 8 million yuan.15 Assets of the Commercial Press totalled 5
million yuan while those of Zhonghua Books came to 2 million yuan. The
next closest competitor was World Books, with less than a third of
Zhonghuas assets. The other eighty firms were worth only about 300,000
yuan altogether. The key to this accumulation up to 1930 was the marketplace, which in turn depended on government supervision and legislation.
Moreover, Shanghais modern publishing business was driven by the expansion of modern educational opportunities, beginning in the late imperial period and continuing until the end of the Nanjing Decade (1928-37).
For this reason, Wang Yunwu, chief of the editorial office at the Commercial
Press from 1921 to 1929 and general manager from 1930 to 1946, linked
school enrolments from 1910 to 1937 with the growth of publishing in his
chronological history of the Commercial Press.16
The steady expansion of educational opportunities, from just over 100,000
students enrolled in some 4,000 schools in 190517 to nearly 13 million students studying in approximately 230,000 schools nationwide by 1937,18
represented an enormous educational and commercial opportunity for responsive publishers. This observation was particularly true of a society in
which textbooks were repeatedly mandated in a series of educational regulations, issued initially by the Qing court and then, after 1911, by successive
national and warlord governments, often influenced by university-based or
independent intellectuals.19 No other form of printed matter in China ordinarily reached such a large, and regulated, readership.20 Government endorsement, whether formal or informal, turned out to be the single most
important element in creating the public patronage on which the major
textbook publishers relied.
Already by 1904, when the Commercial Presss Zuixin guowen jiaokeshu
(Modern Chinese Textbooks) appeared, the publishing impetus in China
had shifted from official publishers to privately owned publishing houses,
most of which were based in Shanghai. In 1906, for the first time, the
imperial Ministry of Education approved a list of officially accepted primary school textbooks. Eight publishers had issued the 102 textbooks on

211

212 The Three Legs of the Tripod

that list. Of those, 90 (88.2 percent) had been issued by Shanghai-based

publishers, private and official; 85 had been issued by three private publishing companies (Commercial Press, Wenming Books, and Shizhong shuju).
Over half (54) of the total number of titles had been issued by the Commercial Press; Wenming came in second with 30. Nanyang Public Institute, the
Shanghai school and translation bureau that had first employed Zhang Yuanji,
had published 4, while Shizhong shuju had published 1.21
Even more significant to the publishers than the actual school enrolments
were the amounts spent on education. In 1911, according to Wang Yunwu,
1.6 million students were paying almost 21 million yuan in tuition fees or
about 13 yuan each.22 By 1937, just under 13 million students were spending 73 million yuan.23 Although per-pupil spending had dropped to 5.6 yuan,
the range of schools had increased, inflating the variety of textbooks needed.
Just as it had in 1906, the Commercial Press continued to dominate the
new-style book market in 1937. In that latter year, 52 percent of all new
books published in China came out of the editorial offices of the Commercial Press. Gone were most of the genteel competitors of the late imperial
period; they had been replaced by publishers whose names signalled their
ambitious marketing targets. Apart from the Commercial Press, Zhonghua
(meaning China) was founded in 1912, and World appeared in 1921.
Chapter 4 discussed the organization of joint-stock limited liability firms in
the abstract; we will now see how these corporate kingpins of Wenhuajie
worked in practice.
The Three Legs of the Tripod: The Commercial Press, Ltd.,
Zhonghua Book Company, Ltd., and World Book Company, Ltd.
The Commercial Press, Ltd., 1904-37
Due to their demand for textbooks, schools and teachers colleges were the
most dependable patrons of the industrialized Chinese publishers between
1904 and 1937. Once government-sponsored libraries began to appear
around 1908-9,24 they supplemented the textbook market, but libraries did
not make a significant economic demand on publishers until the public
library movement of the late 1920s. After the civil service system was abolished in 1904-5, the struggle for mastery of both these markets, schools and
libraries, along with that of private readers, was usually dominated by the
Commercial Press in competition with one or more other publishing houses.
From 1904 until 1937, the Commercial Press was Shanghais leading comprehensive publisher in terms of sustained hegemony, publications, physical plant, corporate wealth and profits, and even size of its printing and
publishing workforce. From its commanding position among Shanghais

Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books, 1912-37

publishers, the Commercial Press changed the face of Chinese education

and informed opinion. The firms corporate command structure was organized around its General Business Office and board of directors. Both provided it with the kind of control necessary to direct operations locally, across
the country, and in the corridors of political power, whether in Beijing, the
national capital until 1927, or in Nanjing, which replaced Beijing during
Nationalist rule from 1928 to 1937.
Although the Commercial Press asserted its control over the national textbook market early and went on to become Republican Chinas premier industrial cultural corporation, its authority did not go unchallenged. Indeed,
its seemingly inexorable advance ground to a halt at least four times between 1904 and 1937: in 1911-12, in 1919-21, in 1926-27, and in 1932.
In the first instance, the firms preponderance was stymied from within, by
overly cautious leadership, and from without, by two turncoat lieutenants
eager to work their way independently into the companys markets. In 1919,
the Commercial Press was caught off-guard a second time by changes in
intellectual fashion brought on by the New Culture Movement (1915-21).
In 1926-27, heedless directors and editors learned to their dismay that printers in the Baoshan plant were just as important to the firms operation as
the intellectuals and white-collar employees in its editorial offices. Finally,
in 1932, the Commercial Press received the ultimate affirmation of its importance in shaping national Chinese opinion when Imperial Japan singled
out its Baoshan Road printing plant for destruction. Notably, however, following each setback, the Commercial Press recovered to recapture hegemony within the publishing economy.25
Thanks to its growing backlist of new educational publications, the Commercial Press in the early 1900s seized the popular educational market that
had been ruled in the 1890s by Shanghais lithographic publishers such as
Feiying Hall and Wenming Books. Over the next decade, the Commercial
Press used its success with educational titles to launch several series of important modern reference works. For instance, trading on war, the same
topic that had enabled the Dianshizhai Pictorial to rise to prominence in the
mid-1880s, the Commercial Press published a twenty-four-volume reference series covering the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, followed by an eightyvolume work on Japanese constitutionalism.
As early as 1904, Zhang Yuanji had begun collecting books for the
Commercial Presss editorial reference library to be called the Hanfenlou
(Fragrance-Harbouring Library). Three years later, the Hanfenlou opened
atop the specially constructed editorial building located on the new eightymu site on Baoshan Road in the northern part of the city that also held a
large new printing plant (see Figure 5.3).26 The same year, in a move that

213

214 The Three Legs of the Tripod

Figure 5.3 Commercial Press editorial offices and printing plant,

Baoshan Road, Zhabei, Shanghai, pre-1932.
Source: Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei dangshi yanjiu shi and Shanghaishi
zonggonghui, eds., Shanghai Shangwu yinshu guan zhigong yundong shi (Beijing:
Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 1991), 194.

recalled the crown commission garnered by Tongwen, the Qing court commissioned the Commercial Press to publish a thirty-two-volume series comparing constitutionalism around the world. In 1908, more titles on comparative
political systems, particularly that in Japan, appeared through the Press,
signalling once more the editors support for constitutional monarchism.
The new editorial command centre went on to produce important reference works such as Xin zidian (New Dictionary, 1912), Chinas first major
new dictionary since the publication of the Kangxi Dictionary, and Ciyuan
(The Encyclopedic Dictionary, 1915, which Mao Zedong would use in the 1940s
at Xibaipo). High-quality reproductions of traditional texts such as Sibu
congkan (Library of Chinese Classical, Historical, Philosophical, and Literary Works, 1920), were issued.27 Works such as these demonstrated that the
Commercial Press not only had captured the carriage trade formerly dominated by Tongwen and Saoye shanfang but also now had surpassed them.
Along with record-breaking sales of textbooks and landmark reference
works, the Commercial Press was also responsible, thanks to the firms success in publishing important works by fin-de-sicle translators Yan Fu (18531921) and Lin Shu (1852-1924), for introducing large readerships to their
first articulate impressions of Western modernity. Parallel with the Nanyang
Public Institutes buying Yan Fus translation of Smiths Wealth of Nations
(Yuanfu) and publishing it in 1902, six other major translations of social

Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books, 1912-37

science works by Yan Fu appeared between 1899 and 1908 under the
Commercial Press imprint: Mills On Liberty (Qun jiquan jie lun, 1899),
Montesquieus Spirit of Laws (Fayi, 1902), Mills System of Logic (Mule
mingxue, 1902), Spencers Study of Sociology (Qunxue yiyan, 1902), Huxleys
Evolution and Ethics (Tianyan lun, originally 1898 in woodblock, then circa
1905), and Jevonss Logic (Mingxue qianshuo, 1908).28 Supplementing these
social science works, the juren and translator Lin Shu introduced 142 Western literary works to Chinese readers through various Commercial Press
publications.29
Magazine and journal publishing was another important domain of Commercial Press dominance. Its first journal was Zhang Yuanjis (1867-1959)
Waijiao bao (Diplomatic News, 1902-10), followed by Dongfang zazhi/The
Eastern Miscellany, started by Zhang in 1904. By 1910, the Eastern Miscellany
had reached a national circulation of 15,000, making it the most widely
circulated journal in China at that time. Initially directed by Zhang himself,
the editorship eventually passed to Zhang Jians (1853-1926) disciple Meng
Sen (1868-1937), science writer Du Yaquan (1873-1934), and then to Hu
Yuzhi (1896-1986), all important figures in their own right. Surviving until
1948, the Eastern Miscellany set a record for longevity in Republican Chinese publishing.
Other important and long-lived Commercial Press periodicals included
the literary journal Xiaoshuo yuebao (Short Story Monthly, 1910-32, edited
first by Wang Chunnong, followed by famous writers Mao Dun [Shen
Yanbing, 1896-1981], Zheng Zhenduo [1898-1958], and Ye Shengtao [18941988]); Jiaoyu zazhi/Educational Review (1909-48) and Shaonian zazhi (Youth
Magazine, 1911-31); Fun zazhi (Ladies Journal, 1915-31); and Yingwen zazhi
(English Magazine, 1915-?).30 All told, the Commercial Press published eight
major journals and at least forty others between 1897 and 1937, with several influential ones terminated as a result of the events of 1932.
Perhaps because of the editorial offices commitment to constitutional
reform of the monarchy, in 1911-12, as will be seen in greater detail below,
the Commercial Press was caught off-guard by the success of the Republican
Revolution and of Zhonghua Books. Forced by both to withdraw its successful late Qing textbook series from the market, the presss editors gradually worked their way back into the schools with a new series, the Gonghe
zhong xiao xue jiaoke shu (Republican Textbooks for Middle and Elementary
Schools). In 1912, just when the publishers textbooks were stricken from
the new, nominally republican Beijing governments lists, Bao Tianxiao went
to the Commercial Press, where Zhang Yuanji interviewed him for a job.
Signed up as a part-time editor so that he could keep his job with Shibao,
Bao arranged to work from 1 to 5 p.m. each afternoon. Participating on the

215

216 The Three Legs of the Tripod

editorial teams of several new Chinese literature textbooks, he earned forty

yuan per month.31 When it came time to publish the books, Bao claims, he
himself proposed printing the new five-colour (red, yellow, blue, white, and
black, symbolizing the five main ethnic groups in the Republic of China)
national flag on the new textbooks.32
Even as the Commercial Press dealt with setbacks on the publishing front,
it began diversifying its operation. Two new divisions were created in 1912,
one to produce educational supplies and the second to produce machinery.
Although the machine shop soon curtailed much of its operation in the face
of competition from the manufacturers discussed in Chapter 3, a Chinese
type-caster that Xia Ruifang bought in Germany, most likely a Thompson,
made its appearance. By 1913, workers in the Commercial Press machine
shop replicated it and began producing 15,000 metal Chinese type per day.
They also started manufacturing lithographic printing presses, letterpress
machines, galley presses, etc.33
Then, adding tragedy to the economic setback of 1912, in 1914 founder
Xia Ruifang was assassinated in front of the Commercial Presss main retail
outlet on Henan Road near Nanjing Road. His death may have reflected
nationalistic feeling stemming from the Republican Revolution that manifested itself in opposition to Japanese investment in China. Nonetheless,
four days before, Xia had already reached an agreement with Kinko-do- that
allowed the Commerical Press to buy out the Japanese investors. At the
time, competing publishers were also suspected of involvement in his death,
but Xias demise did little to undermine the Commercial Presss market
dominance. By 1914, the press was an all-Chinese corporation already worth
over 1.5 million yuan.34
With Xia gone, the board appointed cofounder Gao Fengchi to replace
him as general manager and Zhang Yuanji as manager. From 1915 to 1920,
Gao and Zhang ran the Commercial Press according to the one office,
three departments (yichu sansuo) system that Zhang apparently borrowed
from Zhonghua to reduce bureaucratic meddling by the Church Band led
by the two Bao brothers and Gao. Under the General Business Office were
the editorial, printing, and distribution departments. With Zhang in charge
of editorial work, the Baos and Gao took responsibility for the other two.
Important decisions concerning administration, employment, and finance
were made at joint meetings of the general manager, manager, and three
department heads.35
One August day in 1916, manager Zhang Yuanji interviewed Shen Yanbing,
the recent Beijing University graduate who would become known as the
left-wing writer Mao Dun, for a position grading papers in the English section of the editorial departments correspondence school. Maos memoirs

Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books, 1912-37

reveal fascinating insider details about how the Commercial Press actually
ran at the time. Entering Zhangs third-floor office at the Commercial Presss
retail outlet on Henan Road with a letter of introduction from the firms
Beijing branch manager, Mao recalled that, even though his interview was
at 9 a.m., he was the seventeenth person Zhang had seen that day. Mao
found Zhangs office surprisingly plain.36
After being hired, Mao was delivered by Zhangs driver to the Baoshan
Road editorial office. He started work under chief editor Gao Mengdan
(1870-1936) at twenty-four yuan per month. Mao spent his first month
correcting English essays before being transferred to the translation section.
Although he avoids personal criticism of Zhang, Mao comments that the
Commercial Press kept a significant number of editors for special purposes
(teshu yongxin) on the payroll who never actually performed editorial or translation work. Mao concluded that the editorial office operated much like an
overstaffed government office (guanchang), not totally surprising in light of
Zhangs background.37
In 1920, Gao and Zhang both resigned from their positions as general
manager and manager, respectively. The two men were now appointed as
supervisors, and their former positions were filled by Bao Xianchang (1864?1929), the second surviving founder, and Li Bake (1880-1950), a younger
scholar whom Zhang had trained in the editorial office. All important business decisions continued to be made in joint sessions of the General Business Office, which now included the two supervisors.
In 1918, Zhang had resigned from leadership of the editorial department
in favour of the long-time editor, Gao Mengdan. The two men had joined
the Commercial Press in 1903, and both now acknowledged the need to
find new, younger men to replace themselves. On 1 May 1919, just before
the May Fourth Incident became the political turning point of the literary
revolution known as the New Culture Movement, Zhang met Hu Shi (18911962), one of the movements two well-known champions, for the first
time.38 An ardent advocate of substituting the vernacular language (baihua)
for literary Chinese (wenyan) in books and other publications, Hu held the
PhD in philosophy from Columbia University, where he had studied with
John Dewey. Hu had also begun publishing his translations of foreign short
stories in Beijings Xin qingnian (New Youth) magazine, which trumpeted
the message of cultural revolution from 1915 onward.
Two years after Zhang and Hu first met, Gao Mengdan visited Hu at
Beijing University, where Hu was teaching in the philosophy department,
to ask him to consider taking over the editorial department at the Commercial Press. During the New Culture Movement, no publishing house had
suffered greater obliquy than the Commercial Press. In response, the press

217

218 The Three Legs of the Tripod

leadership acknowledged the necessity of making personnel changes. Hiring Hu Shi, the most moderate of the New Culture leaders and widely known
for his advocacy of language reform, it was hoped, would enable the press to
silence its critics. In January 1920, the New Culture Movement had played
itself out in a new government mandate for elementary textbooks in the
vernacular.39 When the Commercial Presss amended textbooks, titled Xin
xuezhi jiaokeshu (New School System Textbooks), appeared, however, they
would be the first ones directed by the new editor, Wang Yunwu.
Hu Shi declined the editorial position but took the opportunity to recommend his old English instructor from Wusongs Zhongguo gongxue (China
College), Wang Yunwu, an autodidact with a wide range of experience. Although technically a native of Xiangshan county, Guangdong, Wang had
been born in Shanghai and had grown up there, speaking the local Chinese
pidgin (Yangjingbang hua). In his first school, which he entered in 1899,
Wang studied the Four Books, standard preparation for an academic or
official career. In a second school, Wang supplemented this traditional curriculum with the Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian), Zuozhuan (Chronicle
of Zuo), and Tangshi sanbai shou (300 Tang Poems). Interestingly, he also
encountered the Twenty-Four Dynastic Histories in a lithographed Tongwen
Press edition. Adding a new chapter to Wangs academic career, however,
his father then arranged for him to begin learning English, the key to business success in Shanghai. After Wang had spent half a year in Guangdong,
his father next enrolled him in one of Shanghais American missionary
schools. At the same time, Wang started to learn English in earnest and read
multiple works by Bacon, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and Spencer, all translated by Yan Fu.40
In 1907, Wang Yunwu was hired to teach English at a private academy
that was soon absorbed into China College. By late 1911, fellow Xiangshan
native and Republican president-designate Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) had
hired Wang as his private secretary. After Sun resigned the presidency in
late February 1912, Wang went to Beijing, where a new ministry hired him
in an editorial capacity. In 1916, Wang returned to Shanghai and worked
for the Board for Opium Suppression. Before long, Wang set himself up as
a minor Shanghai compradore, building a house on Sichuan North Road.
In 1921, Commercial Press science editor Zheng Zhenwen first met Wang
Yunwu in Wangs new private library during a visit with chief editor Gao
Mengdan. Wang was rumoured to be skilled at foreign languages as well as
at physics and engineering, all fields in which the Commercial Press desired
to develop lines of publications. In Wangs study, Zheng spied a complete
run of a German chemistry periodical that he had not seen since leaving
Japan some years before and asked Wang if he often subscribed to this sort

Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books, 1912-37

of publication. He had no alternative but to tell me the truth, [which was

that] he had bought it from a Tongji University Medical School chemistry
teacher when he had left Shanghai. Trying to discuss some of the contents
of the periodical with Wang, Zheng was deflected by Wangs comment that
I did not read it carefully.41
As Zheng and Gao returned from their meeting with Wang, Zheng related
his poor impressions of Wang to Gao, who just smiled. Later they learned
that Wang knew only a smattering of German and Japanese. Eventually,
though, Wang was selected for the editorial position, partly, says Zheng,
because Gao wanted to overcome the image retained by the editorial office
as the preserve of Fujianese.42
Wang Yunwu, then, was a beneficiary as well as a promoter of the new
editorial spirit, fundamentally a commercial one, inspiring Fuzhou Roads
leading comprehensive publisher after 1921. In the view of Manying Ip,
Wangs basic personality was quite unlike those of Zhang Yuanji and Gao
Mengdan. Where the two imperial degree holders were modest and selfeffacing, Wang, ill-educated, rough around the edges, and lacking an imperial degree, was confident, aggressive and ambitious.43 For 1920s Wenhuajie,
however, where book culture, industrial production, opportunistic marketing, and shrewd politicking all merged into one another, Wangs personality
was just what was needed, as would become clear between 1924 and 1927.
Wang Yunwus reforms at the Commercial Press covered mainly editorial
and classificatory operations. He also tried, after a research trip to America
and Europe in 1930, to implement Western-style rationalization in the editorial department via a program known as scientific management (kexue
guanli fa). In 1922, Wang had reorganized the editorial office into nine
departments and hired 196 editors, more than doubling the departments
roster to 365. At a time when many editors were already demoralized by
criticism from the New Culture generation, older editors soon began to
leave, dubbing Wang the Yuan Shikai of the publishing world for his dictatorial style of leadership and patronage.44 Concurrently, however, Wang
had also experimented with serial reprints of well-known books. The financial success of his 1923 Baike xiao congshu (Library of Basic Knowledge, also
Miniature Encyclopaedia) series, which summarized the latest Western
thought on a range of topics, helped Wang overcome opposition to his leadership and solidified his position.45 Also, building on an idea that former editor and Kaiming founder Zhang Xichen says originated with Gao Mengdan,
from 1924-28, Wang perfected the four-corner system (sijiao haoma) for
classifying Chinese characters and tied it into his modification of the Dewey
library classification system; the latter gradually replaced the sibu/siku system
that dated to the Wei dynasty (220-65) and that had been made obsolete

219

220 The Three Legs of the Tripod

by Chinas Gutenberg revolution.46 The two systems were combined in various Commercial Press publications and so greatly simplified library development and administration that they were adopted by other publishers,
two dozen libraries, the Harvard-Yenching Institute, and even by the Nationalist Party.47 Wang was less successful with his plan for piece-rate pay
scales at the Commercial Press, however; his efforts were thwarted by the
firms editors, who argued that intellectual work was different from physical
labor and could not be quantified.48
In the short term, however, Wang Yunwu and the Commercial Press were
about to discover that their activities in the editorial office were useless without the continually calibrated physical labour of the technicians in its printing plant. By the mid-1920s, about 10,000 people in Shanghai were employed
by the new-style printing and publishing industry. They were represented
by the second-largest trade union in the city. The Commercial Press itself
employed about 4,000 printers and printing workers, the largest number of
any single publisher.49 Throughout the nineteenth century, increasing numbers of Chinese had begun to work with Western printing presses, but there
is no indication of any labour strife at that time. Indeed, as we know, in
1911 the booksellers guild had counted on its employees to form a militia
to protect their firms. By 1917, however, the class harmony of 1911 was a
thing of the past.50
The first Chinese printers strike had occurred at the Commercial Press in
March 1917 as a result of printing shop director Bao Xianchangs attempt
to introduce a piece-rate pay scale that anticipated Wangs 1930 effort in
the editorial office. Although a sympathy strike had quickly broken out
among Zhonghuas workers, this time the two firms had been able to suppress the workers with the help of the police.51 In 1919, in support of the
anti-imperialist strike of the Beijing students, Commercial Press printers
had driven Japanese consultants out of the plant and had taken to the streets
for a second time. Their rancorous disputes with management had soon
attracted the attention of outsiders.
As already noted, the writer Mao Dun had joined the editorial offices of
the Commercial Press in 1916. He remained with the publisher for nine
years. His early involvement with the Communist Party had enabled him to
serve as a go-between linking the Communist Party to the Commercial Press
workers. As a result, he was familiar with the sources of labour discontent
despite his own white-collar position in the editorial department, where he
rose rapidly through the ranks from English grader to dictionary editor and
finally, in 1921, to the editorship of the revamped Short Story Monthly. At
that point, his monthly salary jumped to 100 yuan.

Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books, 1912-37

Although the Communist Party was not founded officially until July 1921,
a local Shanghai organizational cell had been set up in May 1920, and Mao
had joined it half a year later.52 Mao also contributed translations to the new
cells short-lived journal, Gongchandang (The Communist). In the autumn
of 1921, when the secretary of the new Communist Party, Beijing University professor Chen Duxiu (1879-1942), moved from Beijing to Shanghai,
Mao took advantage of the Commercial Press practice of collecting a galaxy
of stellar honorary editors to invite Chen to serve at 300 yuan per month.
Editor Chens home also served as the site of the weekly Communist Party
meetings.53
Because Mao had a good cover working as chief editor of Short Story
Monthly, the party had appointed him as its contact person. All correspondence to the central party figures was first sent to him for forwarding. The
burden of his party responsibilities eventually became so great that he had to
transfer many of his editorial responsibilities to Zheng Zhenduo, who joined
the Commercial Press in May 1921 to work on Republican Chinas first
regularly published periodical for children, Ertong shijie (Childrens World).54
In the winter of 1921, the party leadership had sent Xu Meikun, a typesetter from Hangzhou, to organize Commercial Press printers. Mao, who
often visited the printing department to deal with last-minute revisions to
Short Story Monthly, was responsible for introducing Xu to printers Mi
Wenrong and Liu Puqing, who later joined the party. On 1 May 1922, Xu
and Mao, joined by Dong Yixiang, another party member and, like Mao, a
Commercial Press editor, had organized a meeting in an empty lot on Sichuan
North Road. About 300 people, most of them Commercial Press printers,
had shown up to hear Mao lead them in commemoration of Labour Day,
but just before Mao had begun to speak concession constables had arrived
and broken up the meeting.55
In July 1923, Shanghais forty-two Communist Party members had assembled for a joint meeting. With thirteen participants, the Commercial
Presss group was the largest of the four contingents. In addition to Dong
Yixiang, the groups leader, other Commercial Press members had included
Mao Dun and Yang Xianjiang (1895-1931)56 from the editorial department.
Mi Wenrong, Huang Yuheng, and Guo Jingren had represented the printing
and distribution departments. Xu Meikun, who had organized the Commercial Press workers and had gone on to lead the huge Shanghai Printing
Workers Union (Shanghai yinshua gongren lianhe hui),57 was also included
in the Commercial Press group. At the next monthly meeting, Mao Dun
had met Mao Zedong (1893-1976), himself a veteran organizer of Changsha
printing workers, who earlier that year had fled his native Hunan under an

221

222 The Three Legs of the Tripod

arrest warrant and, in June, had just been elected to the Central Committee
of the Communist Party.58
In the meantime, as we know from Chapter 1, the Commercial Press
printing plant had added many new printing machines. They had the doubleedged effect of boosting production while increasing workloads. A Harris
offset press, purchased in 1915, was supplemented by an American Miehle
cylinder press in 1919. In the same year, a new type font in a classic style
(Gu ti) was put into production along with a font featuring the phonetic
alphabet (Zhuyin fuhao). Three years later, an Ai-er-bai-tuo (Albright? Heidelberg?) rotary press, ten times faster than the Miehle, was acquired from
Germany. The following year, six German technicians were hired to improve
printing techniques in the plant. A new George Mann two-colour offset
press and a rotogravure printing machine were added in 1922-23. Zhang
Yuanjis improved type case was installed in 1923 to speed up typesetting.59
All had contributed to increased tension in the printing plant.
In the middle of 1925, the explosive May Thirtieth Movement was ignited by panicky concession constables at the Laozha station not far from
Fuzhou Road. Firing on an unarmed Chinese crowd protesting the murder
of a Chinese worker in a Japanese textile mill, the policemen killed eleven
and wounded dozens. Over the next six months, patriotic protests radiated
outward from Shanghai and across the country, involving students, workers, merchants, and politicians in Chinas most massive anti-imperialist confrontation to date.
Locally, the Commercial Press was one of the first Chinese media companies to fight back against the general news blackout imposed by the British
colonial forces. On 3 June, a new daily newspaper, the Gongli ribao (Justice
Daily) hit the streets. Edited in Zheng Zhenduos home by a group of Commercial Press editors on behalf of eleven patriotic organizations, it reached
a circulation of 20,000.60 At the same time, the Eastern Miscellany produced
a special issue about the massacre of unarmed Chinese civilians in the midst
of the International Concession and was sued by the British-dominated
Shanghai Municipal Council for its actions.
By mid-1925, the Communist Party had had a significant presence in the
Commercial Press for nearly five years. Building on efforts that went back
to 1920, in June, with help from party organizers, Commercial Press workers formed their first labour union. The success of striking workers at the
Shanghai Post Office incited Commercial Press workers, led in part by Chen
Yun (Liao Chengyuan, 1905-95), a typesetter from Qingpu and chairman
of the union, to halt work in an effort to improve their own working conditions.61 By the end of the year, strikes in the printing and distribution

Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books, 1912-37

departments had broadened the Communist Partys influence at the press

and, in turn, at other printing and publishing operations in the city.
Partly for this reason, as Chiang Kai-sheks Northern Expedition armies
approached Shanghai in the spring of 1927, Shanghais General Labour
Union (Zonggonghui), under the leadership of Zhou Enlai (1898-1976),
decided to launch the 21 March strike that has become known as the last of
the Three Armed Uprisings. Once it became clear that Chiang intended
to use Shanghai to stage his counterrevolutionary showdown with the Communist Party, Commercial Press workers, now led by Wang Jingyun and
Chen Yun, joined by employees from Zhonghua and other smaller firms,
were prominent among those who rose in resistance.62
Nonstop tolling of the Commercial Press lunch bell, the clarion for the
March 1927 uprising, called out 800,000 workers across Shanghai.63 In April,
the Baoshan Road plant served as an Alamo for the uprisings final defence
mounted by the printers and the General Labour Union against Nationalist
Party soldiers and underworld gangs. Nine Commercial Press workers were
killed by government troops. At least twenty other Commercial Press employees, including the editors Mao Dun, Zheng Zhenduo, and Yang Xianjiang
and union leaders Wang Jingyun and Chen Yun, were forced to flee into
exile.64 Others were arrested in the dragnet that followed the uprising. Prominent Shanghai intellectuals, led by Commercial Press editors Zheng Zhenduo
(Childrens World) and Hu Yuzhi (Eastern Miscellany) along with former editor Zhang Xichen (Ladies World), then head of Kaiming shudian, addressed
an open letter to Nationalist Party intellectuals Cai Yuanpei (1868-1940),
Wu Zhihui (1864-1953), and Li Shizeng (1881-1973), protesting the slaughter and betrayal.65 In the meantime, the Nationalists extorted a 200,000yuan loan from the Commercial Press to support their armies.66
The establishment of the Nationalist government at Nanjing in 1928,
following the events of 1927, had five immediate ramifications for the Commercial Press and other Shanghai publishers. First, building on the terror of
the 1927 massacres and mass arrests, the Nationalists drove the Communist Party labour activists out of the printing plants and other factories.
Those who remained in Shanghai burrowed deep underground and eventually left in 1931, largely severing the Communists ties with Shanghai until
the late 1940s and pacifying labour relations for the corporate publishers.67
Second, in 1928 the Nationalists issued a copyright law banning antigovernment publications. The scope of this legislation was broadened incrementally thoughout the 1930s, forcing the Shanghai publishers to think
carefully before they published modern works, particularly those in the social science field.

223

224 The Three Legs of the Tripod

Third, in the same year, the Nationalists created a government-directed

trade association (Shanghai shuye shangmin xiehui) that competed briefly
with the organization formed in 1920 when the guild and trade association
merged. In 1930, the Nationalists forced all Shanghai publishers to join the
comprehensive government-directed trade association, the Shanghai Booksellers Same-Industry Association. By this means, the Nationalists expected
effectively to emasculate these cultural enterprises.68
Fourth, at the same time, the new Nanjing bureaucrats began setting up
government-run, market-oriented publishing companies to compete with
the independent Shanghai publishers. Most prominent among the dozens
of Nationalist Party publishing companies was Zhengzhong shuju
(Zhengzhong Books), named after Chiang Kai-shek and directed by Chen
Lifu (1900-), who happened also to be in charge of enforcing censorship
regulations.69
And fifth, predictably, the Nationalists mandated the creation of new
textbooks from 1928 on. For the Commercial Press, the Xin shidai jiaokeshu
(New Era Textbooks) and Jiben jiaokeshu (Basic Textbooks) created to meet
this edict were the second Wang Yunwu-edited set within six years.70
Initial Commercial Press opposition to the Nationalist government quickly
turned into accommodation of it. Although there is no evidence that Wang
Yunwu and the Commercial Press management directly collaborated with
the Nationalists during the events of 1927, clearly they benefited by having
their labour problems solved. Later they enjoyed the policed calm that settled
over the printing plant once the storm subsided. In 1929, Wang left the
publishing company for six months to work with Cai Yuanpei at the new
Shanghai-based Academia Sinica. He returned to replace Bao Xianchang as
general manager in 1930. Under his renewed leadership, the Commercial
Press became widely known for two collectanea, Wanyou wenku (Universal
or Complete Library Series)71 and Congshu jicheng (Collection of Collections).
Both compilations represented the next step in the movement toward popular
dissemination of compendia of modern and traditional learning. The two
works, largely apolitical, were also necessitated by the drive for financial
compensation that was an essential part of the reality behind the Commercial Presss output in the 1920s and 1930s.
Eventually, the ministries of Internal Affairs and Education ordered each
local government administration to buy a set of Wangs series as a means of
outfitting new local libraries. In spite of the Commercial Presss heavy investment in the Wanyou wenku, sales had been discouraging prior to this
edict. Once provincial governments each ordered several hundred sets, the
guaranteed state patronage for the Commercial Press cemented Wangs authority. As Jean-Pierre Drge reports, by 1935, 3,679 sets had been sold,

Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books, 1912-37

with the largest volume of sales going to Jiangsu (564 sets), Guangdong
(462), Sichuan (407), and Shandong (345).72
The importance of government policy in promoting Wangs success with
trade publications turned out to be paramount. From 1897 through the
mid-1920s, when China was plagued by a weakened and an unstable central government, the key influence on Shanghai publishing was the marketplace hence the name Commercial Press. From 1902 to 1930, the only
years for which such statistics exist, the Commercial Press issued 8,039
titles.73 Between 1927 and 1936, however, nearly 18,000 volumes were issued.74 After the establishment of the new central government at Nanjing,
the power of the marketplace was increasingly displaced by government
patronage. Meddlesome officialdom, largely banished from Shanghais modern Chinese publishing industry since its early days, vigorously reinstated
itself throughout the 1930s. After the destruction of 1932 at the hands of
the Japanese, the Commercial Press under Wangs leadership prospered by
concentrating on apolitical reference works, library series, and collections.
Largely abandoning the Baoshan Road site, Wang also moved much of the
Commercial Presss operation back into the International Concession for
safety. By these means, in the precise period when government censorship
was most overbearing, the Commercial Press somewhat paradoxically
achieved its highest output.75 One historian has described the period from
1933 to 1936 as the most productive years of the Commercial Press.76
Although Wang remained loyal to the Commercial Press until the Second
Sino-Japanese War (1937-45) forced the removal of the publishing company to Chongqing, he then used the prestige of the firm to launch his third
governmental career.77
Lufei Kuis Zhonghua Book Company, Ltd., 1912-37
At its founding in 1912, Zhonghua Book Company78 had fewer than ten
people, but by 1937 it would have over 3,000 employees. At that point,
Zhonghua was the second-largest and was regarded as the second-mostinfluential publishing firm in Republican China, surpassed only by the Commercial Press. Most of its early employees had originally worked at the
Commercial Press. Founder and general manager Lufei Kui moved directly
from the Commercial Presss editorial office to Zhonghuas new offices,
betraying his old masters. In spite of its conception under less than
honourable circumstances, Zhonghua would become an increasingly staid
publishing pillar, first of Republican ideals and then, after 1927, of the
Republic itself.
In the middle of 1911, the Commercial Press found itself challenged by
renegades in its midst. Lufei Kui, an important editor and head of several

225

226 The Three Legs of the Tripod

departments, organized some friends to pool their money and secretly compile a set of new textbooks. The editors had at least two reasons to keep
their activities secret. First, they had broken the Commercial Presss injunction against permitting staff to work on any nonpress business. Second, and
even more important, they had to guard the contents of their new anti-Qing
textbooks. However, the spectacularly remunerative success of the Commercial Press textbooks pointed the way. The lure of earning enough quick profit
from the as-yet nonexistent Republican textbook market to launch their own
publishing firm proved to be irresistible to Lufei and his co-conspirators. In
spite of their knowledge that, if the anti-Qing contents of the new textbooks became known prematurely, it could have meant death once they left
the International Concession, Lufei and the other editors went ahead with
their project.79
A native of Tongxiang, Zhejiang, Lufei had been born in the prefectural
capital of Hanzhong, Shaanxi.80 He had grown up on both the northern and
the southern banks of the Yangzi River in Hubei and Jiangxi. His father,
apparently well known for his pursuit of the literati arts of calligraphy and
seal-carving, had worked as a confidential secretary (youmu) in the provinces of Henan, Hebei, Shaanxi, and Jiangxi. On the other side of his family,
Lufeis mother was Viceroy Li Hongzhangs (1823-1901) niece.81 Coming
from an eminent literary family (shuxiang mendi), she was also herself an
educated woman.
Like Wang Yunwu, Lufei Kui was educated on a standard literati fare, including the Four Books, Shijing (Classic of Poetry), Yijing (Classic of Changes),
Zuozhuan, Shangshu (Classic of History), and the Tangshi sanbai shou. It was
an impressive if entirely conventional curriculum for one training for the
civil service examinations. Interestingly, though, young Lufei also studied
computing on the abacus, the key to a commercial career. Hence, much
more directly than the rarefied instruction and experience received by Zhang
Yuanji, and more similarly to Wang Yunwus early training, Lufeis education prepared him for the uncertainties of the late Qing literati job market.
Lufeis studies were interrupted only by the thunderclap of the 100 Days
of Reform in 1898. Told by his father to pay no mind to what he saw in
leisure papers (dianxin shubao), Lufei not only ignored his fathers command but also began to read Liang Qichaos lithographed Shiwubao (Chinese Progress) and the banned Qingyibao (Journal of Disinterested Criticism).
After supplementing his conventional education with this radical periodical
diet, Lufei and a classmate started a bookstore, Changming shudian, in
Wuchang.82 This was a fairly standard commercial alternative for Chinese
literati at the turn of the twentieth century. Lufei began at the top, though,

Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books, 1912-37

taking the positions of general manager and editor. After he fell out with his
partner, the bookstore closed.
Within half a year, Lufei went on to open his own firm, which he called
Xinxuejie shudian (New-Studies-World Bookstore). Purely a retail outlet,
with no publishing facilities whatsoever, the firm specialized in reformist
and revolutionary titles such as Zou Rongs (1885-1905) Gemingjun (The
Revolutionary Army) and Chen Tianhuas (d. 1905) Meng huitou (Wake
Up!), and Jingshizhong (Alarm to Arouse the Age).83 Just as significant, Lufei
began to write his own anti-Qing revolutionary tracts.84
Eager to take part in the anti-Qing Republican movement, Lufei joined a
newspaper discussion group influenced by Sun Yat-sens Xingzhonghui (Revive China Society).85 Soon several members were arrested, and, as is typical
of such organizations, the group itself was split by infighting and perfidy.
Appalled, Lufei lost interest in direct political action. He would continue to
support the anti-Manchu revolutionary cause from the sidelines but he also
recommitted himself to his educational activities.
While Lufei was busy in Wuchang with his bookstores and his hesitant
revolutionary activities, across the river in Hankou, the treaty port dominated by the British and the Americans, Wu Woyao (1866-1910), future
author of Vignettes from the Late Qing, was working as a newspaper editor.86 In
1905, Wu left his position on the Chubao (Hunan Journal), an Americanfinanced and -managed newspaper, perhaps as a political protest against the
American policy of Chinese exclusion. During the time Wu was still preparing to vacate Hankou, however, Lufei quit his bookshop in Wuchang, crossed
the river, and assumed a position as editor and reporter for Wus paper.
According to one account, Lufei and Wu worked together from summer to
fall of that year.87
Lufeis monthly salary at Chubao was fifty yuan. During the three months
that he was there, he wrote over ten articles dealing with reform and revolution. Soon, however, after the newspaper issued exposs detailing corruption in the Canton-Hankou Railway contract, warrants were issued for Lufeis
and his colleagues arrest. To avoid incarceration, Lufei had little choice but
to flee to Shanghai, where he could hide beyond the reach of the Qing
magistrates. Once in Shanghai, he prepared to go to Japan, but before he
could leave the lithographic publisher Changming gongsi (Changming Company, which had no known connection to his Wuchang bookstore) hired
him to manage its Shanghai branch off Henan Road.88 As he had in Wuchang,
Lufei doubled as an editor for Changming. Working with Ding Fubao (18741952), the well-known Shanghai physician and Buddhist scholar, he edited
at least three (unpublished) textbooks.89

227

228 The Three Legs of the Tripod

As we already know, as Changmings representative, Lufei participated

prominently in the founding of the Booksellers Trade Association in 1905-6.
In fact, he served as an officer of the association and wrote its bylaws. He
also ran the associations night school and edited its short-lived publication,
Tushu yuebao (Book Monthly).90 The association and its journal gave Lufei a
forum in which he could air some of his ideas on educational reform, including those for compressing (jia) Chinese characters as well as for the
use of romanization to facilitate memorization.
In the spring of 1906, the new Qing Ministry of Education issued its own
set of modern textbooks.91 However, as an ardent Republican and proponent of private publishing, Lufei believed that the Qing government should
not mandate certain textbooks through its Ministry of Education. Rather,
textbooks should be created by private publishers subject to endorsement
by the government. Lufei wrote an angry essay critical of the ministrys
books, which he thought contained antiquated material unsuitable for the
youngsters who would have to use them. His essay maintained, in part, that
the textbooks issued by the book bureau organized by the Ministry of
Education mostly copy the style of those from the Commercial Press and
Wenming, but they add on so much antiquated material (gudong cailiao) not
suitable for the minds of children that they have been severely criticized by
those outside the government.92 Lufeis criticism of the Qing governments
meddling in what he thought should be the business of private publishers
should not be misinterpreted as the Shanghai publishers declaration of
independence from state control. His position legitimated the role of the
state in endorsing textbooks, a view that makes clear the Chinese intellectuals
validation of state intervention in education. Indeed, one might argue that
Lufei recognized that, without the state, there could be no large-scale Chinese print capitalism.
Lufeis article obliquely praising Wenmings textbooks along with his work
at the Booksellers Trade Association must have brought Lufei to the attention of Yu Fu, association director and founder of Wenming Books. In June
1906, Lufei moved from Changming to Wenming. He was also appointed
principal of Wenmings affiliated primary school and held on to his position as head of the associations school. Along with Yu Fu, himself an erstwhile schoolteacher in Wuxi who had turned entrepreneurial publisher, and
Ding Fubao, Lufei worked on another set of textbooks covering Chinese
literature, civics (xiushen), and arithmetic. Again, as with the earlier set that
he had edited at Changming, finances made it impossible to issue the entire
set.93
From 1906 to 1908, Lufei Kui continued to cochair association meetings,
where Gao Mengdan of the Commercial Press began to appraise him. Gao

Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books, 1912-37

was impressed by Lufeis versatility in running a printing business and by

his fairly considerable editorial experience. After conferring with Zhang
Yuanji, in 1908 Gao offered Lufei a sizable salary94 to leave Wenming and
start work as an editor at the Commercial Press. Lufei accepted. In 1909, he
was promoted to direct both the publishing and communications departments and at the same time to become editor of the important Commercial
Press journal Educational Review.
Regarding the latter job, Lufei afterward said that one aspect of editing
the Educational Review for [those] three years was [that it allowed me] to
issue my own views critical of the Qing educational system.95 The academic system eventually adopted by China (three years of primary school,
three of elementary school, five of middle school, and a year of college
preparation leading to a three- or four-year university degree) was first proposed by Lufei in the pages of the Educational Review.96 Also, in spite of
strong opposition to the idea, Lufei used his editorship to expound his proposals for simplifying Chinese characters to bring literacy within the grasp
of more people more quickly.
While Lufei was at the Commercial Press, he also finally successfully published a textbook, this one on elementary commercial studies. Sold throughout the country, it was accepted by the Qing government with the comment
that this book is very distinctive and can be used as a text to supplement
elementary school commercial subjects and primary commercial school teaching materials.97 Through 1909 and 1910, Lufei continued to publish articles calling for educational reform. In the summer of 1910, when the
Ministry of Education called a meeting of the Zhong jiaoyu hui (All-China
Educational Association), Lufei went to Beijing with an entourage headed
by Zhang Yuanji. While there, he was selected as a section chief and wrote
the bylaws for that association. On his way back to Shanghai, he stopped in
Tianjin to tour nearly a dozen modern academic and vocational schools for
both boys and girls, all of which suggests a wide-ranging pragmatic interest
in educational reform.
In the months before the 1911 Revolution, various politically astute editors at the Commercial Press suggested that it prepare Republican textbooks.
Senior personnel such as Zhang Yuanji, however, insisted on adopting a
wait-and-see attitude (guanwang taidu). Zhang recognized that the textbooks
not only would have to be compiled in secret, but also could become a
criminal liability if a republic did not materialize. In addition, as Manying
Ip makes clear, even as many former constitutionalists were changing their
minds in favour of revolution after 1910, there is every indication that
Zhang Yuanji remained a [constitutional] monarchist right up to the last
months of 1911.98

229

230 The Three Legs of the Tripod

Publishing department director Lufei Kui strongly disagreed with Zhangs

decision on the textbooks. Interaction with Shanghais Tongmenghui (Revolutionary Alliance) stalwarts such as Liao Zhongkai (1878-1925) had convinced Lufei that conditions for radical change were maturing.99 Faithful to
the revolutionary principles that he had been studying and supporting since
1900, Lufei found fellow travellers in the Chinese-language editor Dai Kedun
and the sales departments Shen Zhifang. The three men soon began to
meet secretly at Lufeis house, working on new textbooks late into the night.
Lufeis brother, Lufei Shuzhen, also a revolutionary sympathizer and until
recently a student at Beijings Qinghua School, came south to Shanghai and
joined the secret editorial cabal.
To throw both their Commercial Press colleagues and the Qing courts eyes
and ears (Qingting ermu) off the conspirators trail, Lufei arranged to have the
textbooks printed at a Japanese-owned printing shop.100 Moreover, he sent
his brother there to read the proofs rather than check them at home. Next
Lufei resigned from the Commercial Press,101 and with his co-conspirators,
jointly invested 25,000102 yuan to set up a separate kitchen (ling qi luzao)103
founding Zhonghua Books as a partnership. The early partners, in addition
to Lufei, Shen, and Dai, included Chen Xiegong (d. 1935), whom Lufei had
known since they had worked together as editor/proofreaders at Wenming,104
and Ren Shenyi.105 Lufei, Shen, Dai, and Chen all left the Commercial Press
to undertake the new venture.
Timed to coincide perfectly with the establishment of the new Republican government, Zhonghua Books was formally founded on 1 January 1912,
but it did not actually open for business until 22 February.106 From the start,
Zhonghua was organized on the yichu sansuo principle (with a General Affairs Office supervising editorial, printing, and distribution departments)
that the Commercial Press would adopt in 1915.107 Lufei Kui, for the first
time since he and his partner had started up Changming shudian in Wuchang,
emerged again as general manager of a sizable publishing concern.108 Shen
Zhifang, who would eventually betray Lufeis firm, just as he and Lufei had
proven false to the Commercial Press, served as his assistant manager.109 Dai
Kedun headed the editorial office,110 assisted by Ren Shenyi in the elementary textbooks section and Yao Hanzhang in the section preparing middle
school and teachers college textbooks. Chen Xiegong took charge of business affairs.
Revealing the profound impact that textbook production had had on
Shanghai publishing since the first text had appeared with Nanyangs imprint in 1897, Zhonghua shuju xuanyan shu (Manifesto of Zhonghua Books),
composed by Lufei, stated that the foundation of the state is concern with

Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books, 1912-37

education, and the foundation of education is truly the textbook; [when]

education is not revolutionary the state finally has no way to be stabilized,
and [when] textbooks are not revolutionary, the purpose of education has
no way to be achieved.111 Soon after Zhonghua was founded, its explicitly
revolutionary and Republican textbooks in the series titled Zhonghua
xiaoxue jiaokeshu (Zhonghua Primary School Textbooks) and Zhonghua zhongxue
jiaokeshu (Zhonghua Middle School Textbooks) appeared. Adorned with the
new national flag, books flew off the presses and soon ranged from Chinese
literature, history, and geography to arithmetic and natural science.112
From 1912 to 1916, Zhonghuas main office and sales outlet were located
at the corner of Henan and Nanjing Roads, one of the busiest commercial
intersections in Shanghai then and now. In the winter of 1912, Lufei opened
a printing department with six presses on Fuzhou Road.113 The juren Yu Fu
of Wenming Books doubled as Lufeis head printer and held the job until
1927.114 Sales of Zhonghuas publications received a powerful boost when
President Yuan Shikais postrevolutionary government nullified all Qing
textbook endorsements. Suddenly, all of the Commercial Presss textbooks,
and those of other textbook publishers, were nothing but waste paper. Dealing the Commercial Press its first real setback since 1904,115 Zhonghua seized
the market temporarily. The Commercial Press managed finally to bring out
its hastily revised Republican Textbook series. In the interim, though, according to a speech recalled by Zhonghua employee Wu Tiesheng, Lufei Kui
described being utterly overwhelmed by the public clamour for Zhonghuas
textbooks: After we opened for business, letters and telegrams poured in from
every province (gesheng handian fenchi), and customers sat in front of the
door demanding [books]. We could not meet the demand and could not cope
with the financial strain (zuozhi youchu) ... It is hard to find language to describe the opportunity we lost.116 From 1904 to 1912, the Commercial Presss
textbooks had been distinguished by their covers featuring a yellow dragon,
symbol of the Qing dynasty. Now this marketing device was drastically out
of date. Furthermore, Zhonghua ruthlessly exploited the reformist conservatism of the Commercial Press along with the senior publishers ties to
Japan, issuing advertisements calling for Chinese to use Chinese textbooks.117
Eventually, according to Lufei, the Commercial Press recovered its monopolistic control of the textbook market. However, using guerrilla tactics,
Zhonghua had successfully carved out a niche for itself. Because the Commercial Presss prestige was so preponderant, Zhonghua was able to hold on
to only 30 percent of the textbook market, despite the older presss late
restart.118 Still, that slice bolstered Zhonghuas claim to be Republican Chinas
premier bookstore and publisher.

231

232 The Three Legs of the Tripod

In 1913, Lufei managed to quadruple Zhonghuas capital to 100,000

yuan. The editorial department moved to 83 East Broadway, the same general area in the old American sector in which Tongwen Press had been operated.119 The same year, former and future minister of education Fan Yuanlian
(1875-1927) began a three-year stint120 as head of the editorial office, and
his influence enabled Zhonghua to bring out two new textbooks so well
received121 that the workforce was expanded to 200. This expansion, on the
heels of issuing successful titles, is direct evidence of the intimate relationship between book sales and growth in Shanghais modern publishing sector in the period prior to 1928, when government patronage would become
the prime factor in publishers success.
Zhonghua now purchased nine more printing presses. Even with the added
capacity, the print shop could not meet the market demand, and Zhonghua
had to contract out some of its printing to Wenming.122 Regional sales
branches were also opened in 1913-14 in all of the major urban markets in
which the Commercial Press could be found, such as Beijing, Tianjin, Canton, Hankou, Nanjing, Fuzhou, Chengdu, and Kunming.123 Where the Commercial Press continued to make all marketing and editorial decisions at its
head office in Shanghai and then relayed them through branch managers
who travelled back and forth, Zhonghua relied much more on local initiative. With only a fraction of the Commercial Presss capital at its disposal,
Zhonghua depended on local literati to direct sales and did so successfully,
for it expanded rapidly.
Lufeis efforts at expansion were reinvigorated after he went to Japan to
view its publishing industry. His frustration at having been unable to satisfy
the demand that had greeted Zhonghuas opening in 1912 was reflected in
his view that the firm was hamstrung by its inability to plan ahead. Lufei
traced the source of this dilemma to Zhonghuas initial low investment:
The basis of business is this: As a small company, we could not plan our
own affairs. For this reason, we reorganized as a corporation, increased our
capital, wildly expanded our outlets, and did our own printing; in 1913, Fan
Yuanlian came in as chief editor, working hard to improve [our textbooks]
with the benefits of enriched content, a new method, and a new style; [we
brought out] eight big magazines [that] were popular; and the Zhonghua da
zidian (Zhonghua Big Dictionary) became an unprecedented success. It was
an extremely successful period!124
Zhonghua went public in 1915, reorganized as a joint-stock limited liability corporation (with the Chinese name Zhonghua shuju gufen youxian
gongsi).125 At the same time, it absorbed Wenming Books and a second firm,
seeking to increase its assets by following the blueprint drafted by the Commercial Press in 1913, when it had bought out two rivals.126

Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books, 1912-37

The tactic worked, at least in the short term. By mid-1916, the firms capital assets totalled 1.6 million yuan.127 Lufei Kui held on to the position of
director. He also appointed a group of notables to Zhonghuas board. They
included Fan Yuanlian along with the well-known constitutional monarchist,
journalist, and former Commercial Press editor, Liang Qichao; the former first
premier of the Republic, Tang Shaoyi (1860-1938); and Tangs former vice
minister of industry and commerce and future premier, Wang Zhengting (18821961). Access to increased capital enabled the enlarged company finally to
open its own printing facility. After buying several hundred new and used
machines, Zhonghua fully outfitted a new factory on a forty-mu (6.6 acres)
site along Hardoon Road in the Jingan district of the International Concession, seeking to match the large plant that the Commercial Press had been
building outside the concession on Baoshan Road since 1907.128 Four printing
departments were established: letterpress, lithographic, photomechanical,
and intaglio, the last to enable the printing of financial instruments.129 Technicians were hired from Japan and Germany. The success of the Zhonghua da
zidian130 and works by Liang Qichao expedited the firms growth.131 Soon
Zhonghua had forty branches nationwide and over 2,000 employees.132
At the same time that Zhonghua was planning its printing shop, it bought
the real estate that opened the Fuzhou Road district to the major modern
publishers. Taking possession of the southwest corner of the Henan Road
and Fuzhou Road intersection, Zhonghua soon erected a five-storey head
office building. The new site enabled Lufei to consolidate in one location
his administrative and editorial offices from East Broadway with his sales
outlet, formerly on Nanjing Road. Symbolically, Zhonghua, the number
two claimant to the national market, was announcing its intention of relocating the centre of Shanghais and by now, increasingly, Chinas main book
district. Furthermore, Zhonghuas new purpose-built publishing citadel, by
dominating the intersection that led into what would become the Central
Plains of Republican Chinese publishing, guaranteed that pedestrians, approaching from the amusement district to the west along Fuzhou Road or
en route to the book dealers still located north or south, would have to pay
obeisance to the booklords of Zhonghua.
The symbolism was not lost on the Commercial Press. Soon thereafter, it
left its redoubt farther up Henan Road, near Nanjing Road, and moved into
new quarters immediately south of Zhonghua. The Commercial Press was
in fact wedged in on both sides, for its old rival, Wenming Books, formerly
located on Fuzhou Road and now owned by Zhonghua,133 lined up next to it
almost immediately,134 completing the image of Chinas three corporate publishing lords of that day facing the financial edifices a few blocks east along
the Bund.

233

234 The Three Legs of the Tripod

Although the Commercial Press and Wenming Books were actually still
located along Henan Road, it makes sense to talk of Fuzhou Road and the
area around it as the centre of Chinas publishing industry from 1916 onward. Once the large corporate publishers established themselves in the
district, smaller, less robust, and more narrowly based firms crowded into
their immediate environs and built on the foundations erected by bookshops
since the 1890s. In 1916, Carl Crow, the American publicity agent and
author, although personally aware only of the translation business, nevertheless accurately announced the curtain-rising on this new stage of
Shanghais Chinese-language book publishing industry:
During the past few years there has been a marked growth in local manufactures ... Shanghai is [now] the publishing centre of China, especially as concerns modern Chinese literature. It was here that the first progressive
newspapers were issued and the first translations made of foreign books into
Chinese. This translation has extended to so many lines during the past few
years that it is no longer possible to give a complete list of the books, [with]
new ones appearing every few days. Today the [translated] books in popular
demand include the writings of Henry George, Huxley, Darwin, Spencer, Uncle
Toms Cabin, Sherlock Holmes, Greens History of England, Life of Lincoln, etc.135

In 1917, however, Zhonghuas dreams of supremacy, symbolized by the

five-storey bulwark guarding that Fuzhou-Henan Road intersection, nearly
brought down the publishing and bookselling kingdom that Lufei had been
striving to build since the early days of the Republican Revolution. At the
time, Zhonghuas annual sales exceeded one million yuan, but ruthless competition and rising costs seriously reduced the firms profit margin.136
Seeking an explanation for Zhonghuas crisis, Lufei Kui himself blamed
the rise in the cost of paper brought on by the European war. According to
Lufei, four influential persons from inside and outside Zhonghuas management were essential to its survival and had repeatedly assisted the firm
during these early years: editors Dai Kedun and Fan Yuanlian; Chen Zhongyu;
and stockholder and big investor Song Yaoru (Charles Jones Soong, 18661918), father of future Nationalist government minister Song Ziwen (T.V.
Soong, 1894-1971) and of the famous Soong sisters and, in this way, fatherin-law of Sun Yat-sen, of H.H. Kung (Kong Xiangxi [1881-1967]), and future father-in-law of Chiang Kai-shek.137
In 1916, the same year that Zhonghua moved into its new headquarters,
it had also sought to raise money. The goal was to combine new resources
with the firms existing capital so that its total assets would equal those of

Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books, 1912-37

the Commercial Press. Sadly, Zhonghua was able to raise only part of what
it needed.
This disappointment was quickly followed by a series of near-disasters.
First, in late 1916 or early 1917, the board of directors had ordered assistant manager Shen Zhifang to account for expenditures involving the expansion of the firms physical plant. Directors Jiang Mengping and Chen
Baochu demanded information about Shens supervision of what had become the firms new purpose-built Jingan district printing plant, erected a
year earlier.
This was not the first time that the board had called Shen to account for
money spent under his watch. As supplies manager for Zhonghua, Shen
had earlier engaged an American firm to order large quantities of paper
from overseas. He himself had also ordered a large quantity. Unexpectedly,
the world war had broken out, and the international price of paper had
risen, costing Zhonghua dearly. In 1917, questions about the Hardoon Road
construction and a lawsuit mounted against him personally by the American importer138 both caught up with Shen. Forced to outrun the officers of
the Mixed Court, he left Shanghai, derailing his career with Zhonghua.
Just as Shen Zhifang was coming under the scrutiny of the law, Lufei Kui
himself was implicated for malfeasance.139 According to researchers Wang
Zhen and He Yueming,140 Lufei was sued in the Mixed Court for embezzling
funds entrusted to the firm under a deathbed trust (linzhongguan de cunkuan).
As a result of the suit mounted by Shen Jifang,141 a Commercial Press employee and Zhonghua investor, Lufei Kui was incarcerated, pending trial.
Soon, though, Zhonghuas printing plant mortgage was entrusted by the
court to a securities firm. Although Lufei appeared to have lost part of his
printing business in the settlement, he was released from jail as a result of
the deal.142
Wu Tiesheng, who joined the firm in the 1930s, has written that investors, presumably in panic, began to withdraw their money in 1917. Suddenly, Zhonghua was faced with the strong likelihood of bankruptcy. Just as
customers had once sat in Zhonghuas Nanjing Road retail outlet waiting
for books that the firm could not yet afford to print, so too creditors now
occupied the firms accounts office demanding to get their money back.143
Discussing the threat of bankruptcy in 1917 and the conditions that had
led Zhonghua to the brink, Lufei summed up the challenges of running
Zhonghua by citing military and competitive obstacles: The causes of the
panic [included]: first, the budget could not be made carefully, and this
imprecise budget was caused by domestic warfare, which reduced income;
moreover, the European war caused expenses to rise. Second, competition
in the publishing business was fierce, and the selling prices [of books] did

235

236 The Three Legs of the Tripod

not cover the costs of production.144 In Lufeis view, not only did the Shanghai
publishers suffer from the high operating costs and overhead imposed by
the necessity of purchasing much of their machinery (and paper) from
abroad, but also local conditions, particularly civil war and excessive competition within the publishing world weakened its economic viability. In
1917, when Zhonghua ran into difficulties, selling prices did not even cover
production costs, according to Wu Tiesheng. At that time, the Commercial
Press encouraged sales with a coupon system, by means of which each consumer would get three textbooks for the price of two and two trade books
for the price of one.145 In the view of Commercial Press director Gao Mengdan,
this kind of competition was seriously counterproductive. Rather than leading to both sides getting slightly hurt, in his view, each side threatened the
other with the prospect of annihilation.146
Regarding Lufeis release from jail, Wu Tiesheng suggests a scenario that
differs from the one cited above. In Wus view, Shi Liangcai (1879-1934),
owner since 1912 of Shanghais leading Chinese-language newspaper,
Shenbao, paid Lufeis bail, returning Lufei to the publishing firm a free man.
In this version of events, Shi Liangcai had had designs on Zhonghua for
some time and now took advantage of Lufeis financial vulnerability to effect what we today call a hostile takeover. Shi took Zhonghuas printing
plates (stereotypes) as collateral for Lufeis release and good conduct and
stored them in the Shenbao newspaper offices, located half a block away
from Zhonghuas main office. The board of directors then elected Shi Liangcai
head of Zhonghua, a position that he held just long enough to balance the
firms accounts.147
In July 1917, according to Wu, Zhonghuas plant was rented out to Xinhua
Company but regained its autonomy in November.148 Determined to find
some solution to the firms financial precariousness, Lufei now turned to
his rival and former employer, the Commercial Press. Talks were conducted
with the extraordinary goal of combining the two firms,149 but internal resistance at the Commercial Press compromised the deal, and it fell through. In
one view, however, Lufei himself became the chief opponent of the merger
when the deals terms stipulated that he would have to remain outside publishing for the next decade.150
A year later, in July 1918, the Changzhou businessman Wu Jingyuan and
ten others organized the Weihua Bank Group (Weihua yintuan) and granted
Zhonghua a three-year loan of 60,000 yuan.151 Wu also took over as
Zhonghuas managing director in charge of finances152 and reorganized
Zhonghuas board of directors, introducing Yu Youren (1879-1964153), H.H.
Kung,154 brother-in-law to Sun Yat-sen and eventually to Chiang Kai-shek
by virtue of his marriage to Song Ailing (1890-1973), and Kang Xinru.155

Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books, 1912-37

Lufei was temporarily relieved of his directorial responsibilities. Assigned to

manage the retail store, he soon arranged to return to the boardroom.156
Three years later, however, after the bank groups loan had matured,
Zhonghuas situation had still not improved, and director Gao Xinmu and
six others organized the Heji gongsi (Heji Company) to lend Zhonghua
90,000 yuan for a second three-year period. Both of these loans had to be
extended for further three-year periods.157
Long after he left the Commercial Press, where he had been able to air his
views on the reform of education in Educational Review, Lufei continued to
use every public opportunity to advance his own educational ideas in writing. Even as he was starting up Zhonghua and then struggling to keep the
firm together, Lufei continued to write and publish, lobbying strongly on
behalf of his view that education could save China.158 Having broken with
Zhang Yuanji, the dean of Shanghais urban reformist publishers on the eve
of the 1911 Revolution, Lufei then promoted educational reform as a foundation for the newly established republic.
Lufeis sustained public advocacy of educational reform throughout the
1910s established his reputation in government circles. Despite his own
brushes with the law in 1917, serious enough to have required him to resign
as director, succour had come immediately from the highest levels of government. When former editorial department chief, Fan Yuanlian, again minister of education, heard of Lufeis problems, he offered Lufei a position in
the ministry.159 Lufei politely declined the offer because, in Wu Tieshengs
view, he thought the cultural education business provided [him with] the
basis for hundreds of causes (baiye zhiji).160
Lufeis view anticipated themes that he would outline in a 1924 preface
to a volume commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the establishment of the Booksellers Trade Association. In that preface, he articulated
the notion that the expansion of education and publishing were mutually
dependent. Throughout his twenty years in Shanghais modern publishing
sector, just like hundreds of others who worked there, Lufei proclaimed that
he had been contributing to the advancement and modernization of China:
In these twenty years, what has been the worlds progress? What has been the
nations progress? Societys progress? Educations progress? Learning and ideas
progress? ... [What with] natural disasters, and civil war, and the prices of
commodities, and the currency anarchy, inconvenience of transportation all
sorts of problems [in the nation generally] we still have had twentyfold of
progress in the book trade during these twenty years. [If] we want the nation
and society to advance, we must [also] want education to advance; [if] we want
education to advance, we must [also] want the book business to advance.

237

238 The Three Legs of the Tripod

Although our book business is a relatively small [modern] industry, still it has
a [close] connection with the nation and society, and for this reason [it] is
somewhat bigger than any other [modern Chinese industry].161

His statement also harkens back to his view of the early 1900s when he had
suggested that Chinese print capitalism could not function without state
patronage.
Between 1919 and 1926, with Lufei back in command, Zhonghua underwent more or less steady expansion. It was made possible in part by a series
of successful publications known as the Big Eight Journals that supplemented its staple of textbooks. Under Lufeis sponsorship, Zhonghua brought
out Zhonghua yingwen zhoubao (Chinese-English Weekly) and Zhonghua shushang yuebao (Chinese Booksellers Monthly). In addition, Zhonghua issued
collectanea of the New Culture Movement and published the magazines
Xinli (Psychology), Xueheng (Critical Review), Guoyu (National Language),
Shaonian Zhongguo (Young China), and Xiao pengyou (Friends), along with
other publications for children. In the same period, Zhonghua increased its
annual profit to 200,000 yuan and opened branches in Changde, Hengyang,
Wuzhou, Jiujiang, Wuhu, Xuzhou, Qingdao, Zhangjiakou, and Lanzhou.
By 1927, it had also expanded its retailing operations into Hong Kong.162
In 1928, the Nationalists Northern Expedition finally united the country politically after a dozen years of nearly endless warlord fighting. Although the workers uprising in March 1927 had provoked Lufei to leave
Shanghai for Japan, he returned just after the April massacre to take the
reins again.163 The establishment of the new national government in Nanjing
stimulated him to contemplate further expansion. With this goal in mind,
in 1929 Zhonghua founded Shanghais Zhonghua jiaoyu yongju zhizao chang
(Zhonghua Educational Instruments Factory) on Kunming Road.164 A year
later, when Zhonghua director H.H. Kung was appointed minister of industry in the Nanjing government, Lufei exploited Kungs connection to
Zhonghua by having him selected as chairman of the board. Using his official influence, Kung brought considerable business in the factorys direction. Thus, manufacturing, promulgation of educational theory, publishing,
and politicking all overlapped.
In 1932, Zhonghua augmented its printing plant.165 Thanks to its government connections, the firm soon gained commissions to print government
securities and small denominations of currency. It also contracted to print
cigarette boxes for private tobacco companies.166 In the same year, of course,
the Commercial Press plant was destroyed by Japanese bombers, knocking
Zhonghuas major competitor out of the publishing market for nearly a
year. During this hiatus, reminiscent of the year 1912, when Zhonghua had

Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books, 1912-37

Figure 5.4 Zhonghua Books general printing plant, Macao (Aomen) Road, Shanghai,
1935.
Source: Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei dangshi yanjiu shi and Shanghaishi zonggonghui, eds.,
Zhonghua shuju zongchang zhigong yundong shi (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 1991),
frontmatter.

first taken the field without having to look over its shoulder for the Commercial Press, Zhonghuas profits reached 400,000 yuan. By 1934, Zhonghua
had opened an advanced printing plant in Kowloon, chiefly to print currency and government securities. In the same year, Zhonghua crossed
an important threshold, publishing geologist Ding Wenjiangs (1887-1936)
Zhonghua minguo xin ditu (New Map of Republican China), the first completely Chinese-drafted and Chinese-printed modern map of China.167
A year later, in 1935, with Lufei Kui having resumed directorship of the
board from H.H. Kung, Zhonghua opened a new printing plant inside the
concession on Shanghais Macao (Aomen) Road (see Figure 5.4).168 Editorial facilities were also relocated there from the Henan and Fuzhou Roads
intersection. Part of the Educational Instruments Factory was dispersed,
and a subsidiary called Baoan Industries was created to manufacture rubber boats, gas masks, nautical lights, and other products that Zhonghua
could sell to the defence ministry. By the spring of 1937, Zhonghuas profits returned to the 400,000-yuan level. Its forty retail branches nationwide
had done ten million yuan in sales. Since its founding in 1912, Zhonghua had
published over 5,000 titles.169 The two main plants, Shanghai and Hong Kong,
together employed more than 3,000 workers, and Zhonghua was now regarded as the finest colour printer in China. Its printing plant had over 300
printing presses, including rotary machines, colour rotogravure presses, 100
intaglio presses, and an immense range of Chinese and Western type sets.170

239

240 The Three Legs of the Tripod

Lufei Kuis career had paralleled Zhonghuas. The would-be scholarpolitician now ascended to high-level positions in both the commercial and
the governmental worlds, actually anticipating Wang Yunwu. After 1929,
he chaired Shanghais new Nationalist-sponsored Booksellers Same-Industry Association, which undermined the corporate independence formerly
promoted by the booksellers guild and trade association. Simultaneously,
Lufei served on the Ministry of Industrys planning committee for a newsprint mill and on the Zhonghua gongye zong lianhehui (Chinese Industrial
General Federation).171 He was also named a director of the Zhongfa
dayaofang (Sino-French Pharmacy).172
Founded in 1912 in a preemptive blow to the Commercial Press, Zhonghua
Books had also rapidly established itself as Republican Chinas most important printing and publishing alternative to it. From the birth of the Republic in 1912 to the Japanese invasion in 1937, no other prominent publisher
was so wildly buffeted by the winds of Chinese print capitalism or rode
them out so successfully by identifying with the changing fortunes of Chinese republicanism. During the era from 1912 to 1927, prior to the establishment of the Nationalist government capital in Nanjing, Zhonghua
demonstrated its eagerness to compete in the topsy-turvy world of Chinese
print capitalism. In 1914, in a bid to expand its physical plant and its financial base, Lufei reorganized the firm as a corporation. By 1917-18, however,
despite consistent rapid expansion, economic, legal, and personnel troubles
undermined the firm and led it into collaboration with Nationalist-allied
capital. Although this alliance represented one step back in corporate independence, eventually it enabled Zhonghua to take two steps forward in
advancing its corporate objectives with the Nationalist state.
With Lufei Kui still at the helm, Zhonghua weathered the 1920s, even as
it tacked more and more conspicuously toward the Nationalist shore. Between 1928 and 1937, Zhonghua became a permanent client of the
governments patronage, printing its security instruments and even its money,
while simultaneously holding on to a nominal independence, thanks in part
to its perennial success with 30 percent of the textbook market until 1937.
Incorporation in 1914 gave Zhonghua the technology, organizational structure, and financial flexibility needed to underwrite its permanent effort to
keep up with the government. As Lufei had implied in the early 1900s in his
criticism of the Qing states production of its own textbooks, and again in
1924 in his statement to the Booksellers Trade Association, Chinese print
capitalist firms could not operate successfully without all four technology,
organization, finance, and government patronage. Having all four granted
Lufei Kui and Zhonghua a degree of stability and permanence denied Shen
Zhifang and World Books.

Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books, 1912-37

Shen Zhifang and World Book Company, Ltd., 1921-37

In 1917, Zhonghua had found itself weakened not only from without but
also by internal mismanagement. As noted above, assistant manager Shen
Zhifangs expansion projects and mistimed orders had twice weakened the
firm from within. Who was Shen Zhifang, this scalawag of the publishing
world who had set in motion the disastrous events that seriously compromised Zhonghuas independence? According to the view of one of his army
of authors, Shen was the outstanding oddity (guaijie) of the Shanghai
publishing world.173 His special qualities stemmed from the fact that, even
in an era when it was common for publishing entrepreneurs to become involved in a multiplicity of enterprises, Shen far surpassed ordinary standards of the day, starting up approximately ten publishing operations during
his career.
Only one of Shens enterprises, World Books, made a major impact on
the city of Shanghai or on the Chinese Republic. Through his association
with World Books, however, Shen became a seminal figure in promoting the
image of Fuzhou Road as the symbolic and commercial centre of Republican Chinas book world. In doing so, he added a component of sheer commercial opportunism to that industry. Shens shifting presence distinguishes
the culture of Fuzhou Road from what came before and placed it solidly
within the ruthless marketplace of Republican China.
Like many of Wenhuajies leading figures, Shen Zhifang hailed from
Zhejiang. He was born in Shaoxings Cangqiao Street. Unlike Wang Yunwus
and Lufei Kuis biographies, in Shens background there is no whiff of a
literati upbringing or of attempts at self-cultivation through public service.
Instead, from a young age, Shen learned about books as a commodity. He
left school in about 1897 to enter the citys Guizhaolou shufang as an unpaid apprentice.174 A year later, he left that firm to apprentice at a bookstore
in Yuyao.175 After another year had passed, the seventeen-year-old found
employment in Shanghais Huiwentang shuju, then probably located on
Henan Road,176 and so started his long association with the Shanghai booksellers district. Shens fleeting loyalties and frequent changes of employment foreshadowed the twists and turns that became a permanent feature
of his career, which unfolded with an air of sharp-edged competition and
unrelenting effort to hit a publishing jackpot.
Shens business acumen drew the attention of Xia Ruifang, the Commercial Press founder who had a reputation for recognizing talent and putting it
to work. By 1900,177 Xia had hired Shen away from his employer to work as
a street peddler (paojie), a typical entry-level job in highly commercialized
and urbanized Shanghai.178 After a year, Shen left even the Commercial
Press, casting his net over a newly opened Cantonese firm called Lequn

241

242 The Three Legs of the Tripod

shuju. With four years of experience in the retail book business, however,
Shen was already thinking of moving upstream to join those who actually
supplied the retailers that is, the publishers. Working at Lequn may have
been just the opportunity that Shen thought he needed. Engaging an editor,
he soon began to publish pirated Commercial Press textbooks under Lequns
imprint. Within a year, predictably, the Commercial Press sued Lequn for
copyright infringement. Incredibly, as Lequn tottered, Xia Ruifang invited
Shen Zhifang to rejoin the Commercial Press179 in his old position.
Back in the fold, Shen soon left his job as street peddler behind and was
promoted to a job at 200 yuan per month as Xias personal advisor. In this
capacity, he received a five-year contract that he renewed upon its completion for a second term. Apparently, these contracts did not preclude outside
ventures, for Shen was soon involved180 in setting up the Fulunshe (Fulun
Society), which in 1910 began to publish Chinese literature (guoxue) for antiManchu ends.
Wang Junqing joined Shen as partner-editor in the Fulun Society venture.
Taking advantage of both the protection afforded Chinese publishers within
the International Concession and the lightened enforcement of publishing
restrictions by the overextended and increasingly moribund Qing court, the
two editors published a wide variety of prohibited works. In particular, the
Fulun group brought out dozens of collected works by the proscribed MingQing official Qian Qianyi (1582-1664),181 anti-Qing petitioner and vernacular
literature critic Jin Shengtan (1610-1661),182 scholar-official Fang Bao (16681749),183 leading statecraft theoretician Gong Zizhen (1792-1841),184 and
constitutional monarchists Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao.
Eventually, the Fulun Society was bought out by the Commercial Press,185
and Shen moved on to a new enterprise, joining forces with Chen Liyan to
start the Gushu liutongchu (Ancient Book Dissemination Bureau) located
on Maijiayuan.186 Chen acted as manager, and Shen, with connections presumably acquired through his travels as a paojie, worked as an acquisitions
supervisor. In this capacity, Shen managed to acquire the Ningbo library
known as the Baojinglou. Taking the rare and even proscribed volumes from
it, Shen collated, printed, and sold them separately, using the library volumes as a kind of exemplar collection. For this activity, he was widely praised
in revolutionary and intellectual circles.187
In his next project, Shen Zhifang established the Jinbu shuju (Progressive
Bookstore) on the original Fuzhou Road site of Wenming Books. His partner in this venture was his nephew, Shen Junsheng.188 Under Shen Zhifangs
direction, the new firm printed over 100 Ming and Qing biji (anecdotal
essays) and novels, many of which were quite rare as a result of repeated
Qing book inquisitions. Partly because of their anti-Qing sentiment, they

Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books, 1912-37

sold very well. Always dabbling in new ventures that could exploit fissures
in the market, Shen Zhifang started another firm in these early years known
as the Zhonghua yudi xueshe (Chinese Map Study Society). Having discovered that modern Western-style primary and middle schools featured geography courses, Shen and his partner began to publish maps of the world and
of the Chinese provinces189 under the Map Study Societys imprint to supply books for the geography curriculum.
On the eve of the Revolution of 1911, Xia Ruifang, equally alert to new
business opportunities, called in his advisor Shen Zhifang. Is the revolution going to succeed and, if so, should we start a new set of textbooks now
to prepare for it? he queried Shen.190 Shen dissembled, denying that any
changes were necessary, telling Xia that the revolution would fail. At the
same time, as noted above, Shen had already begun meeting with the
Zhonghua textbook cabal at Lufei Kuis home.191
When the 1911 Revolution did come to pass, opening broad new business opportunities for a growing range of merchants including book publishers, Shens and Lufeis new organization was ready to mount its stealth
attack on the Commercial Presss hegemony. With Lufei acting as general
manager, Shen assumed vice-managerial responsibilities and was put in charge
of the retail outlet. In that first year, Zhonghua began to buy out Wenming
Books, the stalwart of the prerevolutionary decade, soon rendering it what
Bao Tianxiao calls a dependency.192 Appointed to direct Wenming, Shen
was soon supervising Bao, then chief editor of Wenmings quarterly literary
anthology, Xiaoshuo daguan (Guide to Literature), as well.
During the three years193 that Bao and Shen worked together, Bao had
ample opportunity to observe Shens character. Bao believed that Shen was
distinguished chiefly by what merchants call an eye for business (shengyi
yan).194 Bao reached this conclusion through a series of discussions over the
name of the quarterly, which struck Bao himself as philistine and sure to
inspire ridicule.195 Shen, on the other hand, was eager, according to Baos
Han-dynasty analogy, to play General Han Xin and lead the soldiers [i.e.,
other publishers] (Huaiyin jiangbing)196 and insisted on the name, reasoning
that, Once we publish it, we want it to be a sensation. After we decide, I
will prepare some advertisements. If we use the name Xiaoshuo daguan, I will
be able to control things when I peddle it [because guides, or daguan, were
selling well], but if we use another name I cannot guarantee anything.197
Bao felt trapped between Shen and the market that Shen held out for the
journal. In the end, he went along with Shen on the journals name198 but
refused to compromise on the cover art. According to Bao, they next debated the journals cover, with Baos insistence on elegant calligraphy
by guest calligraphers winning out. Shen pondered long and hard, says

243

244 The Three Legs of the Tripod

Bao. Finally, he gambled that maybe it was time to abandon what was
already then a hackneyed marketing gimmick namely, pretty girls on
the cover.199
In spite of Baos frustration with Shens effort to cheapen the impression
presented by the quarterly, Bao does concede that Shen and WenmingZhonghua marketed the publication very successfully. Shen really did have
command of the marketing aspect [of publishing], Bao writes, thanks to
Zhonghuas extensive national branch store system.200 This system, supplemented by local retail kiosks (fenxiaochu), guaranteed that a minimum of
4,000-5,000 copies could be sold each quarter.201 On Baos testimony, then,
by the mid-1910s, Zhonghua manager Shen Zhifang already displayed great
marketing ingenuity as well as shrewdness about how to manipulate the
cupidity of authors. In spite of Baos moderating influence, Shen relied on
clever post-Qing marketing techniques and did so with great success at the
cash register. Shen was well down the path of marketing gimmickry; this
mentality would incrementally coarsen Shanghais publishing world and its
sense of taste and decorum.
In 1917, as already noted, Shen Zhifang was forced to leave Shanghai to
sidestep a lawsuit brought against him by a foreign firm. According to Zhu
Lianbao (1904-88), however, who joined the central administration of World
Books in 1921 and remained there until 1950, Shen was forced to leave
Shanghai because of his imprudent participation in a scheme to manufacture Dragon-and-Tiger brand medicine. For evidence, Zhu cites the view of
Shens brother, Shen Zhongfang, saying that Shen joined forces with Huang
Chujiu to found the Zhonghua zhiyao gongsi (China Medicine Company).202
In addition to patent medicine, Shen and Huang prepared to manufacture matches.203 What they had not anticipated was that securing a necessary ingredient, gunpowder (baiyao), from the American firm Maosheng
would involve them with the military and entangle them on the losing side
of a lawsuit. It was actually for this latter reason that Shen left Zhonghua in
1917 and fled to Suzhou. After arriving in the neighbouring city, Shen issued his own obituary in the newspaper, announcing that he had succumbed
to illness. In this way, Shen hoped to throw his pursuers off his trail!204
Rising almost immediately from his grave, Shen started over in Suzhou,
engaging editors to prepare manuscripts. Soon he even dared to sneak back
to Shanghai, leasing rooms off Baoshan Road205 and in Fuzhou Roads
Qichang Hotel to serve as his new bases of operations.206 Without money to
rent a storefront, he offered his manuscripts for sale to his nephew, Shen
Junsheng, by this time a founder and board-member of Dadong shuju.207
In this period, Shen Zhifang marketed books with relatively polite contents under the name of Guangwen; indecent or shady materials bore the

Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books, 1912-37

imprint of Zhongguo diyi shuju (China First) or Shijie shuju (World Books).
Of the three shadowy firms, Worlds materials found the widest audience.
As the market for Worlds publications grew, Shen realized that he had
chanced across a name that surpassed that of his old firm (Zhonghua, or
China) in symbolic scope. He began to dream of an actual market that
would correspond in size to the name of his company. Eventually, Worlds
logo did feature a globe.208
Between 1917 and 1920, Shen Zhifangs privately owned (duzi) company, World Books, brought out over 200 titles,209 apparently hampered
only by a lack of operating capital. In 1921, just as the Commercial Press,
Zhonghua, and many others in the Shanghai publishing world had done
before him, Shen led World into a merger with another firm.210 Realizing his
goal of gaining greater financial resources, Shens new joint-stock corporation (called Shijie shuju gufen youxian gongsi) was capitalized at 25,000
silver yuan,211 meagre investment given the resources then available in Shanghai. As a result, Shen would spend the next thirteen years in nearly constant
pursuit of consumer patronage and investor confidence.
Shen Zhifang remained the chief investor in the new corporation from
1921 to 1934.212 The new retail outlet, painted red and known ever after as
the Red House,213 opened on 7 July 1921 in a lane near the corner of
Fuzhou and Shandong Roads; the administrative offices of World Books
remained there until 1925. To promote sales, cheap gifts were distributed to
customers.214 Shen assumed the position of general manager and was assisted by a complete range of Western-style administrative departments
(business office, retail manager, branch store managers, and credit, wholesaling, and mail order departments215). World printed its publications in
two plants216 located in Zhabei district. In addition to selling its own publications, just as Dadong had recently retailed Shens publications, World
now handled those of smaller publishers that could not afford to run their
own retail outlets on Fuzhou Road217 but still sought access to the customers
who, by the 1920s, thronged the central book market of China.
Between 1921 and 1923, Shen Zhifang set out to make a killing in the
trade-book market, publishing all manner of low-brow literature intended
to attract the interest of petty urbanites (xiao shimin).218 In fact, his publishing company became well known for these publications, particularly trashy
traditional novels of the mandarin duck and butterfly school (yuanyang
hudie pai) edited, rearranged, punctuated, and then sold at low prices despite having been bound in relatively expensive Western-style covers.219
Longer novels popular with Shanghais petty urbanites included Zhang
Henshuis (b. 1895) works and Cheng Xiaoqings Fuermosi tan an quanji
(Complete Famous Detective Stories).220 World Books also specialized in

245

246 The Three Legs of the Tripod

popular biographies and anecdotes of famous persons, such as the revolutionary politician Sun Yat-sen, the warlord general Feng Yuxiang (18821948, himself soon to become a loyal World customer), and the actor Tan
Xinpei (1847-1917). Attempting to keep pace with Zhonghuas famous Big
Eight Journals and those of other Fuzhou Road publishers, World also
issued five periodicals aimed at the same petty urbanite readership that
bought its books.221 Last but not least, in 1925 World created the name
lianhuanhua shu (serial-picture books) for its comic book-style presentation
of the famous sixteenth-century novel Xiyou ji (Journey to the West).222
Sales in the north and elsewhere were enhanced by the steady spread of
Worlds Shanghai-based publishing operation into other cities. In the first
two years of the companys existence, staff increased to over 100.223 Many
were employed in the new editorial and printing facilities at the corner of
Hongjiang and Baoshan Roads in Zhabei directed by Zhang Yunshi and
Wang Chunbao. Branch offices were opened in Canton, Beijing, Hankou,
and Fengtian.224
Just as Xia Ruifang had been distinguished by his eye for talent, so too
Shen Zhifang was remarkable for his eye for business.225 Shen acknowledged,
however, that editors and staff were the key to the publishing business.
Having opened his firm just as Wang Yunwus methods began driving editors out of the Commercial Press, Shen was able to hire them and dozens
more from his other two largest competitors, Zhonghua and Dadong.226
Generally speaking, he favoured nonfamily employees, and once he hired
them, he trusted them absolutely. Although he had a reputation for haughtiness to outsiders, Shen was always polite to Worlds editors and authors,
say his biographers.227
By 1923, with Worlds trade books, magazines, and trial textbooks already selling well, Shen Zhifang boldly decided to break into the national
textbook market. The National Language (guoyu or Mandarin Chinese)
Movement had picked up considerable energy during the New Culture Movement. The literary movement now prompted the leading textbook publishers to solicit the patronage of those seeking to promote literacy in a national
vernacular. Where the Commercial Press and Zhonghua, respectively, had
sought guaranteed patronage by relentless pursuit of the textbook market
from the start of their operations, Shen only now tried to branch out from
the trade market that had proven so profitable for him. However, the year
1923 was not 1904 or 1912, the years in which the Commercial Press and
Zhonghua had seized control of the textbook market. Thus, when Shen
entered the national textbook market, he was forced to deal with the complex politics of the warlord era (1916-28) and the vigour of his two main
opponents.

Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books, 1912-37

At the time, Chinas central government was under the domination of the
Beiyang Clique; all textbooks had to be approved by the cliques Ministry
of Education, located in Beijing, before they could be sold legally.228 To expedite clearance of Worlds textbooks, Shen Zhifang borrowed a leaf from the
histories of both the Commercial Press and Zhonghua. He engaged the former
chancellor of Beijing University, Hu Renyuan (1883-1942), and Beijing
education notable Li Jinxi,229 to supervise the new set of textbooks, hoping
in this way to promote his publications with the ministry. At the same time,
though, and just to be sure of his position, he sent bribes to members of the
ministry staff.
Shens first general textbook230 appeared in 1924. Under his direction,
editors Fan Yunliu and Zhang Yunshi prepared the initial group of elementary school textbooks. However, World Books soon departed from traditional textbook design by targeting specialized markets with textbooks created
for them. Indeed, World was one of the first Shanghai publishers actively to
seek the patronage of nonurban learners. Hence, texts were designed for
rural areas, small cities, and metropolitan areas. Book series were divided
into A (countryside and small towns), B (small- and middle-sized cities), and
C (middle- and large-sized cities and overseas) series. Different editors were
hired for each series. For example, World engaged the well-known follower
of John Dewey and rural reconstructionist Tao Xingzhi (1891-1946) to edit
two sets of trial textbooks for industrial workers and peasants.231 The books
sold widely throughout the Yangzi provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Anhui.
There were also books for special classes that ran in nonstandard periods of
time, such as books for peasants who could spare time for studying only in
the off-season.232 In the northern province of Hebei, warlord Feng Yuxiang
adopted another trial series for instructing his soldiers.233
Hunting out and then satisfying these specialized markets enabled World
Books actually to surpass the conventional suppliers in sales, opening what
would become known as the final chapter in the long series of intermittent
textbook wars stretching back to 1904. Worlds success was now viewed as
a direct challenge by the Commercial Press and Zhonghua, the former newly
led by Wang Yunwu and the latter by Lufei Kui. These two firms responded
with a united front against their common enemy.
The showdown began with a payoff. Lufei Kui, Shens former partner,
made his way up Fuzhou Road from his offices on the Henan Road corner
to the Red House with the suggestion that Shen accept 100,000 silver yuan
and abandon his efforts to conquer the textbook market.234 Shen flatly
refused.235 Zhonghua and the Commercial Press then teamed up to underwrite a new publishing operation, the Guomin shuju236 located on Henan
Road at present-day Shaotong Road.237 Through this puppet organization

247

248 The Three Legs of the Tripod

established in 1925,238 Shanghais two leading corporate publishers collaborated on editing textbooks meant to pull the rug out from under Worlds
elementary school market. The new textbooks were promoted through
dumping (diejia xiaoshou) and giveaways (mianfei zengsong).
Shen Zhifang and World Books fought back fiercely. They appealed to
book merchants throughout China, concluding contracts with new ones to
supplement those that they already had with their own branch managers.
Moreover, World pursued customers in new ways, both foul and fair (bu ze
shouduan). Some branch managers bribed female instructors with high-heeled
shoes, silk stockings, fabrics for qipao, and other gifts. Male teachers were
offered even more opportunities for entertainment and dining with World
Books sales agents than they had been offered previously.239 Before long,
World was blanketing the country with its merchandise.
Furthermore, Shen conferred with each branch manager confidentially,
outlining three main tactics.240 First, trade books and periodicals were to
remain Worlds primary business, and the textbook division would seek
only to break even. Second, adopting a strategic hamlet approach to commercial warfare, World Books would avoid hand-to-hand combat with the
Commercial Press and Zhonghua in urban areas. Instead, it would seek to
control the countryside below the level of county towns and villages. It
would make contact directly with schools. Then, rather than discount the
prices of World textbooks sold to schools, Shen would pay monetary commissions directly to the schools for using the books. And third, Shen told
his local managers that, although World would avoid any direct conflict
with the much weightier of its two foes, the Commercial Press, the company
would vie strenuously with Zhonghua for control of its rural domains (dipan).
To counter Worlds sales, the jointly owned Guomin shuju spent a great
deal of money trying to buy off Worlds agents. The scheme worked temporarily, but, as World agents began to cancel their contracts, Shen sent out
new representatives of a nonexistent publishing company of his own devising to negotiate new contracts with the same agents. World held onto its
distribution network in all but name while Guomin wasted a great deal of
money.241
Overall, the tacticians at the Commercial Press and Zhonghua believed
that the price of paper and wages, the two highest production costs on a
publishers tally-sheet, would eventually defeat World Books in this textbook war. They surmised correctly that Shen had a limited treasury. What
they did not anticipate accurately enough was that the wily Shen, a book
merchant apparently resurrected from death at least once already, would
use his vast experience in this style of guerrilla fighting to best them both.
World was also assisted by its director, Wei Bingrong, who merged his

Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books, 1912-37

own printing firm242 with Worlds printing plant. This alliance considerably
boosted Worlds resources. The merger gave Shen greater economy of scale
and secured his flank. At the same time, Shen took on the challenge of
supplying himself with paper by buying from Japan on the instalment basis,
temporarily delaying his payments. He also convinced his in-house printers
to wait for their wages.
The second-rate Guomin textbooks did the rest, weakening the viability
of the Commercial Press-Zhonghua alliance. After all, neither the Commercial Press nor Zhonghua was willing to invest the time and resources necessary to create a viable new line of textbooks, particularly when each was still
operating independently in search of its own market share against the other.
The textbooks that they sold were outdated from the start and received a
lukewarm welcome from educational circles. Finally, the two partner firms
own textbooks were in competition with Guomins, and their own agents
were not eager to lose sales on those newer works. In 1927, Guomin surrendered by closing its doors, effectively ending the last of the textbook wars.
From this date on, World Books came to be recognized as one of the Big
Three publishers of Shanghais Wenhuajie.
In spite of the cost of the last great textbook war to all three corporate
publishers, the conflict did produce at least one major social benefit. Whether
selling, discounting, or giving away the textbooks, the three publishers with
their guoyu textbooks were promoting the spread and use of the new national language. Zhu Lianbao approvingly cites the following views of a
1931 article on the National Language Movement: In 1925 World Books
issued National Language textbooks and unexpectedly produced a big wave
of National Language book sales. At that point, the three publishing houses
[began] to compete with each other. Since they only thought about getting
the books out ... sometimes they gave them away or dumped them. As a
result [of the competition], the three publishing houses lost over a million
yuan but also did more to promote the National Language than any other
National Language campaign.243
We have seen that prior to 1928, the Commercial Press and Zhonghua
both sought to secure their fortunes with the government via strategically
placed personnel. In 1926, lacking the national prominence of his two leading competitors, Shen began to hedge his bets against the established Beijing
warlord government by publishing Nationalist Party propaganda that other
prominent Shanghai publishers would not touch.244 The Canton office of
World Books assembled batches of propaganda pamphlets,245 prepared in
advance of the Northern Expedition in 1926, and forwarded them to
Shanghai, where they were printed up. The pamphlets were then distributed in Yangzi-area provinces to ready the populace for Chiang Kai-sheks

249

250 The Three Legs of the Tripod

northward-advancing armies of liberation.246 In Zhu Lianbaos view, when

printing revolutionary pamphlets, Shen was motivated both by a spirit of
adventure and by his awareness of Worlds comparative safety in the International Concession.247 Unlike for Lufei Kui in 1911-12, support for Nationalist Party politics seems to have had little to do with it.
Shens political publishing continued after the Nationalists counterrevolution of April 1927, the events of which unfolded largely in Shanghai.
Among the last workers battalions to hold out against the gangsters and
Nationalist troops had been those who barricaded themselves into the Commercial Press plant on Baoshan Road. The Commercial Press management
was obliged to pay off the Nationalists. Lufei Kui had avoided the slaughter by going to Japan. After his return, he had led Zhonghua to embrace
the Nationalist state and took on a number of prominent government
directorships.
In contrast to his well-heeled competitors, Shen Zhifang and World Books
helped to support refugees from the Nationalist Partys reign of terror by
secretly employing them. The Communists Mao Dun and Yang Xianjiang,
both from the Commercial Presss editorial office, escaped the executions in
the wake of the workers failure and fled to Japan. There they lived off their
translation work. Unable to return to Shanghai or to seek work openly in
Shanghai, Mao and Yang were eventually put in touch with World Books.
World commissioned translations from each, putting Zhu Lianbao in charge
of mailing their wages to Japan.248
Concurrently, once the Nationalists established their new national government at Nanjing in 1928, World, like its competitors, was obliged to
edit its textbooks to reflect the new political order. To begin with, the firm
named the well-known Nationalist journalist, Yu Youren, whom Shen Zhifang
had known as a newspaper publisher when Shen had first come to Shanghai, to replace Hu Renyuan, the former Beijing University chancellor-turnedtextbook editor.249 Primary school textbooks were changed, and a new series
of middle school texts was issued. World Books continued to issue the popular
collectanea (congshu), painting manuals, and law books for which it had become known by then. The firm also invested in several new ventures, including the foreign firm Siberia Printing (as a result of which World first employed
non-Chinese workers) and Guangzhi shuju, Wu Woyaos old publisher.250
To expand his operating capital, starting in 1925, Shen had sent representatives to Southeast Asia with the aim of gaining investors from the Chinese
communities there. Thanks to the intervention of his distribution department chief, Liu Tingmu, and the overseas Chinese, Bai Jiaxiang, owner of
Xinmin shudian in Xiamen (Amoy), Shens appeal reached the famous
Singapore rubber king, Chen Jiageng (Tan Kah Kee, 1874-1961).

Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books, 1912-37

Chen and Shen seemed to be a perfect match. Chen needed a partner in

China to sell his rubber products domestically; Shen needed an agent in
Southeast Asia for his publications. Chen also embraced the idea of marketing Shens publications as a means of encouraging patriotism among the
Southeast Asian overseas Chinese.251 A contract was drawn up specifying
that each side would become the others business representative.252 To consolidate the growing intimacy of the two enterprises, Chen was appointed
to Worlds board in 1928. The relationship ended badly, however, when Shen
could not pay Chen his dividends or return his 40,000-yuan investment.
Constantly pressed financially to pay for expansion and machinery, Shen
sought multiple avenues of financing. In the late 1920s, Worlds operating
capital expanded greatly when investors from the worlds of finance, journalism, and government began to take an interest in the publishing house.
Like Wang Yunwu and Lufei Kui, Shen was happy rubbing shoulders with
officialdom, and his company soon attracted investment from, among
others, the well-known industrialist Qian Yongming (1885-1958) of the
government-run Bank of Communications.253
Not surprisingly, Shen found various shady ways of raising funds as well.
He converted employees in-house savings funds to financial instruments
for the benefit of the company. Expanding the savings program to include
readers investments, within a short period Shen raised 1.8 million yuan.
With this new resource, he opened World Bank254 and an educational
merchandise-manufacturing company. He even started to buy up Fuzhou
Road real estate, taking control of Huaiyuan Lane, where World Books had
started, and changing its name to World Lane. Shen planned also to demolish his own building and rebuild it as the World Mansion.
With his added capital, Shen purchased larger presses, advanced photogravure presses, and engraving equipment. To house the new equipment,
World added to its printing plant, took in more manuscripts, and lengthened its backlist. Borrowing 100,000 yuan from Yao Mulians Nzi shangye
chuxu yinhang (Womens Commercial Savings Bank) on the security of the
Red House, Shen also enlarged his Fuzhou Road retail outlet.255
Plans for further expansion were thwarted by the worldwide depression,
the ripples of which struck Shanghai in the early 1930s, sending real estate
values plummeting. Hoping to borrow further against the Red House and
his other Shanghai properties, Shen was pressed more and more by the
uncertainties of both the real estate market and the textbook-publishing
business. By now, a portion of his real estate had already been garnished by
Jincheng Bank. When Shen failed to clear his debt, Jincheng claimed the
property, further compressing his operating capital. Faced with disaster, at
this point Shen had no choice but to agree to delayed loan repayments.256

251

252 The Three Legs of the Tripod

At the same time, Lu Gaoyi,257 newly appointed head of the administrative office, requested help from director Wu Yunrui (Wenzhai) of Jincheng
Bank.258 Wu conferred with government banker Qian Yongming, who turned
to Zhang Gongquan. Together they approached the Nationalist godfather
Li Shizeng. Wu, Qian, and Zhang convinced Li to invest 500,000 yuan in
World Books.259 In return, Li demanded a seat on the board and control of
more than half of the examiners seats.
From this point in 1934 on, Li Shizeng, as the primary financial-backer,
ran World Books with Lu Gaoyi as his general manager.260 At the same time
that Lis investment breathed new financial life into the publishing firm, Li,
Qian Xinzhi, and Wu Yunrui demanded that Shen Zhifang step down from
his position as general manager. Shens position was then awarded to Lu
Gaoyi. For the sake of the entire publishing operation, Shen had no option
but to concede defeat and take on a purely supervisory role. In this way,
Shen, the outstanding oddity of Shanghais publishing sector, succumbed
to the pressure of government-allied capital just as Lufei Kui and Zhonghua
had yielded a decade and a half earlier. Between 1921 and 1937, World
Books had published about 3,715 titles.
Shen continued to work on Fuzhou Road, even though he no longer controlled World Books. He was still tied closely to Dadong shuju, another
major Fuzhou Road publisher-retailer, through his nephew. Moreover, in his
forced retirement, Shen started up Qiming shudian, managed by his son,
Shen Zhiming. Small in scope, it published several hundred titles of its
own, including popular cultural works and calligraphy manuals.
At home, Shen collected and edited old books and historical paintings in
his personal library.261 Just like book collectors of the imperial era, he published a catalogue of his collection for the sake of visitors. Unlike them, he
had his calligraphy collection photographed for the benefit of later generations. On 28 July 1939, Shen died, aged fifty-eight sui,262 of an unspecified
gastric disease that had plagued his adult years.
World Books, the most successful of the more than ten book-publishing
and distribution firms that Shen Zhifang had founded in his career stretching back to the early 1900s, now had over thirty sales branches in major
provincial cities, with branch editorial offices in Suzhou and Hangzhou263
and branch publishing offices in Ganzhou, Changsha, Shaoyang, and
Chongqing.264 Consistently lacking the capital and technology available to
each of its competitors and predecessors, World positioned itself to exploit
their weaknesses. World hired cast-off editors from the Commercial Press in
particular and then aggressively and creatively exploited market niches that
the larger firms had neglected. Even Zhonghua, known for its identification
with the Republican cause, would not touch Nationalist propaganda in 1926,

Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books, 1912-37

but Shen, exploiting the safety of the International Concession, was willing
to take the kind of risk that Xia Ruifang of the Commercial Press would
likely have appreciated. In doing so, Shen exhibited a bravado and flourish
characteristic of Shanghais Chinese print capitalism dating back to the
1880s and, with scores of other smaller publishers, he kept that buccaneer
spirit alive in Wenhuajie during the 1920s and 1930s.
Conclusion
This chapter has argued that, between 1912 and 1937, Shanghais second
generation of new-style corporate publishers, although themselves often
would-be scholars, were nevertheless driven by their awareness of markets
and politics. Whether seeking to dominate markets, as the Commercial Press,
Zhonghua, and World Books did with their textbooks; manipulate them, as
Lufei Kui did with his Republican publications; or simply satisfy them, as
Shen Zhifang did with his popular novels and subversive political tracts, the
Shanghai publishers found a constant patron in national book markets from
1912 to 1937. Supplying them required the three publishers to marshal
technological, financial, intellectual, and political resources in much the
same way that armies prepare to do battle, a metaphorical image that contrasts with the relatively casual approach to Chinese print capitalism of the
period prior to 1895.
Throughout both the late Qing and Republican periods, the Commercial
Press set the pace of the publishing marketplace through sales of its textbooks, reference books, journals, collectanea, etc. It did so even as it was
challenged repeatedly by opponents such as Zhonghua and World, whose
directors had been schooled in its own editorial and marketing departments.
Shanghais Wenhuajie suggests that the opportunism, exploitativeness, and
combativeness of the Shanghai publishing world actually had their roots in
a struggle for supremacy that began with efforts to address the national
political crisis. Those publishing efforts were reflected intellectually in editorial offices and materially in industrialized Western printing technology.
The loyalty to the Republican cause shown by Xia Ruifangs editor, Lufei
Kui, and the opportunism of Xias chief lieutenant, Shen Zhifang, enabled
both of these latter figures to anticipate the broad new marketplace that
would open up to Shanghais new-style general publishers once the 1911
Revolution succeeded. What they did not anticipate, however, was the impact that a political vacuum would have on publishers whose economic
foundation was textbooks. Even with the success of the revolution, privately owned publishing firms remained at the mercy of their own overhead
and of the governments educational policies. As the industry expanded
rapidly in the mid-1910s, even its employees, who as recently as 1910 had

253

254 The Three Legs of the Tripod

served in a publishers militia, donning military uniforms and shouldering

rifles, now became violently unpredictable.
As Lin Heqin pointed out in his 1937 article on the problems of funding in
Shanghais printing industry, keeping the presses running between academic
semesters demanded planning, marketing ingenuity, and financial fluidity.
Just as the Commercial Press had been forced to extend its bid for publishing supremacy by going public in 1902, so too Zhonghua in 1915 and World
in 1921 discovered that access to the marketplace required the funding
mechanisms and bureaucratic flexibility of a modern corporate structure.
The retail homes of each of these modern corporate publishing kingdoms
did not become fixed on Fuzhou Road until 1916. The construction of Zhonghuas corporate headquarters at the Henan Road corner in that year signalled the opening of Republican Shanghais Wenhuajie. Already at that
time, however, Shanghai itself was the centre of Chinas new-style book
industry and also an important new intellectual focal point, thanks in part
to processes that had been set in motion by lithographic publishers after
1876 and machine manufacturers after 1895.
The corporate giants that took Fuzhou Road as their marketing centre
now remade the old imperial book trade, largely one of examination aids,
reprints, and antiquarian works, along technology-based, capitalist lines.
The progressive, entrepreneurial image of Wenhuajie fostered by the Commercial Press, Zhonghua, and World Books survived until the end of the
Republic but was undercut by the hard realities of renegotiated markets and
patronage once the Nanjing government was established in 1928. At the
same time, the entrepreneurial independence symbolized by the guild of
1905 and the trade association of 1905-6/1911 was compromised by the
new government-supervised trade association of 1930.
Just as editors ignored the challenges and opportunities of the marketplace at their own risk, so too Western-style printing technology imposed
its demands on them. Technology was a key resource enabling these publishers to establish their claims to Chinas vast marketplace for books. In
this light, although it may be tempting to assume that the Communist Party
merely manipulated Shanghai printing workers between 1920 and 1927 for
its own ends, one should keep in mind Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martins
discovery not only that European printing shops were among the worlds
first capitalist enterprises but also that they created the worlds first factory
floors. By implication, European printing workers were among the first to
organize opposition to capitalist employers. Just as these conditions prevailed
earlier in European print shops than in other industries, part of the impact of
the Gutenberg revolution in China, in addition to creating some of the first
corporate industries, included enabling articulate, organized labour activism.

Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books, 1912-37

Lest we exaggerate the independence of these publishing companies from

the society in which they operated, it is important to recall that, between
1912 and 1928, this struggle involving first the Commercial Press and
Zhonghua and then these two and World Books was carried out in a series
of textbook wars. These wars serve to focus our attention on the importance of relations between the publishers and successive national and regional governments. Zhonghuas Lufei Kui made clear in the early 1900s
and again in 1924 that profitable Chinese print capitalism required the
presence of the Chinese state. His views were borne out by the fact that the
most ruthless and destructive years of market competition lasted from 1912
to 1927, the era in which governments were weakest. The years between
1917 and 1927 were also those of greatest class polarization. The Shanghai
corporate publishers settlement with the Nationalist state in 1928 ended
both ruthless competition between firms and publicly explosive class conflict in the printing plants.
Between 1912 and 1937, control of Shanghais market-driven printing
and publishing operations passed to a second generation of leaders who had
matured in the fragmenting society of the late Qing dynasty. Wang Yunwu
of the Commercial Press, Lufei Kui of Zhonghua, and Shen Zhifang of World
Books were remarkably savvy individuals with a sharp eye for business, both
corporate and personal. In this, they recall Xia Ruifang much more than Zhang
Yuanji and Wenmings Yu Fu of an earlier generation of publishers.
Wang Yunwu took over the reins of the Commercial Press, venerable survivor of the imperial era, ushering it into the heyday of the Nanjing Decade
and beyond. Lufei Kui founded Zhonghua by merging the literati editorial
traditions of the Commercial Press with the realities of the post-1911 Republican marketplace. Shen Zhifang, after helping to found and manage
Zhonghua, several years later packed up, took his winnings, and moved out
to originate World Books, a less heavily capitalized and hence more directly
market-dependent and crassly opportunistic corporate publishing operation.
Throughout the period of their struggles against each other, monopolistic
marketing was the goal sought, if not always the reality achieved, by each
against its rivals. For the two and a half decades extending from the abolition of the civil service examinations and the examination book culture that
complemented it to the relative calm imposed by mutual exhaustion and
the growing assertiveness of the new Nationalist Party-state established at
Nanjing, these three conducted their struggle with remarkable singleness of
purpose and, simultaneously, a multiplicity of operations. When the textbook wars formally ended in 1928, the development of new publication
formats and corporate expansionism guaranteed that the struggle would
continue in milder forms until 1937. Western printing technology, by now

255

256 The Three Legs of the Tripod

a fully sinicized tool in modern Shanghai publishing, continued to be used

to manufacture the books that Chinese consumers wanted to buy.
Between 1928 and 1937, through their heavy dependence on textbook
sales, these three publishing firms became the three legs of the Chinese
state tripod. In reality, the legs were never equal. The Commercial Press
regularly controlled 65 percent of the textbook market with 30 percent going to Zhonghua and part of the remainder to World. Including other markets, the Commercial Press outsold Zhonghua three to one and surpassed
Worlds sales by five times. Nonetheless, all three were equal in their need
for a strong Chinese state that could guarantee expanding school patronage.
With their backs secured, the companies were able to invest their resources
more broadly, thereby taking advantage of their command of Western technology, their patriotism, and their organizational flexibility. Although this
chapter has focused on individuals such as Wang, Lufei, and Shen, the corporations that they ran did survive these three individuals even after the
war with Japan began in 1937, just as the Shanghai printer-publisher Lin
Heqin suggested the corporation form would allow them to do. Simultaneously, Shanghais corporate print capitalists turned away from many politically risky ventures, leaving the ground that they had once dominated
to smaller, even underground, publishers. This shift suggests directions for
future research.

Conclusion

This book has studied the reciprocal influences of the mental and the material cultures that played major parts in establishing Shanghai as Chinas
leading intellectual, cultural, and educational centre between the years 1876
and 1937. Contesting scholarly views that propose a universalistic model of
print capitalism, those that argue Chinas nineteenth-century technological
development was retarded by its culture, as well as those that regard Chinese modernity as a merely cultural phenomenon, the major conclusion of
this book is that selective and deliberate use of Western technology and
evolving traditional values enabled Chinese to engage the West constructively. Similarly, Shanghais unexpected vault to prominence in late Qing
and Republican China has been shown to have been due, in large part, to its
development of business and industrial institutions, particularly those related to the printing and publishing industry, a knowledge-based microeconomy. Through an assessment of the impact of modern industry on the
ancient Chinese world of textual production, Shanghai has been presented
as a site of social and cultural history, but this book has emphasized the
technological, entrepreneurial, and vocational sides of that history.
Unlike most other non-European parts of the world that have experienced the Gutenberg revolution, China had had a significant national reading public well before the nineteenth century. However, the means by which
books, journals, illustrations, etc., reach a national Chinese audience of
hundreds of millions in the early twenty-first century are those of a modern
industrialized publishing industry. The origins, both mental and material,
of that industry lie in late Qing and Republican Chinese print capitalism.
Three major concepts have framed this study of the process by which
Western-style printing technology replaced Chinese xylography to produce
this modern industry from 1876 to 1937. First, the concept of print culture
has been contextualized in the senses advanced by Roger Chartier. Thus,
this book has focused on both the effort to understand the social meaning
of the Gutenberg revolution and the study of a set of new acts that arose
from innovative forms of writing and illustrating. In the case of China, a
civilization with 1,000 years of print culture, this set of new acts included
the system of values that preceded and, indeed, set the stage for Chinas

258 Conclusion

Gutenberg revolution. Those values also shaped the choices that Chinese
made concerning both technology and business organizations in the modern period.
Second, this book has argued that China experienced many centuries of
print culture and print commerce in advance of Shanghai-based modern
print capitalism and that that history deeply influenced the contours of the
modern industry. Insofar as recent scholarship aims to universalize the concept of print capitalism, it usually takes into account neither the traditional
printing history nor the modern publishing experience of this quarter of
humanity. Benedict Andersons own concept of print capitalism appears
overly beholden to Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martins insights into
European history. For this reason, Andersons understanding fails to illuminate Chinas experience in two important regards. First, he does not acknowledge the existence of print commerce before Chinas Gutenberg
revolution or the role that that commerce played in shaping Chinese print
capitalism. Second, Andersons accounts cannot illuminate what difference
industrialization made to the Gutenberg revolution in China. The present
book has engaged both of these issues to show that Chinese made a series of
choices from the broad range of Western printing technologies available to
them. These technological choices in turn influenced, but did not determine, the competitive pursuit of new forms of government and public patronage, the adaptation of the corporate model to Chinese circumstances,
and the appearance of new forms of class polarization.
Third, based on what has been said here, partly in response to the historical and cultural limitations of Andersons notion of print capitalism, it is
clear that a new definition of the term is required to account for the special
circumstances of Shanghai-based Chinese print capitalism. Print capitalism
is best understood to mean the social, economic, and political system that
resulted from the reciprocal influences of the mental realm of literati print
culture and the material world of industrialized mechanical duplication of
printed commodities for privatized profit. Part of what distinguished Chinese print capitalism from many of its foreign counterparts were the ways in
which the three operations of editing, printing, and marketing were united
in its leading corporate firms.1 Access to educated persons, to technology
and technicians capable of repairing and duplicating it, and to operating
and investment capital provided a rationale for this form of unitary operation. In Shanghai between 1876 and 1937, the inherited but slowly evolving values of the editorial office heirs to the literati tradition, the new, rapidly
changing circumstances of print-shop workers, and the exigencies of modern banking interacted to yield the distinctive system of print capitalism
that shaped modern Chinese life.

Conclusion

Wenhuajie, Present and Past

Today many visitors to Shanghai ride the gleaming new subway to Peoples
Square, the political and cultural heart of the megacity formed after 1949
by merging the old Nanshi, the former foreign concessions, and the suburban areas of the city administered by the Nationalists in the 1930s. Detraining at Peoples Square, the visitor will likely stroll through the sparkling
underground arcade of shops and restaurants before surfacing into the square
itself. In front of the visitor appears an expansive municipal plaza that, in
1937, held little more than a horse-racing track and clubhouse. The track
and clubhouse were intended to allow the Western heirs of treaty-port opium
dealers and gunrunners, along with more recently arrived businesspeople
and colonial administrators, to ape, at a remove of many thousands of miles,
the ancient equestrian culture of Britains landed aristocrats. With the track
gone, a splendid new museum, an opera house, a symphony hall, and numerous other pavilions and fountains now celebrate the achievements of the
citys Communist government. The municipal government itself is housed
in a new city hall, the plainest building in the square, near the heart of the
reconstructed civic centre.
Just to the west, outside the formal boundaries of the square, is the new
Shanghai Art Gallery, housed in the former Shanghai Library, itself once
the racing clubhouse. The library has moved to a recently built facility in an
upscale western district long inhabited by overseas Chinese businesspeople
and the families of the citys Communist Party leadership. If the visitor
heads north from the Shanghai Museum and then east after encountering
the city government building, he or she will find that the cultural theme
established in Peoples Square continues to the east of the square as well.
Seen from the square, across Xizang Road, an illuminated arch beckons our
visitor into Fuzhou Road, the core of the citys old, and now newly revitalized, Wenhuajie.
Walking east, one reaches the centre of what used to be Republican Chinas
Wenhuajie, but familiar storefronts are long gone. Centrepieces of the Republic, Zhonghua and the Commercial Press, are both absent, having moved
to Beijing, New Chinas intellectual centre-to-be, after 1949. World Books,
an adjunct of the Nationalist Party-state after Shen Zhifangs (1882-1939)
death, is no more, having departed for Taiwan with the Nationalists in 1949.
Instead of these three old print capitalist operations, the more than 300
bookstores and book publishers, and newspapers such as Shenbao, Shibao,
Xinwen bao, and Zhongyang ribao that congregated here between the 1880s
and 1937, only a handful of bookstores and publishers remain. The staterun Waiyu shudian (Foreign Languages Bookstore), Guji shudian (Classics
Bookstore), Duoyunxuan, and Shanghai Shucheng (Bookcity), a multistorey

259

260 Conclusion

edifice that replaces the interim Xinhua bookstore that was on this site after
1949, are all the visitor will find here. Most of the current retailers or some
mutation of them have been in this location since the Revolution of 1949.
The firms that remain are intended to suggest cultural and commercial continuity from 1916 to the present, but they are actually only a faint echo of
1930s Wenhuajie, when there were more than seventy privately owned bookstores and publishers competing here for public patronage.
The Chinese renewal of Shanghais city centre is, symbolically, one of the
most significant cultural steps taken in this city since 1949. The Japanese
invasions of 1937 and 1941 weakened the European powers grip on the
treaty port, but only in 1949 did the Chinese Communists reach the goal
that the Nationalists had set for themselves in the 1920s but never carried
out namely, expulsion of the foreign powers from all the old treaty ports
scattered along Chinas coasts and rivers.2 Between 1949 and the late 1980s,
the Communist government invested heavily in Shanghais housing, schools,
and factories, but it did little to put its stamp on the old International and
French Concession areas. In the early 1990s, however, the city government
began to revitalize the core of what had become a shabby industrial port
city. By the mid-1990s, the Communists also started building the modern,
world-class city that Western, Nationalist, and Japanese occupiers had never
managed to create.
In the 1920s and 1930s, when Westerners ruled supreme here, even boastfully calling Shanghai The Model Settlement, the treaty port lacked a
sizable public library, a public museum, a municipal opera house or theatre,
or even a proper civic centre. The Shanghai Municipal Council ran the International Concession like a business from its fortresslike structure at the
corner of Hankou and Jiangxi Roads.3 Throughout the 1930s, the Nationalists attempted to build a new civic centre at Jiangwan in their suburban
sector of the city, but Japan cut their efforts short in 1937 when it occupied
the Chinese sectors of the city. In addition to containing three government
jurisdictions, physically Shanghai in the 1930s was a city of office buildings,
banks, hotels, clubs, factories, department stores and shops, restaurants and
brothels, godowns, a few parks, and many residential districts. Often, just
as in the nineteenth century, all were jumbled together with no apparent
zoning or regulation.
In short, except for the modern media, foremost among which were the
citys roughly 11,000 printers and publishers, 1930s Shanghai was a city
that lacked most major forms of what are conventionally associated with a
modern urban cultural infrastructure. It is true that the city was home to
some of Chinas leading modern schools and universities, most founded
through the efforts of urban reformist elites from northern Zhejiang and

Conclusion

eastern Jiangsu, and that the presence of these institutions contributed to

Shanghais reputation as Republican Chinas leading intellectual centre.
However, essential to the schools endeavours were the textbooks, reference
works, journals, and general-interest publications edited, printed, and sold
by Shanghais publishers, who themselves also came largely from Zhejiang
and Jiangsu. Day in and day out, throughout the late 1910s, 1920s, and
1930s, students, teachers, and the general public were drawn to the citys
Wenhuajie, where they patronized the retail shops of the Commercial Press,
Zhonghua, World, and many smaller firms. Thanks to the 8,000 or so editors and printers employed by the citys three leading corporate publishing
companies alone, shelves were full in Wenhuajie except, of course, when
war intervened. New and old ideas about science, democracy, and myriad
other subjects unavailable anywhere else in China could be obtained here at
reasonable prices in modern, Western-style books, journals, and newspapers.
All were printed using the foremost enabling technology of Chinas intellectual and political transformations since 1880, Western-style presses and
machines.
A printing and publishing revolution had taken place, separating the more
broadly based modern Chinese reading public of machine-printed works of
the 1920s and 1930s from their Qing-era predecessors, habituated by 1,000
years of print culture to seek woodblock-printed editions. As this book has
argued, a revolution of machines and social reorganization just as much as
one of ideas and mass movements divided these two worlds of reading consumers from each other. During each of the major turning points in Chinese
history since the Guangxu reign began in 1875, from the Sino-French War
of 1884-85, to the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, to the Republican Revolution of 1911, the New Culture Movement of 1915-21, the Nationalistled Northern Expedition of 1926-28, the establishment of the Nanjing
government in 1928, and the Japanese attack of 1932, the Shanghai publishers and their publications supplied a backdrop and offered a printed
interpretation of events for sale. No mere philanthropists, unlike many of
their forebears in traditional Chinese print culture circles, Shanghais print
capitalists managed to make a profit through each of these events. Until
they were stopped short in 1937, again by Japan, they did so even as they
informed, educated, and entertained, publishing 86 percent of all books
produced in China in that final year of the Nanjing Decade.4
Contrary to those who would focus purely on the publishers commercial
outlets on Wenhuajie as a means of revealing the cultural exuberance of Republican Chinese publishing, this book has suggested that this cultural and
commercial districts importance is best understood when seen as part of a
technological, geographical, temporal, and organizational continuum. That

261

262 Conclusion

continuum extended technologically from Gutenbergs manual printing press

to electric rotary machines, geographically from Europe and America to
Shanghai, temporally from 1876 to 1937, and organizationally from corporate editorial offices to printing plants and then back to these retail outlets.
Without Western technology, industrialized printing plants, and the system
of extraterritoriality that loosely shielded Shanghais publishers, Shanghais
publishing business would have been no different from those of many older
Chinese book districts, such as Beijings Liulichang or Suzhous Changmen
district, that preceded Shanghai throughout the past three centuries of Chinese print commerce. Shanghais Wenhuajie differed from those other booksellers districts thanks to its mastery of foreign printing technology and its
creative responses through guild, trade association, incorporation, and state
alliance to the challenges of regulating the markets needed to purchase its
new products and so to pay for its growth.
Apart from the financial benefits that accrued to the owners of and shareholders in Wenhuajies business enterprises, the Shanghai publishers continuing quest for national Chinese markets also changed the city of Shanghai
in direct ways. Between 1876 and 1937, the centripetal organizational drive
of technology-based capitalist industry simultaneously created and concentrated an industry that had been spread across China for centuries into this
single urban centre. During the same period, Shanghai itself evolved from a
medium-sized city in 1876 to an expansive metropolis sprawling across three
municipal administrations in 1937 by drawing upon successive waves of
migrants and refugees. Among these arrivals, of course, were lower-degree
holders such as Wang Tao (1828-97) and Bao Tianxiao (1875-1973); illustrators such as Dianshizhais Wu Youru (1840?-93?); compradores such as
Dianshizhais Chen Huageng, Tongwens Xu Run (1838-1911), and Zhongguo tushu gongsis Xi Zipei; future officials such as Li Shengduo (18601937) of Feiying Hall and former officials such as Zhang Yuanji (1867-1959)
of the Commercial Press; elite urban reformers such as Wenmings Yu Fu;
idealists such as Guangzhis Feng Jingru and He Chengyi; technicians such
as Xia Ruifang (1871-1914) of the Commercial Press and Li Changgen (b.
circa 1845) of the Li Yongchang Machine Shop; and entrepreneurs such as
Zhang Jinlin of Mingjing Machine Shop, Lufei Kui (1886-1940) of Zhonghua
Books, and Shen Zhifang (1882-1939) of World Books; and many others
who came after them. Each was a sojourner drawn to Shanghai by employment hopes that were realized in the citys print shops, machine works, and
publishing companies. Concurrently, these persons reflected and established
many of Chinas intellectual priorities and contributed to both the citys
and the nations modernization and industrialization.

Conclusion

Social History of Technology

In making an argument for why scholars should turn their gaze to the material
world, the French medievalist Marc Bloch once pointed out that the meaning of technology is not self-evident and needs to be explained historically.
A study of technology as the basis for understanding a society, in its most
intimate structure, does not imply the writing of a triumphant Q.E.D. at the
end of a theorem, after which only a line has to be drawn.5 Instead, Bloch
tells us, an understanding of technology leads to a whole succession of new
questions, from among the most fascinating and most difficult ones that
history can raise.6
Among the questions raised in this book and addressed in successive chapters have been the following. What happens when technology is transferred
to a civilization different from the one where it originated? Does technology impose its own historical logic on the new society with which it interacts, as is often assumed? How did Western printing technology first go to
China, and how did Chinas late imperial print culture and commerce influence Chinese choices related to Western-style printing technology? Why
did the Chinese embrace Western printing technology, and what happened
once they did? How long did that acceptance take? Why do bookmen and
then printers become so prominent in twentieth-century Chinese fiction
and memoirs? And, given the fact that Shanghais Gutenberg-based print
capitalist revolution occurred in a fraction of the time that Europes did,
how did precapitalist ideas influence the form of that revolution?
The origins of what would be known by the 1930s as Wenhuajie lie in a
mixture of the cultured, mercantile, and then industrial worlds of the late
Qing dynasty. For this reason, a balanced historical account of Wenhuajie
cannot be achieved until the spectrum of influences reaching from the intellectual to the material are related to one another. Without suggesting that
the intellectual can be reduced to the material, I have argued for the need to
balance historical accounts of the men and ideas of Wenhuajie with understanding of the technology that the Chinese used to disseminate ideas. Failures to provide such accounts indicate an inability to transcend the limited
perspectives of the Chinese literati themselves.
Although modern Western printing technology arrived in China in 1807,
it did not rapidly dislodge xylography, which had been invented in China in
the seventh century and had spread widely during the centuries following
the Song dynasty (960-1279). An important commodity market, the late
imperial Chinese book world, had come to reflect the intellectual concerns
of the national group most involved with it, the literati. Under the influence
of the public service ethic of literati publishers, publishing had also been

263

264 Conclusion

established as a form of personal and social service. At the same time, the
literati themselves felt the impact of the far-reaching commercialization of
the Chinese economy from the mid-sixteenth century onward. The commercialization of their book world conflicted with their anticommercial credo.
It also influenced the views of those, often drawn from the literati, who made
their living from book commerce. Inherited disinterest in technology minimized the literati concern with the social aspects of xylographic technology.
Partly as a result of this cultural background, partly because of the expense of Western technology, and partly because of the aesthetically unappealing nature of texts created using Western techniques, Chinese did
not favour imported Western printing technology before the 1870s. The
first real steps in the development of Chinese print capitalism were taken in
1876-77 with Shanghais industrialization of market-oriented lithographic
printing. Although lithography was initially used for printing religious imagery, its commercial potential soon became clear via the Dianshizhai print
shop across town from the Catholic orphanage where it had begun. From
that beginning, Chinese entrepreneurs slowly embraced the foreign technology, but they applied it to traditional printing and publishing goals. Of
particular importance was the process of reprinting the literary heritage lost
in the Taiping Rebellion in aesthetically and commercially attractive formats. Well over 100 lithographic publishing firms soon mushroomed across
the city of Shanghai and survived until the end of the Republican period.
Of profound importance to this rapid expansion was the reprint business
modelled on the traditional xylographic one, which lithography now replaced.
At first, lithographic firms such as Tongwen Press largely disregarded the
industrial nature of their new business. Indeed, the psychological emphasis
of Shanghais book merchants and publishers would long rest, primarily, on
cultural and public service and, only secondarily, on commerce and industry. It was not an accident that many of the firms discussed here produced
works intended to supply the academic market. The civil service examination system had created an insatiable market for study guides, reference
books, etc. For this reason, both service-based publishing and commerceoriented publishing were heavily dependent on the Chinese civil service
examination system, which itself reflected the sociopolitical objectives of
the Qing state.
Twenty years after lithographic printing appeared on the banks of the
Huangpu River, it was superseded by letterpress printing, motivated in part
by printers need to provide timely coverage of the events of the First SinoJapanese War. The development of this modern letterpress printing industry in response to an expanded public readership now prompted Chinese

Conclusion

machinists to begin to manufacture printing presses and machines along

with aesthetically pleasing Chinese type fonts. Chinese-made presses helped
to reduce the obstacle of cost in setting up a Western-style print shop, and
improved Chinese-designed fonts brought Western-style letterpress printing into the aesthetic universe of Chinese readers. Both press manufacture
and typeface design were combined in the early corporate firms, epitomized
by the Commercial Press, founded in 1897 and incorporated in 1902.
Although incorporation signified the future of Chinese print capitalism,
predictably many of these early firms remained individual proprietorships.
As noted earlier, the individual proprietorship gave the owner maximum
managerial control and confidentiality. Like the traditional booksellers, many
of Shanghais early, transitional book dealers lacked the compulsion to saturate the national market with their products. Their traditional political and
sales ethics restrained them, with the result that these firms sought simply
to duplicate the limited influence of their predecessors, albeit from the relative security of Shanghais International Concession.
Within a short period of time, however, it became clear to many of
Shanghais new-style publishers that industrial technology demanded a more
flexible and growth-oriented funding mechanism than the old-fashioned
individual proprietorships and partnerships that had enabled traditional
Chinese publishers and booksellers to prosper modestly. The industry leader
in technology, the Commercial Press, was also among the first to experiment
successfully with incorporation. Founded with 3,750 yuan in 1897, by 1910
the publishers asset valuation crossed the million-yuan threshold, thanks
in part to its ability to combine editorial, technical, and entrepreneurial
talent under one corporate roof. Its adoption of a foreign business model
coincided with, and may even have been part of, the cause that prompted
the Qing government to endorse such efforts via new commercial legislation. A few years earlier, the Commercial Press had printed its first bestseller, a knock-off, Western-style, Japanese-influenced textbook, which
became the genies lamp of the Shanghai publishers. The modern textbook
was the most profitable new-style book commodity to emerge in the period
after the heyday of the lithographed examination text. Those who could
claim a significant portion of the textbook market would now grow, and
those who could not would stagnate or wither.
The blending of the traditional emphasis on elite public service, with its
access to government, plus the modern capitalist emphasis on mechanization, specialization, and adequate compensation for important new manufacturers can be seen in the establishment of both the booksellers guild
and the trade association, in 1905 and 1905-6/1911, respectively. The
membership of each was defined by access to printing technology, a new

265

266 Conclusion

phenomenon in the ancient world of Chinese publishing. Compensation,

an ever-present but not publicly discussed spectre in the now-defunct Suzhou
Booksellers Guild, became a publicly justifiable objective in Shanghai as
the Qing court tried consciously to promote new business enterprises. Imperial reformers in Beijing were especially interested in fostering book publishing because of their belief in the symbiotic relationship between the
advance of China as a nation and modern book learning.
In the final decade of the Qing, tentative moves to reform the education
system, which were then legitimized by the abolition of the traditional examination system, sparked interest in modern Western-style educational
commodities. Just as the newspaper and lithographic magazine had excited
the interest of those who were already literate, so too the modern textbook
now appealed to those who sought literacy. Many newly literate people started
to use the printing press to articulate their competing perspectives on Chinas
past, present, and future.
Even though they operated largely within the International Concession,
modern Chinese publishers depended heavily on the Chinese state to provide a market for their most remunerative commodity, the textbook. From
the founding of the first Chinese xylographic publisher discussed, the seventeenth-century Saoye shanfang, through the earliest lithographic houses,
including Dianshizhai, Tongwen, and Feiying Hall, and into the era of the
comprehensive publishers such as the Commercial Press, Zhonghua, and
even World, the Chinese state was an essential, if often silent, partner in the
publishing business. In the era of educational reform that began in 1904,
the states importance grew even as its vigour declined.
Just as the lithographers had depended on the civil service examination
market for their success, the comprehensive publishers from 1904 to 1937
relied on the textbook policies of successive national and regional governments. As time went on, such works became cheaper, more widely disseminated, and available in an increasingly broad selection. Simultaneously, the
textbook market became the chief battlefield of modern Shanghai publishers.7 Their heavy dependence on governments to define markets may not
have reflected the explicit continuing influence of the state on Chinese intellectuals value system, but it determined who issued marching orders,
even when profits were privatized.
If the corporation combined intellectual and material culture in a uniquely
new way, it also brought together the constituencies involved with each
cultural segment. Former literati editors, their minds shaped by elitist values from the imperial past, and their younger colleagues influenced by those
same values, along with proletarian printers whose eyes focused on a technological future, all worked for the same printing and publishing corporations.

Conclusion

Yet each group did not benefit in direct proportion to its contribution to
making China modern. Technology had changed the Chinese editorial workplace in ways of which many editors were only faintly aware, but the literati
viewpoint nonetheless prevailed frequently in social structure and outlook.
At the end of the nineteenth century, there were 21 letterpress and over
100 lithographic printing and publishing firms in Shanghai. In 1917, the
booksellers guild recorded a membership of 132, including letterpress and
lithographic printers. Thirteen of the 132 guild members were joint-stock
corporations, the Commercial Press and Zhonghua Books among them. The
previous year, Wenhuajie had been born, a cultural commercial centre inseparably tied to industrial printing plants in the north and west of the city.
Although it is tempting to suppose that Wenhuajie thrived on its own virtue, in fact, it benefited from the long-standing concern of the Shanghai
publishers with harnessing Western technology to the Chinese states educational policies while they all took their profits from the arrangement. To
do this, they needed workers.
In 1894, 870 workers in the lead-type trades made up less than 1 percent
of all workers employed in heavy and light industry in China,8 an astonishingly low figure when one thinks of the enormous influence that the industry would wield in twentieth-century affairs via its publications. The 1890s
lithographic industry was more significant, adding a minimum of 1,300
and a maximum of 8,050 to yield a total figure of between 2,170 and 8,920
workers, a sizable workforce that anticipated the bulk of Shanghais printing force in the twentieth century.
Three decades later, in 1930, the printing trades represented the ports
third-largest form of Chinese industrial investment after the Chinese-owned
brocade-weaving and cigarette-manufacturing industries. In terms of the
overall value of the national machine industrys manufacturing output, in
1933 the printing and paper-making machine industry ranked seventh among
the largest of Chinas industries. In the same year, vis--vis numbers of
Shanghai-based industrial factories, Chinese-owned factories active in the
printing business were the third most numerous (out of nine industrial categories) with 271 plants.9 In 1933, the 11,211 workers that they employed
made up the fifth-largest industrial group, with an average of 41 workers
per shop.10 A second source records that, in 1935, 10,531 Chinese printers
lived in the city.11 Even with the apparent loss of nearly 700 workers between 1933 and 1935, one is left with the sense that, by the 1930s,
Shanghais market-based, Western-style printing and publishing industry
was extremely robust in terms of its business value and workforce.
In 1930, when it was worth eight million yuan, the Shanghai publishing
industry was defined by a new government-mandated Shanghai Booksellers

267

268 Conclusion

Same-Industry Association. Eighty-three firms constituted the organization, an increase of fifty-six firms since the guild was first organized in
1905 but a decrease of forty-eight since 1917. As each of the surviving
firms must have been aware, the pivotal factors in the expansion and contraction of the industry up to 1930 had been Western technology and the
Chinese marketplace, of which the latter reflected government supervision
and legislation.
Chinese print capitalism was the product of sixty years that is, three
generations of hothouse evolution. Late imperial print culture and print
commerce, along with the public service ethic, remained a permanent, if
not always visible, backdrop throughout this period. If technology, incorporation, and markets are seen as the high road to Chinese print capitalism,
however, the low road involved the kind of dismal working conditions that
can be seen in the Mingjing Machine Shop and that exploded in strike
action in printing plants of the Commercial Press and other Shanghai publishers from 1917 to 1927. Class polarization and proletarian politicization
occurred in even less time two generations than it took for Chinese print
capitalism to mature, perhaps because, unlike the editors and corporate
officers of each publishing firm, the print workers had no government concerned with their survival.
In summary, late-imperial print culture and commerce, a still-strong public service ethic, Western technology, extraterritoriality, and Chinese government policies were all necessary, but insufficient, conditions underlying
the creation of Chinese print capitalism. The sine qua non was personnel,
particularly the sort of entrepreneurial personalities epitomized by those
discussed in this book: in the first phase, Mr. Tang (active 1850) of Foshan,
the shadowy experimenter with cast type, and Wang Tao, the Hong Kong
and Shanghai printer-publisher; in the second, compradores such as Chen
Huageng and Xu Run and the zhuangyuan Li Shengduo; in the third, Xia
Ruifang, Zhang Yuanji, Zhang Jian (1853-1926), and Yu Fu; and in the
fourth, Zhang Jinlin, Wang Yunwu (1888-1980), Lufei Kui, and Shen
Zhifang. The organizational structure of the corporation helped to lift those
in the last two phases beyond the financial and psychological limitations
that impeded those in the first two.
Elite Critiques of Wenhuajies Publishing Operations
As seen here, the Chinese empire and its special rewards and status for
intellectuals continued to influence the self-perception of Chinese publishers long after the meritocratic system of the empire itself had collapsed.
Outrage at the unequal distribution of the material benefits of industrial
capitalism and a continuing sense of noblesse oblige led pundits of the broader

Conclusion

system to attack the particular cases with which they were most familiar.
No capitalist industry was closer to the conscience of Chinese intellectuals
than publishing. Likewise, no capitalist industry was measured against a
higher standard than this one. Where government circles of the 1930s identified praiseworthy high achievement in the Chinese printing and publishing industry, critics outside government focused on how much more had to
be done.
As observed in the discussions of Wang Taos career and of Tongwens
editorial department, many of those involved in the intellectual that is,
editorial or authorial functions of publishing inherited or shared the literati faith in the value of public service through intellectual endeavour. This
faith remained even when the meritocratic-bureaucratic system that had
fostered such ideals itself could no longer employ their talents gainfully. It
also held true after the system was abolished for good in 1904-5.
Learned individuals, many of whom became increasingly dependent on
financial capital, were now forced to accommodate the reality of industrial
civilization. In doing so, their moral culture collided with the ramifications
of industrialization in a way that few could have anticipated. The bifurcated set of moral and commercial values that had fed into Shanghai now
collided with finance and industry in a way that coloured Shanghais print
capitalism down to 1937. Even as the Western-style corporation provided
what Lin Heqin regarded as the structure essential to their work, their attitudes reflected their cultural roots in the hybridized philanthropic and commercial culture of late Qing society. As a result, sometimes, such as when
Lufei Kui equated publishing work with the growth of modern China, publishers confidently defended their scholarly backgrounds and privileges. At
other times, such as when publishers succumbed to the meretricious lustre
of profit gained from printing forbidden texts, regardless of copyright or the
books moral contents, they sedulously turned a blind eye to their social
and political responsibilities.
By the early twentieth century, literate Chinese were well acquainted with
the views of Liang Qichao (1873-1929), who had begun publishing articles
in the 1890s on the important role of the press and fiction in promoting a
self-conscious citizenry. As a result, the Shanghai publishers, whom Liang
knew well, had, at least by implication, been part of a national dialogue on
social and political reform. Even the Qing dynasty joined this discussion
with new legislation concerning press regulations and nationally mandated
textbooks. In 1912, the post-Qing, nominally republican government of
Yuan Shikai (1859-1916) also issued new press regulations and revised stipulations for textbooks, both of which were reinforced in one form or another
by subsequent national and warlord governments.

269

270 Conclusion

Against this background, even the judgments of Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925),

first president of the Republic and then longtime oppositionist revolutionary, regarding Shanghais publishers remained mixed. In the abstract, Sun
held views similar to those that Lufei Kui articulated. For example, eight
months after the May Fourth Incident of 1919, Sun pointed to the importance of the publishing industry in disseminating the ideas of Beijings progressive and anti-imperialist university students. Discussing the role of the
publishing industry in helping to establish a new Chinese nation, Sun stated
that The business provides the people with knowledge, one of the needs of
modern society, and without which there is no progress. All the affairs of
mankind need printing to record them; all the knowledge of mankind needs
printing to save it.12
However, a year before, when Shanghais Commercial Press had refused
to publish Suns work, Sun Wen xueshuo (Theories of Sun Yat-sen), Sun had
been forced to approach another Shanghai publisher, Qiangyin shuguan, to
print and distribute it for him. The experience had awakened Sun and other
Nationalist Party leaders to the need to establish their own publishing operations. In particular, a loyal Nationalist Party publishing firm was required
to break what they regarded as the Commercial Presss monarchist, monopolistic, and reactionary tendencies.13 The Nationalists attack bore fruit in
1921 with the establishment of the Nationalist publishing house, Minzhi
shuju, with capital raised from overseas patriots.14
Suns discovery that Shanghais publishers would not or could not publish everything deemed necessary for progress ran parallel to the New
Culture Movements criticism of the Shanghai publishers. Although the
movement itself produced some 400 new vernacular periodicals, its impact
in corporate publishing circles was limited at first.15 The Commercial Press,
in particular, found itself the target of attacks by Luo Jialun (1897-1969), a
Beijing University history student and New Culture activist, who, in April
1919, criticized its journals and magazines for their political backwardness,
superfluity, and obsession with safe profitability.16 That these criticisms found
their mark is indicated by the Commercial Presss appeal to a New Culture
leader, Beijing University professor Hu Shi (1891-1962), to take over the
editorial office. By 1921, even without Hus guidance, the journals that had
been attacked were revamped and their editors replaced. But it was now
clear that both the political and the intellectual worlds had found grist for
their mills in Shanghais Wenhuajie.
Moralistic, antimonopolistic, and implicitly anticapitalist criticism continued in 1925. Creation Society member Zhou Quanping (1902-83), writing under the pen name Ting Sheng (Sound of the Thunderbolt), issued a
critique of the Shanghai publishers called Chuban jie de hunluan yu

Conclusion

chengqing (Murkiness and Clarification in the Publishing World). Zhous

bitter critique of Wenhuajies pursuit of profit at the expense of culture and
education echoed interests of other left-wing critics but also anticipated
concerns upon which the Nationalist state would act. According to Zhou,
the Chinese publishing world neglected its duties to the nation because of
its preoccupation with profit.
If one looks at the range of book titles, Zhou explains, Chinas publications do not seem to be lacking. It is only when one searches through their
contents that disappointment grows. Errors, inconsistency, plagiarism, and
wild punctuation all mar the products issued by Chinese publishers. Even
after these blemishes are identified, they remain unchanged in the materials
promoted to readers by an advertising infrastructure devoted to profitseeking. Advertising, Zhou says, once functioned to notify people of the
real value of a commodity, but deceitful businessmen turned it around and
used it to confuse the eyes and ears of society (yaoluan shehui shang de ermu).17
According to what the advertisements say, there exist almost no books that
are not good publications, and, for this reason, you buy and I buy, and we
do not say that this kind of foul thing gives us a stomach ache after we eat
it; if people take it home and discover later that it is foul and they do not eat
it, still the book is already sold, and the goal of earning your money was
achieved long before.18
The most wicked aspect of the Wenhuajie publishers behaviour is their
heartless attitude toward authors. We know, for instance, Zhou asserts, about
the workers being fleeced by the capitalists, and that seems too inhuman,
but what about the authors? According to what Zhou was able to discover,
the cost of printing a book was only a third of its retail price. When the
publishing companies print a lot, he says, their cost is reduced. Cheap paper
and binding bring their costs down even further, but the Commercial Press
or Zhonghua author gets only a 15 percent royalty. Distribution costs may
add no more than 20 percent and will add none if the work is sold directly.
The publishers take all the remaining income, up to 50 percent, says Zhou.
As we have seen in the discussion of the textbook wars, particularly those
from 1924 to 1928, when Zhou was writing, there was contemporary justification for his critique. But his comments also have an abstract, timeless
quality that sounds much like the views of Wu Woyao two decades earlier.
In Vignettes from the Late Qing, Wu also criticized Chinese publishers, particularly for their exploitation of Chinas national crisis. Like Wu, whose
solution to the crisis was a call for the production of useful books, Zhou
offers a solution to the problem of commercially driven intellectual abuse.
However, his methods suggest a longing for the early days of Shanghai publishing, before print capitalism had become so aggressively and anonymously

271

272 Conclusion

consumer oriented, marketing its wares to any and all who came through
the shop door with money in their hands.
To redress the evils of Chinese print capitalism, Zhou called for the revival of two publishing methods that would have been familiar to the early
print capitalists of the 1880s as well as to their literati predecessors. One
was the subscription method (yuyue fa), similar to the system by which Xu
Run and many literati publishers prior to him had subsidized their publications in advance of printing. The second was what Zhou calls the loan
method (daikuan fa). It would involve a form of self-publishing whereby a
group of friends would organize a publishing organ and make a loan to an
author to help him publish and distribute his own work.19 The publishing
organ would, he suggests, take only some trifling administrative fees.
In Zhous lack of interest in or awareness of how technology had changed
Chinese publishing, he was, paradoxically, similar both to many other intellectual critics of Wenhuajie and to many of Wenhuajies own boosters. Like
them, he suffered from the social myopia of the bookworm. Issues such as
where presses and machines would be manufactured, who would pay for
them, and how they would be maintained were outside his purview. Instead,
Zhou left that discussion to printers such as He Shengnai (active 1920s,
1930s) et al., through whose eyes we earlier viewed Chinas Gutenberg revolution. As we know, only a small but nonetheless historically influential
group of Chinese intellectuals crossed the bridge that led from a focus purely
on intellectual culture to one that included material culture and the reciprocal influence of both on the modernization of China. Even that group
of intellectuals, however, did not present the view from the print-shop
floor up.
An Elite Critique of Wenhuajies Printing Operations
The Chinese print workers strikes of 1917, 1925, and 1927 suggest the
relevance of Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martins observations about the
social history of the European book to the history of the Western-style
Chinese one. Febvre and Martin, it will be recalled, described the printer as
Europes first capitalist, his print shop as the worlds first factory floor, and,
at least by implication, his employees as being among the first beneficiaries
and victims of the emerging capitalist system. Febvre and Martin also explained their interest in the history of the printing press from the perspective of those concerned with a new way of producing and circulating ideas
in an aristocratic society and with the impact of these ideas on those who
had formerly been silent and illiterate.20
Other scholars of European history, such as Robert Darnton, have
pursued aspects of Febvre and Martins logic. Darntons early modern French

Conclusion

printers are familiar from his essay Workers Revolt: The Great Cat
Massacre of the Rue Saint-Sevrin, but printer-activists also appear in accounts of the French Revolution of 1789, the German revolutions of 1848,
and Russias 1905 revolution. Paul Chauvet writes on the French Revolution, P.H. Noyes describes the German revolutions of 1848, and Charles A.
Ruud profiles a leading pre-Bolshevik Russian printer-publisher. All develop
the theme of book printers as the most intelligent of the working classes
(as the printers of the 1848 Mainz Congress styled themselves). All four
cases, the French, the German, the Russian, and now the Chinese suggest
that not only the story of publishing and publishers, but especially that of
printing and printers, is revealed most strikingly in the context of revolutionary politics.21
Five years after the first Shanghai printers strike, the Changsha, Hunan,
printers revolted. In her account of the 1922 Changsha strike of lead-type
compositors and printers, Linda Shaffer observes that the striking workers
performed a job that had not existed in China before the [nineteenth]
century.22 By 1922, however, says Shaffer, thirteen modern printing firms
were located in Changsha; a new-style, class-based printers union had also
been organized in 1920 by budding labour leader Mao Zedong (1893-1976).
Shaffer quotes Maos biographer, Li Rui (b. 1917), to the effect that Mao
was secretary of the union and that he was very familiar with the lives of
the printers and had a deep understanding of their problems.23 Mediated on
10 December 1922, the strike ended two days later. Leading the union mediators was none other than Mao himself, who certainly knew how much of
this new industry depended on Chinese technicians working with Westernstyle technology, whether imported through Shanghai or manufactured there.
The Nationalist Party had been introduced to the values of the Shanghai
publishing world through its own early efforts to disseminate its ideology.
Parks Coble points out that, in the early 1920s, Sun Yat-sen had condemned the selfish capitalists and called for state control of major industrial enterprises in China.24 In 1927, after Suns death, the Nationalists
also discovered the leading role taken by printers among the citys proletariat. Following establishment of the new national government in 1928, as
we know, the Nationalist state apparatus began to seek ways of curbing both
publishers and printers.
Even after 1928, the Nationalist Party platform remained fundamentally
anticapitalist, Coble argues. From their new national capital in nearby
Nanjing, the Nationalists now sought to suppress the Shanghai publishers
not only commercially but also politically. They developed a commercially
competitive series of publishing units under their direct control in the new
national capital with the intention of supplanting Shanghai and Wenhuajie

273

274 Conclusion

as Republican Chinas modern publishing capital. The Nationalists also

moved their own personnel onto the directorates of the elite Shanghai publishing corporations, a process that had begun at Zhonghua in 1918. Control of the publishers, of course, also implied control of the printers.
Although strikes could be suppressed, the conditions that gave birth to
them did not disappear. Already by the early 1920s, Chinese printers were
being radicalized daily at work not only by a mechanized workplace but
also by Marxism, which those who made the presses run regarded as a profoundly democratic philosophy. Also, rather than praise the capitalists who
organized the economy, Marxism praised those who ran the machines. Underlying printers new importance in China was their access to and mastery of
the single most important public communications machinery known to
humans since 1814, when the steam engine was adapted to print the Times
of London. The polarization of class relations between print capitalists and
print proletarians seems to have been almost inevitable in retrospect, yet,
when class harmony ruptured in Shanghai in 1917, in 1925, and again in
1927, it seemed to many to signal a malady in the capitalist system itself.
Between 1928 and 1937, Nationalist government ministers, printers, and
publishers trumped the commercial and industrial centralization brought
about by Shanghai publishers with an unfamiliar form of political centralization. Perhaps because of the success of the Nationalist Party-state and
the Shanghai print capitalists in jointly regulating printing workers, the
fiction of Mao Dun (1896-1981), the well-known Commercial Press editor,
Communist Party organizer, and writer encountered in the final chapter,
remains one of our best guides to the lives of printing and publishing workers
in 1930s Shanghai. The newly literate, and articulate, printing proletariat
was first given voice in Maos writing of the 1930s and reveals the psychological impact of print capitalism on at least one privileged member Mao himself of the new class of intellectuals created by that system of production.
Twice in the 1930s, first in 1932 and then again in 1936, Mao Dun
published stories about Shanghais printing and publishing industry. Where
Wu Woyaos (1866-1910) Vignettes from the Late Qing (1909) discusses late
imperial print culture and print commerce, Mao Duns stories are clearly set
in the era of industrialized print capitalism. Mao was an editor, so it is not
surprising that editors exist in his stories. Still, even more significant to
Mao were print workers, absent from Wus novel.25 Just as He Shengnai et
al.s coeval discovery of printing technology indicates a new Chinese awareness of the importance of material culture in creating modern China, so too
Mao Duns stories reflect the broadening social awareness of the importance of these new workers in the creation of modern China. Although the
editorial offices may have been run like old-fashioned government offices,

Conclusion

as Mao tells us in his memoirs they were, his short stories make clear that
the printing plants were not.
Maos short story You di er zhang (Wartime) is set during the 1932
Japanese attack on the Commercial Presss Baoshan Road plant. Sharply
satirical, the story establishes a stark contrast between the pusillanimous
establishment intellectual, represented by Mr. Li, a ten-year veteran of the
Commercial Presss editorial office, and Xiang, the bold typesetter who lives
next door, and other selfless patriots who work with him. Not only are these
proletarian printers a central part of Maos story, but they are also the most
admirable characters in it.
Once the Commercial Press buildings start burning on 28 January 1932,
these anti-Japanese printers rush to the firms aid while Mr. Li cowers at
home. First, though, as the Japanese bombers regroup for another assault
on the Commercial Press and its Zhabei district neighbours, Mr. Li and
Xiang discuss the initial attack. Mao Dun describes Li and Xiang as being
both in the same line, so to speak: that is, publishing. In fact, however,
they have never spoken until the night of the attack because of the social
hierarchy prevailing at the Commercial Press. Although [Xiang] was a neighbor and they both worked for the same firm, since one was a gentleman in
the editorial department and the other only a worker on the printing press,
the two seldom met.26 Almost immediately, their paths, having crossed for
an instant during the Japanese raid, diverge again. The story concludes with
Xiang and his friend, another typesetter, volunteering to join an army work
gang to fight the Japanese while Li and his family move into Shanghais
French Concession, living on an advance of Lis Commercial Press pension.
Regardless of the era, Chinese writers seem to have drawn repeatedly on the
same lexicon to describe publishing industry editors.27 Mao Duns Mr. Li,
the Commercial Press editor, is presented as an ineffectual and calculating
hypocrite who distorts the proper ends of book learning. Unlike Vignettes
from the Late Qing, however, Wartime offers a positive view of the proletarians responsible for manufacturing the books edited by effetes such as Li.
Four years after publishing Wartime, Mao Dun returned to this theme
in a story that reflected the Shanghai publishing industrys new awareness
of science, technology, and invention. In 1936, Wenhuajies Kaiming shudian,
itself founded by a former Commercial Press editor, Zhang Xichen (18891969), invited Mao to submit a contribution to the publishers new magazine for adolescents, called Xin shaonian (New Youths). New Youths was created
to compete with the Commercial Presss Ertong shijie (Childrens World).
Although Mao rejected the assignment at first, he eventually wrote Shaonian
yinshua gong (The Young Printing Worker). This second story presents
a microcosm of Shanghais printing industry, echoing many themes of late

275

276 Conclusion

imperial and modern Chinese printing and publishing discussed in the present
book.
Partly under the influence of Thomas Francis Carters (1882-1925) work
on Chinas invention of printing, 1930s Shanghai printers began writing
about the history of their craft, both before and after the development of
Western-style printing. Their interest reflected a broadened popular concern with modernizing Chinas science and technology that dated back to
the elitist Self-Strengthening Movement (1860-95) of the nineteenth century. In his memoirs, Mao Dun states that his story was aimed at youths with
the equivalent of an upper primary and early secondary education as well as
at apprentices, child workers, and boys (i.e., waiters). All were the kinds of
youths who probably had had some schooling but had also had to quit school,
often because of straitened family circumstances. In spite of the youths own
need to find some means of supporting themselves, the educational values
of 1930s China often left them with a bias against technical work. The chief
editor of New Youths was Maos fellow writer, the well-known novelist Ye
Shengtao (1894-1988), who, by this time, had also served as an editor at
the Commercial Press. In addition to entertaining its readers, part of the
objective of Maos story, in keeping with Yes experiment in using his journal to impart scientific knowledge to young readers, was to introduce technical printing knowledge to them.28 Yes effort represented a literary approach
to the growth of interest in 1930s China in promoting the ideal of a broadbased education in science and technology for the sake of the country.
Mao Dun wrote about a group of adolescents with whom he was probably
familiar from his Commercial Press days. Like Wartime, The Young Printing Worker is set in the days following the Japanese attack of 1932. It
involves a boy, Zhao, whose fathers store is bankrupted by postwar economic collapse, just like dozens of the small Zhabei district machine shops,
discussed in Chapter 3, that depended on the Commercial Press. Zhao is a
gifted and idealistic student but has to quit middle school. He reads about
foreigners who became successful inventors despite their poverty. However,
he is most inspired by a book about a still-living Shanghai inventor who
founded a well-known local electric fan company.
Soon Zhao finds work in a paper-making factory, believing that he will be
able to learn about machines and electricity while earning six yuan per month.
Recalling that Chinese invented paper long before, Zhao is disappointed to
find that the paper-making machine was manufactured in the Netherlands.
Quickly dissatisfied with his job counting sheets of paper all day long, Zhao
quits it. His father then urges him to take a position as a restaurant boy so
that he will be able to wear nice clothes and work with nice people; factory
workers, by contrast, he says, pass dirty lives among rough people. Mao

Conclusion

Dun makes clear that Zhaos fathers contempt for technical work reflects a
deep-seated cultural bias against physical or technical work. Zhao refuses to
take a job as a boy, actually insisting that he prefers to serve machines
(sihou jiqi), not rich compradores and foreigners.29 Having read a book about
a successful local inventor, Zhao still dreams of becoming one himself by
working with electrical machines.
Eventually, his uncle suggests that Zhao apprentice himself to a small
printing shop so that he can learn typesetting. Like the apprentices in the
Mingjing Machine Shop, who dreamed of opening their own businesses,
Zhaos uncle holds out the prospect that patient acquisition of printing
skills will position Zhao to run his own printing firm. Zhao also fantasizes
about reading books hot off the presses.
The printing firm is located in a four-room, two-storey residential structure reminiscent of the houses in which both Tongwen and the Commercial
Press got their starts. It has five or six type racks and only one manual
printing press. After reporting for work, Zhao finds that he will live on the
ground floor of the shop house with another apprentice, again much like
the apprentices in the Mingjing Machine Shop. Zhao also meets an older
worker, Lao Jiao, who was baptized (xili) by revolutionary activities in 1927,
a clear reference to the Nationalist governments attack on the Commercial
Press printing workers in advance of the Japanese attack that ruined Zhaos
family.
By watching the firms printers, Zhao gradually learns how to typeset,
print proofs, and do other printing operations. While he works there, the
small print shop converts from hand-casting lead type, presumably using
techniques that dated back to Peter Perring Thoms (active 1814-51) in
Macao around 1815, to using copper matrices of the sort that Samuel Dyer
(1804-43) had developed in 1838 in Penang. At the same time, Lao Jiao
tells Zhao about the Monotype keyboards used to print foreign languages.
Unfortunately, he says, no such machines exist yet for printing Chinese.
The boys dreams of invention are revived, and Zhao begins to dream of
inventing such a machine.30 When Lao Jiao leaves for a new job in a larger
print shop, Zhao accompanies him, his new dream of working in a large,
mechanized publishing plant apparently on the cusp of fulfillment.
Both of Mao Duns stories evoke the same concern that Marc Bloch alluded to in his comments on the history of technology. The fiction of technology, like the history of technology, should reveal the importance of social
values, both inherited ones and newly acquired ones, in the choice and
deployment of machinery. For Mao, these values extend from the preoccupation of the gentleman editor, Mr. Li, with his status as an editor
and intellectual, to the interest in technology and inventions shown by the

277

278 Conclusion

apprentice, Zhao. To Zhao, and to Maos readers as well, machinery, particularly mechanized printing presses that can be used to print books to
advance public knowledge of science and technology, is a beacon for poor
men in a country under siege by belligerent imperialists and torn apart by
civil strife.
For Mao Dun, as well as for Mao Zedong, modern printing workers using
lithographic and letterpress machines were what separated Shanghais and,
indeed, Chinas modern printing industry from its traditional one. Both
Maos likely also realized that, without Western printing technology and
large industrialized corporate printing firms, neither these thousands of
modern workers nor the plethora of new-style books from which they themselves had learned about science, democracy, and invention could have existed. At the same time, both regarded Western printing technology as having
been largely sinicized by the 1930s.
Fully a third of Mao Duns The Young Printing Worker, intended to
reveal the mysteries of modern printing technology to latter-day Xia Ruifangs
in search of both role models and apprenticeships, is devoted to explaining
how printing technology actually functioned, both as a technological and as
a social system. Although, like Mao Zedong, Mao Dun recognized that this
was a foreign technology adapted to Chinese uses, in light of its importance
in advancing modern ideas, for all intents and purposes, the technology is
treated as if it were modern Chinese mind. Politics, formal schooling, libraries, popular scientific and technical education, invention, markets, patriotic
workers, printing technology, printing shops, and publishing companies are
all interwoven in Mao Duns mid-1930s view of Chinese print capitalism.31
Minus the capitalism, it is a pastiche that would live on into fiction writing
of the Peoples Republic of China, revealing the profound impact of Shanghai-based print capitalism on the modern Chinese mind. Indeed, Mao Duns
stories initiated the motif of the articulate, intellectually aware, and morally
committed printer later reworked by well-known fiction writers such as Gao
Yunlan (1910-56) in Xiaocheng chunqiu (Annals of a Provincial Town) and Yang
Mo (b. 1914) in Qingchun zhi ge (Song of Youth).32
Although Chinese of the 1930s gained from the plenitude created by the
Wenhuajie publishers, the publishers had also increasingly come to be seen
as part of a social and political system benefiting too few in a country of too
many. In Wartime, Mao Dun, himself a product of Shanghais print capitalist system, criticized capitalism only implicitly. By the time he published
The Young Printing Worker four years later, however, he did so directly,
through praise for the Soviet Union. Maos short stories praise technology,
the process of invention, books, workers, and large industrial plants. At the
same time, reflecting the inability of Nationalist-era markets to reach all

Conclusion

who could have profited from these advances, capitalism and the commerce
that it encompasses are regarded as dispensible. In this critique, Mao affiliates himself with a long Chinese tradition of censuring commerce in books.
Updating the criticisms of Vignettes from the Late Qing, Maos story also reflects the criticisms of Wenhuajie that had surfaced throughout the 1920s
and 1930s and that would contribute, eventually, to the ease with which
most Chinese intellectuals in the publishing world, the Commercial Presss
Zhang Yuanji among them, would embrace the Communist state in 1949.
In the end, after reading elite critiques of Chinese print culture, print
commerce, and print capitalism, one is left wondering whether the ambiguous status of Chinas book merchants had changed at all between 1909,
when Wu Woyaos critique appeared, and the 1920s and 1930s, when Zhou
Quanping and Mao Dun published theirs. However, through all the evaluations of the traditional publishers and the modern Shanghai print capitalists, both from within and from outside their industry, from its consumers,
and from the various governments with which they interacted, one major
transformation stands out clearly.
The technological foundation on which the book merchants relied under
Chinese print capitalism, and on which they would later rely again under
Chinese print communism, had changed irreversibly. Western printing presses
and machines had been chosen and modified by Chinese to serve Chinese
objectives. This vital civilian technology that many Chinese could trace to
Gutenberg made possible, and may even have helped to motivate, educational efforts to alert other Chinese to technologys myriad benefits, eventually allowing a wide range of foreign technology to ride in on its coattails.
In the meantime, the influential new-style dictionaries produced with Western-style presses, Ciyuan (Commercial Press, 1915) and Cihai (Zhonghua
Books, 1936-37), found their way to Mao Zedongs remote corner of wartorn
China, material evidence of the importance of Shanghais print capitalists
words and ideas in the establishment of the Peoples Republic of China.

279

Appendix:

A Birds-Eye View of 1930s Shanghais

Fuzhou Road/Wenhuajie District

Note: To simplify addresses, numbered lanes and alleys are listed as if they
were numbers on the main streets. When different firms share the same
address, they are on different floors of the same building.
1 Commercial Press
(est. 1897, comprehensive [lithographic,
letterpress, collotype, etc.] printer, publisher, and bookseller with retail
branches throughout China; most important of the Big Three corporate printer-publishers of Republican China; controlled 65 percent of

Appendix

3
4
5

6
7
8
9

10
11

12
13
14

the 1930s primary and secondary school textbook market), 211 Henan
Middle Road, 1912-49.
Zhonghua Books
(est. 1912 by Lufei Kui [1886-1940] and
Shen Zhifang [1882-1939], former Commercial Press employees;
comprehensive printer, publisher, and bookseller with retail branches
throughout China; second most important of the Big Three corporate
printer-publishers of Republican China; controlled 30 percent of the
1930s primary and secondary school textbook market), 221 Henan
Middle Road, 1916-49.
Zuozhe shushe
(est. 1932, bookseller), 269 Fuzhou Road,
1932.
(est. 1927, publisher and bookseller),
Guangming shuju
Fuzhou Road, 1927-38, then moved to 296 Fuzhou Road.
(est. 1921, Zhang Jinglus [1898-1969] first
Guanghua shuju
firm and Shanghais first all new-style publisher and bookseller), Fuzhou
Road, 1925-35.
Zhongxuesheng shuju
(est. 1930, publisher and sales of
works for juveniles), Fuzhou Road, 1930-c.40.
(est. date unknown, publisher and sales of works
Qinfen shuju
for juveniles), Fuzhou Road, 1930s.
(est. c. 1930, publisher and bookseller),
Sishuju menshibu
Fuzhou Road, 1930s.
Huatong shuju
(est. 1920s by Nationalist Party members and
a Shanghai gangster as publisher and bookseller), Fuzhou Road, 1920s38 (after merger with Japanese publisher Sanshengtang shudian
became Santong shuju
, distributor of the Nanjing
puppet governments primary school textbooks).
Huanqiu huapian Company
(est. date unknown, published
calendars and painting reproductions), Fuzhou Road, 1930s-56.
(est. 1926 by Beijing University professor
Meide shudian
Dr. Zhang Jingsheng, a.k.a. Dr. Sex, publisher and bookseller, particularly of Zhangs own works; in February 1926, when his Xingshi
[Sex Histories] was published, concession police had to use fire hoses
to disperse the throngs of customers spilling into Fuzhou Road), Fuzhou
Road, 1926-29.
Liangxi tushu gongsi
(est. date unknown, publisher and
bookseller), Fuzhou Road, 1930s.
(est. date unknown, pubChen Zhengtai huapian dian
lished calendars and painting reproductions), Fuzhou Road, 1930s-49.
Zhongxi/Sino-Western Pharmacy.

281

282 Appendix

15 Baixin shudian
(est. 1912, publisher and bookseller, multiple
branches, including Hong Kong), 375 Fuzhou Road, 1932+.
16 Beixin shuju
(est. 1924 in Beijing, well-known letterpress
printer-publisher of Lu Xuns works and books advocating New Culture ideals, forced to leave Beijing by warlord Zhang Zuolin [18731928], later also known for publishing social sciences, textbooks, etc.),
Fuzhou Road, 1926+.
17 Wenhui shuju
(est. date unknown, lithographic publisher and
bookseller), 397 Fuzhou Road, 1930s
(est. by Fudan University faculty, date unknown,
18 Liming shuju
publisher and bookseller), 254 Fuzhou Road, 1930-49.
19 Chuanxin shudian
(est. date unknown, sold old stringbound woodblock and lithographed books and rubbings, a favourite
haunt of bibliophile Zheng Zhenduo [1898-1958]), 260 Fuzhou Road,
?-1956.
(est. 1926 by Zhang Xichen [188920 Kaiming shudian (retail)
1969], former editor of Commercial Presss Fun zazhi; comprehensive
publisher and bookseller; also ran and operated Meicheng yinshua
, located in Hongkous Wuzhou Road until the Japagongsi
nese destroyed it in 1937), 268 Fuzhou Road, 1930-47.
21 Kaiming shudian (business and editorial offices), 272 Fuzhou Road,
1930-47.
22 Xinyue shudian
(est. 1927 by intellectuals Hu Shi [18911962], Xu Zhimo [1897-1931], Liang Shiqiu [1903-87], Wen Yiduo
[1899-1946], et al. to publish the journal Xinyue/New Moon and other
literary works), 272 Fuzhou Road, 1927-33, when it merged with the
Commercial Press.
(est. 1927 by Zhang Jinglu, Shen Songquan,
23 Xiandai shuju
and Lu Fang, published and sold art and social science books), 286, 288,
290 Fuzhou Road, 1927-35.
(est. 1930s, journal and book publisher), Fuzhou
24 Jinwu shudian
Road, 1930s.
25 Guangming shuju
(est. 1927, progressive publishing and
sales), 296 Fuzhou Road, 1938-55.
(est. early 1920s, gen26 Qunzhong tushu zazhi gongsi
eral publisher, including Shen Congquans 1924 edition of Xu Xiake
youji), 300 Fuzhou Road, 1924-c.40.
27 Kaiming shudian original site, Fuzhou Road, 1926-30, then Xin Zhongguo
tushuju
(est. 1930, primary school textbook publisher
and bookseller), Fuzhou Road, 1930+

Appendix

28 Zhenmeishan shudian
(est. 1927 by late Qing writer Zeng
Pu [1871-1936] and his son Zeng Xubo, journal and book publisher)
Shandong Road (then Wangping St.), 1927-1933 or 1935.
(est. 1929 by former
29 Hanwen zhengkai tushu gongsi
Zhonghua fine art editor Zheng Wuchang [1894-1952], general publisher and printer; known for its wide range of Zhengkai-style type
matrices sold throughout China and imitated by the Japanese publisher
Sanshengtang), Shandong Road (then Wangping St.), 1935-54.
30 Shibao newspaper offices
(est. 1904 by Buddhist Di Chuqing
[1873-1939] with financial support from Kang Youwei [1858-1927];
Di lost control of the paper in 1921 but it continued until 1939; in
1906, Shibao hired Bao Tianxiao [1876-1973] as an editor, starting his
long relationship with Shibao); Shibao was located here from 1921; first
floor was occupied by sister-firm Youzheng shuju
(est. 1904
on Weihaiwei Road, it moved here in 1921; a collotype printer, publisher
of paintings, calligraphy, traditional books, and a bookseller, it published Dis works and some of Baos translations; journalist Ge Gongzhen
[1890-1935] apprenticed with Youzheng in 1913 and rose to become
chief editor of Shibao); 1931-49, building was also occupied by Dadong
(est. 1916), a comprehensive printer-publisher and bookshuju
seller with branches throughout China; in addition to printing books
and journals, Dadong printed currency for the Nationalist government,
1931-49; 310 Shandong Road.
(est. date unknown, closed by conces31 Xinxin chubanshe
sion authorities for publishing a memoir of the 1927 Shanghai massacre), Shandong Road, 1934.
(see 30 above) lithographic, letterpress, and
32 Youzheng shuju
collotype printer-publisher and bookseller; in late Qing had branches in
Beijing, Tianjin; Shandong Road, 1904-43.
33 Gonghe shuju
(est. date unknown, branch of Canton firm,
publisher and bookseller), Fuzhou Road, 1920s-30s.
34 World Books
original site (Red House), est. 1921 by Shen
Zhifang, former Commercial Press and Zhonghua employee, third most
important of the Big Three corporate printer-publishers of Republican China; 320 Fuzhou Road, 1921-32, then Dazhong shuju
(est. 1932 by former World Books distribution manager, lithographic
and letterpress printer-publisher of primary school textbooks, medical
dictionaries), 1932-49.
35 Shanghai zazhi gongsi
(legendary progressive firm est.
1934 by Zhang Jinglu after he left Xiandai shuju [see 23 above]; Chinas

283

284 Appendix

36

37
38

39

40

41
42

43

44

first store to specialize in journal sales, both foreign and domestic;

from 1935 published literary journals and books), 324 Fuzhou Road,
1934-49.
(est. by Shen Zhiming, son of Shen Zhifang,
Qiming shuju
with help from Zhu Lianbao [1904-88] and others, published reference
books, childrens books, etc.), 328 Fuzhou Road, 1930s.
Dazhong shuju
original site, Fuzhou Road, 1916-31, then
Jiuzhou shuju
(est. 1930s, published popular works), 1930s.
Xinshengming shuju
(New Life Bookstore, est. c. 1928 by
Nationalist Party intellectuals Zhou Fohai [1897-1948], Tao Xisheng
[b. 1899], Fan Zhongyun, et al., who published progressive works, including Hu Yuzhis [1896-1986] memoirs of life in Moscow), Fuzhou
Road, 1928-37.
Yadong tushu guan
(est. 1913 by Anhui natives and eventual Trotskyist fellow travellers Wang Mengzou and his nephew Wang
Yuanfang as an outgrowth of their Kexue tushushe in Wuhu; moved in
1919 close to the corner of Canton (Guangdong) and Henan Middle
Roads at the suggestion of lifelong friend Chen Duxiu (1879-1942),
who, with Hu Shi, also acquired New Culture manuscripts for the firm
to publish; 1919-35, letterpress printer; published journals, books),
Fuzhou Road, 1935-37.
Commercial Press original retail site, corner of Fuzhou Road and Shanxi
(1909Road, 1897-1902, then Xu Shengji huapian dian
56, using its own print shop, which had some of East Asias most advanced printing equipment, published miniaturized reproductions of
paintings, calendar-style nianhua for sale nationally, in Hong Kong,
Southeast Asia, and even India), 1930s.
, Fuzhou Road, 1915-49?
Taidong tushuju
Taiping shuju
(est. c. 1937, issued official Japanese literary
propaganda after the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War, including
some by Zhou Zuoren [1885-1967]), 342 Shanxi Road, post-1937-45.
(est. 1932 by well-known patriotic jourShenghuo shudian
nalist Zou Taofen [1895-1944] after the demise of his weekly journal,
Shenghuo zhoukan/Life Weekly; published books, journals, etc.; supported
by the Chinese Communist Party, it was the most progressive patriotic
bookstore in China), 378-84 Fuzhou Road, 1932-37; after 1937,
Shenghuo became Xiongdi tushu gongsi
here.
(est. c. 1936, published
Zhongguo tushu zazhi gongsi
journals), 380 Fuzhou Road, 1936-39, later Yongxiang yinshuguan
(est. in 1899 as a general printing firm, started to issue
books and journals around 1942), 1942-56.

Appendix

45 Shenzhou guoguangshe
(est. 1908 with 10,000 yuan;
letterpress printer-publisher, also collotyped calligraphy, rubbings, etc.;
after 1932, Chen Mingshu, Wang Lixi [d. 1939], and Hu Qiu operated
it as an important publisher of social science works), 384 Fuzhou Road,
1908-54.
46 World Books
(see 34 above) 390 Fuzhou Road, 1932-49; this
.
site was originally that of the Qingliange Restaurant
(est. 1883 in Chinese city near the Great
47 Jiaojing shanfang
Eastern Gate on Chaobao Road, woodblock printing 1883-84;
letterpress by 1899; lithographic printing 1905-26, published traditional
string-bound books, vernacular novels, and, in the 1930s, works by Zheng
Yimei and traditional medical works), Fuzhou Road, 1935-41.
48 Sanyi huapian gongsi
(est. 1927 as a printing company
but expanded into high-quality calendar, painting reproductions, and
other publishing), 420 Fuzhou Road, 1927-30s.
(est. date unknown, well-known publisher of
49 Ertong shuju
childrens books), 424 Fuzhou Road, 1930s.
50 Shougu shudian
(est. c. 1927, rare-book dealer and lithographic publisher), Fuzhou Road, 1930s.
51 Hanwenyuan shusi
(est. date unknown, rare-book dealer;
with Shougu shudian [see 50 above], a frequent haunt of bibliophile
Zheng Zhenduo), Fuzhou Road, 1930s.
(est. 1935 by famous
52 Wenhua shenghuo chubanshe
writer Ba Jin [b. 1904] and others, literary publishing and sales),
newspaper offices,
436 Fuzhou Road above the Dagong bao
1936-38.
(est. 1872 by Ernest Major, parent
53 Shenbao newspaper offices
company of old Dianshizhai, Tushujicheng, and Shenchang shushi
firms), corner of Hankou and Shandong (Wangping) Roads, 1918-37.
(est. 1883 in Chinese city; like Saoye
54 Qianqingtang shuju
and Zhuyitang, it started as a lithographic printer-publisher of stringbound books, especially medical works; 1930s, started letterpress printing and manufacturing Kaiti [block letter] font matrices), corner of
Hankou and Shandong (Wangping) Roads, 1883-1955.
55 Xinwen bao newspaper offices
(est. 1893), on Hankou Road
between Shandong and Henan Middle Roads, 1930s-49.
56 Zhonghua Books
original site, 325 Henan Middle (Qipanjie)
(est. 1903, comRoad, 1912-16, then Huiwentang shuju
prehensive printer-publisher), 1916-49
57 Commercial Presss second address, Henan Middle Road near Nanjing
Road, 1902-12.

285

286 Appendix

58 Zhongyang ribao newspaper offices

(Nationalist Party, then
central government newspaper), corner of Henan Middle and Hankou
Roads, 1916-49.
59 Shanghai Fire Brigade
, Henan Middle Road between
Hankou and Fuzhou Roads.
60 Wuzhou Pharmacy, corner of Fuzhou and Henan Middle Roads.
(est. 1930 with links to Jiangsu
61 Longmen lianhe shuju
No. 2 Normal School, after 1938 merged with three Beijing refugee
printing-publishing firms; photo- and litho-reprinted German- and
English-language science and technology textbooks for sale at from 10
to 20 percent of the original prices; this effort led to a subsidy from
Jiaotong University students and contracts with Nanjings Zhongyang
and Hangzhous Zhijiang universities but also caused some copyright
problems in the late 1940s; in 1937, the Japanese destroyed Longmens
Hongkou printing plant, which Longmen rebuilt during the war), 210
Henan Middle Road, 1937-54.
62 Minzhi shuju
(est. 1921 by Nationalist Party stalwarts with
links to strongman Hu Hanmin [1879-1936]; published textbooks,
reference books, and official Nationalist works), Henan Middle Road,
1921-37.
(est. early 1930s by the Lingnan School
63 Shenmei tushuguan
painter-brothers Gao Jianfu [1889-1933] and Gao Qifeng [1879-1951];
chiefly an art gallery, it also printed and published fine postcards and
pictures), Henan Middle Road, 1930s.
(est. 1933 by the Nationalist Partys CC
64 Zhengzhong shuju
Clique, with an office at 384 Fuzhou Road and a sales office on Henan
Middle Road at Qiujing Road; the head office was in Nanjing; published and sold Nationalist Party-guided publications, which controlled
less than 5 percent of the 1930s middle and primary school textbook
market), 1933-49.
(est. 1902 in Changsha, Shanghai branch est.
65 Qunyi shushe
1907, Tokyo 1909), opened at the corner of Qiujing and Henan Middle
Roads, original publisher of Chen Duxius journal Xin qingnian/New Youth,
also published reference and literary works, 1912-35.
(est. before 1880 in Chinese native city, lithographic
66 Wenruilou
publisher by 1893 and seller of string-bound traditional works, medical
works, popular novels, as well as Wu Youru huabao [1911]), Henan Middle
Road, 1880-1937.
67 Zhuyitang
(est. in Chinese native city c. 1878, woodblock and
letterpress printer-publisher of a wide variety of traditional and modern works, sold traditional literature, medical works, popular novels;

Appendix

68

69

70
71

72
73

74
75

76

77

had exemplar library of 1,200 volumes), corner of Canton (Guangdong)

and Henan Middle Roads, 1890-c. 1912.
(est. date unknown, owned
Zhengxing huapian gongsi
by Singapore Chinese, published nianhua-style calendars and reproductions of paintings for sale in Southeast Asia; also imported Westernstyle oil paintings for sale in China), Canton (Guangdong) Road, 1930s.
Wenhua meishu tushuguan
(est. date unknown, published best-selling account of the 1932 Japanese attack on Wusong and
Shanghai, Song Hu yu ri xue zhan dahuashi), Canton (Guangdong) Road,
1932-?
Yadong tushu guan
(see 39 above), Canton (Guangdong)
Road, 1919-35.
(est. c. 1932 by former Taidong, Beixin,
Hezhong shudian
Xiandai employee who issued works by progressives Qu Qiubai [18991935], Lu Xun [1881-1936], and A Ying [1900-77]), Shandong Road
near Renji Hospital, 1932-49
Dongya shuju
(est. by Shen Zhifang and others, date unknown), Shandong Road near Renji Hospital, 1920s-30s.
Jinzhang shuju
(est. 1894, reestablished 1901 with 50,000
yuan and fifteen lithographic presses; originally printed, published, and
sold string-bound traditional works, medical books, popular novels;
1,300 of its titles were lithographed, according to Zheng Zhenduo; had
branches in Beijing, Changsha, Hengyang, Hankou, Chengdu, and Canton; it also issued a leading butterfly school journal and cheap novels),
Henan Middle Road, c. 1914-50s.
(see 47 above), Henan Middle Road, c.
Jiaojing shanfang
1936-?
(est. c. 1600 in Suzhou; this was Saoyes secSaoye shanfang
ond Shanghai address; woodblock and lithographic printer-publisher
[including 1929 Xu Xiake youji] and booksales), Henan Middle Road,
1880-1955.
Guangyi shuju
(est. 1879 to print and publish lithographed
civil service examination aids, traditional textbooks, after 1906 published
traditional literature and popular novels sold in market towns and villages; later published illustrated popular literature; added letterpress
printing from 1920; had retail branches throughout China; bought by
World and Guangzhi shuju in 1925), 137 Henan Middle Road, 1900-47.
(est. 1925? by former Zhonghua manager, pubXinya shudian
lished charts, educational aids, and primary and secondary school science textbooks, as well as semi-official Nationalist Party publications),
159 Henan Middle Road, 1925?-49.

287

288 Appendix

78 Wenming shuju
original site (est. 1902 by Yu Fu, Lian Quan,
and Ding Fubao [1874-1952] as a rival to the Commercial Press, comprehensive printing, publishing, and bookselling firm, 1904 became a
colour lithographer and a collotype printer, then merged with Zhonghua;
Bao Tianxiao worked here in 1910s, editing, among other works, Xiaoshuo huabao [1917]), 201 Henan Middle Road, later Qixin shuju
(est. date unknown, co-invested by Zhonghua, sold books,
stationery, etc.), 1930s.
Sources:
Fan, Muhan, ed. Zhongguo yinshua jindai shi, chu gao. Beijing: Yinshua gongye chubanshe, 1995.
Quanguo Zhongyi tushu lianhe mulu. Beijing: Zhongyi guji chubanshe, 1991.
Wang, Qingyuan, Mou Renlong, Han Xiduo, eds. Xiaoshuo shufang lu. Beijing: Beijing tushuguan
chubanshe, 2002 [1987].
Zhu, Lianbao. Jiefangqian Shanghai shudian, chubanshe yinxiangji, yi, er. CBSL 1-10
(1982-87).
. Jinxiandai Shanghai chubanye yinxiang ji. Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 1993.

Glossary of Chinese Terms,

Titles, and Names

Note: Commonly Used Characters Have Been Omitted

Printing and Publishing Terms

aoban yinshua
intaglio/gravure printing
baihua
vernacular language
bansitiao
halftone
newspaper office, bureau
baoguan
collotype
boli ban
caise shiyin
chromolithography
colour photogravure
caise yingxie ban
cazi
short, whisklike brush used in xylographic printing
ce
volume
long brush, used in xylographic printing
changshua
chuanzhen ban
facsimile
Cu ti
Cu font, one of the four major Republican fonts, created
by the Commercial Press
Da Yingji
Big English Press (Wharfedale)
dangun tongji
single-cylinder press
danxian baimiao
line drawing
alternative name for Monotype
danzi zhupaiji
diandu tongban
electrotype
electric lens
dianjing
dianxin shubao
leisure papers
diaoke huozi
cut type
copperplate
diaoke tongban
Fangsong ti
Song-like font, one of the four major Republican
fonts, created by Zhonghua Books
Fangtou ti
full-head, square-head script, alternative name
for Cu font
cylinder press
guntong yinshua ji
Gu ti
classic-style font

290 Glossary of Chinese Terms, Titles, and Names

huangyang ban
boxwood/yellow poplar printing plate
Huawen paishaoji
Sinotype
huozi
movable printing type
workman-style (characters)
jiang ti
jiaoban
offset lithography
classics, histories, philosophers, collections, one
jingshi ziji
traditional way to list book categories
metal printing plates
jinshu ban
old-style or traditional books
jiushu
juan
volume
regular script font
Kai-ti
plain written-hand or standard calligraphic style
Kaishu ti
keluo ban
collotype
Linotype
Lai-na paizi ji
Lai-nuo zhupai ji
Linotype
Han-dynasty official script
lishu
lianhuanhua shu

serial-picture books

a southern-style bamboo paper, frequently used for

lianshi zhi
lithography
Liulichang
Beijings booksellers district since the eighteenth
century
cylinder or flatbed printing machine,
lunzhuan yinshua ji
also rotary press
tinplate
makoutie
Ma-na pai shaoji
Monotype
rough-edged bamboo paper
maobian zhi
a crude paper
maocao zhi
maotai zhi
a rough paper
Meihua ti
Gambles Song/Meihua/APMP type font
Miehle printing machine
Meili yinji
mincho-tai (Chinese, Mingchao ti)
Japanese name
for Ming-dynasty-style character font
Monotype
Mo-nuo zhupai ji
nianhua
New Years woodblock prints
niban
clay stereotype, also plaster stereotype
light and shade colour printing
nongdan seban
pingban yinshua
planographic printing
qianban
stereotype
perfected: i.e., printed on both sides
quanfen
quanzhang qianyin baozhi ji
full-page lead-type
newspaper press

Glossary of Chinese Terms, Titles, and Names 291

sanjiao zijia
one of three names for Gambles type rack
sanse ban
three-colour printing
sanyuanse
three-colour printing
one of three names for Gambles type rack
shengdou jia
plaster stereotype
shigao ban
shiyin
stone-based lithography
double-cylinder press
shuanglun tong yinshuaji
shuye xuetang
booktrade school
4-corner system of book classification
sijiao haoma
Song-dynasty-style font, one of the four major
Song ti
Republican fonts
Tang-mu-sheng zidong zhuzi ji
Thompson automatic
type-caster
a set of books
tao
tongchang jia
unitary long type rack
copperplate
tongke ban
tuban yinshua
relief printing/media
Shanghais Culture-and-Education Streets
Wenhuajie
offset lithography
xiangpi ban
xinshu
new-style books
xiupei
repair machines and supply parts
one office, three departments
yichu sansuo
Yingguo Mi-li-ji
English Miehle
yingtou xizi
fly-head characters lined up like eyebrows
photogravure/heliogravure
yingxie ban
yuanbaoshi zijia
one of three names for Gambles type rack
yuanzhuo huiyi
roundtable system of editorial decision-making
zhaoxiang aoban
gravure printing
zhaoxiang tongziban
photoengraving
zhaoxiang shiyin
stone-based photolithography or zinc-plate
photolithography
Zhengkai font, a.k.a. Standard font, one of the four
Zhengkai ti
major Republican fonts, created by the Commercial Press
zhixing
papier-mch stereotype, a flong
Zhuyin fuhao
phonetic alphabet for Chinese
zhuzi ji
type-casting machine
automatic type-casting machine
zidong zhuzi ji
cast-type matrices or movable type
zimo

292 Glossary of Chinese Terms, Titles, and Names

Book and Other Titles

Chubanjie de hunluan yu
chengqing
Congshu jicheng
Dianshizhai huabao
Feiyingge huabao
Feiyingge huace
Guanshang kuailan
Liangyou
Manyou suilu
Meishu shenghuo
Qingchun zhi ge
Qinglou huabao
Quanshi liangyan
Rizhilu
Shaonian yinshua
gong

Shenbao
Shenjiang shengjing tu
Shiwubao
Songnan mengying lu
Tushu yuebao
Wanyou wenku
Wenxian tongkao
Xiaocheng chunqiu
Xiaoti Langxuan wenji
Xinwen bao
Xunhuan ribao
Yingruan zazhi
You di er zhang
Zhongxing gongchen tu

Personal Names

Bao Tianxiao
Bao Xianchang
Bao Xianen
Bi Sheng
Cai Gao
Chen Cunren
Chen Huageng
Chen Jiageng (Tan Kah Kee)
Chen Jintao
Chen Lifu
Chen Liyan
Chen Yun
Chen Zhaoqing
Chen Zhaoquan
Dai Kedun
Deng Qiuzhang
Ding Fubao
Du Yaquan
Fan Yuanlian
Gao Fengchi (Hanqing)
Gao Mengdan

Ge-deng-bao
Gu-teng-bao
Gui Zhongshu
He Chengyi
He Shengnai
Hu Renyuan
Hu Yuefang
Hu Yuzhi
Huang Sheng (Pingfu)
Ji Yihui
Jiang Weiqiao
Ka-te
Kong Xiangxi
Li Changgen
Li Jinxi
Li Shengduo (Muzhai)
Li Xiangbo
Liang Afa
Liu Longguang
Lu Gaoyi

Glossary of Chinese Terms, Titles, and Names 293

L Ziquan
Lufei Kui (Bohong)
Luo Jialun
Ma Duanlin
Mao Dun
Mao Xianglin
Qian Tangding
Qian Zheng
Qiu Ziang
Qu Yaang
Shen Jifang
Shen Junsheng
Shen Zhifang
Shen Zhizhang
Shi Liangcai
Tang Shaoyi
Tao Xingzhi
Tian Jiasheng
Wang Boqi
Wang Jingyun
Wang Junqing
Wang Licai
Wang Longyou
Wang Mengzou
Wang Shangen
Wang Tao
Wang Yunwu
Wang Zhengting
Wu Danchu
Wu Jingyuan
Wu Tiesheng
Wu Woyao (Jianren)

Wu Youru
Wu Yunzhai
Xi Zipei
Xia Ruifang
(Cuifang)
Xia Songlai
Xu Hongfu
Xu Jifu (Xu Ji)
Xu Meikun
Xu Run
Yan Fansun
Yan Zhong
Yang Zhengyang
Ye Jiuru
Ye Shengtao
Yu Fu (Zhonghuan)
Yu Youren
Zhang Jinglu
Zhang Jinlin
Zhang Xichen
Zhang Yuanji
(Jusheng)
Zhang Zhiying
Zhao Hongxue
Zheng Zhenduo
Zheng Zhenwen
Zhong Shiguang
Zhou Quanping
Zhu Jingnong
Zhu Lianbao
Zhu Tian
Zhuang Yu

Firm Names and Business Terms

Baishi shanfang
Baojinglou
Biefa yanghang
Bowen yinshua
gongsi
Changming gongsi

Changxing jiqi zhizao chang

(Shanghainese, Chong
Shing)
Chongde gongsuo
Dadong shuju
daikuan fa

294 Glossary of Chinese Terms, Titles, and Names

Dalong jiqi chang

Dianshizhai shiyinju
diejia xiaoshou
diya jiekuan
duzi jingying
fangdian
Feiyingguan shiyinju
fenxiao chu
Fuwenge
Fuxing tongmudian
Gongmin shuju
gongsi
gongsuo
Gongyichang jiqi
chang
guan shu wenwu xing
gongye
Guangbaisong zhai
Guangzhi shuju
guanyue
gufen youxian gongsi
Guomin shuju
Guoxue fulunshe
Gushu liutong chu
Hanfenlou
Heji gongsi
hetong
hezi jingying
Hongbaozhai
shiyinju
Hongwen shuju
houtai laoban
Huada jiqi chang
Huiwentang shuju
Hujiang jiqi chang
Hushang shuju
huxiao
jia
Jianye jiqi zhizao youxian
gongsi
Jinsuzhai

Jishi shanfang
Kaiming shudian
kexue guanli fa
Kezi gongsuo
Kinko-do- (Chinese,
Jingangtang)
Lequn shuju
Li Yongchang jiqi
chang
lingban
linzhong tuoguan de
cunkuan
liudong zijin
Luyin shanfang
Meihua shuguan
Mengxuebao baoguan
mianfei zengsong
Mingjing jiqi chang
mingshi
Mohai shugan
paojie
qianzhuang
Qingxintang
Ruitai jiqi chang
Saoye shanfang
Shanghai shuye
gongsuo
Shanghai shuye
shanghui
Shanghai shuye shangmin
xiehui
Shanghaishi shuye tongye
gonghui
Shangwu yinshu guan
Shenchang shushi
Shenzhou guoguangshe
sheqian
Shijie shuju
Shizhong shuju
Simei xuanchashi
Tongtie gongsuo

Glossary of Chinese Terms, Titles, and Names 295

Tongwen shuju
Tushu jicheng qianyin
shuju
Weihua yintuan
Wenbao gongsi
Wenming xinji shuju
Wenyutang
Xiaoshuo congbao she
Xieda jiqi chang
Xiuwen yinshuju
Yadong tushuguan
yagui
Yanguangshi
Yinshuaye gongyihui
Yinyinlu
Yiyuan zhenshang she
Youzheng shuju
yuan
Yunlange

yuyue fa
Zhengzhong shuju
Zhiye gongsuo
Zhongguo fanggu
yinshuju
Zhongguo tushu
gongsi
Zhonghou shuzhuang
Zhonghua jiaoyu yongju zhizao
chang
Zhonghua jinyuan
Zhonghua shuju
Zhonghua yinwu
zongju
Zhonghua yudi
xueshe
zhuangju
Ziye gongsuo
Zuiliutang

Other Terms and Phrases

baiye zhiji
bu ze shouduan
chaxu
dianshi chengjin
dipan
gesheng handian
fenchi
guaijie
guowen
hongtou a-san
Huaiyin jiangbing
huanqin tuoyou
jiaohui pai
jiaoyu de dao, ze qi guo qiang
sheng
jieyi xiongdi
Jiujiaochang
ling qi luzao
longtang
magua

Nanshi
Nanyang gongxue
pingfang
Qipanjie xunyue shi
sanjia dingli
Shanghai sitong bada
she
shifu xingli
shu daizi
shu du tou
shuoku
shusheng pai
shuxiang mendi
sihou jiqi
teshu yongxin
tongqian
traditional cast
copper coins
tongyuan
modern stamped
copper coins
tu

296 Glossary of Chinese Terms, Titles, and Names

xie shi jiu

xiushen
Yangjingbang hua
yaoluan shehui shang de
ermu
yindu xunbu
yinghai kaitong
yingshe xiaoshuo
clef

roman

yiwofeng
yixin ermu
youmu
zhengqi yinjin
Zhongguo sida
faming
zilaihuo yinjin
zuozhi youchu

Notes

Note: For abbreviations used in the following notes, please see the Asian-Language and Western-Language Bibliographies.
Acknowledgments
1 Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Fulton H. Anderson (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1960),
118.
2 Andr Malraux, Mans Fate, trans. Haakon M. Chevalier (New York: Random House, 1961),
132.
Introduction
1 Harrison E. Salisbury, The New Emperors, China in the Era of Mao and Deng (Boston: Little
Brown and Co., 1992), 8. Ciyuan was compiled by Lu Erkui et al. and was issued in numerous
editions, as was Cihai, edited by Shu Xincheng et al. Each work contains phrases, definitions,
proper names, and foreign terms with some overlapping coverage. Cihai, which benefited
from Ciyuans editorial mistakes, is distinguished by a clearer citation and definitional style.
See Endymion Wilkinson, The History of Imperial China, A Research Guide (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard East Asian Research Center, 1975), 8-9.
2 This conventional view has recently been questioned by Etiemble, LEurope chinoise (Paris:
Gallimard, 1988), 30ff., among others, who argues that Gutenberg himself was reinventing
Chinese technology. I would like to thank my Ohio State University colleague, Patricia Sieber,
for this reference.
3 The phrase wealth and power is usually identified with the late-nineteenth-century translator Yan Fu, who is studied in Benjamin I. Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and
the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964).
4 Roger Chartier, General Introduction: Print Culture, in Chartier, ed., The Culture of Print,
Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1987), 1.
5 Ibid.
6 Major works on aspects of Chinese print culture include Evelyn S. Rawski, Education and
Popular Literacy in Ching China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1979); Tsuen-hsuin
Tsien, Paper and Printing, in Joseph Needham, ed., Science and Civilisation in China (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), 5:1; Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology,
Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East
Asian Monographs, 1990), esp. Chapter 4; Joan Judge, Print and Politics: Shibao and the
Culture of Reform in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); and Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in Chinas Medical History 960-1665 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1999). On the relationship between education, literacy, and social hegemony, see David Johnson, Communication, Class, and Consciousness in Late Imperial China,
34-74, esp. 56-67, in David Johnson et al., eds., Popular Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), and Benjamin A. Elman, A Cultural History of Civil
Examinations in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), Ch. 5-7,
esp. 371-83.

298 Notes to pages 5-6

7 The standard work on the impact of the Gutenberg revolution on Europe is Elizabeth L.
Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations
in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
8 Tsien, Paper and Printing, 190, note f. Thank you to my Ohio State University colleague Cynthia
J. Brokaw for alerting me to questions about these figures. By way of contrast with the 268
years of the Qing, during the thirty-seven years of the Republic of China (1912-49) 68,183
titles were published. See Beijing tushuguan, ed., Minguo shiqi zongshumu, 1911-1949 (Beijing:
Shumu wenxian chubanshe, 1986 and 1994). According to Sigfried Taubert and Peter
Weidhaas, eds., Book Trade of the World (Munich: K.G. Saur, 1981), 69, between 1949-77,
488,569 titles appeared in the Peoples Republic of China.
9 Official publishing was not all philosophy books. For example, Tsien, Paper and Printing, 190,
finds that 80 percent of all local Chinese histories known to exist were issued in the Qing
period.
10 Rawski, Education and Popular Literacy, 23.
11 See W.L. Idemas review of Rawskis book in Toung Pao 66:4-5 (1980): 314-24. Thanks to
Mark Halperin of the University of California at Davis for this citation. David Johnson,
Communication, Class, and Consciousness in Late Imperial China, in Johnson et al., 59,
argues that, in 1800 (when the total population was about 300 million), only 5 percent of the
adult male population was literate by the standards of the civil service examinations. If we use
Johnsons figure, we still have a literate audience of five to ten million. By comparison, the
English literacy rate, surpassed in Europe only by those of the male populations of Scotland
and Sweden, was about 60 percent for males and 40 percent for females in 1790-1800, when
literacy is defined by the low standard of having the ability to sign ones name. Englands
population was then 8.9 million, yielding a literate public of no more than 4.5 million. In
France, which historians usually regard as having had a lower rate than England, the literacy
rate for men was 47 percent and for women, 27 percent. At that time, when Frances population was about 26 million, the total literate population could have been no more than 11.3
million. In 1850, when Englands population had ballooned to 17.9 million after a century of
industrial revolution, literacy rates of 70 percent for males and 55 percent for females are
likely. Nearly complete literacy (99 percent) for males and females was not achieved in England until around 1911. I would like to acknowledge my Ohio State University colleague,
David Cressy, for referring me to his Literacy & the Social Order, Reading and Writing in Tudor
and Stuart England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), esp. 176-81.
12 Yang Licheng and Jin Buying, eds., Zhongguo cangshujia gaile (Taipei: Wen-hai chu-pan-she,
1971 [Hangzhou, 1929]), list over 750 notable private Qing libraries. See also Ye Dehui,
Shulin qinghua (Taipei: Shih-chieh shu-chu, 1961 [1911]); Cho-Yan Tan (Taam), The Development of Chinese Libraries under the Ching Dynasty, 1644-1911 (Shanghai: Commercial Press,
1935), 18; and Su Jing, Jindai cangshu 30 jia (Taipei: Chuan-chi wen-hsueh chu-pan-she,
1983).
13 Sun Congtian, Cangshu jiyao (1812), trans. Achilles Fang, Bookmans Manual, in Harvard
Journal of Asiatic Studies 14:1, 2 (June 1951): 220-21.
14 Many Chinese historians now use the term commodity economy to characterize Chinas
highly commercial but non-capitalistic economy. For one example, see Gary G. Hamilton and
Chi-kong Lai, Consumerism without Capitalism: Consumption and Brand Names in Late
Imperial China, in Henry J. Rutz and Benjamin S. Orlove, eds., The Social Economy of Consumption (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989), 253-79.
15 Lucille Chia, Printing for Profit: The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Song-Ming (960-1644)
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003).
16 On print commerce, see Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure, Commerce and Culture in
Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner
Chambers: Women and Culture in 17th Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994);
Kai-wing Chow, Writing for Success: Printing, Examinations, and Intellectual Change in
Late Ming China, Late Imperial China 17:1 (June 1996): 120-57; Ellen Widmer, The
Huanduzhai of Hangzhou and Suzhou: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Publishing, Harvard
Journal of Asiatic Studies 36 (1996): 77-122.

Notes to pages 6-10 299

17 Cynthia J. Brokaw, Commercial Publishing in Late Imperial China: The Zou and Ma Family
Businesses of Sibao, Fujian, Late Imperial China 17:1 (June 1996): 49-92.
18 James Flath, Printing Culture in Rural North China: Reading Nianhua as History (forthcoming,
UBC Press).
19 On Jianyang in the Song and the Yuan, see Lucille Chia, The Development of the Jianyang
Book Trade, Song-Yuan, Late Imperial China 17:1 (June 1996): 10-48. On Huizhou, see Zhang
Haipeng et al., Huishang yanjiu (Hefei: Huangshan shushe, 1995), 534-43. On Ming printing,
consult K.T. Wu, Ming Printing and Printers, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 7 (1943):
203-60.
20 Robert E. Hegel, The Novel in Seventeenth Century China (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1981), 11.
21 Li Demao, in Ichinose Yuichi, Shindai Rurisho- sho-shi ni kan suru hitotsu ko-satsu, Shisen,
Historical and Geographic Studies in Kansai University 67 (March 1988): 30.
22 Sir Rutherford Alcock, The Peking Gazette, Frasers Magazine, new series, VII (February,
March 1873), 245-56, 341-57, is the only first-hand record of a visit by a Westerner I have
found prior to the appearance in 1935 of L.C. Arlington and William Lewisohns In Search of
Old Peking (New York: Paragon Reprint, 1967).
23 For historical materials on Liulichang, including turnover among shops, see Sun Dianqi, ed.,
Liulichang xiaozhi (Beijing: Beijing guji chubanshe, 1982 [1962]).
24 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,
rev. ed. (London and New York: Verso, 1991), especially Chapter 3.
25 Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book, The Impact of Printing, 14501800, trans. David Gerard (London: NLB, 1976 [1958]), 128, 109, 216.
26 As Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life 1400-1800, trans. Miriam Kochan (New
York: Harper and Row, 1973), xiii, points out, even the term capitalism was not coined until
1870. Karl Marx was largely unaware of the word capitalism.
27 Karl Marx, Capital (New York: The Modern Library, 1906), 407.
28 Marie-Claire Bergre, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937, trans. Janet Lloyd
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 17.
29 Oddly, the situation is little better in American history, for example. In Endless Novelty,
Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865-1925 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), Philip Scranton studies regional specialty manufacturing industries, including publishing. By 1860, Scranton observes, outlining a situation that would be true of
Shanghai in the late 1890s, New York had the countrys largest industrial workforce, a vast
array of machine works, including R. Hoe & Co., which manufactured printing presses, and
was the hub of American book publishing. In Scrantons view, reasons for scholarly neglect
of the New York printing and publishing sector include the fact that the industry was structurally intricate, partly because of the divorce of publishing from printing in the mid-1870s.
Further, publishing, he says, was heavily oriented toward local and regional clienteles.
Scrantons comments suggest that, both organizationally and in terms of its national influence, Shanghais print capitalism exhibited distinctive characteristics lacking in the AngloAmerican world.
30 ZYS, 566-69, discusses other materials, such as Dege copper, iron, and tin blocks in Sichuan,
cerography (wax blocks) in Canton, and Jiangnin copper blocks, used during the Ming and
Qing periods.
31 Cynthia J. Brokaw, Woodblock Printing and the Diffusion of Print in Qing China, conference paper delivered at The First International Scientific Conference on Publishing Culture
in East Asia, Tokyo, December 8-10, 2001, 6, relates the dispersal of Chinese print culture to
the convenience of blockprinting technology.
32 Rawski, Education and Popular Literacy, 121. For more on the traditional process, see Literary
Notices, Chinese Repository I:10 (February 1833), 414-15, and Robert E. Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 106-113;
Tsuen-hsuin Tsien, Technical Aspects of Chinese Printing, and Wan-go H.C. Weng, Chinese Type Design and Calligraphy, both in Soren Edgren et al., Chinese Rare Books in American
Collections (New York: China Institute in America, 1984).

300 Notes to pages 10-14

33 On the translation of these and other terms related to woodblock printing, see David S.
Barker, A Chinese-English Dictionary of Terms Related to Woodblock Printmaking (London: Muban Foundation, 2003).
34 Perry Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese
Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
35 Leo Ou-fan Lee and Andrew J. Nathan, The Beginnings of Mass Culture: Journalism and
Fiction in the Late Ching and Beyond, in Johnson et al., eds., Popular Culture in Late Imperial
China, 360-98.
36 Ibid., 361. Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China
1930-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) reengages some of the same
issues by studying modern Shanghai culture from the perspective of prominent publishing
houses. By focusing on publishers purely as cultural organizations issuing print culture, however, Lee misses the critically important distinguishing characteristic of modern publishing
namely, its reliance on machinery.
37 Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth
Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), and ZYS.
38 Jean-Pierre Drge, La Commercial Press de Shanghai, 1897-1949 (Paris: Memoires de lInstitut
des Hautes Etudes Chinoises, 1978), 3. In 1985, Tsien, Paper and Printing, 380, drawing a
fundamental distinction between Chinese printing and publishing and that in the West, echoed
Drge, noting that [w]hile printing in the West was primarily a business for profit, it had
strong moral implications in Chinese society.
39 Albert Kaprs fascinating Johann Gutenberg, The Man and His Invention, trans. Douglas Martin
(Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1996), 27-36, discusses the issues of the printers birth and
actual name. Kapr also says that Gutenberg was not recognized as the inventor of printing
until the 1740s. In the West, Gutenberg studies reached a high tide in the first half of the
twentieth century.
40 See Fu Yunsen et al., eds., Xin zidian (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1912). Both Lu Erkui et
al., eds., Ciyuan (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1915) and Xu Yuangao et al., eds., Zhonghua da
zidian (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1915), although focused on Chinese terms, also included
phrases and information culled from Western books.
41 By the 1930s, Shanghai publishers promoted popular works on science, technology, and invention, issuing works such as Xu Shoushen, Xiandai kexue faming shi (Shanghai: Commercial
Press, 1930) and Qian Yishi, Shijie famingjia liezhuan (Shanghai: Zhonghua Books, 1936). On
the growth of popular Chinese interest in scientific and technical arts, see Carrie Waara,
Invention, Industry, Art: The Commercialization of Culture in Republican Art Magazines,
in Sherman Cochran, ed., Inventing Nanjing Road, Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900-1945
(Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Program, 1999), 61-90.
42 GGZ, 311.
43 Ibid.
44 Arguably, Ges acknowledgement of the importance of printing technology and of Chinas
contribution to world printing technology laid the groundwork for the Chinese phrase
Zhongguo si da faming (Chinas four great inventions: paper, printing, gunpowder, and the
compass), taught today to all Chinese schoolchildren. In Shu Xincheng et al., eds., Cihai
(Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1937), this phrase is limited to san da faming (three great
inventions). This reference follows, without citing, Francis Bacons discussion in his New Organon (1620) of three great inventions: printing, gunpowder, and the magnet (compass). Bacon did not know that all three had come to Europe from China. Mention of the fourth,
paper, does not appear in Chinese dictionaries until the 1950s.
45 HSN, I: 257.
46 Earlier, during the Self-Strengthening Movement (1860-1895), only a tiny number of elites
had been exposed to this ideal.
47 Xiang Bing, Zhongguo yinshua yu Gudengbao, in Kexue de Zhongguo 4:5 (1 Sept. 1934),
187-90, republished in SXSJ, 58-61.
48 From China, movable type had spread initially to Korea, where the first book, now lost, was
printed using movable metal type in 1234. The oldest extant Korean book printed with mov-

Notes to pages 14-17

49
50
51

52

53

54

55
56
57
58
59

60

61

able metal type dates from 1377. Korean typography flourished after 1403 thanks to royal
patronage. See Printing, in Keith Pratt and Richard Rutt, eds., Korea, A Historical and Cultural Dictionary (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1999), 359-60. According to Peter Kornicki, The
Book in Japan, A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill,
1998), 129, Hideyoshi took movable Korean type (whether wooden or metal is not stated) to
Japan in the 1590s, where it was used to print the Xiaojing in 1593.
Xiang, Zhongguo yinshua yu Gudengbao, 61.
Shu et al., eds., Cihai, II: you ji, 68.
Bai Mu, Yinshuashu jiangzuo, er, in YW II:2 (1 August 1939), 38. YW (Yiwen yinshua
yuekan/The Graphic Printer), published by Lin Heqin, a Chinese graduate of Pittsburghs Carnegie
Institute of Technologys printing program, followed in the tradition of Chicagos The Inland
Printer (1883-1983) and Britains British and Colonial Printer (1878-1952), journals that fostered esprit de corps among printers with their articles on history, new techniques, and current
working conditions.
On the many portraits of Gutenberg, see George D. Painter, The True Portrait of Johann
Gutenberg and The Untrue Portraits of Johann Gutenberg in Painter, Studies in Fifteenth
Century Printing (London: Pindar Press, 1984), 32-38, 39-45.
Qian Cunxun (Tsuen-hsuin Tsien), Qian Cunxun boshi xu, in ZYS, 2, says that, in the
1930s, he too first became interested in Chinese printing via Carter. The same seems to have
been true of Zhang himself; see Li Ximi, Li Ximi xiansheng xu, in ZYS, 5.
There is not yet evidence to suggest that Korean typography influenced Europe. Other examples of pre-World War II technologies that underwent this process of transfer and return
may include Egyptian measurement technologies; Islamic astronomy, mathematics, and medicine; Indian cotton spinning devices; and African quinine.
Linda Cooke Johnson, Shanghai: An Emerging Jiangnan Port, 1683-1840, in Johnson, ed.,
Cities of Jiangnan in Late Imperial China (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 180.
The others were Canton, Xiamen (Amoy), Fuzhou, and Ningbo.
Brian Martin, The Pact with the Devil, in Frederic Wakeman, Jr., and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds.,
Shanghai Sojourners (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1992), 267.
Extraterritoriality lasted from 1842 until the end of World War II.
In their use of Shanghais International Concession as their base of operations from which
they sent books into the Chinese market, and in the threats they faced, not only from the
Qing and subsequent governments but also from the foreign powers, Shanghai gangsters,
concession police, etc., Shanghais modern publishers suggest a parallel with the publishers
of Neuchtels Socit Typographique discussed by Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). As will become
clear in this book, freedom of the press was not an absolute value upheld by the concession governments.
In 1939, Christopher Isherwood, a brief visitor to the city, lampooned the Bund memorably
as nothing more than an unhealthy mud-bank onto which [t]he biggest animals have pushed
their way down to the brink of the water; behind them is a sordid and shabby mob of smaller
buildings. Nowhere a fine avenue, a spacious park, an imposing central square. Nowhere
anything civic at all. See W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, Journey to a War (New
York: Random House, 1939), 237.
With the passage of time, a nostalgic view of Wenhuajie has emerged that ignores this ambiguity. Throughout the period from 1991 to 1993, articles regularly appeared in the Shanghai
press, discussing Shanghais Wenhuajie and calling for its revival. For more on this phenomenon, and its survival into the late 1990s, see the Conclusion to this book. The term I am
using here, Wenhuajie or Culture-and-Education Streets, is not to be confused with its
homonym, the figurative term which is translated as cultural/academic world. Both terms
were already in journalistic use by the 1930s, but only the former refers to a specific place.
See Shehui ribao (17 April 1936), 1, which refers specifically to Simalu, or Fuzhou Road, as
Wenhuajie. Likewise, Shanghai writer and newspaperman Bao Tianxiao recalls in his memoir CYL, I:382, that in the 1930s, on Fuzhou Road (popularly called Simalu), starting
from Shandong Road (then Wangping Road) and going to Henan Road (then Qipanjie) was

301

302 Notes to pages 19-32

62

63

64
65

66
67
68
69
70
71

all newspaper plants and bookstores. The Commercial Press, Zhonghua, World, and Great
Eastern were all here, and so people called this strip Wenhua dajie [Great Culture-andEducation Streets]. Also, Yang Shouqing, writing in the mid-1940s, stated that by the New
Culture era (late 1910s) the cultural center [of China] had already moved to Shanghai, and
later, when the thicket of bookshops on Fuzhou Road appeared, it got the name Culture-andEducation Streets. See Yang, Zhongguo chuban jie jianshi (Shanghai: Yongxiang yinshuguan,
1946), 22. As for translating Wenhuajie as Culture-and-Education Streets, I should note
that the meaning of the term wenhua is much broader than my translation culture suggests; in modern Chinese, wenhua is used to mean education or mental cultivation just as
often as it is used to mean culture (as in the sneering comment Ta meiyou wenhua to
mean He is uneducated/boorish). Also, see Chapter 5.
In the lineage of the Chinese satirical novel, Wu Woyaos Vignettes from the Late Qing is a direct
descendant of Wu Jingzis (1701-54) Rulin waishi (The Scholars, 1740-50), with which it shares
its satire of print culture- and print commerce-related issues.
Wu Woyao and his novel are studied in Michael Wai-mai Laus unpublished 1968 Harvard
PhD dissertation titled Wu Wo-yao (1866-1910): A Writer of Fiction of the Late Ching
Period. Wu was born in Fenyi, Jiangxi, but grew up in his native district of Foshan (Fatshan),
now part of the Canton suburbs. His great-grandfather was the Hanlin scholar, Wu Rongguang
(1773-1843), who obtained the jinshi in 1799, and, as Fang Chao-ying writes, so belonged to
one of the most celebrated classes of [jinshi] in the [Qing] period. See ECCP, 872-74. In a
more recent discussion of late Qing fiction, David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-sicle Splendor, Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849-1911 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997),
188, points out that [t]he majority of late Qing expos fiction is written in the form of
yingshe xiaoshuo, or romans clef, a fictional mode that describes historical events and figures
in the manner of fiction, a situation that reinforces my claim that Vignettes can be used as a
historical source describing conditions at the turn of the twentieth century.
Wu Woyao, Ershinian mudu zhi guai xianzhuang (Taipei: Shih-chieh shu-chu, 1962), I:79.
For the translation, see Wu Woyao, Vignettes from the Late Ching: Bizarre Happenings Eyewitnessed
over Two Decades, trans. Shih Shun Liu (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press,
1975), 91, which I have modified slightly based on Ershinian mudu, I:81.
Vignettes, 93; Ershinian mudu, I:82.
Ibid.
Ershinian mudu, I:82, says book-buyers coveted works like Duobao ta, Zhenzhu chuan, and Dati
wenfu, but spurned maps and practical works like Fuguo ce and Jingshi wenbian.
Vignettes, 93; Ershinian mudu, I:83.
Ibid.
Maurice Meisner, Maos China, A History of the Peoples Republic (New York: The Free Press,
1977), 297.

Chapter 1: Gutenbergs Descendants

1 According to K.T. Wu, The Development of Typography in China during the Nineteenth
Century, in The Library Quarterly 22, 3 (1952): 292, the Toleration Edict of 1844 lifted the
ban on missionary work within China.
2 Contrary to popular belief, woodblock printing was never totally eradicated in China. In
particular, its life was extended by the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), which necessitated the use of simple, mobile printing for propaganda purposes.
3 Literary Notices, CR 1, 10 (1833): 415-16.
4 Walter Henry Medhurst first advanced these ideas to the circumscribed missionary community in Typographus Sinensis, Estimate of the Proportionate Expense of Xylography, Lithography, and Typography, as Applied to Chinese Printing, CR 3 [1834]: 246-52.
5 Walter Henry Medhurst, China; Its State and Prospects (Boston: Crocker & Brewster, 1838),
451. Having the xylographic work performed in China itself (which was then both illegal and
perilous for the cutters) would have reduced the charges to 1,254.
6 Ibid., 451-52.
7 Letter dated 5 April 1843, cited in MPC, 3-4.
8 Thank you to Patricia Sieber for this suggestive insight.

Notes to pages 32-36

9 HSN, 257, and Liu Longguang, Zhongguo yinshuashu de yange, xia, in YW 1, 2 (1937): 67. Wang Hanzhang, writing for the Huabei bianyiguan in 1943, used the same three categories.
See Wang, Kanyin zongshu, [1943] in ZJCSE, 363. The Chinese-language categorization
follows the Western-language literature. The fourth key phase in the development of Western
printing processes, unexpected by anyone in the 1930s, was computerization, which transformed printing in the 1970s and 1980s, largely eliminating letterpress printing and replacing
it with thermal transfer processes.
10 Contrary to what Cihai says, Gutenberg was no mere machine worker. He would have been
familiar with mould and matrix technology through his patrician familys hereditary ties to
the Mainz archbishopric mint.
11 Michael Clapham, Printing, in Charles Singer et al., eds., A History of Technology (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1957), 3: 391-93. Copper punches with lead matrices may also have
been used.
12 A piece of type was 15/16 inches high from the base to the top of the letter. Thank you to David
S. Barker of the University of Ulster, Belfast (personal communication, October 2002).
13 W. Turner Berry, Printing and Related Trades, in Charles Singer et al., eds., A History of
Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 5: 683.
14 Sometimes they were combined with woodblock illustrations or special wooden forms of
letters.
15 Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965,
1977, 1993), 1: 2, 679-80; 2: 3, 527, writes that the first Chinese type was printed using a
press at Coimbra, Portugal, in 1570. By 1585, two Japanese present in Lisbon began teaching
Portuguese printers how to improve the cutting of their typefaces. In the same year, a catechism and a Latin-Chinese vocabulary were printed at Macao using woodblocks (2: 3, 49697). The first printing presses reached Japan in 1590, the Philippines in 1595, and Macao in
1614. In addition to Portugal, Chinese type was also cut in Flanders. For illustrations, see
Lach 1: 2, 2: 3, Donald F. Lach and Edwin Van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993), 3: 1, 3: 4.
16 The Kangxi Dictionary has 40,919 different characters.
17 See ZYS, 566, 716. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Kangxi and Qianlong
emperors printed using 250,000 movable Chinese-cut copper type.
18 MPC, 2-3, 20-21. Eventually, as the missionaries began to issue magazines and journals, they
needed up to 10,000 different type.
19 Preface, in Joshua Marshman, Elements of Chinese Grammar (Serampore: Mission Press,
1814), xvi.
20 However, as Joseph P. McDermott of Cambridge University, citing Milne, has explained to
me, Marshman overlooked the fact that small changes could be and often were made to
woodblocks.
21 Earlier efforts in Europe had been more successful.
22 W.S. Holt, The Mission Press in China, Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal 10, 3 (1879):
210. Cecil K. Byrd, Early Printing in the Straits Settlements 1806-1858 (Singapore: National
Library, 1970), 9-10.
23 ZYS, 582, mistakenly says that they used woodblocks.
24 HSN, 258. Cai Gao is the same person as Tsae A-ko, mentioned in Medhurst, China,
215.
25 In this regard, it is not surprising that, in the view of Su Ching, The Printing Presses of the
London Missionary Society Among the Chinese (PhD diss., London University, 1996), 132,
Milne consistently preferred to use wooden blocks to print Chinese. Thank you to Joseph P.
McDermott for this reference. Medhurst, China, 446, strongly implies that type was also sent
from Macao (most likely from the College of St. Joseph) to Malacca.
26 Morrisons lack of access to speakers using Beijing pronunciation is reflected in the fact that
he used the Nanjing, or southern Mandarin, pronunciation as his standard, pointing out that
it was the basis for guanhua, the language and pronunciation used by Chinas officials.
27 Patricia Sieber broadens our understanding of the East India Company printer usually identified by historians only as P.P. Thoms, in Theaters of Desire: Authors, Readers, and the Reproduction of Early Chinese Song-Drama, 1300-2000 (New York: Palgrave, 2003).

303

304 Notes to pages 36-41

28 Alexander Wylie, ed., Memorials of Protestant Missionaries to the Chinese (Shanghai: American
Presbyterian Mission Press, 1867), 7. According to Medhurst, China, 219 and 446, the dictionary was printed with a 15,000 subvention from the EIC. The last part was printed at the
College of St. Joseph in Macao, using stereotypes. Morrison had also printed religious literature in Canton using woodblocks, including those cut by his first convert, Liang Afa (1789?1855), a former pencil maker and block cutter, who eventually worked with Milne at Malacca
and also published at least nine works of his own. Since at least the late 1860s, when Wylie
published his view, Liangs Quanshi liangyan (Good Words Exhorting the Age), printed at
Canton in 1832, has generally been assumed to have been the Christian tract that set Hong
Xiuquan, leader of the Taiping rebels, afire spiritually. Hong was introduced to the tract in
Canton in 1836 or 1837 by the Tennessee Baptist missionary Issachar J. Roberts (1802-?).
29 Robert Morrison, Advertisement, in Dictionary of the Chinese Language in Three Parts (Macao:
East India Companys Press, 1815), 1: 1.
30 Ibid.
31 Morrison, Introduction, Dictionary, 1: 1, i.
32 Ibid., 1: 1, xi, referring to C.L.J. de Guignes and Julius von Klaproth, Dictionnaire chinois,
franais, et latin (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1813).
33 Figure 1.3, from volume 1 of part 1 (1815), features the characters shang and h (xie) cut by
Thomss Chinese assistants. This shang can be compared with the same character in Figure
1.5; h can be compared with the same character in Figure 1.2. Figure 1.4, taken from volumes 2 (1822) and 3 (1823) of part 1, was cut by Thomss Portuguese employees. Contrary
to Morrisons own argument in the Preface, although the large characters for wan and e are
presentable, the smaller characters in the examples are not nearly as fine as those carved for
volume 1 by the Chinese assistants. Wan and e can be compared with the same characters in
Figure 1.12.
34 Ibid., 1: 1, x.
35 Ibid., 1: 1, xi. Like Medhurst, discussed earlier, Morrison debated the pros and cons of letterpress and other printing options. According to Su Ching, Printing Presses, 70, Morrison
discussed the relative advantages of letterpress and stereotypes in an 1815 letter to the London Missionary Society directors. By the 1830s, however, he had become a staunch supporter
of movable type. Thanks to Joseph P. McDermott for this citation.
36 What Morrison, following the Chinese, calls Song style (Song ti), with its broad vertical and
flat horizontal strokes, is more accurately termed jiang ti (workman style), explain Robert E.
Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1998), 112, and Lucille Chia, Printing for Profit: The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Fujian
(11th-17th Centuries) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002), 197. Jiangti
was a creation of late Ming block cutters attempting to imitate Song styles, hence the name
Song ti.
37 Robert Morrison, Dictionary of the Chinese Language in Three Parts (Macao: East India Companys
Press, 1819), 2: 1, x.
38 According to David S. Barker, the correct term for an individual piece of type is a character. To avoid confusion with Chinese characters, in this chapter, I generally use the term
type.
39 Information on Thoms comes from MPC, 7, and ZYS, 581-83.
40 S. Wells Williams, Movable Types for Printing Chinese, in Chinese Recorder and Missionary
Journal 6 (1875): 26.
41 Note that the entries also sometimes list the seal (S.C.) and running hand (R.H.) versions
of the character.
42 HSN, 1: 258. In 1815, He reported, Baptist missionary Marshman published the first
Chinese-language Bible using type cast from type moulds cut by Thoms of Macao.
43 Literary Notices, 416.
44 According to He, in 1804, Charles Mahon, Third Earl of Stanhope (1753-1816), had invented stereotypes (rigid printing type) out of plaster moulds (niban). What He did not
know was that stereotyping had been invented in 1725 by a Glasgow goldsmith named
William Ged (1690-1749). In making it possible to print entire pages at once, stereotypes
portended an eclipse of Gutenbergs revolution. By 1804, stereotyping had become a widely

Notes to pages 41-42

45

46
47
48
49
50

51

52
53
54

55

56
57

58

59
60

practised technique among book printers. Stereotypes were still dependent on movable type,
however, and could be created only after a page of type was first set up. A plastic medium, first
Geds plaster and, after 1830 in Europe, papier-mch (zhixing), was then pressed onto the
type and dried. When it was peeled off, the intaglio (engraved) image could be used to mould
a full page of (now stationary) lead-alloy type known as a printing plate. Stereotypes made it
possible for printers to bypass endlessly recasting type as well as to avoid resetting type each
time a reprint of a popular book such as the Bible, prayer book, etc., was needed. By saving
the mould of entire pages, stereotypers accelerated reprinting and freed up movable type for
new jobs. Initially flat, even when used on a cylinder press, by the 1870s, when the modern
rotary press was popularized, stereotypes were made in a curved form that could be attached
to the rotary press. On stereotyping Bibles, see Leslie Howsam, Cheap Bibles: NineteenthCentury Publishing and the British and Foreign Bible Society (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), 77, 79-81.
Not every attempt to duplicate Gutenbergs innovation in East Asia succeeded. One particularly clumsy effort was made by the Reverend Charles Gutzlaff who tried chiselling out matrices. The results defeated the purpose of metal type namely, regularity and precision. See
Williams, Movable Types, 26.
Medhurst, China, 447-49, 454. According to Byrd, Early Printing, the punches cost two shillings and ten pence each.
MPC, 7; Holt, Mission Press, 209; and ZYS, 583-84.
Holt, Mission Press, 209; Byrd, Early Printing, 5-6, says that Dyer worked at Penang from
1827 to 1835, when he moved to Malacca; he died in Macao.
Legge would later achieve fame as a translator of the Chinese Classics and a professor of
Chinese at Oxford.
Byrd, Early Printing, 6. In Hong Kong, says Su Ching, Printing Presses, 291, Chinese workers cut characters on cast type blanks at a cost of half a penny each. Thanks to Joseph P.
McDermott for this reference.
Formerly of the American Presbyterian Mission Press (from which MPC implies he was fired)
which he founded in Canton in 1844 and moved to Ningbo in 1845, Cole seems to have been
a restless individual, possibly out of his element with the pious China missionary crowd. After
leaving Hong Kong, he sailed for California, where he founded a newspaper.
ZYS, 584, says that the Hong Kong font was used to print quite a few books as well as
newspapers. Books included an Old Testament (1841) and Aesops Fables (1868).
Article IV, Literary Notices, CR 20, 5 (1851): 284.
Holt, Mission Press, 211-12. According to Wylie, Memorials, 135, Cole produced two fonts,
including a Three-Line Diamond font, and part of a third. On Huang Sheng and the London
Mission Press, see Paul A. Cohen, Between Tradition and Modernity: Wang Tao and Reform in
Late Ching China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Council on East Asian Studies, 1987). Huang
was responsible for printing Legges Chinese Classics.
ZYS, 593, says 1843. Robert Fortune, Three Years Wanderings in the Northern Provinces of China
(London: John Murray, 1847), 182, and Protestant Missions, in Chinese Recorder 8, 4 (1877):
307, suggest 1844.
Wylie, Memorials, 173. Medhurst remained in Shanghai on and off until 1856.
Protestant Missions, 308, and MPC, 37. According to H. McAleavy, Wang Tao: The Life and
Writings of a Displaced Person (London: China Society, 1953), 4, Wang visited the London
Mission Press in February 1848 and met its director, Medhurst. The next year, Medhurst
asked Wang to become a Chinese editor for the press.
Holt, Mission Press, 211; McAleavy, Wang Tao, 25ff.; Cohen, Between Tradition and Modernity, 76-77. Huang and Wang changed the name to Zhonghua yinwu zongju (China Printing
Company). In 1874, they began to issue one of the first modern Chinese-run newspapers,
Tsun-wan yat-po (Mandarin Xunhuan ribao). Oddly, MPC, 37, incorrectly says the London
Mission Press was sold in 1879.
Holt, Mission Press, 211.
The Albion, made in England, had been operating in Macao but was interdicted by the Portuguese governor and transferred to Canton, where the missionary S. Wells Williams (see note
72 below) put it into operation. See Article V, Literary Intelligence, CR 3, 1 (1834): 43.

305

306 Notes to pages 42-44

61 Holt, Mission Press, 207. In early 1833, according to Introductory Remarks, CR 2,1
(1834), 6-7, there were two English-language printing presses in Macao and three in Canton.
One of the three British-made presses was an Albion; two presses had been made in America.
By June 1833, says Article V, Literary Intelligence, the number of presses had declined to
four, with only one in Macao, joined by a Portuguese-language one, possibly that which had
arrived in 1614.
62 Article V, Chinese Metallic Types, CR 3, 11 (1835): 530-32. A similar method, involving
sending wooden blocks to London, had been explored by the British around this same time.
See Literary Notices, 417, and Article III, Penang, in CR 3, 5 (1834): 228-29.
63 John Francis Davis, The Chinese: A General Description of the Empire of China and Its Inhabitants
(London: Chas. Knight & Company, 1836), 2: 211-13, discusses the similarities between the
woodblock and the stereotype in some detail.
64 According to Holt, Mission Press, 210, the American Board Mission closed its operation in
Canton in 1856 but reopened in Beijing in 1868 with the indemnity it received after the
Arrow War. In Beijing, the Congregationalists issued at least fifty-seven publications, including a Mandarin-language Bible in 1874, said to have been a fine specimen of the printers
art.
65 The American Presbyterian Mission Press was called Huahua shengjing shufang (Huahua
Bible Publishers) when it was located in Macao, but it changed its Chinese name to the more
widely recognized Meihua shuguan after it moved to Ningbo in 1845.
66 Article IV, Literary Notices, 282.
67 The Socit Asiatiques Journal Asiatique began printing Chinese with a different font as early
as 1829. Thank you to Patricia Sieber for this information.
68 See HSN, 259; Article V, Metallic Types, CR 3, 11 (1835): 528-30; Medhurst, China, 44950; Wells, Movable Types, 28-29; MPC, 7; ZYS, 583. MPC also reports that the Imprimerie
Royale created a font in 1838 using the same method of stereotyping and sawing that Dyer
had tried. Shi Meicen, Zhongguo yinshua fazhan shi (Taipei: Taiwan Commercial Press, 1966),
150, reports that a Leiden publisher purchased a Chinese font in 1845 and used it for the
next forty years, publishing bilingual texts. It seems likely that the publisher used the Paris
font of Marcellin LeGrand, whose shop was located at 99 rue du Cherche-Midi, Paris.
69 Holt, Mission Press, 213, says the five workmen included a compositor, two pressmen, a
type cutter, and an apprentice.
70 Ibid. When Ningbos APMP sent Medhurst an order in Shanghai for a Chinese font, he
replied that fulfillment of the order would take nine months. In 1847, the Ningbo firm purchased a small font of Japanese type.
71 Liu, Zhongguo yinshuashu, 6, mistakenly says that stereotyping reached Macao sometime
in the 1860s where it was used by the APMP. By the 1860s, APMP had already arrived in
Shanghai. He Shengnai agrees with Liu that, while in Macao, the APMP was probably the
first to use stereotypes, but he is vague on the chronology, saying that the APMP adopted
them between 1844 and the 1860s. He Shengnai also reports that Shanghais North China
Herald (founded in 1850) and Shenbao (1872) newspaper companies, along with the publisher Zhuyitang, acquired this technology after the book and tract publishers.
72 MPC, 11. Like the Chinese literati discussed in the Introduction, until at least 1895, Protestant missionaries tried to maintain a clear division between their activities and market-driven
printing, or so says MPC. Nonetheless, Protestant Missions, 308, had claimed in 1877
about the London Mission Press that, although The work done was confined almost entirely
to the supply of missionary wants, nearly a quarter of the English printing [was] being done
to accommodate commercial residents while there was no other press available. One wellknown nineteenth-century missionary who clearly crossed the line from nonprofit, philanthropic, religious printing to profit-driven secular printing, S. Wells Williams, also ran the
EIC Printing Office in Macao for a while. He later became a professor of Chinese at Yale.
73 Recall that Thomss 1815 Hong Kong font never caught on.
74 In 1842, the same year the Opium War had ended, an early group of three French Jesuits
returned to Shanghai. By 1849, thirty-seven more had arrived. See Gu Yulu, Shanghai
tianzhujiao chuban gaikuang, CBSL 4 (1987): 30, and Zhang Hongxing, Zhongguo zui zao
de xiyang meishu yaolan, Dongnan wenhua 1991, 4: 124-30.

Notes to pages 44-47

75 HSN, 260. By 1869, says Gu, Shanghai tianzhujiao, 30, the Tushanwan Jesuits had published seventy works, largely woodblock reprints of works issued by their missions in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
76 The orphanage print shop was located in a Catholic church on Sichuan South Road from
1870 to 1871, says Zhuang Suyuan, Tushanwan yinshuguan xiaoji, CBSL 4 (1987): 35. It
was directed by Yan Siwen from 1873 to 1879.
77 Ibid.
78 Gu, Shanghai tianzhujiao, 30-31. The newspaper, Yiwen lu, first appeared in 1879 and was
joined in 1898 by a Catholic scientific journal, Yiwen gezhi huibao. According to Zhuang,
Tushanwan, 35, the metal-type shop expanded steadily. By 1898, it had a hundred Chinese
printers and forty apprentices.
79 Before plaster, Farnham had used clay plates (niban) for creating stereotypes, probably for
instructional materials. Eventually, he became well known as the editor of the illustrated
missionary journals, Xiaohai yuebao/The Childs Paper (1875-1915) and Tuhua xinbao (18801913). He also ran the APMP for a short period. Qingxintang was later known as the Qingxin
shuyuan and, by the 1950s, as the Qingxin Middle School. See Shanghai tongshe, ed., Shanghai yanjiu ziliao, xubian (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian yinhang, 1984), 324.
80 HSN, 266.
81 Liu, Zhongguo yinshuashu, 6, and HSN, 265.
82 HSN, 265. The Western newspaper world did not adopt stereotypes until after 1815, when
movable lead type was increasingly replaced by lead stereotype plates. ZYS mistakenly cites
1912 for the date when the Commercial Press adopted paper-mould technology.
83 HSN, 266.
84 This account of electrotyping is drawn from James Moran, Printing Presses: History and Development from the Fifteenth Century to Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973),
207, and CMS, 20.88, 626.
85 CMS, 20.88, 626.
86 MPC, 12.
87 Ibid., 12, 19-20.
88 Boxwood or yellow poplar was one of many alternatives to the pear, jujube, and catalpa often
used by Chinese woodblock printers, according to Tsuen-hsuin Tsien, Paper and Printing (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 196.
89 Normally, electrotyping was a high-turnover process by which entire sheets were printed,
eliminating the need for individually setting each page using type. In the West, it was used for
printing daily newspapers until well into the twentieth century. Nineteenth-century missionary printers were so familiar with the process, presuming that their readers would be as well,
that they rarely explain it in detail. Some of the few surviving examples of electrotypes are on
display in the Capital Publishing Company Printing Museum, Guthrie, Oklahoma. Gambles
electrotyping was used not to print whole sheets but to create type matrices, from which fonts
were then made.
90 MPC, 20.
91 Wang Tao, Yingruan zazhi (Taipei: Hua-wen shu-chu [1875]), 275. A wholly different contemporary Chinese response to Western printing machinery was recorded in NCH 14 August
1875: 167. According to the newspaper, the Cantonese manager of Shanghais Yibao newspaper took action against a printing press that had thrice injured men on his staff. He propitiated the devilo that he believed inhabited it with sacrifices of pork, fowl, fruit, and sycee.
Then, while the Cantonese manager kowtowed to the press in his best robes, other Chinese
jeered at him, asserting that the machine, being foreign-built, can contain neither joss nor
devil to be propitiated.
92 HSN, 260. In 1859, after fourteen years of effort, a Berlin font of 3,200 punches was completed by A. Beyerhaus and arrived in China. Beyerhaus duplicated Marcellin LeGrands
format of compound characters but with a more elegant result. His work was supported by
Walter Lowrie of the Presbyterian Board of Missions in New York and S. Wells Williams, who
raised his contribution to the project by delivering the lectures that were eventually published
as his classic account of the Chinese, The Middle Kingdom (New York: Wiley and Putnam,
1848). MPC, 15-16, mistakenly says that the Berlin font arrived in 1849.

307

308 Notes to pages 48-49

93 Florence Chien, The Commercial Press and Modern Chinese Publishing, 1897-1949 (MA
thesis, University of Chicago, 1970), 9.
94 Xing Fang, Shanghai gongdu yinzhishe de gailiang zijia, in YW 1, 7 (1937): 24, and Holt,
Mission Press, 215. Known formally as the original treasure-style typecase (yuanbaoshi
zijia), the case was also called the three-sided case (sanjiao zijia) and the pints and pecks
case (shengdou jia) in the Chinese vernacular.
95 Holt, Mission Press, 215.
96 Although Gambles three-sided case speeded up Bible typesetting, it turned out to be inconvenient for Chinese setting newspapers or works of social science. In 1909, the Commercial
Press rearranged Gambles case to the advantage of its own secular purposes. Around 1912,
because the old U-shaped case restricted use of type to one typesetter, the Press introduced
the unitary long case (tongchang jia; Figure 1.9) from Japan, which allowed many typesetters
access to the same type. In 1920, Shanghais Shenbao newspaper plant followed the Commercial Presss lead; by the 1930s, most print shops used this arrangement. See Xing Fang, Shanghai gongdu yinzhishe de gailiang zijia, 24-25, and Shi, Zhongguo yinshua, 155-56. Manying
Ip, The Life and Times of Zhang Yuanji, 1867-1959 (Beijing: Commercial Press, 1985), 207-8,
believes that the type case invented by William Gamble remained in use in Chinese print
shops until 1923. In that year, Zhang Yuanji, supervisor of the Commercial Press, invented a
new type case that simplified the compositors task by arranging type on several pyramidal
revolving lazy Susans. Afterward, says HSN, Zhangs type case was superseded by a newer
one, presumbably modifying it, developed by Hong Bingyuan. Shi, Zhongguo yinshua, 156-57,
reports that He Shengnai himself improved Zhang Yuanjis type case in 1931 and that, eventually, Wang Yunwu improved on both. For a full discussion, see Shi, Zhongguo yinshua, 15770.
97 All type metal had to be imported, making the missionary printers dependent on both overseas suppliers and shipping companies.
98 Missionary publications of the period do not refer to fear of the Taipings to account for
Gambles move, but the prospect of their arrival must have influenced his boards decision to
move the publishing house to the relative safety of Shanghai. According to Mary Backus
Rankin, Elite Activism and Political Transformation in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1986), 54-55, Hangzhou fell to the Taipings in late 1861 after a two-month siege. The Taipings
occupied the city on and off for the next two years before being driven out by Zuo Zongtang.
Although fighting was moderate in Ningbo and eastern Shaoxing from 1862 to 1864, the
three-year Taiping occupation of the province was devastating to the local economy, promoting the expansion of Shanghai. According to ZYS, 571-72, when British and American visitors arrived at Nanjing, the Taiping capital, they found 400 woodblock printers working on a
Taiping edition of the Old Testament and eighty working on the New Testament. The Taipings
banned the Confucian Four Books and Five Classics and based their civil service curriculum
on bowdlerized Bibles. To Christian missionary publishers, the fall of the Taipings and their
Christian-inspired religious cult in 1864 seemed to portend a golden opportunity to increase
their own publishing quotas. For another perspective, see Howsam, Cheap Bibles, 186-87.
99 Holt, Mission Press, 216. In 1876, the APMP would produce 47.1 million pages of books,
tracts, etc. Holt gives no information regarding the proportion of Chinese-language materials
to non-Chinese-language printing.
100 Ibid.
101 Ibid. The Chinese printer-publishers names are not known.
102 Joseph P. McDermott validly suggests that the result using Western fonts was probably no
better than that of limited-run high-grade xylography, but that the difference became apparent when print runs were extended.
103 ZYS, 584. According to Peter Kornicki, The Book in Japan (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 164-65, Gamble
was invited to Japan by Motoki Sho-zo- (1824-75), a Bakufu interpreter stationed in Nagasaki,
who had purchased a press from the VOC in 1848. By the late 1850s, Motoki had learned to
cast katakana type and had produced Japans first modern books, bound in the Western
style and dealing with natural science, infantry training, etc. Prior to Gambles arrival, Motoki
and his students had disseminated type-founding and typography from Nagasaki. Gambles
arrival led to the popularization of his Song/Meihua typeface, which the Japanese called Ming-

Notes to pages 49-53

104
105
106

107

108
109

110

111
112

113

114
115
116

117

dynasty type (mincho-tai). Mincho-tai is still the standard typeface in Japan today. Although the
Chinese lost interest in Gambles font, according to He Buyun, Zhongguo huozi xiaoshi, in
Shanghai Xinsijun lishi yanjiuhui, yinshua yinchao fenhui, ed., Huozi yinshua yuanliu (Beijing:
Yinshua gongye chubanshe, 1990), 75, they continued electrotyping matrices until at least
1961. It is not clear what happened to Gamble after he took his methods to Japan, but, in
1938, his children, then living in York, Pennsylvania, presented a collection of works that he
had acquired and/or printed for the APMP to the Asian Division of the Library of Congress,
where they are known as the Gamble Collection.
Holt, Mission Press, 218.
Ibid.
The complete lack of lithographic equipment in inventories of any of the Protestant printingpublishing operations is striking, particularly in light of the Reverend Ernst Fabers comments, cited in Chapter 2, that both the Catholics and the Chinese pushed the Protestants
out of Chinas modern publishing market in the 1890s thanks to their use of lithography.
Another typeface was created by the Tushujicheng shuju, an offshoot of the Major Brothers
Shenbao started in 1884. Known as the Major font, it was used to print an edition of the
stalwart bestsellers, Gujin tushu jicheng and Twenty-Four Dynastic Histories. Unfortunately,
the Shenbao staff did such a poor job collating and printing both that they were nearly unreadable, and the font never became popular with Chinese. Chinese dislike of both the Gamble
and the Major fonts led them to buy presumably modified Ming fonts from Japan until
after 1919. See He Buyun, Zhongguo huozi, 76.
Holt, Mission Press, 218.
That there were other obstacles to the expansion of the APMP is made clear by further remarks in Holts account. For instance, Holt insists that his firm had performed an important
role in assisting Chinese in opening printing offices. This boast was proven false almost immediately by the Chinese lithographic business. Three years after Holt published his comments,
Tongwen Press opened in Shanghai, employing 500 printing and publishing workers, as we
will see in Chapter 2. This was nearly four times the number then employed at the APMP.
MPC, 32-33, 46, 53. Just as the London Mission Press had been bought by Chinese investors
in 1873, in 1923 the APMP was finally absorbed into the Commercial Press, says JSF, 267.
The second-largest mission printing-publishing operation was Hankous National Bible Society of Scotlands Press, established in 1885. By 1895, it employed seventy people working
three cylinder machines and four hand presses.
See ZYS, 590, for a list of Shanghais lead-type printers from 1842 to 1911.
Wang, Kanyin zongshu, 366. Wang Licai and Xia Songlais Kaiming shudian should not be
confused with Zhang Xichens later Kaiming shudian, founded in 1927. Wang Licai is credited with having written two classics of early-twentieth-century Chinese bookselling, Jinling
maishuji (Record of Selling Books in the Nanjing Area) (1902) and Bianliang maishuji (Record
of Selling Books in Kaifeng) (1903); see ZXCS 1: 384-402, 403-14.
This paragraph is based on Wang, Kanyin zongshu, 2: 366. In Beijing, lead-type firms
included the London Mission Press; Xiehua shuju, founded in 1884 and surviving into the
Republic, which specialized in collections of government edicts; Jinghua yinshuju; and Falun
yinziguan, established by Xu Youzheng and Zang Jianqiu to print the works of Wu Zhifu and
Lin Qinnan. Based in Yantai, the Chengwen xinji printed and distributed Western books
and textbooks widely throughout the Dalian-Andong corridor and into northern Manchuria.
Ibid. Three legs of the tripod is the dictionary translation of the phrase sanjia dingli, said
of three antagonists confronting each other who nonetheless support the world between them.
Basil Kahan, Ottmar Mergenthaler, The Man and His Machine (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll
Press, 2000), 1.
The stranglehold of the type-caster on the printing and publishing industry was so powerful
that, in 1869, the New York World sponsored a contest that would have awarded an inventor of
a typesetting machine a prize of $500,000. No one claimed the prize, reports Kahan.
On the inventor David Bruce, see Berry, Printing, 5: 683-84. Although Berry provides no
information about the casting speed of Bruces machine, he does say that, by 1881, successive
improvements yielded a type-caster at the London Times that could make 60,000 type per hour.

309

310 Notes to pages 53-59

118 Chia, Printing for Profit, 37.

119 MPC, 31.
120 ZYS, 586, says that, soon after its founding in 1897, the Commercial Press developed three
styles imitating ancient calligraphic models that gradually replaced the missionary fonts. The
Kaishu (standard script), created in 1908 by the Jiangwan native, Xu Xixiang, using photographic and electrotype methods, was the first to win high marks, having been deemed both
beautiful and elegant. It was soon joined by the Lishu (Han dynasty official script) and a Cu
ti or Fangtou (full- or squarehead script). According to Wang, Kanyin zongshu, 367, in
addition to the three fonts mentioned above, the Zhengkai (also standard script) font was
first created by the Commercial Press in 1909, but it did not become popular until the mid1920s. Its greatest promoter was Ding Fubao (1874-1952), the well-known Wuxi scholarphysician who also cofounded the Shanghai publisher of medical texts, Wenming shuju. After
Zhengkai became popular through Dings and the Commercial Presss efforts, Zhonghua Books
countered by repopularizing new Song-style characters (Fangsong ti) in the mid-1920s. The
Fangsong font was used to print Zhonghuas famous collection, Sibu beiyao (1927-37). Another major Chinese-designed font style, called Wei stele type, imitated writing styles of the
Northern Wei dynasty (424-535). It was designed in 1926 or 1927 by the famous Beijing
calligraphers Xu Jifu (Xu Ji) and Zhong Shiguang for a reprint of the Kangxi Dictionary. Developed in northern China, it became very popular in Shenyang (Mukden) and Tianjin. For
more examples of typefaces, see ibid., illustrations between 372-73; for more on the history of
typeface design, see HSN, 261-64, who notes that the Commercial Press even created the
Zhuyin fuhao in 1919 after the Ministry of Education issued its regulations on the new
syllabary. Between the 1911 and the 1949 revolutions, at least five different Song styles and
nine different Zhengkai styles were developed by bringing calligraphers and typographers
together, sometimes using photographic methods. Interestingly, in 1915, the Commercial Press
even appointed a famous Hubei woodblock printer, Tao Zilin, to develop an ancient script
(Gu ti), but it does not seem to have caught on. See He Buyun, Zhongguo huozi, 77-81.
What is striking, after all this experimentation, is that as few as four became standard. Rather
than blaming an abstract typographic conservatism, Wan-go H.C. Weng, Chinese Type
Design and Calligraphy, 28-29, says that the size of Chinese fonts restricted the range of
styles; each stylistic modification had to be carried through fonts of at least 10,000 different
type (for magazine work) to be effective.
121 Changxing zidong zhuziji/Chong Shing Automatic Type-Casting Machine, in YW 2, 8 (1940):
52. Chong Shing was located at 272 Ai-wen-yi-da-tong Road; Jianye was off La-fei-de Road;
Ruitai was in an alley off Suzhou North Road.
122 Quanguo yinshua tongye ji quanguo ge da baoguan qishi, [advertisement], YW 1, 3 (1 March
1937), 4.
123 Although the inventions that led to the Monotype machine date to 1822, they were given a
solid foundation in 1840 by Henry Bessemer (1813-98), also known as the father of modern
steel-making processes.
124 Berry, Printing, 5: 685, 711-12.
125 NCH 2 May 1900: 1708 reports that the North China Herald had just installed Linotype
machines for its subsidiary, the North China Daily News.
126 Linotype, in YW 1, 7 (1937): 4, and Xu Xiliang, Ma-na-pai shaoji gaishuo, YW 1, 5
(1937): 34-39.
127 Six years before, according to Minami Ryo- shin, Mechanical Power and Printing Technology
in Pre-World War II Japan, Technology and Culture 23, 4 (1982): 623, Kyo- ta Sugimoto, one of
the inventors of the Japanese typewriter, developed a Japanese-language monotype machine.
Neither the Linotype nor the Monotype was imported to Japan until about 1910, says Minami.
Before 1937, he adds, the Linotype never really caught on in Japan. It was not manufactured
there either.
128 HSN, 264.
129 In 1958, according to Shi, Zhongguo yinshua, 171-72, after a stay in America, Taiwanese Gui
Zhongshu modified photographic typsetting for Chinese. Former New Culture adherent, ambassador to the United States, and president of the Academia Sinica, Hu Shi, present at the
exhibition where Guis invention was revealed, classified Gui in a long line of educators,

Notes to pages 59-61

130
131
132
133
134
135

136
137

138
139
140
141
142

143

144

stretching back to Cai Yuanpei and Lin Yutang, who had tried to modernize reproduction of
Chinese characters.
Berry, Printing, 5: 704.
TPP, 12.
Berry, Printing, 5: 704.
Liu, Zhongguo yinshuashu, 6. The first to demonstrate the process for the Press was an
American consultant, Shi-ta-fu (Stafford), who apparently had little success.
HSN, 267.
Liu, Zhongguo yinshuashu, 6. As seen above, the Jesuits twice introduced movable type to
China, first in the 1600s and again in the 1800s; below we will see that they also introduced
lithography, a means of printing with stones, and collotype, which substituted glass plates for
the stones.
HSN, 267.
Manying Ip, The Life and Times of Zhang Yuanji, 1867-1959 (Beijing: Commercial Press, 1985),
119-27, was the first to discuss this Sino-Japanese chapter in the history of the Commercial
Press. She points out that He Shengnai, a Commercial Press printer who was almost certainly
aware of the link, was silent about it. This Japanese chapter in the history of the Commercial
Press lasted from 1903 to 1914.
Ibid.
Liu, Zhongguo yinshuashu, 6; HSN, 266.
Both citations come from HSN, 266.
Boxwood prints are not mentioned in Western literature on printing; the process was probably invented by the Japanese themselves.
According to Berry, Printing, 5: 706, there were two basic operating choices in lithography:
either a reverse image was drawn directly onto the lithographic stone or an image prepared on
special paper was transferred to the stone. The same could also be done with a photographic
negative, as happened with the development of offset lithography. During printing, the stone
was moistened with water, but the greasy crayon lines making up the image repelled the water
that the unillustrated part of the stone absorbed. A thick printing ink was then spread over
the surface, adhering to the greasy drawing lines but being repelled by the watery parts of the
stone. As late as 1975, John Fraser of Aberdeen, Scotland was still printing with stones. For an
arresting photograph of his printing stone archive, see Michael Twyman, Lithography: the
Birth of a New Printing Process, in The Bicentennial of Lithography (San Francisco: The Book
Club of California, 1999), 9.
Alois Senefelder, The Invention of Lithography, trans. J.W. Muller (New York: The Fuchs & Lang
Manufacturing Co., 1911), 18. Thank you to David S. Barker for pointing out Senefelders
name for lithography, which recalls Wang Taos historically later comments, discussed above,
on the importance of chemistry to modern printing.
The lithographic industry spread quickly following its invention by the otherwise unknown
Bavarian playwright, Senefelder, who was born in Prague (HSN, 269, is probably mistaken
when he claims that Senefelder was an Austrian). Senefelder developed the technique as a
means of cheaply reproducing first his plays and then musical scores. He took his lithographic
hand press to England in 1800, and by June 1801 had secured a patent. The technique
reached France at approximately the same time. A lithographic printing firm was established
in Rome in 1807, and, within the next decade, the industry spread to all major centres in
Europe, including St. Petersburg. Lithography arrived in the United States in 1819, in India
and Australia in 1821, in Chile in 1823, in Southeast Asia in 1828, and, as we shall see in
Chapter 2, in Shanghai in 1876. For the early history of the technique and its practitioners,
see Michael Twymans Lithography 1800-1850 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970); his
The Lithographic Hand Press 1796-1850, Journal of the Printing Historical Society (JPHS), 3
(1967): 3-51; and his two articles Lithographic Stone and the Printing Trade in the Nineteenth Century, JPHS, 8 (1972): 1-41 and A Directory of London Lithographic Printers
1800-1850, JPHS,10 (1974-75): 1-55. On the history of the American lithographic industry, see Lithographic Stone in America [1807-1970] by Philip J. Weimerskirch, Printing
History 11, 1 (1989): 2-15. For extended accounts of the lithographic industry in non-Western
European environments, see Gul Derman, Resimli tas Baskisi halk Hikayerleri (Ankara: Ataturk

311

312 Notes to pages 61-62

145
146
147

148

149
150

151

152

153

154

155

156
157

Kultur Merkezi Yayini-Sayi, 1988), 24:1, which includes an English-language summary, and
Irena Tessaro-Kosimowas Historia litografii warszawskiej (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo
Naukowe, 1973). I would like to thank Ella Benson of Pacific Lutheran University for summarizing this Polish-language book for me.
Beatrice Farwell, Lithographs and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 1: 1.
Medhurst, China, 278, also 451-54.
Ibid., 223-24, citing Morrison on Keuh Agang/Qu Yaang. ZYS, 580, converts Keuhs name to
Mandarin (Qu Yaang) and confirms that he was the first Chinese to master lithography.
According to Medhurst, Qu had worked as a printer with Morrison since the early days of the
London Mission. By the early 1830s, Qu was in Canton with Morrison. Medhurst makes
clear that he himself did not arrive in Canton until 1835, meaning that Morrison must have
taken the lithographic press to Canton. According to Wylie, Memorials, 12, Morrisons son,
John, taught lithography to Qu. Wylie also says Qus son, Ahe, had been a typesetter for
Morrisons dictionary. The oldest surviving Canton-lithographed works are short-lived
Chinese-language news and commercial monthlies called Geguo xiaoxi issued by Medhurst
from September and October 1837. After 1844, Qu worked with Legge in Hong Kong.
Medhurst, China, 227. Napiers unwise gambit, which revealed that the British knew how to
write and print Chinese using their own technology, led to his removal to Macao, where he
died.
MPC, 16.
ZYS, 579, is one of the first book-length accounts to have discussed the Canton lithography
business of the 1830s. However, Han Qi and Wang Yangzong, Qingchao zhi shiyin shu,
[source unknown, collected in Ricci Institute Library, University of San Francisco] (n.p., n.p.,
1991), 37-38, also discuss the Canton operation.
Including Dianshizhai, the total before 1911 was 149; see Chapter 2, which discusses the
growth of the lithographic industry after 1876, for an explanation of how this number was
calculated.
TPP, 13. Chromolithography advanced rapidly in the second half of the century in spite of
the need to prepare a separate stone for each colour. Before 1900, most European colour
printing, such as that for book illustrations, greeting cards, magazines, and posters was performed using stone-based colour lithography. After 1900, relief-based, three-colour process
printing was developed by the letterpress industry and quickly replaced stone-based lithographic printing.
Liu, Zhongguo yinshuashu, 7, and HSN, 271. ZYS, 580, says that at the end of the Qing,
Shanghais Zaowenge and Hongwen shuju were among the first to experiment, with poor
results, at five-colour lithographic printing.
To-puro Ko-gyo- shi Hensan linkai, eds., To-kyo- Purosesu seihan ko-gyo-shi (Tokyo: To-kyo- Purosesu
ko-gyo-shi kyo-do- kumiai, 1974), 23-57, appendix 3-13, indicates that Japanese experimentation with lithography began at the end of the Tokugawa era and advanced rapidly after the
Meiji Restoration (1868). The Prussian ambassador presented the shogunate with its first
lithographic press in 1860; the first Japanese book on lithography and photolithography appeared two years later. By 1867, the Japanese had begun to buy lithographic presses in Paris
and intensive research into the new printing method, along with photography, accelerated.
Seven years later, the Japanese periodical Shinbun zasshi (Chinese, Xinwen zazhi, News Magazine) was carrying advertisements for lithographic printing. In 1876, the Japanese navy began research into photolithography, and, over the next four years, both processes eventually
spread from Tokyo and eastern Japan to Osaka and the Kansai region.
Numerous names are associated with the development of photo-offset techniques, even that
of the poet Charles Baudelaire. Twyman, Early Lithographed Books, 243-58, credits Edward
Isaac Asser of Amsterdam with the technological breakthrough in 1857 and British Colonel
Sir Henry James with the entrepreneurial gift of disseminating zinc-plate (or photolithographic) technology. Subsequent antiquarian projects were so successful that, in England by
1880, the age of the hand-produced facsimile was effectively over. HSN, 272, suggests that
John W. Osborne invented photo-offset in 1859.
See, for example, NCH 1 June 1889: 666.
HSN, 271.

Notes to pages 62-65

158
159
160
161
162

163
164
165

166

167

168

169
170
171
172

173
174
175
176

177

ZYS, 580.
Liu, Zhongguo yinshuashu, 7, and HSN, 271.
The technicians name was L.E. Henlinger.
HSN, 272.
TPP, 14. Despite the crudeness of early offset printing results, the new presses could average
1,000 impressions per hour, a rate twenty times that of the fastest old lithographic presses.
There is a striking parallel between the marketing ideas behind the IBM personal computer,
whose design, like Harris Brothers design of offset printing was never patented, and those
relating to the Apple computer, whose designers restricted the right to copy it just as Rubel
tried to limit use of his design to major lithographers only. Eventually, the Harris Brothers
design, like IBMs, brought down prices and put an offset machine in the shop of almost any
printer who wanted one.
Colin Clair, A History of European Printing (New York: Academic Press, 1976), 375-76.
Thank you to David S. Barker for clarifying this for me.
HSN, 272-73. Liu, Zhongguo yinshuashu, 7, mistakenly states that the Commercial Press
brought offset to Shanghai in 1921. Before long, offset printing spread inland from Shanghai
to Wuchang, where the Yudi xueshe used it for printing maps.
Wang, Kanyin zongshu, 369. On Liangyou, see Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China 1930-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1999).
Even here, printing depended on the principle of greasy ink and water repelling each other.
The paperback book revolution of the twentieth century, grounded on being able to print
thousands of copies of a text on coarse paper, was made possible by web-fed offset lithographic printing, particularly that using plastic plates. See CMS, 20.135-37, 640.
In the view of Berry, Printing, 5: 707, collotype was more purely photographic than any of
the other processes. Given the unstable printing surface (gelatine on glass), only a small
number of prints could be made from each plate, restricting collotypes use to limited-edition
books and wall pictures.
Ibid., 707-8.
Liu, Zhongguo yinshuashu, 7.
HSN, 273.
Wang, Kanyin zongshu, 369. Outside Shanghai, important collotypers were the Qin family
firm (Yiyuan zhenshangshe) of Wuxi, the Tao family firm (Baichuan shushi) of Wujin, and the
Luo family firms of Mochitang and Yiantang in Shangyu; all of these firms were also well
known for their photomechanical (yingyin) reproductions of pictures, calligraphy, and inscriptions. As late as 1941, the Luo firms were reprinting material from Dunhuang. Many of these
firms, along with others too numerous to mention, also printed using metal plates (jinshu ban).
HSN, 273-74.
Wang, Kanyin zongshu, 369.
HSN, 273. According to He, tinplate printing was adopted by Shanghais Huacheng, Huachang
(sic), and Kangyuan can-producing factories to print labels.
ZYS, 575-78. According to Zhang, Chinese printers, as opposed to foreign Jesuits, first used
copperplate in 1783 to produce a copperplate map of the imperial palace at Yuanmingyuan.
Twenty-four plates from that issue are now in the Beijing University library, made even more
valuable by the Anglo-French destruction of that palace in 1870.
Wang, Kanyin zongshu, 370, and HSN, 274. I am speaking here about printed paper currency. The Chinese had been casting copper coins (tongqian) for centuries. Stamped copper
coins (tongyuan) were introduced as part of the post-Boxer currency reform. The modern minting of Chinese coins began in 1887 when Liangguang Viceroy Zhang Zhidong asked the
Chinese minister in London to purchase modern coining machinery. The Birmingham, England, firm Ralph Heaton & Sons was contracted to supply coining machinery for the production of silver and copper coins at Canton. Modern mints on the Canton model were then
established at Wuchang (1895), Tianjin (Beiyang Mint) and Fuzhou (1896), Nanjing, Hangzhou,
Shenyang (Mukden), Jilin, and Chengdu (1898), followed by a stampede of provincial mints,
which together replaced the fifty or so old Qing mints. The Shanghai Mint was not established
until 1921. British, German, American, and Japanese equipment was used in these mints. See

313

314 Notes to pages 65-68

178
179
180

181
182

183
184

185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192

193
194
195

Wen Pin Wei, The Currency Problem in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1914),
49, and Eduard Kann, The Currencies of China (Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, 1927), 439-64.
BDRC, 1: 170.
HSN, 275.
HSN, 274, and Wang Zhaohong, Tongke xiaoji, in ZJCSC, 298-308. In addition, according
to Wang, Kanyin zongshu, 368 and 374, note 9, for a limited time during the Guangxu
reign (1875-1907), a number of Japanese firms opened on Shanghais Henan South Road,
issuing copperplate works like Huimao zizai and Jinxiang huapu, images of the Meiji Restoration, and books, such as Kunxue jiwen and Rizhilu, both with tiny fly-head characters lined
up like eyebrows (yingtou xizi). Because of the high prices and narrow market orientation of
their work, these Japanese firms, which used the Chinese names Leshantang, Leshantang
shudian, Xiuwenguan, and Songyin shushi, did not last long.
Berry, Printing, 5: 708. HSN, 275, mistakenly identified Karl Kleisch, known for improvements to photogravure in 1864, as its inventor.
Liu, Zhongguo yinshuashu, 7, and HSN, 276. According to HSN, photogravure first arrived in Shanghai in 1917 as a result of English war propaganda. The Chinese did not learn
the techniques until, by chance, the Commercial Press was able to hire a German technician,
F. Heinicker. Heinicker had been working in Japan, but, after the 1921 Tokyo earthquake
destroyed many photogravure printing firms, he passed through Shanghai on his way back to
Germany. After helping the Commercial Press print the cover of the Dongfang zazhi/Eastern
Miscellany, he co-invested with some Chinese in a firm called Zhongguo zhaoxiangban gongsi/
China Photogravure Company. With rotogravure printing, a steel cylinder is first coated with
copper. Then, using acid, designs are etched into the copper using photographic film. Tiny
recessed wells in the copper are inked to print web-fed paper; the larger the wells, the more
the ink, and the darker the colour. Unlike in letterpress or offset lithography, text as well as
illustrations can be printed using the rotogravure process. The plates themselves are made
through a photochemical process of etching. See TPP, 15; CMS, 20.90 and 20.91, 626-27.
HSN, 275.
Article IV, Movable Metallic Types among the Chinese, CR 19, 5 (1850): 247-49; Article
IV, Literary Notices, 282-84; Holt, Mission Press, 210; Williams, Movable Types, 24-25.
For a view of a page printed with Tangs tin type, see Article IV, Movable Metallic Types,
248. Tangs type were lost in 1854-55 during uprisings related to the Taiping Rebellion (185164). It is not explained in my sources why Tang, or other Chinese printers, did not simply find
another kind of brush. The figure $10,000 may simply reflect a literal missionary translation of a Chinese phrase meaning a lot. Thanks to Joseph P. McDermott for querying this
issue.
Article IV, Literary Notices, 281.
Historians typically explain Gutenbergs selection of the screw press by way of his adaptation
of Europes wine presses (known as zonka/zonca) and/or paper presses.
Because of a lack of sources on Western intaglio presses in general, but on those in China in
particular, I do not discuss them.
Moran, Printing Presses, 49, says that the screw on Stanhopes press was so powerful it would
have broken a wooden press.
Ibid., 54. The cost was ninety guineas each.
Berry, Printing, 5: 691.
Ibid., 686.
Moran, Printing Presses, 59-61. In general, the lineage of platen printing starts with Gutenbergs
screw press and is followed by the innovations of Blaeu in 1620, Annison of the Imprimerie
Royale in 1785, Ramage in 1790, Stanhope in 1800, the Columbian press in 1814, the Albion
in 1820, the Washington of 1821, the Adams presses of 1830 and 1845, the Gordon of 1851,
and the Universal of 1869. See TPP, 47-51.
Berry, Printing, 5: 693, and David S. Barker (personal communication). The Columbian
initially sold for $400.
Moran, Printing Presses, 68-69.
Major nineteenth-century manufacturers included the long-lived British firms Napier (18081958), Dawson (1854-1960s?), Harrild & Sons (1801/09-1948), and R. Hoe & Company of

Notes to pages 69-74

196
197
198
199

200
201
202

203
204
205

206

207
208
209
210
211

212
213

214
215
216
217

New York and London (1805-1978). Harrild, which we first encounter in Figure 1.21, although independent of the Times, worked closely with the newspaper and, for a time, with
Friedrich Knig, discussed below. Harrild also manufactured the Albion. For a history of R.
Hoe & Company, see Frank E. Comparato, Chronicles of Genius and Folly: R. Hoe & Company
and the Printing Press as a Service to Democracy (Culver City: Labrynthos, 1979). A functioning
Washington press, manufactured by A.B. Taylor of New York, founded by a former Hoe
employee, can be seen at the Stratford-Perth Museum, Stratford, Ontario.
For an illustration, see Moran, Printing Presses, 81.
W.S. Holt, The Mission Press in China: The Am. M.E. Mission Press, at Foochow, Chinese
Recorder and Missionary Journal 10, 4 (1879): 270, and MPC, 40-43.
Moran, Printing Presses, 88.
HSN, 267. Supplementing the letterpress, and using similar media, was the jobbing press.
One of Gutenbergs major achievements had been the creation of the job-printing industry.
According to Moran, Printing Presses, 143, job printing was historically regarded as any work
involving less than a sheet. Before 1830, much job printing was done using engraving. In the
1810s, Daniel Treadwell of Boston, the inventor of the power-driven cylinder press, experimented unsuccessfully with a job press, but the vertical, self-inking press as it was known in
Shanghai did not appear until the 1850s, when the Gordon press was first used in New York.
Although it is difficult to say when the first job press arrived in Shanghai, by the late 1930s
Hongkous Jianye Machine-Making Company was manufacturing electric job presses.
Article V, Literary Intelligence, 43, and MPC, 43.
Thank you to David S. Barker.
Moran, Printing Presses, 99, says that the Albion was also the preferred press of the nineteenthcentury private printer, including William Morriss famous Kelmscott Press. In England, at
mid-century, the Albion sold for 12 to 75. Moran, 97, says a small Albion, with a Japanese
or Oriental air, found in Singapore may have been manufactured by the Japanese around
1880.
MPC, 46.
This distinction is spelled out in CMS, 20.42.
Moran, Printing Presses, 105. Knig and Bauers chief patron was Thomas Bensley, a wellknown book printer located off Fleet Street, London, who, coincidentally, as early as 1801,
had tried his hand at printing Chinese. Unfortunately, the type Bensley used for the frontispiece to Joseph Hager, An Explanation of the Elementary Characters of the Chinese (London: Richard
Phillips, 1801), printed all three characters incorrectly. Inside the book, myriad other errors
appear. According to Minami, Mechanical Power, 614, each of Knigs cylinder presses was
powered by a two-horsepower steam engine for the first time in 1814.
Moran, Printing Presses, 110. That first book was a second edition of the English translation of
Blumenbachs Institutions of Physiology, a great contrast to the first book credited to Gutenbergs
press, purportedly the forty-two-line Latin Bible, and to Marshmans Chinese Bible, produced at Serampore in 1822.
Ibid., 109.
Ibid., 123.
Ibid., 113.
Protestant Missions, 308.
Wang, Manyou suilu, f.3a, cited in McAleavy, Wang Tao, 4. Wylie, not Medhurst, was director
of the Press after 1847, but Wang, who revised his diaries frequently, may have been confused. I have used McAleavys translation of this passage with some minor changes.
The text says meiyou, an error; Wang should have said meiyan (soot).
Wangs memory is not always to be trusted. He claims that in one day, you can print more
than 40,000 pages using the cylinder press. This must be an exaggeration; only the rotary
press was that fast; see below.
Wang, Yingruan zazhi, 274.
Ibid.
ZYS, 593.
Cylinder presses, invented in 1812, were attractive to newspaper publishers because of their
speed but turned out to be problematic in China due to a lack of suitable paper.

315

316 Notes to pages 74-76

218 Gezhi huibian was published by John Fryer (1839-1928), an English ex-missionary directing
the Translation Bureau at the Jiangnan Arsenal. After leaving Shanghai in 1896, Fryer became
the first Agassiz professor of Chinese at the University of California.
219 The Gezhi huibian announcement indicated that Major Brothers would act as Shanghai agents
for the cylinder presses produced by Londons Harrild & Sons. Shenbao, owned by Major
Brothers, carried similar advertising.
220 Moran, Printing Presses, 157. According to Minami, Mechanical Power, 615, the Japanese
did not import cylinder presses until 1874, two years after Shenbao. By the 1890s, they were
already manufacturing them. In 1898, a Japanese sales agent brought Japanese-made copies
of a European cylinder press to Shanghai; the reasonable price is said to have guaranteed it a
wide appeal, says HSN, 267. I have seen no evidence to suggest that the Chinese ever manufactured cylinder presses.
221 ZYS, 588.
222 HSN, 268, and JSF, 263.
223 Moran, Printing Presses, 159.
224 Ibid.
225 HSN, 269. ZYS, 588, says that the Commercial Press bought a Miehle in 1912, which it used
in conjunction with a German single-cylinder printing-and-folding machine. This machine
could print 8,000 perfected pages an hour.
226 This schematic drawing of an advanced mid-nineteenth-century steam-powered printing-andfolding machine hints at the distance covered by nineteenth-century Western technological
innovation in printing. Knowing that the machines operation would not be obvious, the
editors included an illustration to elucidate how the steam-powered machine actually worked.
In rotary printing, rather than a flat typeform, the printing surface is etched onto a plate
attached to a cylinder. Paper is then passed through two cylinders, one that bears the image
and a second that works as a platen, much as in the cylinder press. Moran, Printing Presses,
173-75, shows that the roots of the rotary press lie, not in relief printing processes, as did
those of the cylinder press, but in early intaglio printing processes. Already in the eighteenth
century such principles were at work printing textiles. Although patents were taken out on
paper-printing rotary presses as early as 1786 and 1790, rotary printing presses did not become viable until the middle of the nineteenth century.
227 De Zhen, Zhengqi ji yinzi zhediefa shuole, Zhongxi jianwen lu 4 (1872), cited in ZJCSE,
393.
228 Ibid., 391-94. For some time, scholars have debated the impact of Euclidian perspectival
drawings on the Chinese. The issues underlying this debate are complex but are related to the
nature of scientific revolutions and the absence of one in China until the twentieth century.
One early attempt to understand the relationship between the visual culture of technical
drawing and a scientific mentality is found in Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1973), particularly Chapter 13. Carrie Waaras article Invention,
Industry, Art: The Commercialization of Culture in Republican Art Magazines, in Sherman
Cochran, ed., Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900-1945 (Ithaca: Cornell
East Asia Series, 1999), 61-90, esp. 68-74, covers similar issues from another perspective.
229 For a sense of the relationship between memory and visual images, see Christopher A. Reed,
Re/Collecting the Sources: Shanghais Dianshizhai Pictorial and Its Place in Historical Memories, 1884-1949, in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12, 2 (2000): 44-71.
230 Moran, Printing Presses, 185.
231 Berry, Printing, 5: 690.
232 The earliest rotary press was built by Cowper and Applegath in 1816, but rotary presses did
not catch on until their later, immensely successful, model was built for the Times in October
1848, four months too late for the revolutionary events that had rocked Paris that year. Robert
Hoe built his first rotary press in 1847 and was followed by William Bullock in 1865. In 1866,
the Times patented its famous Walter press. See TPP, 59-62, and Berry, Printing, 700-1.
233 Berry, Printing, 5: 698.
234 Moran, Printing Presses, 192.
235 ZYS, 588. In Chinese, there is no distinction between the most common terms for cylinder
press (lunzhuan ji) and rotary press (lunzhuan ji). Even according to the Han-Ying Ying-Han

Notes to pages 76-80

236

237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246

247

248
249
250
251
252
253

254

255

yinshua chuban cihui (Chinese-English, English-Chinese Printing and Publishing Vocabulary)

(Shanghai: Yiwen chubanshe, 1991), the proper names for cylinder press are guntong yinshuaji
(cylinder press) or lunzhuan yinshuaji (rotating press); rotary press is also listed as lunzhuan
yinshuaji. For this reason, one must infer from the brand name or description which type of
press is being described.
ZJCSE, 394, note 2. According to Clair, A History of European Printing, 387, there was a Leipzig
firm, founded in 1869, named Baensch-Drugulin that specialized in exotic fonts and became
known for printing in Oriental languages; the foundry was sold in 1919, but the printing
house lasted until 1930. Minami, Mechanical Power, 616-17, says that Japans first electric
cylinder press had started printing in 1888. In 1890, the Printing Bureau imported its first
steam-driven French-built Marinoni rotary presses from France. Tokyo and Osaka newspapers followed the governments lead, buying similar presses throughout the 1890s. By 1904,
Osaka Asahi had succeeded in copying the steam-powered Marinoni press, marketing it as the
Asahi rotary press.
HSN, 269.
Ibid.
GGZ, 201.
HSN, 269.
Linotype and L & M Machinery Co. was located at 160 Ai-duo-ya Road.
Linotype and L & M No. 3 Rotary Press (advertisement), YW 1, 3 (1937): 1.
Duplex Tubular Plate Press/Du-bi-li-shi pai tongban yinbaoji, in YW 1, 4 (1937): 2-3.
Linotype and L & M Machinery, Ltd., in YW 1, 3 (1937): 1-2.
Senefelder, Invention of Lithography, 159ff. According to Senefelder (7, 18), the mechanical
process was developed in 1796, followed by the chemical process in 1798-99.
Weimerskirch, Lithographic Stone in America [1807-1970], 2-15. Twyman, The Lithographic Hand Press, 1796-1850, 4, says that By 1850, the lithographic hand press was as
satisfactory in terms of the quality of work it produced as it was ever likely to be. Lithographys
slow production rate was the only significant way in which it compared poorly with letterpress printing. Once the stone was leveraged into position, a calfskin roller had to be used, in
much the same way that the cylinder of the flatbed press was manipulated, to transfer ink
from the stone to the paper. In fact, this was known as the direct-rotary litho-press, as
opposed to the indirect, or offset, litho press. See TPP, 13.
Berry, Printing, 5: 707. Lithographic stones continued to be exported worldwide from
Kelheim, Germany until the early twentieth century. On the multiple developments in the
nineteenth-century lithographic press, see R.M. Burch, Colour Printing and Colour Printers, with
a Chapter on Modern Processes by W. Gamble (Edinburgh: Paul Harris, 1983 [orig. 1910]), esp.
Chapters 5-8.
Ibid.
Yao Gonghe, Shanghai xianhua (Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 1989 [1917]), 12, reports his name
as Qiu Zhiang.
He, Sanshiwu nian lai zhongguo de yinshua she, [1937], cited in SUN, I: 117-18, says that
hand rotation rendered the printing process extraordinarily wasteful.
Mao Xianglin, Moyulu [late Qing], cited in JSF, 272. I would like to thank Patricia Sieber for
help translating in this section as well as Sun Cigongs poem cited earlier.
Zhuang, Tushanwan, 36.
Chens dates are unknown. See HSN, 270. According to Yang Shouqings Zhongguo chuban jie
jianshi (Shanghai: Yongxiang yinshuguan, 1946), 10, the compradores name was Xi Ziang,
and he was a native of Qingpu.
Frank H.H. King, Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1845-1895 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1965), 237. Other reports say that Ernest Major and his brother Frederick
went to Shanghai via Nova Scotia. On the question of which of the Major brothers founded
Shenbao, see Reed, Re/Searching the Sources, 49-50, note 6.
Yu Yueting, Woguo huabao de shizu Dianshizhai huabao chutan, in Xinwen yanjiu ziliao
congkan 1981, No. 5 (December 1981): 149, says that in 1872 Ernest Major joined with
three others (Wu Huade, Piao Laiyi, and another non-Chinese) in investing 400 taels each
in Shenbao.

317

318 Notes to pages 80-91

256 JSF, 269, reports that in 1918 Shenbao moved from its original residential location at Hankou
and Jiangxi Roads to purpose-built quarters at Hankou and Shandong Roads in the heart of
the Wenhuajie district. At the same time, they bought an American Sextuple parallel (Si-gete) rotary press which could produce 48,000 four-page sections per hour. Using it, Shenbao
could delay printing its daily paper until 4 a.m.
257 Hu Daojing, Baotan yihua, cited in HSN, 285, note 10. Shenbao published over 160 titles,
issuing incomplete catalogues in 1877 and 1879. It issued a limited-edition (maximum 2,000
copies), 160-volume reprint collection of fiction called Shenbaoguan juzhenban congshu with
wooden type that imitated the Qianlong movable-type editions.
258 Yao, Shanghai xianhua, 12, says that Dianshizhai was first located at the corner of Nanjing
Road and the Nicheng Bridge (now Xizang Road) but that it moved to a new location within
a few months. JSF, 272, says its print shop was located there and its sales outlet was found at
the corner of Nanjing and Henan Roads.
259 The official English name is given in Francis L.H. Potts A Short History of Shanghai (Shanghai:
Kelly & Walsh, 1928), 135, as Tien Shih Chai Photolithographic Publishing Works, which
I have abbreviated and reromanized here.
260 For a roughly contemporary San Francisco lithographic firm (in 1889), see George K. Fox,
American Lithographers Trade Cards, in Bicentennial of Lithography, 87.
261 HSN, 272.
262 Huang Shiquan, Songnan mengyinglu (Shanghai: [n.p.], 1883), cited in Liu, Zhongguo
yinshuashu de yange, part 2, in YW 1, 2 (1937): 6.
263 HSN, 272.
264 Ibid.
265 Ibid., 273.
266 These statistics are based on references scattered throughout the documentation consulted
for this chapter.
267 Intaglio printing was also historically important, but after the eighteenth century missionaries played little role in its transfer.
268 ZYS, 578.
269 Liu Longguang, Zhongguo yinshuashu de yange, part 2, in YW 1, 2 (1937): 4-7. Liu Longguang was a graduate of Guanghua University. In the 1930s, he was involved with a number
of Shanghai graphics industry publications; after 1949, he joined Renmin chubanshe and was
part of the publishing team that produced Mao Zedong xuanji (Selected Works of Mao Zedong).
270 Shanghai tuhua ribao (n.d.), quoted in ZYS, 588.
Chapter 2: Janus-Faced Pioneers
1 CYL, 1: 113.
2 Ibid., 1: 148.
3 Kang Youwei, Riben shumu zhi (Shanghai: Datong yishuju, 1897), in Chen Pingyuan and Xia
Shaohong, eds., Ershi shiji Zhongguo xiaoshuo lilun ziliao (1897-1916) (Beijing: Beijing daxue
chubanshe, 1989), 1: 13.
4 In his Early Lithographed Books (London: Farrand Press & Private Libraries Association, 1990),
15, Michael Twyman points out that, in the West, after a run of five centuries, Letterpress
printing ... is now almost a thing of the past ... It is all the more surprising, therefore, that
historians of printing should have neglected to study ... lithographic book production.
Twymans comment also pertains to Chinese lithographic book production.
5 Zhang Zhidong, Shumu dawen (1876) quoted in Cho-yuan Tan (Taam), The Development of
Chinese Libraries under the Ching Dynasty, 1644-1911 (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1935),
75-76. See Fan Xiceng, ed., Shumu dawen buzheng (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1963 [1876]),
216-17.
6 The exception is the Sino-British hybrid Dianshizhai, publisher of the Dianshizhai Pictorial
read by Bao.
7 Yu Yueting, Woguo huabao de shizu Dianshizhai huabao chutan, Xinwen yanjiu ziliao congkan
5 (1981): 175-77. According to JSF, 276, lithography dominated the Chinese newspaper
world for thirty years until the early Republican era, when copperplates took over. An American

Notes to pages 92-94

8
9
10
11

12
13

14
15
16
17
18

19
20

variant of these views is found in Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern, The Flowering of a New
Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 6467, who argues that the Dianshizhai Pictorial was important for preparing the ground for
Shanghais pictorial magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, specifically, Dongfang zazhi and the
photography-dominated Liangyou.
Beatrice Farwell, Lithographs and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 1: 1.
Paul Jobling and David Crowley, Graphic Design, Reproduction and Representation since 1800
(New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), 42-43.
Geoffrey Wakeman, Victorian Book Illustration, The Technical Revolution (Newton Abbot, UK:
David & Charles, 1973), 15.
Under the influence of the Newcastle engraver, Thomas Bewick, British publishers of satirical
magazines combined wood engravings, sometimes prolonged in use by stereotyping, with
typography, which allowed for vast print runs. See Celina Fox, Graphic Journalism in England
during the 1830s and 1840s (New York: Garland, 1988), esp. Chapter 2. Even the Illustrated
London News used wood engravers rather than lithographers for the sake of speed. Vanity Fair
was a notable exception to this rule. Woodblock book illustration remained a viable industry
in England until about 1880, when it was surpassed by various types of lithography and a
technique known as line illustration. See Wakeman, Victorian Book Illustration, 162.
Twyman, Early Lithographed Books, 190.
Ibid. Twyman identifies the Glasgow Looking Glass as the first of these papers, although it soon
moved to London, where it became the Looking Glass. According to Jobling and Crowley,
Graphic Design, 30-35, the Looking Glass was joined by publications such as the Weekly Chronicle
(1830s) and the Illustrated Police Gazette (1867?-1938). A well-known mid-century lithographed
work was Edward Lears Book of Nonsense (1846) which combined illustrations with limericks
and was frequently reprinted.
David Roberts, From an Antique Land: Travels in Egypt and the Holy Land (New York: Weidenfeld
and Nicolson, 1989 [1842-49]).
By the time of the American Civil War, photography had joined lithography in presenting war
to stay-at-home audiences.
Ronnie C. Tyler, The Mexican War, A Lithographic Record (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1973), 1-12.
Frederic A. Conningham, Currier & Ives Prints (New York: Crown Publishers, 1949), v-vi.
Twyman, Early Lithographed Books, 22. According to Wakeman, Victorian Book Illustration, 16163, in addition to its use in book printing, lithography was well known as a means of book
illustration. Of the sixteen different book illustration techniques available in London in the
latter half of the nineteenth century, lithography led the pack from 1850 to 1890.
Twyman, Early Lithographed Books, 22.
Yu, Woguo huabao de shizu, 177. According to Su Ching, The Printing Presses of the
London Missionary Society Among the Chinese (PhD diss., University of London, 1996),
294, in the early 1840s, missionaries at Shanghai found that Chinese-published books using
Chinese characters to represent sounds in the Wu dialect were very popular among the common people, especially women. Chinese teachers at the mission then began to adapt Christian books to the Wu dialect. The first book to be adapted in this fashion, The Forms of Prayer,
in 64 pages, was printed using lithography and appeared in 1845. Lithography was discontinued in 1847 and then resumed on a smaller scale in the mid-1850s. Although fascinating as
an alternative fount of lithographic expertise, this operation does not seem to have been the
main influence on the birth of print-capitalist lithography in 1877. Thanks to Joseph P.
McDermott for this citation. Han Qi and Wang Yangzong, Qingchao zhi shiyin shu, [source
unknown, collected in Ricci Institute Library, University of San Francisco] (n.p., n.p., 1991),
point out that Walter Henry Medhurst brought lithography to Shanghai in the 1840s and
that John Fryer, Jiangnan Arsenal translator, working together with Xu Jianyin and Wang
Dejun, translated Strakers Lithography and Berrys Lithography into Chinese before 1875 even
though most Arsenal translations were printed with woodblocks. Similarly, starting in 1877,
Fryers own science and technology publication, Gezhi huibian, issued detailed accounts of
lithographic printing.

319

320 Notes to pages 95-97

21 Yunlange was located in Suzhous Changmen district.

22 This account of Wu Yourus life summarizes JSF, 276, and Wu Youru, Selections from the
Dianshizhai Pictorial, trans. Don J. Cohn, Renditions, A Chinese-English Translation Magazine 23
(1985): 47. Yu, Woguo huabao de shizu, 177, lists ten of Wus colleagues: Zhou Muqiao,
He Yuanjun, Tian Zilin, Fu Liangxin, Xie Zunlong, Ma Ziming, Gu Yuezhou, Wu Zimei, Shen
Meipo, and Guan Quan.
23 According to Fan Muhan, ed., Zhongguo yinshua jindai shi, chu gao. (Beijing: Yinshua gongye
chubanshe, 1995), 253, it was printed by the lithographer Hongbaozhai.
24 Wu, Selections from the Dianshizhai Pictorial, 49.
25 Gong Chanxing, Xinwen huajia Wu Youru; jiantan Wu Youru yanjiu zhong de jige wenti,
Meishu pinglun (n.l.: n.p., 1991?): 70.
26 Unfortunately, neither has yet been adequately classified by scholars or librarians.
27 Song Yuanfang and Li Baijian, eds., Zhongguo chubanshi (Beijing: Zhongguo shuji chubanshe,
1991), 225-26. Yan Fus transitory but excellent Tianjin daily, Guowen bao, and its accompanying ten-daily, Guowen huibao, both of which contained his political essays, are other wellknown lithographed newpapers.
28 Jonathan Hay discusses illustrated magazines and books from a perspective that reinforces this
view. See his Painters and Publishing in Late Ninetheenth-Century Shanghai, in Chou Juhsi, ed., Art at the Close of Chinas Empire ([Tempe]: Arizona State University, 1998), 134-88.
29 Using Quanguo Zhongyi tushu lianhe mulu (Beijing: Zhongyi guji chubanshe, 1991) and Wang
Qingyuan, Mou Renlong, Han Xiduo, eds., Xiaoshuo shufang lu (Beijing: Beijing tushuguan
chubanshe, 2002 [1987]), 102-203, I have been able to identify only seven Shanghai publishers before 1876: Lingyun ge (active from the Qianlong era), Jiangzuo shulin (active by
1798), Wenyun shuju (first appeared 1839), Jinzhang shuju (active by 1856), Saoye shanfang
(present in Shanghai from about 1860), Jinhua shuju (established by 1860), and Wenyi shuju
(founded by 1866). I would like to thank Marta Hanson of the University of California at
San Diego and Pieter Keulemans of the University of Chicago for recommending these works
or editions to me.
30 See Wang Shucun, ed., Xiju nianhua, 2 vols. (Taipei: Yingwen hansheng, 1991), 313-15.
31 See Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book (London: NLB, 1979), 21.
Febvre and Martin describe the exemplar as follows: To keep proper intellectual as well as
economic control over the use of books [and] to assure the reproduction of copies under the
best conditions ... the universities [of the European Middle Ages] devised an ingenious system. Manuscripts were loaned ... From them copies could be made ... The original text (the
exemplar) was returned ... after copying ... each copy was made from the same original.
32 In 1890, John Fryer, of the Jiangnan Arsenal and Chinese Scientific Book Depot, delivered a
report to the General Conference of Protestant Missionaries of China on the Chinese textbook series that he had been commissioned in 1879 to provide. Fryer, General Editors
Report, in Records of the General Conference of the Protestant Missionaries of China (Shanghai:
APMP, 1890), 715, suggests that woodblock cutting was still being undertaken in Shanghai in
1890. Fryer mentions that the books that have been cut on woodblocks are in good, bold
type ... The cutting of the blocks has been effected partly in Shanghai and partly in Canton
and [Hankou], where at first it could be done cheaper than in Shanghai. The prices for cutting are now nearly the same in all three places; and therefore, as a matter of convenience, all
recent work has been done here. Fryer does not indicate whether Shanghai prices had increased, which might have indicated a reduction in the numbers of woodblock carvers, under
the influence of competition from lithographers. Fryer was not the only late-nineteenthcentury missionary who valued woodblock printing. In the same publication, Ernest Faber,
Christian Literature in China: Its Business Management, 553, writes that printing from
blocks is still done with advantage whenever a larger work meets with continuous demand,
though only a small number is needed, perhaps some hundred copies, per year.
33 SUN, 2: 1, 1: 246.
34 Ibid., 2: 1, 2: 1200.
35 Ibid., 2: 2: 1005-10 and 1166-68. Sun identifies these seven: Feiyingguan, Hongwen shuju,
Fuwenge, Baishi shanfang, Hongbaozhai shiyinju, Jishi shanfang, and Tongwen shuju. To this
list, based on my survey of Quanguo Zhongyi tushu lianhe mulu, I add the following thirteen:

Notes to pages 97-102

36
37

38
39
40
41
42
43

44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51

52

53

Baowen shuju, Dianshizhai, Guxiang ge, Jiangzuo shulin, Jiaojing shanfang, Qianqingtang
shuju, Saoye shanfang, Shanghai shuju, Shenchang shushi, Shenhai shanfang shuju, Shuncheng
shuju, Wenruilou, and Zhushi lianwen shuju. In addition, the research of Wang et al., Xiaoshuo
shufang lu, 102-203, supplies the names of thirty-two more publishers: Baoshan shuju,
Changwen shuju, Chongwen shuju, Datong shuju, Fugu shuzhai, Guangbaisong zhai, Guangyi
shuju, Hongwen shuju, Huanwen shuju, Jinbu shuju, Jinzhang shuju, Jishi shuju, Jiujingzhai,
Kuiguangzhai, Liwen xuan, Puji shuzhuang, Shanghai jushi, Tushu jicheng ju, Wenlan shuju,
Wenxuan shuju, Wenyi shuju, Wenyi shuju (different characters), Wenyuan shanfang, Wenyuan
shuzhuang, Yingshang wucai gongsi, Yizhen shuju, Zhengyi shuju, Zhenyi shuju, Zhonghe
shuju, Zhuji shuju, Zhuyitang, and Zuiliutang.
The figures that Sun quotes are probably based on NCH 25 May 1889: 633.
NCH 30 January 1889: 114. The article goes on to say that there was to be a special examination in the fall in honour of the emperors marriage, and that the book dealers are looking
forward to recouping themselves to some extent next autumn, presumably by stocking lithographed editions for candidates purchase in preparation for the exam. Conversely, it also
states that In the shop lists, the productions of modern authors shut out almost completely
the works of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries which used to be so famous ... the effect of
[the lithographed books] is secretly to undermine the Sung dynasty system of thought which
pervades the old school books and which was the basis of the examination curriculum.
NCH 25 May 1889: 633.
NCH 23 November 1888: 567.
NCH 26 October 1888: 459.
NCH 25 May 1889: 633.
Faber, Christian Literature in China, 552.
Gilbert McIntosh, Discussion, in Records of the General Conference of the Protestant Missionaries
of China (Shanghai: APMP, 1890), 582. The Guangxuehui was located down the street from
Tongwen Press, discussed below.
Ibid.
Ernest Box, Native Newspapers, in Society for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge among the Chinese, 11th Annual Report (Shanghai: n.p., 1898), 40-41.
APMPAR, 1891, 1.
Ibid., 3
Box, Native Newspapers, 39.
NCH 25 May 1889: 633.
Saoye shanfang shumu (Shanghai: n.p., 1917). I am indebted to Marta Hanson for bringing this
publishers catalogue to my attention.
In 1917, according to the Proprietors Notice in the booklet, Saoye had been in existence in
Suzhou for 300 years. In fact, the firm was started by the Xi family of Lake Dongting during
the Wanli reign (1573-1619) of the Ming dynasty. Eventually, a retail outlet was opened in
Suzhous Changmen district. At the beginning of the Qing, the Xis acquired many books from
the Jiguge library in Changshu owned by the Mao family. The Xis Suzhou shop garnered
respect for reprinting many old and famous works.
ZYS, 592. The 1917 Saoye catalogue is divided into four slim sections, the first two of which
are devoted to describing lithographed editions. All of them are reprints. The largest single
category in the catalogue is calligraphy manuals, the specialty by which Saoyes name is still
known in Shanghai today. Sections three and four of the catalogue feature woodblock editions and editions of the Chinese Classics issued by provincial printing offices. These, too, are
all reprints, calling to mind Zhang Zhidongs call to reprint rather than write anew. The first
section of the catalogue is twenty-one pages long and features roughly 275 titles, divided into
sections such as poetry, phonetics, textbooks and reference books, biji, novels, etc. Section
two features 416 titles of lithographed editions, many of which are designated as reprints
from Tongwen Press, one of the three major Shanghai lithographic publishers to be studied
here. Section two also includes many medical books.
These restaurant prices come from Wu Guifang, Qingji Shanghai de yinshi wujia, Dangan
yu lishi 4 (1988): 97, which lists the two bowls of soup in terms of cash, a form of currency
left over from the Qing. Strictly speaking, cents did not equal cash because China lacked

321

322 Notes to pages 103-9

54

55
56

57

58
59
60
61
62

63
64

65

66

a unified coin system in this period, but Eduard Kann, The Currencies of China (Shanghai:
Kelly & Walsh, 1927), 418, suggests that they were comparable. I have chosen to use cents
to make the comparison more transparent. Although Wus figures come from 1908, Thomas
Rawski, Economic Growth in Prewar China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989),
162, suggests that between 1910 and 1936 inflation averaged only 2 percent per year, which
would have made the Saoye prices of 1917 even less in 1908 terms.
NCH 25 May 1889: 633. Something is known of the wages paid to woodblock cutters. According to Evelyn S. Rawski, Education and Popular Literacy in Ching China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1979), 121, Ye Dehui (1864-1927) reported that the cost of carving
woodblocks gradually increased during the Ching period [largely due to inflation], from a
charge of twenty cash per hundred characters in the late seventeenth century to fifty to sixty
cash per hundred in the 1870s. Using female labour brought the costs down to one-fifth of
the prevailing rate. A bowl of noodles at this time cost eight cash, says Rawski. By the 1920s,
according to Chen Cunren, Yinyuan shidai shenghuo shi (Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 2000),
232, lithographic copyists were earning a pittance; first-class quality got only three mao per
thousand characters (second-class earned two mao, third class, one mao). Thank you to an
anonymous UBC Press reviewer for this citation.
SMJG, 1: 439.
A sum of ninety-seven results when the thirty-nine publishers listed in SUN and Quanguo
Zhongyi tushu lianhe mulu are added to the fifty-eight fiction publishers (corrected to eliminate
duplication) found in Wang et al., Xiaoshuo shufang lu, 102-203.
On cigarette trading cards, see Wang Hewu et al., eds., Qicai xiangyan pai (Shanghai: Shanghai
kexue jishu wenxian chubanshe, 1998), 9, which mentions lithographic and offset printing of
the more than 30,000 cigarette trading cards belonging to the Shanghai Library.
GGZ, 145-46.
Joan Judge, Print and Politics: Shibao and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1996), 19.
Yu, Woguo huabao de shizu, 150.
Dianshizhai probably had many more; at Tongwen Press, the ratio of staff to printing presses
was forty-one to one, so Dianshizhai may have had as many as 205 employees when it opened.
For a contrasting drawing of an elite Chinese-style shop selling fans located in the same vicinity, see Dianshizhai huabao, reprint (Canton: Guangdong Renmin chubanshe, 1983), volume
yi, 73.B.
In fact, spacious multistoreyed Western buildings did become part of the Shanghai image of
modernity in Chinese eyes at this time. See, for instance, CYL, 1: 30.
The phrase big foreign church probably refers to the Americans Trinity Cathedral (established 1869) near Hankou and Jiangxi Roads visible on the Shanghai map in the front of this
book. John Fryers Chinese Scientific Book Depot was in the same area. The Shanghai Muncipal
Council buildings were erected on this block in 1913.
Wu Youru, cited in ZJCSE between 360 and 361, caption. On Meng of Shu, see Thomas
Francis Carter and L. Carrington Goodrich, The Invention of Printing in China and Its Spread
Westward (New York: Ronald Press, 1955), Chapter 9. The Meng family ruled the state of Shu,
culturally then the most advanced part of China, from 934 to 965 after the fall of the Tang
dynasty. Although Wu states that the Mengs began printing with wooden blocks, Carter and
Goodrich aver that printing from woodblocks began at Chengdu in Shu under the previous
rulers, surnamed Wang, and spread when it was taken back to the central Chinese capitals of
Luoyang and Kaifeng by Feng Dao (882-954) as an inexpensive alternative to engraving the
Classics in stone. Red and black characters here may refer to the Qing habit of printing basic
texts in black ink and commentary in red. See Pauline Yu, Canon Formation in Late Imperial
China, in Theodore Huters et al., eds., Culture and State in Chinese History: Conventions, Accommodations, and Critiques (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 102. I would like to
thank Patricia Sieber both for her help in translating this poem and for this reference.
For an example of this late-nineteenth-century Chinese tendency to assume that anything of
value in world civilization could be traced in some way to China, see J.D. Frodsham, ed. and
trans., The First Chinese Embassy to the West: The Journals of Kuo Sung-tao, Liu Hsi-hung, and
Chang Te-yi (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), lvii and 140.

Notes to pages 109-11

67 Wu, cited in ZJCSE, between 360 and 361, caption. In the name Dianshizhai, zhai is a
common term used for a scholars studio. The verb-object construction dianshi derives
from the phrase dianshi chengjin, meaning to touch stone and produce gold, conventionally
said when improving a phrase in a composition but clearly functioning here with a double
entendre. The whimsical, vaguely poetic names of the lithographic shops, such as Dianshizhai
(Stones-into-Gold Studio), suggest their cultural continuity with traditional Chinese publishing concerns with similar kinds of names.
68 Yao Fushen, Zhongguo bianji shi (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 1990), 246.
69 JSF, 273.
70 Yao, Zhongguo bianji shi, 247. This price difference is considerably greater than the 40 percent
savings Yao reports as having been afforded the consumer by lithographic printing. In 1917,
the same text from Saoye would cost two Republican yuan in a lithographed edition and three
yuan five mao in a typeset edition.
71 Information in this paragraph comes from the lengthy 25 March 1889 NCH article profiling
the Chinese lithographic industry. Yao Fushen relies on Yao Gonghes Shanghai xianhua, first
published in 1917 by the Commercial Press and republished in 1925 and 1933, for the same
information. For Yao Gonghes own words, see his Shanghai xianhua (Shanghai: Guji chubanshe,
1989 [1917]), 12.
72 Rawski, Literacy and Education, 120; Robert Hegel, The Novel in Seventeenth Century China (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 10; Robert Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late
Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 123. Cecil K. Byrd, Early Printing in
the Straits Settlements, 1806-1858, A Preliminary Inquiry (Singapore: National Library, 1970),
10, reports that the number of impressions that a set of blocks would give depended on the care
of the printer and that some blocks were good enough to produce a total of 20,000 copies.
73 Gong, Xinwen huajia Wu Youru, 70. On Dianshizhais publishing of novels, see Wang et al.,
Xiaoshuo shufang lu, 112. Friedrich Hirth, Western Appliances in the Chinese Printing Industry, Journal of the China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (Shanghai) 20 (1885): 169, strongly
emphasizes that the Dianshizhai reprints were characterized by extreme cheapness but also
clarity. The characters of the Peiwen yunfu, which sold for fifteen yuan (thirty less than a
Canton-woodblocked one), were so small, however, that readers had to be supplied with a
magnifying glass to be able to read them. For other 1885-era Dianshizhai prices, see ibid.,
170. Hirth (1845-1927), who served in the Chinese Customs Service from 1870 to 1897,
became Dean Lung Professor of Chinese at Columbia University from 1902 to 1917.
74 Throughout the history of Chinese commercial publishing, merchandise was sold by travelling salesmen. Wu Jingzi, the author of Rulin waishi (The Scholars), describes the plans of
Guang Zhaoren (a poor scholar) and the manager of Hangzhous Literary Expanse Bookshop
to produce an edition of model bagu essays for sale by merchants travelling to Shandong and
Henan. Similarly, Wang Licai, mentioned in Chapter 1, worked as an itinerant bookseller in
the Nanjing and Kaifeng areas before establishing Kaiming shudian in Shanghai in the early
1900s. According to Yao, Zhongguo bianji shi, 247, lithography spread to Wuchang, Suzhou,
Ningbo, Hangzhou, and Canton, but, he says, the quality never matched Shanghais. For
details on early lithography in Canton and Hangzhou, see SUN, 2: 1: 2, 1010.
75 Zhang, Zhongguo yinshua shi, 591, cites a draft version of Wangs diary, Taoyuan riji, to the effect
that, in one year, probably after 1886, Wang earned 480 yuan editing for Dianshizhai, 200
yuan working for John Fryers Chinese Scientific Book Depot (founded the same year as
Dianshizhai), and only 80 yuan in the employ of the Chinese steamship line China Merchants.
76 According to Yao, Zhongguo bianji shi, 248, the book was Gujin tushu jicheng. The number of
volumes reported in the North China Herald matches its length, suggesting that Yao, who cites
no source, is correct. Gujin tushu jicheng, often abbreviated Tushu jicheng, was an imperially
commissioned encyclopaedia (leishu) completed in 1725 by a large board of scholars led by
Jiang Tingxi. It is interesting to note, given the fact that Dianshizhai reprinted it lithographically, that its 5,020 volumes were first printed in 1728, according to Benjamin A. Elman, From
Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 128, using movable type ... A font of some one and a
half million copper type was cut for the project at the Palace printing office (Wuyingdian) in
Beijing.

323

324 Notes to pages 112-15

77 NCH 29 October 1889: 472.

78 Yu, Woguo huabao de shizu, 150, notes that Shenbao started the monthly Yinghuan xiaoji in
November 1872, following it with Siyan xiaoji in February 1875, and Huanyu xiaoji in February 1876.
79 Wu, Selections from the Dianshizhai Pictorial, 48.
80 Yao, Zhongguo bianji shi, 246, equates the two, mistakenly reporting that the Pictorial first
appeared in 1876, the year before the bookstore opened.
81 According to ibid., 247, the Dianshizhai Pictorial was preceded by Shenbaos unsuccessful pictorial Yinghuan huabao and was followed by publications such as Xunmeng huabao, Haiti huabao,
Chengtong huabao, Feiyingge huabao (mentioned earlier), and Xinwen baoguan huabao.
82 Gong, Xinwen huajia Wu Youru, 71.
83 Chinese lianshi paper was commonly used by lithographers; because it was locally produced,
unlike the rest of the materials needed for lithography, it was cheaper than foreign paper.
According to CYL, 1: 150, Liang Qichaos lithographed Shiwubao was also printed on it. NCH
25 May 1889: 633 says the lithographers favoured Fujian bamboo paper. The stones and
printing machines came largely from England and France, however. Oddly, one looks in vain
for information concerning imports from the pre-1894 era. In the 1903 North China Desk
Hong List (Shanghai: North China Daily News Printing Office, 1903), printed in both English
and Chinese but with an orientation to the foreign residents of Shanghai, only two lithographers, Kelly & Walsh and the Oriental Press, are listed among forty-nine printers, stationers,
and booksellers. Kelly & Walsh (Chinese, Biefa yanghang) was located at No. 11 The Bund,
and The Oriental Press was at 69 rue du Consulat, just off the Bund, in the French Concession. Even at a time when there were as many as ninety-seven Chinese lithographic publishers
in Shanghai, this lack of information in a publication meant for foreigners is not surprising.
Most foreign lithographic work was sent back to England; the influence of the Chinese-language lithographic industry on foreigners lives was small. In the Hong List, only Kelly &
Walsh is listed as an importer and supplier of lithographic supplies, but it is probable that
printing houses such Shenbao and North China Herald carried on a lucrative private trade in
such supplies. Similar hong lists produced solely in Chinese from this period have not come to
light; in the periods for which purely Chinese-language lists are available, lithography had
already passed its prime.
84 Box, Native Newspapers, 40.
85 SUN, 2: 1: 2, 1181. The narrator in Wu Woyao, Ershinian mudu zhi guai xianzhuang (Taipei:
Shih-chieh shu-chu, 1962), 1: 81, comments that his sister bought a copy of the Pictorial from
a newsboy.
86 Box, Native Newspapers, 40, 44-46. I would like to thank Kuiyi Shen of Ohio University
for clarifying these details for me.
87 Lithographic commercial advertisements, Don J. Cohn, ed. and trans., Vignettes from the Chinese: Lithographs from Shanghai in the Late Nineteenth Century (Hong Kong: Chinese University
of Hong Kong Press, 1987), back cover.
88 According to Fan, Zhongguo yinshua, 268, 282, Shenbaos compradore, Xi Yufu, formed the
Jicheng tushu gongsi in 1907 after buying Shenbaos Tushu jicheng shuju and merging it with
Shenchang shuju and Dianshizhai, but I have not found independent confirmation of this
activity. Fan also says that Jicheng tushu gongsi was, at that time, the most complete print
shop in Shanghai. Xi bought Shenbao itself in 1909.
89 Gong, Xinwen huajia Wu Youru, 71.
90 Yao, Shanghai xianhua, 1917, in SUN, 2: 1: 1, 118. Yao also points out that the Ningbo men
set up the Baishi shanfang. These three had a triangular monopoly for a time and were the
first to set the style.
91 Xu Run, Xu Yuzhai zixu nianpu, (n.p.: n.p., n.d.), 31, in SUN, 2: 1: 2, 1005. According to
Hirth, Western Appliances, 170, Tongwen was created by a company of native friends of
Chinese literature who have subscribed the capital necessary for the printing and publishing
of facsimile editions of the best productions of Chinese literature. Rather than a company of
friends, Tongwen was a company of brothers. Xu Run was one of the most prominent members of late-nineteenth-century Shanghais sizable Cantonese community. He had gotten
his start through Dent and Company, which, like Jardine, Matheson, and Company, was a

Notes to pages 115-19

92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99

100
101
102

103

104

105
106
107
108

109

110

Scottish opium-trading firm. Born, like both his famous compradore associate Tong King-sing
and the revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, in Xiangshan, Xu had been in Shanghai since at least the
1870s, when he was appointed by Li Hongzhang to the board of the China Merchants Steam
Navigation Company. See Zheng Shao, Xu Run yu lunchuan zhaoshangju, in Shanghai yanjiu
luncong (Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 1991), 6, 241- 60. In spite of his
three purchased titles, the highest of which was expectant daotai, Xu is not found in either
ECCP or in BDRC, both of which reflect conventional Chinese editorial biases favouring men
of politics and government administration. Xu does figure prominently in Albert Feuerwerkers
industry-oriented Chinas Early Industrialization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1958) and in Wellington K.K. Chans more commerce-directed Merchants, Mandarins and Modern
Enterprise in Late Ching China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian Research Center, 1977).
In addition to his well-known business ties to the China Merchants, the Kaiping Coal Mines
in Zhili, and the Guichi Coal Mines in Anhui, Xu also owned interests in Guangdong silver
mines, the Jianping Gold Mine in Rihe (Jehol), Zhilis Yongping Gold Mine, and many tea
firms in the Yangzi valley. His Shanghai real estate assets alone were valued at 2.2 million
taels in 1883-84. Supported by both Li Hongzhang and Yuan Shikai, he was the archfoe of
Self-Strengthener Sheng Xuanhuai. Xu died in his Bubbling Well Road home.
Such as Peiwen yunfu, Bianzi leibian, and Zishi jinghua.
Hirth, Western Appliances, 170.
ZYS, 591.
Xu in SUN, 2: 1: 2, 1005.
Ibid.
Mentioned in Yao, Zhongguo bianji shi, 273, who also says that Dianshizhai had blazed the trail
in this as in other ways.
ZYS, 592.
See Hirth, Western Appliances, 163. If Yao Fushen is correct that Dianshizhai had received
a stolen Tushu jicheng in 1884, it would be interesting to know which exemplar, its own or
Tongwens, was used for this 1888 printing.
Qian Jibo, Banben tongyi, (n.p.: n.p., n.d.), in SUN, 2: 1: 2, 1005.
ZYS, 592.
Xu, in SUN, 2: 1: 2, 1005. The similarity between Colonel Sir Henry James and the British
Ordnance Survey Offices use of lithography to provide the British nation with facsimiles of
important documentary collections, such as the Domesday Book, and Tongwen Presss providing the throne with reprints of imperial encyclopedias is striking but not altogether surprising. See Twyman, Early Lithographed Books, 243-58.
Coincidentally, Su Chao Hu, The Development of the Chinese Collection in the Library of Congress
(Boulder: Westview Press, 1979), 40, 212, notes that, in 1902, the same year that Friedrich
Hirth began to teach at Columbia University, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs donated
a Tushu jicheng to the universitys Chinese library. In 1908, the Library of Congress also received a copy.
Indeed, with Shanghais construction booms of the 1910s and 1920s, the problems became
worse, largely because the late-nineteenth-century trend of converting residential units to
industrial uses continued unabated.
NCH 30 June 1893: 943.
ZYS, 592.
Ibid.
Recent discussions on the history of the Islamic book imply that lithography may have played
the same intermediary role between xylography and letterpress in the Islamic world that it
performed in China. See Muhsin Mahdi, From the Manuscript Age to the Age of Printed
Books, in George Atiyeh, ed., The Book in the Islamic World (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 12.
Li Shengduo (zi, Muzhai) served as Chinese minister to Japan from 1898 to 1901. According
to ECCP, 781, Li took the place of Xu Shichang, injured by a bomb, in the team of five ministers
sent abroad in 1905-6 to study foreign systems of government. Li served as minister to Belgium until 1909. ECCP, 520-21, states that Li eventually owned the library of the Li family
(no known relation) of Jiujiang, strong in archeological works, particularly inscriptions.
NCH 1 June 1889: 666.

325

326 Notes to pages 119-21

111 Feiyingguan, Shenbao 5 February (first lunar month, thirteenth day) 1887, in SUN, 2: 1: 2,
1007.
112 Ye Jiuru, in SUN, 2: 1: 2, 1006, note 1.
113 Lis firm printed largely from its own library (which, like Tongwens, was located on the
premises). See Shenbao, 24 February (second lunar month, second day) 1887, in SUN, 2: 1: 2,
1007.
114 Feiyingguan, in SUN, 2: 1: 2, 1007.
115 Shenbao 5 February (first lunar month, thirteenth day) 1887, in SUN, 2: 1: 2, 1007.
116 Shenbao 16 March (second lunar month, twenty-second day) 1887, in SUN, 2: 1: 2, 1007.
117 Philip Scranton, Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865-1925
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 121-32, citing Tebbel, focuses on the separation of printing and publishing in New York but notes that Little, Brown and Houghton
Mifflin, both in Boston, were exceptions to this nineteenth-century American rule. On Britain, see John Feather, A History of British Publishing (New York: Routledge, 1988), 39, 132-34,
which makes clear that the separation of printing, publishing, and bookselling into separate
specialized businesses got under way in the seventeenth century, accelerated in the eighteenth, and was widespread by the nineteenth. In publishing, as in other ways, Germany and
Russia did not follow this Anglo-American model. Instead, according to Heinz Sarkowski,
Springer-Verlag: History of a Scientific Publishing House, Part 1, 1842-1945, trans. Gerald Graham
(Berlin: Springer, 1992), 150-51, 214ff.; Charles A. Ruud, Russian Entrepreneur: Publisher Ivan
Sytin of Moscow, 1851-1934 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1990),
20, 30-31, 65, 88, 158-61; and Mark D. Steinberg, Moral Communities: The Culture of Class
Relations in the Russian Printing Industry, 1867-1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1992), 14ff. printing and publishing in Germany and Russia were united in single firms (as
they were in Shanghai).
118 NCH 13 October 1887: 391.
119 In 1888, Ling Peiqing (also Biqing) and identified variously as a Huzhou (Zhejiang) and
Zhenze (Jiangsu) native, started up the Hongwen shuju. Huzhou was known for silk production. Chen Boxi, in SUN, 2: 1: 2, 1006, note 1, describes Ling as Zhejiangese and says that he
invested his inherited silk merchant wealth in his publishing house. Hongwen, says Chen,
stood equal in stature to Dianshizhai and Tongwen, issuing finely printed histories and an
illustrated reprint of Sanguo yanyi, the well-known sixteenth-century historical novel. In addition, Hongwen outstripped both Dianshizhai and Tongwen in the reprinting of works useful
for civil service examination preparation, publications such as Wujing jiazao (Difficulties and
Models in the Five Classics), Wujing huijie (Collected Commentary on the Five Classics), Dati
wenfu (Major Topics in Literature and Government), Xiaoti shiwanxuan (A Vast Selection of
Lesser Topics), etc., all of which sold well. When the examination system was abolished in
1904-5, however, Hongwens backlist was not worth a cent, says Chen, and the publishing
operation was closed. Zhang Jinglu, the Shanghai editor/publisher and authority on Chinas
modern publishing industry, provides details on Shanghais lithographic industry unavailable
elsewhere. In his view, the Hongwen Press and a second, the Jishi shanfang (or Stone Pile
Press) established by Zhong Yinbo, were signficant chiefly because they were organized in
imitation of Li Shengduos Feiying Hall.
120 If Hongbaozhai shiyinju and Hongbaozhai shuju, a firm listed in Quanguo Zhongyi tushu
lianhe mulu and credited with fourteen lithographed medical publications between 1888
and 1934, were essentially the same operation, then Hongbaozhai lasted until 1934 and
perhaps longer.
121 Comparing data from Quanguo Zhongyi tushu lianhe mulu and Wang et al., Xiaoshuo shufang lu,
102-203, suggests that sixty-three lithographic publishers issued both fiction and medical
works after 1876.
122 A total of 126 previously largely overlooked Shanghai-based medical publishers operated
from 1876 into the 1950s. Noteworthy firms, identified from SUN and Quanguo Zhongyi
tushu lianhe mulu, are listed below. Output is mentioned when known; asterisked firms also
published fiction, although the dates given here are only for medical publishing. All firms
were shuju unless otherwise noted: Dacheng* (8 titles, post-Qing to 1926), Fuwenge,
Guangwen* (7 titles, 1919-33), Guangyi* (25 titles, 1906-49), Hongdashan* (13 titles,

Notes to pages 121-25

123

124

125

126

127
128

129

130

1910-33), Huiwentang* (10 titles, 1911-39), Jiangzuo shulin* (9 titles, 1886-1925), Jiaojing
shanfang* (8 titles, 1883-1914), Jinzhang* (15 titles, 1903-55), Qianqingtang* (20+ titles,
1884-1956), Shanghai* (17 titles, 1884-1921), Shenbaos Shenchang shushi (20+ titles, 18841935), Shijie* (20 titles, 1919-42), Wenruilou* (24 titles, 1893-1935), Zhangfuji* (14 titles,
Guangxu reign to 1922), Zhonghua xinjiaoyu she (13 titles, 1921-49), and Zhuyitang* (1
title, incomplete record, 1896).
Excluding those that also published medical works, fifty-eight Shanghai-based lithographic
publishers of fiction were active from 1876 down to 1930. Using the standard of having more
than ten titles listed in Wang et al., Xiaoshuo shufang lu, 102-203, leading lithographic publishers of fiction included (all are shuju unless otherwise indicated; asterisked firms were also
medical publishers): Cuiying,* Dacheng,* Gailiang xiaoshuo she, Gonghe,* Guangyi,* Haizuo,*
Huiwentang,* Jiangdong,* Jiangdong maoji,* Jinbu,* Maoji shuzhuang,* Qixin,* Shanggu
shanfang,* Shen Heji, Shijie,* Tianbao,* Wenyuan, Xiaoshuolin she, Yuwen, Zhangfuji,* and
Zhongyuan.*
The sum of 149 results from adding publishers listed by SUN, Quanguo Zhongyi tushu lianhe
mulu, and Wang et al., Xiaoshuo shufang lu, 102-203, and eliminating duplicated names. ZYS,
590, reports that fifty-six lithographic firms were established after 1876. Although Zhang
does not make this point explicitly, I have determined that his figures cover 1876-1949. Yao,
Zhongguo bianjishi, 247, claims that, in the 1880s, Shanghai had several dozen lithographic
shops. My own research suggests that Zhang significantly underestimates the scale of this
Shanghai industry and that Yaos figures for the 1880s may be too large.
The sixteen included the Commercial Press; Guangyi shuju, founded by 1879, lasted until at
least 1949; Hongbaozhai shuju, open by 1884, may have survived until 1934; Hongdashan
shuju, 1905-33; Hongwen shuju, 1887-1946; Huiwentang shuju, 1911-1939; Huiwentang
xinjishuju, 1911-36; Jiangzuo shulin, 1886-1924 (although, according to Wang et al., Xiaoshuo
shufang lu, 102-203, Jiangzuo shulin published woodblocked books from 1798-1886); Jiaojing
shanfang, 1883-1930s; Jinbu shuju, 1893-1931; Jinzhang shuju, 1894-1955; Qianqingtang
shuju, 1884-1956; Saoye shanfang, 1860-1941; Shanghai shuju, 1875-1924; Wenruilou, 18931935; and Zhangfuji shuju, 1897-1922. Another 111 lithographic medical publishers operated only during the Republic. Dating and calculations are based on Quanguo Zhongyi tushu
lianhe mulu and Wang et al., Xiaoshuo shufang lu, 102-203.
This sum results when the thirty-nine publishers listed in Quanguo Zhongyi tushu lianhe mulu
and SUN are added to the fifty-eight fiction publishers (corrected to eliminate duplication)
found in Wang et al., Xiaoshuo shufang lu, 102-203, and Dianshizhai, Tongwen, and Feiying
are subtracted.
APMPAR, 1897, 2.
The APMPs first Shanghai location was around the corner from the old British Consulate,
across Beijing Road from todays Friendship Department Store; its second location, on Sichuan
North Road, was near the present-day Shanghai Main Post Office.
APMPAR, 1901, 2. By 1901, APMPs publication output in Chinese was considerable,
making the Press essentially a Chinese-language publisher, much like Major Brothers Shenbao
and Dianshizhai. A total of 727,670 copies of Chinese-language items in six categories
(scriptures, religious works, educational works, tracts and calendars, miscellaneous, and
periodicals) were printed; this figure compares with only 94,199 copies in English and
bilingual editions in nine categories. Likewise, its workforce was overwhelmingly Chinese,
and it was providing Chinese-style housing to its employees.
In this regard, it is interesting to note that, already in 1879, when Wenhui bao was first printed,
Chinese newspapers had started to use gas-powered printing machines. In 1890, Shenbao also
introduced a gas-powered engine, according to NCH 21 November 1890: 633. Major Brothers, 18 Hankou Road, Annual Report to Shareholders, in NCH 16 January 1891: 66, reported this gas engine has reduced the number of hands employed in the [Shenbao] office by
13, and [the board of directors] confidently hope that the whole expense of this engine will be
covered by this saving in a little over a year. The speed of the new kerosene-powered engines
was considerable; Shenbao printers had formerly required eighteen hours to print an edition of
the paper, but, after installing the new power plant, fewer workers needed only five or six
hours to print one.

327

328 Notes to pages 125-31

131
132
133
134

NCH 25 May 1889: 633.

Ibid.
As noted above, at least 111 lithographic publishers started up after 1911.
Wang Hanzhang, Kanyin zongshu, in SUN, 2: 1: 2, 1009-10. ZYS, 591, suggests that
Guangbaisong zhai may have used both lead type and lithography, chiefly to print novels. The
sense that the heyday of the lithographic age was gone is reinforced, however, by Bao Tianxiao,
CYL, 1: 113, who relates that, in the early twentieth century, in the midst of starting a magazine, he suddenly recalled the old elegance of the Dianshizhai Pictorial and tried to imitate it
by using lithography to print his new magazine. I tried this and that, without success; it was
impossible, the times were different. It was rather difficult to force it.
135 This number results from adding the 126 publishers found on the medical list to 124 fiction
publishers, minus 63 fiction publishers who appear on both lists, and adding Baishi shanfang,
which is not on either list.
136 One hundred sixty-four is the sum that results from adding the 53 lithographic publishing
firms that, although started in the Qing, survived into the Republic, to the 111 publishers
started in the Republic, using Quanguo Zhongyi tushu lianhe mulu and Wang et al., Xiaoshuo
shufang lu, 102-203, as sources.
Chapter 3: Sooty Sons of Vulcan
1 On this war, one of the first in world history in which a modern industrialized army deliberately attacked civilian targets, see Donald A. Jordan, Chinas Trial by Fire: The Shanghai War of
1932 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). Communists and Nationalists agreed
that about 6,000 civilians lost their lives. Chinese military dead numbered 4,200. The attack
destroyed 180,000 housing units, and property damages reached 1.7 billion yuan.
2 Manying Ip, The Life and Times of Zhang Yuanji, 1867-1959 (Beijing: Commercial Press, 1985),
235.
3 North China Daily News 30 January 1932: 18.
4 In her summary of the assault, Ip, The Life and Times, 236, reports that some said that the
Japanese were so jealous of Chinas foremost publishing company that Japanese ro-nin were
instigated to go into the famous library and set it on fire from within. More prosaically, the
North China Daily News 3 February 1932: 11, reported that a Chinese was arrested on suspicion of arson.
5 Francis K. Pan, One Year of Rehabilitation of the Commercial Press, Ltd. ([Shanghai]: n.p., 1933),
24. Thank you to Mark C. Elliott, now of Harvard University, for having given me this publication. The Commercial Press lost four print shops and several hundred machines in the
attack. Pan does not mention that the Commercial Press, under Wang Yunwus leadership,
permanently laid off 2,700 of its 3,700 employees as a result of the bombardment and destruction or that it relocated most of its printing operations to the No. 5 plant inside the
International Concession and to its printing works in Beiping and Hong Kong. See Ip, The
Life and Times, 235, 264, and Florence Chien, The Commercial Press and Modern Chinese
Publishing, 1897-1949 (MA thesis, University of Chicago, 1970), 70.
6 Leo Ou-fan Lee and Andrew J. Nathan, The Beginnings of Mass Culture: Journalism and
Fiction in the Late Ching and Beyond, in David G. Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, and Evelyn
Rawski, eds., Popular Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1987), 361.
7 Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement, Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1967), 178.
8 Recall that compradore Xu Run, proprietor of Tongwen Press, closed his lithographic publishing house in 1898 in anticipation of opening a lead-type printing firm, Guangbaisong
zhai.
9 Two years before the Japanese attack, according to Jean-Pierre Drge, La Commercial Press de
Shanghai 1897-1949 (Paris: Institut des Hautes tudes Chinoises, 1978), 64, the press had
consumed a ton of lead and antimony, 1,650 pounds of type, 800 reams of paper, and 275
pounds of ink per day.
10 SUN, 2: 1: 246.
11 Ibid., 2: 2: 1181, 1202.

Notes to pages 132-35

12 Shanghai yinshua gongye zhi diaocha, Gongshang banyuekan 1, 22 (1929): 1-7, in SMJG, 1:
349-51.
13 Yan Zhong, Woguo jixie zhi rukou maoyi, Guoji maoyi daobao 4, 6 (1932): 97-102, 108, in
SMJG, 1: 439.
14 See Julian Arnold, Commercial Handbook of China (Washington: USGPO, 1919), 326; Shanghai
zhinan (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1923); China Industrial Handbooks: Kiangsu (Shanghai:
Ministry of Industry and Bureau of Foreign Trade, 1933); China Industrial Handbooks: Chekiang
(Shanghai: Ministry of Industry and Bureau of Foreign Trade, 1935).
15 Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 14501800, trans. David Gerard (London: NLB, 1976 [1958]).
16 For example, see Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin, Paper and Printing (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1985), and James Moran, Printing Presses: History and Development from the 15th Century
to Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).
17 Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1979) deals with this issue only in passing. In a chapter called Bookmaking, Robert
Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1979), despite acknowledging the importance of the issue, mentions only where presses were acquired, not the
social impact of their production. Gary Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700-1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), and Gary D.
Stark, Entrepreneurs of Ideology: Neoconservative Publishers in Germany, 1890-1933 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1981), also neglect this question. Even historians of printing
workers ignore this question; see Clement J. Bundock, The National Union of Printing, Bookbinding, and Paper Workers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959) and Paul Chauvet, Les Ouvriers
du livre en France (Paris: Librairie Marcel Rivire, 1956).
18 In addition to Febvre and Martin, see Robert Darnton, Workers Revolt: The Great Cat
Massacre of the Rue Saint-Sverin, in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French
Cultural History (New York: Random House, 1985), 75-106.
19 Although the term foremen-capitalists is mine, it was suggested by Tian Jiashengs remarks
in his 28 August 1961 interview in SMJG, 1: 238.
20 Wu Baosan, 1933-nian quanguo jiqiye zai gongye zongchangzhizhong suo zhan bizhong,
in SMJG, 2: 601.
21 Shanghai yinshua gongye zhi diaocha, in SMJG, 1: 349-51.
22 Liu Dajun, 1933-nian Shanghai minzu jiqi gongye yu qita dachengshi jiqigongye de bijiao,
in SMJG, 2: 600.
23 The importance to rising national elites of controlling media production has been treated in
relation to national print-languages and official nationalism by Benedict Anderson in
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: NLB, 1983).
In addition, see Emily S. Rosenbergs Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and
Cultural Expansion, 1890 to 1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 204ff., in which she
discusses government efforts in the 1930s to control the media in the interest of national
cultural integrity.
24 Liu Dajun, 1933-nian Shanghai minzu jiqi gongye zhan Shanghai gongye de bizhong, in
SMJG, 2: 602. The problem with this report is that it seems to reflect conditions in 1931,
when the machine industry was at its apogee; according to the Bank of China, in 1932, after
Japans military attack on Zhabei (1/28 Incident), the surviving machine industry was only
64 percent of its earlier size and had dropped to 58 percent of its 1931 size. See Zhonggong
Shanghai shiwei dangshi yanjiushi and Shanghai shi zonggonghui bian, eds., Shanghai jiqiye
gongren yundong shi (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 1991), 17. I use Liu Dajuns
figures to reflect prevailing conditions in the early 1930s, rather than as a strict statement of
1933 conditions.
25 The printing industry itself made up the fifth largest industrial contingent in the city of
Shanghai, with over 11,000 workers in the 1930s.
26 Liu Dajun, 1933-nian Shanghai minzu jiqi gongye yu Shanghai de qita zhuyao gongye de
bijiao, Zhongguo gongye diaocha baogao, in SMJG, 2: 602.
27 Liu Dajun, 1933-nian Shanghai minzu jiqi gongye zhan quanguo jiqi gongye de bizhong,
Zhongguo gongye diaocha baogao, in SMJG, 2: 600.

329

330 Notes to pages 136-38

28 Cong zhuanye changshu bijiao zhizao yu xiupei bizhong, in SMJG, 2: 548.

29 Ibid.
30 Studies of industrial districts are a relatively recent phenomenon in Western historiography
and have made few inroads into Chinese historiography. An exception to this rule is Gail
Hershatters outstanding chapter Flying Hammers, Walking Chisels: The Workers of
Santiaoshi [Tianjin], in The Workers of Tianjin, 1900-1949 (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1986), 82-114. On page 90, Hershatter notes that, in 1935, just over 1 percent of
total Chinese industrial investment was in the iron-casting and machine-building industries. Elizabeth J. Perry, too, by bringing attention to the importance of machine shop workers in Communist organizing tactics and in Shanghais activist circles, demonstrates how
central machine shops and mechanics were to Shanghais industrial culture. See her Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). On
Europe, see Charles F. Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, eds., World of Possibilities: Flexibility and
Mass Production in Western Industrialization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
on the United States, see Philip Scranton, Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American
Industrialization, 1865-1925 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) and Mansel G.
Blackford, A History of Small Business in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2003), esp. Chapter 3. Thanks to my Ohio State University colleague Mansel Blackford
for his comments on this issue.
31 For an excellent introduction to the role of machine shops in promoting mechanization and
invention in a different, but comparable context, see Paul Israels innovative From Machine
Shop to Industrial Laboratory: Telegraphy and the Changing Context of American Invention, 18301920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
32 Jiangnan zhizaoju jingfei biao, in SMJG, 1: 47. Waiguo ziben ji guanliao ziben yu minzu
ziben jiqi gongchang chuangshe touzi bijiao biao, in SMJG, 1: 198, reports that the Arsenal
was capitalized at 760,000 yuan.
33 SMJG, 1: 198, and Shanghai jinkou jiqi tongji, in SMJG, 1: 435.
34 Shanghai gelei jiqi jinkou xiaochang qingkuang biao, in SMJG, 1: 438.
35 Shanghai jiqi jinkou leibie bizhong, in SMJG, 1: 437.
36 Zai jinkou gelei jiqizhong Shanghai zhan quanguo de bizhong, in SMJG, 1: 436.
37 Yan Zhong, Wo guo jixie, in SMJG, 1: 439.
38 Ibid.
39 Marie-Claire Bergre, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937, trans. Janet Lloyd
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 125. See also Chapter 4.3 A Rough Typology
of Chinese Entrepreneurs, 164-86.
40 NCH 9 October 1899: 705.
41 Coincidentally, in their discussion of the nature of invention, Febvre and Martin, The Coming
of the Book, 45ff., pose a similar question with regard to the early history of printing in Europe.
How, they ask, in the middle of the [fifteenth] century, did Gutenberg and his contemporaries succeed in mastering the many technical difficulties which the invention of printing must
have posed? Their answer emphasizes involved social changes.
42 By comparison, Hershatter, The Workers of Tianjin, 82, 87, reports that between 1900 and
1950 Tianjins metal-working centre spawned only about seventy-five establishments, and
about thirty of those appeared between World War I and the Japanese invasion. She says
these figures do not include the concessions that had twenty-four ironworks and six machine
shops (264, note 28), for a total of 105 firms between 1900 and 1950.
43 SMJG, 1: 72. Also, Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei dangshi yanjiushi and Shanghai shi
zonggonghui bian, eds., Shanghai jiqiye gongren yundong shi, 12-13. In this 1914-24 period, say
the Communist Party historians who edited this latter work, the most significant development was the export of Xieda Machine Shops lathes to Java and other markets in Southeast
Asia. It was the first time, they say, that Chinese machinery broke into the international
market (14-15). However, as will become clear in this chapter, Chinese printing machinery
competed successfully against Japanese-made equipment both in China and in the Japanese
home market in the same period.
44 As with most persons discussed in this chapter, Tians date of birth and place of origin are
unknown. In some cases, using extratextual information, one can estimate birth dates; places
of origin usually remain a mystery.

Notes to pages 139-41

45 Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent shop names are jiqi chang.
46 Tian Jiasheng, 7 April 1961 interview, in SMJG, 1: 186-87.
47 In my materials, there is no indication of whether machines were copied legally or illegally,
but recall that industrial piracy was a recurrent problem in the nineteenth-century AngloAmerican world, Englands patent and trademark laws notwithstanding. According to William P. Alford, To Steal a Book is an Elegant Offense: Intellectual Property Law in Chinese Civilization
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 41, the Chinese government did not issue a
permanent trademark law until 1923, and then more in name than in fact.
48 Despite its later importance, at its founding in 1897, the Commercial Press was merely one of
many jobber printers in Shanghai. Nonetheless, the scale of the machine shops was even
smaller than that of print shops, usually one-twelfth the size.
49 Western-owned printing shops had been doing the same in Malacca since the 1810s and in
Hong Kong since the 1840s. The technology became available in Shanghai in 1860 when the
APMP moved there.
50 Cao Pinyou started the Cao Xingchang Machine Shop and eventually manufactured handand foot-operated presses. Wei Shenrong opened the Fuxing Copper Matrix Shop. The proprietor of the Gongyichang Machine Shop at the Laji Bridges (now Laozhao Bridge) southern embankment intersection with Xiamen Road was Wu Yongru; his firm made lithographic
presses. Chen Zhaoqing established number five, the Xieda Machine Shop, at Nicheng Bridge,
and number six, the Yaojinji Machine Shop, was opened by Yao Xujin in 1912 at the presentday intersection of Fujian North Road and Suzhou North Road. See Tian, 7 April 1961
interview in SMJG, 1: 186-7.
51 This early era of repair and copy in the printing industry contrasts with Hershatters Santiaoshi,
in which, as late as 1919, only one firm, Ji Ju Cheng Machine Factory, produced printing
machinery. See Hershatter, The Workers of Tianjin, 88.
52 All information in this paragraph derives from Yinshua jiqi xiupei zhuanye, in SMJG, 1:
188.
53 Unlike those of Hershatters machine shop owners, the familial backgrounds of these Shanghai proprietors are not known.
54 Bergre, The Golden Age, 125. Their successful bridging not only of the divide between unskilled and skilled labor but also of the cultural divide separating Chinese and Western industrial skills is what sets these manufacturers off from those studied by Herbert G. Gutman,
The Reality of the Rags-to-Riches Myth; The Case of the Paterson, New Jersey, Locomotive, Iron, and Machinery Manufacturers, 1830-1880, in Stephan Thernstrom and Richard
Sennett, eds., Nineteenth Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1969), 98-124. Gutmans conclusion that developing industrial cities and
new manufacturing industries offered unusual opportunities to skilled craftsmen and mechanics in the early phases of American industrialization (122) is just as true for Shanghai,
as this chapter shows.
55 It is inaccurate to regard them all as employees; the industry standard, according to many
first-hand accounts, was to have 20 percent of ones workers as paid employees and the remaining 80 percent as unpaid apprentices. See interviews with former apprentices in SMJG,
2: 808. Interestingly, the situation in the Shanghai printing machine manufactories was very
similar to that of nineteenth-century Britains printing trades. See W. Turner Berry, Printing
and Related Trades, in Chas. Singer et al., A History of Technology (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1954-84), 5: 683-715. Berry says that the printing and allied trades saw much unemployment, caused chiefly by the vast number of boys engaged in the trade at low wages ... The
excessive proportion of apprentices indentured for seven years, often with perfect indifference to their future prospects in the trade ... also tended to depress the skilled journeymans
wage. Many of the apprentices had very little tuition and were scarcely little more than
labourers (714).
56 See Zhuang Tingbiao, 13 October 1962 interview, in SMJG, 1: 188.
57 Tian, 24 August 1961 interview, in SMJG, 1: 238.
58 Chen Zhizhao, 10 May 1961 interview, in SMJG, 1: 188. The presence of a lathe is what, in
Chinese historiography, distinguishes these industrial shops from earlier artisanal ones. See
Zhu Bangxing, Hu Linge, and Xu Sheng, eds., Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong (Shanghai:
Shanghai Renmin chubanshe, 1984 [1939]).

331

332 Notes to pages 141-46

59 Chen, 10 May 1961 interview, in SMJG, 1: 188. The manufacture of lithographic printing
machines may have been an industry unique to Shanghai among Chinese cities and was based
on a lithographic printing tradition going back to the Xujiahui orphanage print shop of the
1870s.
60 Tian, 28 August 1961 interview, in SMJG, 1: 238. Bergre, likely because of the breadth of
her project, has also overlooked the early-1900s development of the printing machine industry. See Bergre, The Golden Age, 70ff., 165ff.
61 Cao Jinshui and Zheng Xilin, 20 February 1962 interview, in SMJG, 1: 351-52.
62 Yan Zhong, Wo guo jixie, in SMJG, 1: 439.
63 Yinshua jiqi zhizao zhuanye, in SMJG, 1: 241.
64 Tian, 26 August 1961 interview, in SMJG, 1: 240. Many of these shops combined manufacturing and retail activities. It is interesting to note that Tians shop also sold diesel engines,
rice huskers, etc., shipped for sale to nearby Kunshan and to other ports farther away. The
Commercial Press itself began copying Thompson type-casters and other machines in 1913;
given the fact that Tian had worked at the press, chances are he was producing a modified
Thompson.
65 Ibid., 1: 238.
66 Shanghai gelei jiqi jinkou xiaochang qingkuang biao, in SMJG, 1: 438.
67 Mergenthalers Linotype was invented in 1886.
68 Tian, 24 August 1961 interview, in SMJG, 1: 238. Tian lists seven firms that produced metaltype printing machines, of which only two (Mingjing and Gongyichang) appear in other lists,
and two producers of type-casting machines, one of which, Ruitai, appears in other lists.
69 Shanghai jiqiye gongren yundong shi, 16.
70 Shens careless supervision of the construction of Zhonghuas printing plant was a contributing factor to his hasty departure from Zhonghua; see Chapter 5.
71 Li Xiangbo, Wo he Zhonghua shuju Shanghai yinshua chang, in Zhonghua shuju bianjibu,
eds., Huiyi Zhonghua shuju (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1987), 1: 193-206, esp. 193-95.
72 The Commercial Press began to manufacture printing machinery around 1912 but disbanded
its manufactory in 1927 when the shop provided a soapbox for labour activists. See interviews with its machine-manufacturing competitors, owner-proprietors Tian Jiasheng (26
August 1961, in SMJG, 1: 240), Zhang Xingfang (25 July 1960, in SMJG, 2: 849), and Hu
Yunfu (6 December 1961, in SMJG, 2: 849).
73 According to numerous first-hand reports, in the 1910s and 1920s, the average time to completion of a machine industry apprenticeship was four to six years, so Zhang was probably about
twenty years old when he left Lis as a master machine maker and went to work at the Commercial Press.
74 Hu Yunfu, 28 August 1961 interview, in SMJG, 1: 238.
75 In 1907, the Commercial Press had moved to the Zhabei address in Baoshan Road that its
Shanghai branch plant still occupies.
76 Chen Zhaoquan, Yang Zhengyang, Shen Zhizhang, et al., 27 September 1960 interview, in
SMJG, 2: 827.
77 Mingjing jiqi chang changshi, mimeographed from the collection of Shanghai No. 2 Machinery
Factory, in SMJG, 1: 239.
78 Chen, Yang, and Shen, 27 September 1960 interview, in SMJG, 2: 827.
79 Wang Shangen, 26 March 1961 interview, in SMJG, 1: 239-40.
80 Ibid.
81 According to the Mingjing jiqi chang changshi, it produced about seventy-two machines per year
between 1916 and 1921. A provocative, but unanswerable, question is exactly how Mingjing
workers learned to copy complex machines. Hershatter, The Workers of Tianjin, states that in
Tianjin production depended on the traditional skills of the workers, and the expansion of a
shops repertoire depended upon hiring skilled craftsmen ... experienced in the manufacture
of another product (89). Such a labour-intensive system could have been used at Mingjing.
Hershatter also relates a very amusing account of how Santiaoshi shops learned to copy
Japanese looms through a conspiracy with a Japanese firm that then sold the Chinese-made
copies as Japanese goods (87). No similar accounts in Shanghai have come to light.

Notes to pages 146-49

82 Wang, 26 March 1961 interview, in SMJG, 1: 239-40.

83 Ibid.
84 Linian shengchan chanpin chanzhi guji, from Mingjing jiqi chang changshi, in SMJG, 1: 239.
For reasons that are not clear, the sales figures reported in the factory history are considerably
less than what they should have been if Wangs prices quoted here are correct.
85 Tian, 26 August 1961 interview, in SMJG, 1: 240. This account calls to mind Hershatter, The
Workers of Tianjin, 85, who mentions that a skilled craftsman who had worked at the Tianjin
Arsenal, had lost first his job when the Arsenal was destroyed by the Boxers and then his
monopoly on his casting techniques when he went to work in Santiaoshi. His losses led to
the post-1900 growth of the iron-casting district in Tianjin.
86 Shanghai yinshua gongye zhi diaocha, in SMJG, 1: 351. The others were Huadong jiqi
zhizaochang (Huadong Machine Works, a post-1927 semidependent Commercial Press firm),
Wei Jucheng Machine Shop, Shunchang Machine Shop, and Yaogongji Machine Shop. The
latter three were all founded in 1914-15, contemporary with Mingjing.
87 Zhang Yingfang was still running Mingjing on the eve of the Communist victory in 1949, by
which time it was headquartered at 435 Hankou Road, with its factory located at 528 Haiphong
Road. In those hyperinflationary times, Mingjings assets were listed at 100 million yuan.
After Liberation, Mingjing was nationalized as Shanghai di er jichuang chang (Shanghai No.
2 Machinery Factory). It is not known what became of Zhang Jinlin after 1937.
88 Zhang Yingfang, 25 July 1960 interview, in SMJG, 1: 352.
89 Zhonghua continued to print currency for the government into the late 1940s, a practice that
by then had direct personal benefits to its employees because they were paid in newly printed
currency before its value dropped due to hyperinflation.
90 Bergre, The Golden Age, 169.
91 In my sources, apprentices do not refer to Zhang by name, referring instead to the capitalist, but, given the fact that they are discussing the period from 1919 to 1921, they cannot be
discussing anyone but Zhang.
92 This issue has been widely discussed in works on Chinese labour history. See, for example,
Perry, Shanghai on Strike, 32-36; Hershatter, The Workers of Tianjin, 51-54; and Linda Shaffer,
Mao and the Workers: The Hunan Labor Movement, 1920-1923 (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1980),
152-53.
93 Chen, Yang, and Shen, 27 September 1960 interview, in SMJG, 2: 808.
94 Dalong jiqi chang de fasheng fazhan yu gaizao, in SMJG, 2: 808. According to Zhu Bangxing,
Hu Linge, and Xu Sheng, apprentices still made up about 70 percent of the machine industry
workforce in 1938; see Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong, 561.
95 Yuan Genxin, 23 September 1961 interview, in SMJG, 2: 808.
96 Chen, Yang, and Shen, 27 September 1960 interview, in SMJG, 2: 808. In 1938, regular
workers at Dalong Machine Shop, the largest privately owned Chinese machine works, earned
from eight mao to one yuan three mao per day. Apprentices got only food, shelter, haircuts,
and soap. After a year, apprentices, who ranged in age from sixteen to thirty sui, earned from
one to two yuan per month extra (Zhu, Hu, and Xu, Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong, 561).
97 Chen, Yang, and Shen, 16 August 1960; 23-27 September 1960; 23 December 1961 interviews, in SMJG, 2: 820.
98 The general situation seems to have been slightly improved in 1938, when Communist researchers Zhu, Hu, and Xu, Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong, 567, found that in addition to
their porridge, apprentices at the big firms typically got two dishes of meat and one of vegetable. They also pointed out that, the smaller the factory, the worse the food and other
conditions.
99 These long hours contrast sharply with the ten to twelve hours reported by Zhu, Hu, and Xu
in 1939, but their figures do not include apprentices.
100 For a comparable view of an apprentices daily life, see The Work Ethic, in Wen-hsin Yeh,
Progressive Journalism and Shanghais Petty Urbanites: Zou Taofen and the Shenghuo Weekly,
1926-1945, in Frederic Wakeman, Jr., and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds., Shanghai Sojourners (Berkeley:
Institute of East Asian Studies, 1992), 198-205.
101 Chen, Yang, and Shen, 16 August 1960; 23-27 September 1960; 23 December 1961 interviews, in SMJG, 2: 820.

333

334 Notes to pages 149-63

102 This schedule brings to mind the comment in Peter Golas, Early Ching Guilds, in G. Wm.
Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977), 566,
that the existence of an apprenticeship period and its length had usually only a very remote
connection with the time required for a novice to learn a given trade.
103 See the description of Dalong in Jiqi ji tiegong ye, Chapter 16 in Zhu, Hu, and Xu, Shanghai
chanye yu Shanghai zhigong.
104 As Darnton says in Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre, 88, the journeymen responsible for instructing apprentices in eighteenth-century French print shops did not want another journeyman in their over-flooded labor pool, so [an apprentice] had to pick up the
tricks of the trade by himself.
105 Such was by no means the case for all Shanghai apprentices. At the other end of the publishing industry continuum, Zhang Jinglu, an avid consumer of the printed page while apprenticed to a Tiantong Road distillery in 1912-13, remembers walking to Henan Road every
evening after work solely to look at new books displayed in windows and glass bookcases. See
Zhang Jinglu, Zai chuban jie ershi nian (Hankou: Shanghai zazhi gongsi, 1938), 26-28.
106 Chen, Yang, and Shen, 16 August 1960; 23-27 September 1960; 23 December 1961 interviews, in SMJG, 2: 820.
107 Chen, Yang, and Shen, 27 September 1960 interview, in SMJG, 2: 823.
108 Chen, 19 December 1961 interview, in SMJG, 2: 809.
109 Yang, 27 September 1960 interview, in SMJG, 2: 810. See also Ye Rongyou, 6 August 1961
interview, in SMJG, 2: 810. This practice was first reported in the Shanghai machine industry
in 1897.
110 Yang, 27 September 1960 interview, in SMJG, 2: 810.
111 Chen, 18 December 1961 interview, in SMJG, 2: 813. A similar ceremony is related in Perry,
Shanghai on Strike, 35.
112 These durations are mentioned regularly in interviews by former apprentices and by Perry,
Shanghai on Strike; Hershatter, The Workers of Tianjin; and Shaffer, Mao and the Workers.
113 Chen, Yang, and Shen, 9 September 1960 symposium, in SMJG, 2: 817.
114 Ibid.
115 Ibid.
116 Chen, Yang, and Shen, 16 August 1960; 23-27 September 1960; 23 December 1961 interviews, in SMJG, 2: 820.
117 Chen, 16 August 1960 interview, in SMJG, 2: 823.
118 Chen, Yang, and Shen, 27 September 1960 interview, in SMJG, 2: 827.
119 Bergre, The Golden Age, 167.
120 Qian Shanghai shi jiqi gongye tongye gonghui ziliao, in SMJG, 1: 348-49.
121 Guomindang zhengfu quanguo jingji weiyuanhui, ed., Zhizhi gongye baogaoshu (n.p.: n.p., 1936),
in SMJG, 1: 349.
122 The accounts of Hujiang and New China derive from Zheng Xilin, 20 February 1962 interview, in SMJG, 1: 352.
123 Tian, 26 August 1961 interview, in SMJG, 1: 240.
124 Jiqi gongye shiliao zu, in SMJG, 2: 548. Listed by their proportion of manufacturers relative
to repair shops, industries were ranked from top to bottom as follows: knitting machine manufacturers; printing machine manufacturers; filature machines; machine tools; mechanized farm
tools; silkweavers; cigarette-rolling machines; spinning and weaving; shipbuilding machinery;
others.
125 Between 1914 and 1924, the number of machine shops had grown from 91 to 284.
126 Figures and narrative details in this paragraph are derived from Shanghai jiqiye gongren yundong
shi, 17-20.
127 Handbook of Chinese Manufactures (Shanghai: Foreign Trade Association of China, 1949), 246,
250.
Chapter 4: The Hub of the Wheel
1 This debate is summarized in Sherman Cochran, Encountering Chinese Networks: Western, Japanese, and Chinese Corporations in China, 1880-1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2000), Chapter 1.

Notes to pages 163-70

2 Andrea L. McElderry, Shanghai Old-Style Banks (chien-chuang), 1800-1935: A Traditional Institution in a Changing Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Center for Chinese Studies,
1976). Although William C. Kirby, China Unincorporated: Company Law and Business
Enterprise in Twentieth-Century China, Journal of Asian Studies 54, 1 (1995): 43-63, argues
that the Western model for what he calls Anonymous Private Legal Corporations did not
turn out to be the essential vehicle for private Chinese economic development (44), his
discussion does not include the printing and publishing industry, at least explicitly.
3 Chung-li Chang, The Chinese Gentry: Studies in Their Role in Nineteenth-Century Chinese Society
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1955), 138.
4 Ibid., 138-39, and Marianne Bastid-Bruguire, Currents of Social Change, Chapter 10 in
John K. Fairbank and Kwang-Ching Liu, eds., The Cambridge History of China: Late Ching,
1800-1911 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 11: 2, 538.
5 This term is used by Mary Backus Rankin, Elite Activism and Political Transformation in China:
Zhejiang Province, 1865-1911 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 18.
6 See Joseph W. Esherick, Reform and Revolution in China: The 1911 Revolution in Hunan and
Hubei (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).
7 For the locus classicus of the traditional view, see W. Allyn Rickett, ed. and trans., Guanzi:
Political, Economic, and Philosophical Essays from Early China (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1985), 1: 325. I would like to acknowledge Keith Knapp of The Citadel for his advice
in locating this passage. For a summary of the traditional view, see Ping-ti Ho, Ladder of Success
in Imperial China: Aspects of Social Mobility, 1368-1911 (New York: John Wiley, 1964), 1-4.
Recent Chinese discussions of this phenomenon include Zhang Kaiyuan et al., Zhongguo jindai
shi shang de guan shen shang xue (Wuhan: Hubei renmin chubanshe, 2000). Thank you to an
anonymous UBC Press reviewer for this reference.
8 Rankin, Elite Activism, esp. 6-10.
9 Ibid., 61.
10 Wellington K.K. Chan, Merchants, Mandarins, and Modern Enterprise in Late Ching China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian Studies Center, 1977), 1.
11 Ibid., 70.
12 Nonetheless, terminology used for the book industry (shuye) is remarkably constant between
the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not until the 1920s, when afflicted by industrial strike actions, did the book industry begin to see itself as a modern industry.
13 Barry Keenan, Lung-men Academy in Shanghai and the Expansion of Kiangsus Educated
Elite, 1865-1911, in Benjamin A. Elman and Alexander Woodside, eds., Education and Society
in Late Imperial China, 1600 to 1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 495-96.
14 Jiang Weiqiao, Bianji xiaoxue jiaokeshu zhi huiyi, 1897-1905, in ZCSB, 141.
15 Wen-hsin Yeh, The Alienated Academy: Culture and Politics in Republican China, 1919-1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 82.
16 Ibid.
17 Manying Ip, The Life and Times of Zhang Yuanji, 1867-1959 (Beijing: Commercial Press, 1985),
15.
18 Quoted in ibid., 19.
19 Ibid., 22-27.
20 Ibid., 33.
21 Ibid., 51.
22 Ibid., 51-56.
23 Ibid., 64.
24 Ibid., 75. Li Hongzhang had headed the Zongli Yamen during Zhangs time there, and he
arranged for Zhangs new position through his protg, Sheng Xuanhuai.
25 In 1871, the Shanghai district had seven shuyuan and ten charitable schools (yixue). The most
outstanding shuyuan library belonged to the Longmen Academy. It was founded in 1865 by
Ding Richang (1823-82), then military daotai of the Su(zhou)-Song(jiang)-Tai(cang) circuit
of eastern Jiangsu (which included Shanghai) and director of the Jiangnan Arsenal. Ding
intended it to train lower-degree holders, ostensibly for the provincial exams but actually, as
Keenan argues, to uphold conservative Cheng-Zhu values in Westernizing Shanghai. Ding
was also a noted rare- book collector. On nineteenth-century Shanghai academies, in addition

335

336 Notes to pages 170-75

26
27
28

29

30

31

32

33
34
35
36
37

38

39

40

to Keenan, Lung-men Academy, see Tongzhi Shanghai xianzhi (Wumen: n.p., 1871), 9: 3140. The same source features a printed catalogue of the approximately 166 compilations in
the Longmen library; by 1918, the original collection had changed considerably, with great
emphasis on science and technology. The library of the Qiuzhi shuyuan, founded in 1876,
although twice the size of Longmens, was distinguished by its lack of works on science and
technology. See Yao Wendan, ed., Shanghai xian xuzhi (Taipei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1970
[1918]), 639-43, 644-50. On Ding Richang, see ECCP, 721-23.
Ip, The Life and Times, 77.
Ibid., 91.
For instance, the Tongwenguan, part of the Zongli Yamen, and the Shanghai Interpreters
Institute, part of the Jiangnan Arsenal, both of which also had translation and publishing
programs.
On Shanghais guilds prior to 1842, see Linda Cooke Johnson, Shanghai: An Emerging
Jiangnan Port, 1683-1840, in Linda Cooke Johnson, ed., Cities of Jiangnan in Late Imperial
China (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 151-82.
SMA, 313.1.99, Document 2 (untitled document [1878-1910]), Suzhou Chongde gongsuo,
3A. As with many other Chinese guilds, one of the chief duties of the Suzhou booksellers
guild was burial of those members not native to Suzhou who died while sojourning in the city.
Many of those in the book trade were from other provinces, and if they passed away while in
Suzhou they were interred at nearby Mount Yi. Song Yuanfang, Ji Shanghaishi shuye gonghui,
CBSL 10 (1987: 4): 37, says that Suzhous Chongde Guild was founded in 1608 but provides
no source for this claim.
SMA, 313.1.99, Document 1 (1874), Suzhou Chongde gongsuo [in-house notice], 2B. According to Song, Ji Shanghaishi shuye gonghui, 37, the guild was founded in 1608 and was
followed soon thereafter by the appearance of the shuyuan.
SMA, 313.1.2, Document 8 (1915), Shanghai shuye gongsuo, Shanghai shuye gongsuo
luocheng quanti dahui kaihui ci. Around 1910, CYL 1: 376 observes, the old-book industry
became the bailiwick of Shaoxing natives.
SMA, 313.1.99, Document 2 (undated [1878-1910]), Suzhou Chongde gongsuo, 6B.
SMA, 313.1.2, Document 8 (1915), Zhu Huailu, Huang Xiting, and Wei Futang, Shanghai
shuye gongsuo.
Amounts ranged from 1 to 100 yuan and were paid in both Chinese and British currency. See
Feng Shaoting and Qian Gendi, eds., Chuangjian shuye gongsuo qi, in CBSL 10 (1987:4): 42.
According to Song, Ji Shanghaishi shuye gonghui, 37, the nine were Xia Ruifang, Ye Jiuru,
Xi Zipei, Xia Yuzhi, Fu Zilian, Fei Rongqing, Xia Songlai, Chen Yonghe, and Hua Xinzhai.
Zhang Xichen, Mantan Shangwu yinshu guan, Wenshi ziliao xuanji 43 (1964): 69, notes that
Xi was a major Shanghai compradore with close links to Jiangsus provincial educational
officials. It is tempting to assume that Xi was a descendant of the Suzhou Xi family that had
established Saoye shanfang, but I have found no evidence to confirm this supposition.
Feng Shaoting and Qian Gendi, eds., Shanghai shuye gongsuo zhiyuan mingdan, in CBSL
10 (1987:4): 42. The forty-eight votes suggest that the new guild had at least that number of
members, an increase of 23 since 1884; the exact membership is unknown. However, by
1911, membership would exceed 100. See Song, Ji Shanghaishi shuye gonghui, 37. Song
states that 58 of the members were bookprinters and that 72 were binders (zhuangding ).
This latter term is inconsistent with all other documents; most likely they were retail outlets.
Song, Ji Shanghaishi shuye gonghui, 37. The early dominance of Shanghai-area natives is
striking. Also, as will be shown below, the Commercial Press, represented by Xia Ruifang, had
become a major influence in Shanghais publishing world only after 1904, when it issued
textbooks that became a national industry standard.
Feng Shaoting and Qian Gendi, Shanghai shuye gongsuo chuciding dingzhangcheng, in
CBSL 10 (1987:4): 43. Depot (ju) and shop (fang) seem to be terms that distinguished
producers from retailers; when discussing the distribution of guild offices, the bylaws stipulate
that half of the appointments will go to those from depots and half to those from shops. I use
the term depot because it was in common usage among English-language booksellers in
Shanghai at the turn of the century.

Notes to pages 175-77

41 ZYS, 590, lists Shanghai-based lithographic and letterpress printer/publishers after 1876.
Only eight lithographers from his list of fifty-six and two letterpress publishers from his list of
twenty-one joined the guild, based on a comparison of his list with the guild membership in
Feng and Qian, Shanghai shuye gongsuo chuciding dingzhangcheng, 41-42.
42 Dianshizhai, one of the original subscribers to the guild project back in 1884, had closed in
the late 1890s. This emphasis on excluding non-Chinese booksellers certainly reflected, and
may have been a deliberate response to, the European/Chinese segregation prevalent in
Shanghais Anglo-American organizations and was subsequently reflected in the 1911 bylaws
of the competing Shanghai Booksellers Trade Association as well. See SMA, 313.1.3, Shanghai
shuye shanghui zhangcheng (1906), Statute 3, Item 4, Article C. The stipulation may also
reflect a change in the view of Shanghainese toward foreigners. According to Ye Xiaoqing,
Popular Culture in Shanghai, 1884-1898, (Ph.D. dissertation, Australian National University, 1991), 12, nineteenth-century Shanghainese had distinguished themselves from other
Chinese as well as from their descendants in the early twentieth century by their lack of
xenophobia; it seems clear that the situation had already changed by the time these bylaws
were written c. 1905.
43 SMA, 313.1.2, Document 8 (1915), Shanghai shuye gongsuo, claims the money was eaten
up on formalities like reporting to the local government offices and registering with the
Agricultural and Commercial Bureaus as well as registering with the General Chamber of
Commerce (Zongshanghui). Song, Ji Shanghaishi shuye gonghui, 38, says that the Guanshang
kuailan continued to appear after 1911 with a new title, Guomin bianlan (A Convenient Look
at the Nation).
44 The exhibition hall used to promote sales is mentioned in Chapter 2, Article 5. See Feng and
Qian, Shanghai shuye gongsuo chuciding dingzhangcheng, 43.
45 SMA, 313.1.2, Document 8 (1915), Shanghai shuye gongsuo.
46 SMA, 313.1.99, Document 2 (undated [1874-1910]), Yi jian shuye gongsuo zheng [unclear] shimian qi, 22A.
47 Ibid.
48 The first modern copyright law was in fact not issued by the Qing court until 1906, and then
under the rubric of a publications law, which Kang Youwei had first recommended to the
Guangxu emperor in August 1898. Lee-hsia Hsu Tings Government Control of the Press in Modern China, 1900-1949 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian Research Center, 1974), Chapter
1, includes discussion of previous publication laws, as well as of the Special Statute of the
Great Qing Dynasty Governing Publications which was jointly drafted by the ministries of
Commerce, Police, and Education. It was supplemented by a Press Law in 1908 and was
updated by the Provisional Constitution of 11 March 1912 only to be essentially revived by
Yuan Shikais Publication Law of 1914, which remained in effect long after Yuans death in
1916. The Great Qing Code, as translated by William C. Jones, includes only two laws concerning publication, Articles 165 and 256 under Laws Relating to the Board of Rites and Punishments, respectively. Neither deals with copyright per se or by implication. Shanghais
Mixed Court adhered to copyright regulations, as indicated by A.M. Kotenev in his Shanghai:
Its Mixed Court and Council (Shanghai: North China Daily News and Herald, 1925), 551-53.
According to the 1915 promulgation, Article 1, The exclusive right to print, reprint, publish
or copy any or all of the following works of art shall be granted to any person after registration
in compliance with the provisions of this Act, whereupon it or they shall be Copyright. The
list includes literary works, speeches, dramatic works, musical compositions, pictures, photographs, etc. For a recent view on this topic, see William P. Alford, To Steal a Book is an Elegant
Offense: Intellectual Property Law in Chinese Civilization (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1995), esp. Chapters 2-3. Alfords general argument is that copyrights were difficult, especially for foreign businesses, to enforce in China. My point here is that multiple attempts were
made by Chinese to introduce copyright legislation, including that by the guild, whose members might have agreed with Alford on the difficulty of enforcement. The Nationalist government promulgated a copyright law in 1928. Before 1937, China did not sign the Universal
Copyright Convention or any other bilateral copyright agreement.
49 SMA, 313.1.2, Document 8 (1915), Shanghai shuye gongsuo.

337

338 Notes to pages 177-83

50 Most of the surviving documents, particularly the bylaws, stress the fact that the guild, whether
in Suzhou or Shanghai, was self-supporting. Thus, for example, the 1874 in-house notice of
the Suzhou guild states I. The guilds establishment depends on those in this trade raising
the money themselves, not [getting it from] outside; II. All [Suzhou] bookstores should contribute according to the number of pages [i.e., books] they have; for each [book] one dollar;
contribute silver as per the usual custom. [This way] the guild will not deteriorate, and we can
do annual repairs, honour our promises, conduct funerals, etc., all [as] matters of public
expense.
51 These conditions also included those that were printed or sold despite being banned. See Feng
and Qian, Shanghai shuye gongsuo chuciding dingzhangcheng, 43, Chapter 2, Article 7.
52 Ibid.
53 SMA, 313.1.2, Document 8 (1915), Shanghai shuye gongsuo.
54 Song, Ji Shanghaishi shuye gonghui, 37.
55 Ibid.
56 SMA, 313.1.23, Shuye shangtuan tongzhi xinshi lu (undated [1910]). The SMA collection includes dazibao, medals, para-military paraphernalia, and photographs concerning this
militia.
57 For a recent view that finds growing class dissension and class consciousness dividing printshop employees from owners after 1917, see S.A. Smith, Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism
and Labor in Shanghai, 1895-1927 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 65, 85, 89, 179,
212. Also, see Chapter 5 below.
58 Their average age was thirty sui, with the oldest two being forty-one and the youngest three
being twenty-three. The heavy proportion of non-Shanghainese reflects Shanghais sojourning population discussed in Frederic Wakeman, Jr., and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds., Shanghai Sojourners (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1992). See, particularly, their introduction.
59 Song, Ji Shanghaishi shuye gonghui, 37. In 1914, the general director was Gao Hanqing,
assisted by joint directors, Gong Boyin (replaced by Tang Ziquan) and Ye Jiuru.
60 Conversely, of the total 120 shops existing in 1914, 36 had gone out of business by 1917.
61 This observation is valid unless one makes the assumption that the lithographers, ipso facto,
were antiquarians.
62 SMA, 313.1.23, Shanghai shuye tongye yilanbiao (1917), indicates that the first was located off Jiujiang Road, two blocks north of Fuzhou Road, still within the Wenhuajie district,
in Minfeng Lane. The second was located at Maijiaquan, a name which suggests a site in the
Nanshi.
63 SMA, 313.1.3, Shanghai shuye shanghui zhangcheng (1911). On the evolution of guilds
into trade associations, see Edward J.M. Rhoads, Merchant Associations in Canton, 18951911, in Mark Elvin and G. Wm. Skinner, eds., The Chinese City Between Two Worlds (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1974), 97-118. On the modernization of Shanghai guilds and city
administration, see Mark Elvin, The Administration of Shanghai, 1905-1914, 239-62 in
the same volume. CYL, 1: 382 indicates that Wangping Street became Shandong Road, although he does not say when.
64 Song, Ji Shanghaishi shuye gonghui, 37. Ten years later, in 1930, the Nationalist government forced the reconstituted trade association/guild to unite with a more recent new-style
book industry trade association of its own devising. This time, the merger was intended to
simplify government control of the Shanghai publishers.
65 This firm was not Zhang Xizhens Kaiming shudian, the well-known political/literary publisher founded in 1926.
66 SMA, 313.1.27, Qingchao shuye shanghui er dong mingdan, (1907-9).
67 Song, Ji Shanghaishi shuye gonghui, 38. Revealing the overlap between the guild and trade
association, those present at these meetings included Xia Songlai, Xi Zipei, Xia Ruifang, and
others.
68 SMA, 313.1-79, Shanghai shuye shanghui nian zhou ji niance mulu (Jiading: n.p., 1924),
3.
69 SMA, 313.1.3, Shanghai shuye shanghui zhangcheng, (1911).
70 Ibid.

Notes to pages 183-86

71
72
73
74

75
76
77
78

79

80

81

82

83

84
85

86

Ibid.
SMA, 313.1-79, Shanghai shuye shanghui nian zhou ji niance mulu, 9.
Ibid., 10.
Alford, To Steal a Book, 43, discusses a 1923 lawsuit that G. & C. Merriam brought and lost in
Shanghais Mixed Court against the Commercial Press for unauthorized republication of a
bilingual Websters Dictionary.
SMA, 313.1-79, Shanghai shuye shanghui nian zhou ji niance mulu, 10.
This summary derives from Song, Ji Shanghaishi shuye gonghui, 38.
Chan, Merchants, Mandarins, and Modern Enterprise, 168.
Ibid., 178, says that the five were partnerships of two or more persons with unlimited liability; similar partnerships with limited liability; joint-stock companies of seven or more shareholders with unlimited liability; similar joint-stock companies with limited liability; and sole
proprietorships with unlimited liability. Between 1904-5, interest in registration was greatest
from joint-stock firms of limited liability that, in addition to favouring Western concepts of
business organization, also promoted the legal guarantees that the new commercial legislation
promised. Only 27 out of 272 firms that registered from 1904 to 1908 were companies of
unlimited liability (all of these were pawnshops); a tiny fraction of Chinas traditional sole
proprietorships and partnerships were registered (44 and 48, respectively). The remaining
153 firms were all joint-stock firms of limited liability.
The importance of this development in Britains domination of Chinas sovereignty has often
been lost under the weight of nineteenth-century political history and the unequal treaties.
The first Chinese-run joint-stock company (gongsi) was the well-known China Merchants
Steam Navigation Company (Lunchuan zhaoshangju), founded by Li Hongzhang in 1872,
ten years after the American firm Russell and Company had launched its own Shanghai Steam
Navigation Company. The Chinese firms use of this organizational structure marked a new
departure in Chinese business practice, as Chi-kong Lai maintains in his The Qing State
and Merchant Enterprise: The China Merchants Company, 1872-1902, in Jane Kate Leonard
and John R. Watt, eds., To Achieve Security and Wealth: The Qing Imperial State and the Economy,
1644-1911 (Ithaca: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1992), 140.
Chinese commentators on this topic include Shen Zuwei, ed., Jindai Zhongguo ziye: zhidu he
fazhan (Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexue yuan, 1999) and Huang Hanmin and Lu Xinglong,
Jindai Shanghai gongye qiye fazhan shilun (Shanghai: Caijing daxue chubanshe, 2000). Thank
you to an anonymous UBC Press reviewer for these references.
In this sense, I agree with Douglas R. Reynoldss interpretation of the Xinzheng reforms as a
quiet revolution, in the course of which new paradigms for action were legitimated. See
Reynolds, China, 1898-1912: The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Council on East Asian Studies, 1993), 12ff.
In this regard, Ian Norrie, Publishing and Bookselling (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974), 235,
observes that in Britain the limited liability corporation took some time to catch on in the
publishing business. As of the 1870s, Norrie writes, Few publishing houses had taken
advantage of the Companies Act of 1862 which allowed limited liability. Most were still
partnerships.
Lin Heqin, Ziben yu yinshua shiye, in Yan Shuang, ed., Zhongguo yinshua shi ziliao huibian
(Shanghai: Shanghaishi Xinsijun lishi yanjiuhui, Yinshua-Yinchao zu, n.d.), 1: 120. The same
rationale for the proprietorship, partnership, and corporation is expressed, almost word-forword, in the introduction to Harry M. Trebing, ed., The Corporation in the American Economy
(Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), 6-7. Trebing reviews the history of the corporation as a
legal entity.
Lin, Ziben yu yinshua shiye, 1: 121.
Ibid., 1: 121-22. The four reasons Lin gives are quotas for each investor are small and easy to
shoulder; stockholders can sell their shares freely, without involving the company or other
stockholders; the company has a legal identity, making it more secure (baozhang) in the eyes of
lenders; and, aside from their initial investment, shareholders need have no other duties.
Ibid., 1: 121. Chi-kong Lai also explains that In nineteenth-century Europe and the United
States, a joint-stock company was seen as a legal entity, whose characteristics, such as legal

339

340 Notes to pages 186-91

87

88
89
90

91
92

93

94
95
96
97
98

99
100

101
102

personhood and existence beyond the life of its members, made it more advantageous than
partnerships. See Lai, The Qing State, 141.
The same problem is discussed at great length by Shanghai publisher and magazine distributor Zhang Jinglu. See Zhang, Zai chuban jie ershi nian (Hankou: Shanghai zazhi gongsi, 1938),
160-63.
Lin, Ziben yu yinshua shiye, 122.
Ibid.
According to Tao Shuimu, Zhejiang shangbang yu Shanghai jingji jindaihua yanjiu, 1840-1936
(Shanghai: Sanlian shudian, 2000), 104, the Commercial Press was founded by the extended
Bao family of Ningbo, Xia Ruifang, and Gao Fengchi. The Bao patriarch was Bao Zhecai, a
Presbyterian minister in Shanghai, whose three sons and three daughters were all students at
Qingxin Hall. As apprentices at the APMP, brothers Xianen learned type-casting; Xianchang,
typesetting; and Xianheng, printing. Xia Ruifang also learned to typeset. He married the
second daughter. When the Commercial Press was established with a total of 3,750 yuan,
each share was worth 500 yuan. Xia was one of two who held a full share, surpassed only by
Shen Bofen, who held two. Thank you to an anonymous UBC Press reviewer for suggesting
this work to me.
Although Lufei Kui was considered a native of Tongxiang, Zhejiang, he was actually born in
Shaanxi. See WH, 81-105.
Zhang, Mantan Shangwu, 69. See also JSF, 330. Xi invested 500,000 yuan in the firm and
appointed Zhang Jian as head of the board of directors. Eventually, after several years of fierce
competition over the textbook market, Xis firm was bought out by its chief competitor, the
Commercial Press.
Yu Fu, mentioned earlier as the director of the guild, and his partner Lian Quan, founded
Wenming Books. Established from the start as a corporation, Wenming, along with the Commercial Press and the Chinese Library Company became one of the three leading corporate
comprehensive publishers of the late Qing. Like the Commercial Press, Wenming published
Qing decrees on school regulations and several influential textbooks, as well as foreign social
science texts and modern art books. At the same time, the market for biji (anecdotal essays)
was growing. Wenming imported Japanese printing technology such as collotype machines
and photomechanical printers to print and publish collections of the essays along with many
albums of stele rubbings, calligraphy, and paintings. See Wu Tiesheng, Jiefangqian Zhonghua
shuju suoji, in Zhonghua shuju bianyibu, eds., Huiyi Zhonghua shuju, 1912-1987 (Beijing:
Zhonghua chubanshe, 1987), 2: 72.
This account is found in WH, 2-3.
Needless to say, without concern for copyright ownership.
Florence Chien, The Commercial Press and Modern Chinese Publishing, 1897-1949 (MA
thesis, University of Chicago, 1970), 10.
See WH, 4.
Hu Yuzhi, Huiyi Shangwu yinshu guan, in Chen Yingnian and Chen Jiang, eds., Shangwu
yinshu guan jiushiwu nian, wo he Shangwu yinshu guan (Beijing: Shangwu yinshu guan, 1992),
113.
WH, 4
The Commercial Press has been the subject of two scholarly studies in European languages. In
addition to Chien, The Commercial Press, see Jean-Pierre Drge, La Commercial Press de
Shanghai, 1897-1949 (Paris: Memoires de lInstitut des Hautes tudes Chinoises, [1978]).
Numerous historical accounts and documentary collections have also appeared in Chinese.
One place to start is with the collection Shangwu yinshuguan jianguan bashi zhounian jinian
(1897-1977) (Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1977). Ip, The Life and Times, contains extensive material on the history of the Commercial Press, independent of her focus on Zhang
Yuanji. Finally, I should stress that figures like Xia Ruifang hardly ever appear in Chinese
historical scholarship. The best account of this idiosyncratic, energetic, and fascinating cipher
of a man is in WH, a book that is based on wide reading in the periodicals of the time.
Unfortunately, few of them are cited.
Chien, The Commercial Press, 10.
WH, 4.

Notes to pages 191-94

103 CYL, 1: 220. Baos chronology of these years in the early 1900s is sometimes faulty, a fact
that does not detract from the essentials he does remember accurately.
104 Ibid.
105 Ibid. It was located between Yunnan Road and Guizhou Road, next to the Laozha police
station (which would become infamous during the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925).
106 Bao also dealt with a printer named Wu Yunji, whose old-fashioned but larger and faster firm
was located north of Suzhou Creek on Henan North Road opposite the Fujian Guild (QuanZhang huiguan). At Wus, Bao tried to have Yan Fus translation of Huxleys Evolution and
Ethics printed, but Wus printers could not understand Yans writing style, famous for its
literary quality, so Bao was forced to retreat. Instead, he engaged the Commercial Press for
most of the job.
107 The same book that Zhang Yuanji had then bought and was printing at Nanyang Public
Institute in the suburbs of Shanghai. According to CYL, 1: 222-23, Yan Fus manuscript was
very clean and clear, written in standard script on paper that Yan had blocked out and lined
himself. Bao eventually published a number of other translations by Yan. The other manuscript on which Jinsuzhai was working at this time was a Japanese text translated directly into
Chinese by Ye Haowu, the Hangzhou founder of the Dongwen (Japanese) School, who was
also a translator for the Zhongwai ribao, the newspaper through which Baos firm eventually
advertised its books. Bao found the old man himself, whose small beard gave him a Daoist air,
amusing but complains that his direct translation created great problems in Chinese grammar,
especially because of the plethora of particles that Ye had merely transcribed from long
Japanese sentences into Chinese as . Ye had often to visit the Jinsuzhai to make these and
other corrections, and on at least one occasion was accosted by the whores who frequented
the publishers lane. Unaware that she was sharing the lane with a publisher, when Ye insisted
that he was going to Jinsuzhai, the lady who had hooked him proclaimed, We are better in
every way than Jinsuzhai, and dragged him into her boudoir. He eventually had to buy his
freedom for one yuan, and Jinsuzhai, concerned about the impact of the neighborhood on its
business, soon moved to a new and unnamed street northwest of Nanjing Road (eventually
called Baikal Road, it became Fengyang Road, behind the present-day Park Hotel, after 1949).
108 CYL, 1: 236-37. My translation of this passage, although including numerous changes, is
nonetheless based on Ip, The Life and Times, 112.
109 Baos sympathetic portrait of the self-made Chinese publishing entrepreneur Xia Ruifang
bears a number of similarities to Charles A. Ruuds portrait of the peasant-into-millionaire
Russian publisher, Ivan Sytin. See Ruud, Russian Entrepreneur: Publisher Ivan Sytin of Moscow,
1851-1934 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1990).
110 In Shanghainese vernacular, the detested Sikhs were called hongtou asan (red-headed boys or
red-headed number threes) after their turbans, although Bao uses the polite term Indian
policeman (yindu xunbu). See Shou Ming, Shanghai fangyan shiye tan (Shanghai: Huadong
shifan daxue chubanshe, 1992), 126.
111 CYL, 1: 236.
112 Ibid.
113 One early publication, Tongjian yilan, sold over 11,000 copies. Before, Chinese publishers had
used maobian (rough-edged bamboo paper), maotai, or lianshi paper for works of this sort. Xia
was the first to combine one sheet of coarse maocao paper with one sheet of smooth-finish
guangjie paper. The result resembled lianshi paper but cost two-thirds its price. Woodblocked
copies of Tongjian yilan were selling for twenty silver yuan, and Xias lead-type edition cost
only two yuan more, making it a bestseller. See WH, 6.
114 Feng Jingru and He Chengyi had established Guangzhi shuju in Shanghai in 1898. Feng, a
native of Nanhai, Guangdong, had grown up in Hong Kong and was running a prominent
stationery and printing business serving the Chinese community of Yokohama as early as
1881. During their residence in Hong Kong, the Feng family had taken the English surname
Kingsell and so the Yokohama firm was called Kingsell Company. Feng Jingrus son Feng
Ziyou (1881-1958) would become an important associate of the revolutionary Sun Yat-sen
(1866-1925). The Fengs were influential in the establishment of Suns Xingzhonghui (Restore
China Association) in Yokohama in 1896, and Feng Ziyou was immediately registered as the
youngest member of the organization. Feng Jingrus political activities may have influenced

341

342 Notes to pages 194-97

115
116
117
118

119
120
121

122
123

124
125

126
127

the establishment of Guangzhi shuju; by 1903, the firm published Zhao Bizhens translation
of Socialism for the Modern Age (Jinshi shehui zhuyi), the first Chinese work to mention Marxs
Das Kapital. Guangzhi published numerous other modern political works, many of which
looked forward to the revolutions of 1911 and 1949, as well as three novels by the political
satirist Wu Woyao, including Vignettes from the Late Qing. See BDRC, 2: 30-31.
Jiang, Bianji xiaoxue jiaokeshu, 140.
Ibid.
Ibid.
CYL, 1: 237. As for Baos own Jinsuzhai, it did not last much longer. Bao notes that at that
time many publishers, especially translation bureaus, were organized to get the ball [of reform] rolling (kai fengqi) and not to make profits. For this reason, most had inadequate financing. Baos own employer, Kuai Liqing, an old-style aristocrat (shijia zi), holder of a jinshi
degree, and relative by marriage of Li Hongzhang (CYL, 1: 204, 238), was underwritten
initially by Yan Fu and later by sales of Yan Fus and Ye Haowus books. His business was an
individual proprietorship, hampered by unstable financing, oblivious to the fact that publishing
had already become commercialized (shangyehua), says Bao. Jinsuzhai, like most publishing
firms in the period after 1895, expired prematurely as a rambunctious juvenile, aged two years.
Interestingly, its copyrights for the series of Yan Fu books that it had published under Baos
contracts reverted to the Commercial Press (CYL, 1: 237-41). Bao himself went to work first for
Qixiu bianyiju and then Guangzhi shuju, the other important textbook publisher of the day,
where he translated Japanese engineering books with five or six Cantonese editors whose spoken language he could not understand. After two months there, Bao moved to another translation bureau, where he stayed for a year, and then returned to Suzhou. See CYL, 1: 242-50.
JSF, 320.
Jiang, Bianji xiaoxue jiaokeshu, 140.
Ibid., 141. In the view of JSF, 320, the Patriotic Institute was founded by dissident students
expelled from Nanyang. JSF is supported by Song Yuanfangs chronology of the Shanghai
book business, Zhongguo jindai chuban dashiji, in CBSL 19 (1990:1): 145, which cites 16
November 1902 as the date of the institutes establishment.
Zhang, Mantan Shangwu, 73-74. See also Zheng Zhenwen, Wo suozhidao de Shangwu
yinshu guan bianyisuo, Wenshi ziliao xuanji 53 (1965): 151.
Ip, The Life and Times, 160; CYL, 1:390-91 discusses the origins of those in the editorial office,
pointing out that, among the predominant Jiangsu natives, those originating in Changzhou
were most numerous. Recall, however, that the Baos came from Ningbo; not surprisingly,
Zhejiang natives also played a major role in Shanghais publishing world. See, for instance,
Tao Shuimu, Zhejiang shangbang yu Shanghai jingji jindaihua yanjiu, 1840-1936 (Shanghai: Sanlian
shudian, 2000), 103-10; Chen Cunren, Yinyuan shidai shenghuo shi (Shanghai: Renmin
chubanshe, 2000), 257-58, synthesizes these views with the observation that many major
figures at the Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books were Changzhou (Jiangsu)
or Shaoxing (Zhejiang) natives. For a list of the 63 editors who worked at the Commercial
Press in the late Qing, see Zheng, Wo suozhidao de Shangwu yinshu guan bianyisuo, 143.
According to WH, 8, they were paid what seems to have been a purely symbolic gratuity of
one yuan. Jiang Weiqiao scoffs when he recalls it in Bianji xiaoxue jiaokeshu, 140.
Ip, The Life and Times, 114. Historians offer many reasons to explain why Zhang left when he
did. In light of Xias decision to go independent after being mistreated by the apparently antiChinese OShea, one of the most striking of the explanations (ibid., 80) is that Zhang had a
falling out with John C. Ferguson, the overbearing American missionary and proctor of the
Nanyang Public Institute.
Ibid., 114ff. Zhang was also editor of a trimonthly called Waijiao bao (Diplomatic Review)
that he brought to the Commercial Press.
Ibid., 114, note 7. Zhangs initial monthly salary was a lavish 350 yuan per month. Ip observes, different sources mention different times when Zhang Yuanji formally joined the
Commercial Press. The official Jinian tekan, his obituaries and eulogies give 1901, Wang Yunwu
mentions 1902 ..., Mao Dun mentions 1903. Since the Subao case broke in June 1903 and
did force Cai to leave Shanghai, 1903 seems the most convincing date.

Notes to pages 197-204

128 After gaining the xiucai degree, Gao had abandoned the examination system and, in 1896,
went to Hangzhou with his elder brother, Fengqi (a well-known proponent of the Tongcheng
School). There the two helped their fellow Fujianese Lin Qi to organize the Qiushi Academy
which in 1901 became Zhejiang University. Although offered a position as dean of the new
university, after visiting Japan, Gao wanted to devote himself to compiling primary school
textbooks and turned to Zhang Yuanji, a family friend. See Zheng Zhenwen, Wo suozhidao
de Shangwu yinshuguan bianjisuo, in Wenshi ziliao xuanji 53 (1965): 144.
129 Ip, The Life and Times, 119. My account derives from 119-28.
130 Mao Dun, Wo zouguo de daolu (Hong Kong: Sanlian shudian, 1989), 1: 95.
131 Ip, The Life and Times, 124.
132 As noted above, the early Zhejiang and Jiangsu influence was striking, with all of the editors
but one hailing from those provinces. In time, as Gao Mengdans influence increased, he
himself became wary of relying too much on editors from his home province of Fujian, a
strong temptation given his own inability to speak Mandarin. See Zheng, Wo suozhidao de
Shangwu yinshuguan bianjisuo, 145, where he states in Gaos life, the thing he feared most
was to have to speak Mandarin and 151, where Zheng explains that Gao eventually agreed
to having Wang Yunwu take over the editorial office in 1922 because he did not want to
appear to be holding out for a Fujianese. In the end, Wangs arrival strengthened the Christian Band thanks to Wangs intimacy with Christian missionary values (ibid., 142). This
inability to speak Mandarin led in the first sessions to a heated dispute between Gao and
Jiang over the words and that finally ended when they discovered that they were
disputing the same term, pronounced differently in their respective dialects. Reported in ibid.
and in Jiang, Bianji xiaoxue jiaokeshu zhi huiyi, 141.
133 Ip, The Life and Times, 130.
134 In 1933, most operations would move back into the concession because it afforded protection
from the Japanese. See Chapters 3 and 5.
135 (ROC) Ministry of Education, Jiaokeshu zhi faxing gaikuang, 1868-1918 [1938], in ZJCSC,
1: 231-32. Also, in 1905, aware that old-fashioned schoolmasters may not have known how
to use the new textbooks, the Commercial Press opened a school to instruct teachers in the
new approaches of the modern textbooks. This school was separate from Shanggong Elementary School, the school for employees children that the publisher organized in 1907. See Ip,
The Life and Times, 131-32.
136 GGZ, 145-50, says that, in China, 216 newspapers and 122 magazines emerged rapidly after
1895. The same pattern of accommodation appeared after the Revolution of 1911 and the
counterrevolution of 1927.
137 Shops here included Guangya shuju, Xin shijie xue baoguan, Qiwenshe, Minquanshe shuju,
and Biaohumeng shushi. Before 1910, the most important Fuzhou Road firm was Xi Zipeis
Chinese Library Company, founded in 1906.
138 JSF, 330.
Chapter 5: The Three Legs of the Tripod
1 Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity China,
1900-1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), Chapter 9, discusses the classical as
well as the modern connotations of wenhua. Thanks to Patricia Sieber for this reference.
2 Just as often as one reads of Shanghais Big Three publishers, one hears of the Big Four,
the fourth being Kaiming shudian, founded in 1926. Yao Fushen, Zhongguo bianji shi (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 1990), 355-56, for example, devotes just as much space to
Kaiming as to the Commercial Press, Zhonghua, and World. However, his concern is primarily editorial and intellectual/cultural history. My focus here is technological, commercial, and
industrial; editorship here is important only as an element contributing to the success or
failure of the three largest firms in achieving assets, scale, and impact. It is true, as Yao points
out, that the high quality of Kaimings publications, both in terms of content and of design,
and their focus on the young adult market gave them an impact on an intellectual level as
important as those of the Commercial Press, Zhonghua, and World, but Kaiming never rivalled them in terms of assets or scale.

343

344 Notes to pages 206-11

3 Florence Chien, The Commercial Press and Modern Chinese Publishing, 1897-1949 (MA
thesis, University of Chicago, 1970), 43.
4 Jean-Pierre Drge, La Commercial Press de Shanghai, 1897-1949 (Paris: Institut des Hautes
tudes Chinoises, 1978), 111.
5 According to figures compiled by Wang Yunwu and quoted by Chien, The Commercial Press,
43. Even in the mid-1930s, the heyday of Chinese publishing, total output did not exceed
10,000 titles per year, as compared with about 10,000 in the US, 15,000 in Japan, and 23,000
in Germany. See ibid., 44, Table 3.
6 Ibid., Table 2.
7 Actually, Dadong opened in an alley abutting Fuzhou Road. L Ziquan was Shen Zhifangs
(World Books) friend, and Shen Junsheng was Shens nephew.
8 CYL, 1: 382. I have chosen to translate Wenhua dajie as Culture Street to avoid confusion
with Culture-and-Education Streets (Wenhuajie).
9 Zhang Jinglu, Zai chubanjie ershi nian (Hankou: Shanghai zazhi gongsi, 1938), 2. Zhang says
that he had long demurred, thinking that Zhang Yuanji, Lufei Kui, or Wang Yunwu, three of
the individuals discussed in this chapter, knew more about the Shanghai publishing world
than he did.
10 Ibid., 31.
11 Ibid., 40.
12 Ibid., 114.
13 Ibid. Zhang, who despised Shen Zhifang and World Books for its irresponsible exploitation
of the mandarin duck and butterfly school of literature, says that the Commercial Press,
Zhonghua, Kaiming, Yadong, his own firm, and, in 1925, Beixin shuju (which relocated
here from Beijing), were the main agents of the progressive Wenhuajie with which he was
familiar.
14 Governments of greatest importance to the Shanghai publishers were warlord governments
and the national government. Likewise, the Shanghai Concession and Nationalist Party governments had an impact on publishers, as Frederic Wakeman, Jr., shows in Policing Shanghai
1927-1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 134ff., 173ff., and 236ff. Zhang,
Zai chuban jie, 118ff., discusses the impact of what he calls the International Concessions
slave laws that were a constant thorn in the heel of Shanghais cultural industries.
15 Song Yuanfang, Ji Shanghaishi shuye gonghui, in CBSL 10 (1987:4): 45-49.
16 Wang Yunwu, Shangwu yinshu guan yu xin jiaoyu nianpu (Taipei: Taiwan Commercial Press,
1973).
17 Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1967), Appendix A. Chows statistics cover the years 1905-23, but
Chow acknowledges that they are unreliable; reliable statistics for school enrolment before
the 1930s are rare.
18 Wang, Shangwu yinshu guan, 693. Wangs statistics cover the years from 1910 to 1972; years
overlapping with Chows provide roughly equivalent figures.
19 Robert Culp, The Ideolological Infrastructure of Citizenship: Schools and Publishing, in
Culp, Articulating Citizenship: Community, Civility, and Student Politics in Southeastern
China, 1912-1937 (unpublished manuscript), argues convincingly that elite intellectuals
and the expanding circle of professional educators set standards that publishers and governments felt obliged to follow prior to 1928. Although Culps view broadens the context that I
describe here, it does not invalidate my observation that Shanghais publishers were attentive
to government policies.
20 As suggested in this books Introduction, the size of Chinas reading public and its relationship to reading matter are hotly contested. Terry Narramore, Making the News in Shanghai,
Shen Bao and the Politics of Newspaper Journalism 1912-1937 (PhD dissertation, Australia
National University, 1989), 21-39, cites a 1936 article by Vernon Nash and Rudolph Lowenthal
claiming that, in 1936, from 100 to 150 million Chinese could read with varying levels of
competence. In the mid-1920s, however, as Narramore points out, no periodical or trade
publication sold more widely than Shenbao which claimed an (uncertified) circulation of 141,440
in late 1926. By the 1930s, Shenbao declared a daily readership of one million even though it
never sold more than 150,000 copies of any one issue. Hu Daojing, in his 1933-nian de

Notes to pages 212-16

21

22
23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30
31
32
33

Shanghai zazhi jie, in Shanghai tongshe, eds., Shanghai yanjiu ziliao xu (Shanghai: Shanghai
shudian, 1935), 404, basing his view on post office statistics, says that one issue of the periodical Shanghai zhoukan sold 125,000 copies. Zou Taofens Shenghuo zhoukan sold 150,000
copies per week before it was closed down in 1933, the largest circulation of any Chinese
periodical prior to 1949, says Wen-hsin Yeh, Progressive Journalism and Shanghais Petty
Urbanites: Zou Taofen and the Shenghuo Weekly, 1926-1945, in Frederic Wakeman, Jr. and
Wen-hsin Yeh, eds., Shanghai Sojourners (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1992), 191.
Even though trade books would not be expected to reach the readership of periodicals, by
comparison, Shanghai textbooks were selling at levels nearly thirteen times these numbers
every year.
Wang, Shangwu yinshu guan, 44. The remaining thirteen were issued by the Zhili (Provincial)
Education Bureau (Zhili xuewu shuju): ten; Huagu Primary School: one; Wuchang Library:
one; and unnamed: one.
Ibid., 57.
Ibid., 693. There were 229,911 upper and primary schools in 1937 in contrast to about
43,000 schools in 1910. In 1937, there were also 91 tertiary schools, including 35 universities, enrolling 31,188 students. Chien, The Commercial Press, 50, says that the Shanghai
publishers did not issue university-level textbooks until Wang Yunwu initiated a series in the
1930s.
Wang, Shangwu yinshu guan, 52-54, says Tianjin founded a library in 1908. This institution
was followed by provincial libraries set up in Henan and Shandong in 1909. The most notable library in Shanghai, right down to 1932, was the Commercial Presss own editorial
library, originally known as the Hanfenlou but by then called the Dongfang tushuguan (Oriental Library), which Wang Yunwu opened to the public in 1926. The Presss library was
supplemented by those of other publishers, particularly Zhonghuas. According to Hu Daojing,
Shanghai tushuguan shi (Shanghai: Shanghaishi tongzhiguan, 1935), 7, Shanghai did not gain
a true public library until 1931-32, by which time Jiangsu province had fifty-six publicly
founded local libraries.
Established fifteen years before the Republic of China, the Commercial Press, like Zhonghua
Books, outlasted the Republic of China on the mainland by many decades, albeit in a staterun form.
The library, one of the eight largest in East Asia, with more than 365,000 volumes, including
25,000 rare works dating from the Song through the Qing, was destroyed in the fighting of
1932. See Chien, The Commercial Press, 66-67.
Zhang Yuanji began compiling Ciyuan in 1902. The Sibu congkan is an anthology of 323 rare
books compiled by a team led by Zhang for over ten years. Reprinted in 1929 after Zhang
discovered better exemplars, it was supplemented in 1934 with 77 additional titles and, in
1936, by another 71 titles. Also, according to Drge, La Commercial Press, 104-5, in 1920, the
Ministry of Education granted the publisher 200,000 to 300,000 yuan to reprint the 3,460
volumes of the eighteenth-century imperial Siku quanshu. Paper shortages into the 1930s
thwarted the project. Finally, in 1933, discussions between Zhang Yuanji and Yuan Tongli
(1895-1965) of the Beijing Library led to the publication of 231 rare titles between 1933 and
1935 under the title Siku quanshu zhenben.
He Lin, Yan Fu de fanyi, in ZJCSE, 2: 106. According to A Ying, Wanqing xiaoshuo de
fanrong, in ZJCSE, 1: 201, note 3, the Commercial Press reprinted these and others in a
single collection, Yan yi mingzhu congkan, during the reprint heyday of the 1930s.
Zheng Zhenduo, Zhongguo wenxue lunji, cited in A Ying, Wanqing xiaoshuo de fanrong, 1:
201, note 4. Lin translated a wide range of authors, totalling 99 British, 33 French, 20 American, 7 Russian, 2 Swiss, 1 Belgian, 1 Spanish, 1 Norwegian, 1 Greek, and 1 Japanese. Fourteen of his unpublished manuscripts were incinerated in the Japanese attack of 1932.
Chien, The Commercial Press, 104-6.
CYL, 1: 390.
Ibid., 1: 391-92.
Chien, The Commercial Press, 55-57 and 99; Manying Ip, The Life and Times of Zhang Yuanji,
1867-1959 (Beijing: Commercial Press, 1985), 157-59. In 1919, a Commercial Press employee also invented the Chinese typewriter, which was soon put into production. Drge, La

345

346 Notes to pages 216-22

34

35
36
37
38
39
40

41
42
43
44
45

46
47
48
49
50

51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58

Commercial Press, 64, explains that by 1920 the Commercial Press was printing banknotes for
the government.
This figure dates from 1913, prior to Xia Ruifangs buyout of the Japanese investors. See Chien,
The Commercial Press, 22. According to Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei dangshi yanjiushi and
Shanghaishi zonggonghui, eds., Shangwu yinshu guan zhigong yundong shi (Beijing: Zhonggong
dangshi chubanshe, 1991), 5, by 1915 the company was worth two million yuan. Xia Ruifang
went to Japan to negotiate with the Japanese; the terms he offered are unknown. Less than a
week after the announcement that the Japanese would withdraw, Xia was murdered outside
the door of the presss distribution center. Zhang Xichen and Hu Yuzhi named Nationalist
Party member Chen Qimei (1876-1916) as his killer. Two years later, Chen himself was assassinated by agents of Yuan Shikai. Some believed that the Japanese had Xia killed.
For more on this system, see Ip, The Life and Times, 159-64. For charts depicting Commercial
Press administration, see Chien, The Commercial Press, 58-63.
Mao Dun, Wo zouguo de daolu (Hong Kong: Sanlian chubanshe, 1989), 1: 89-91.
Ibid., 1: 92-94.
Ip, The Life and Times, 193.
Chien, The Commercial Press, 26.
Wangs oldest brother had won the shengyuan degree, the same one acquired by Bao Tianxiao,
but had died young, leading Wangs father to shift Wang from an academic to a commercial
curriculum. This biographical sketch of Wang blends information from BDRC, 3: 400-2;
WH, 50-60; Zheng Zhenwen, Wo suozhidao de Shangwu yinshu guan bianyisuo, in Wenshi
ziliao xuanji 53 (1965): 140-65; and Jean-Pierre Drge and Hua Chang-Ming, La rvolution du
livre dans la Chine moderne: Wang Yunwu, diteur ([Paris]: Publications orientalistes de France,
1979), 13-15.
Zheng, Shangwu, 150.
The other leading candidate for the position was He Songgan, recently retired dean of Xiamen
University, Fujian.
Ip, The Life and Times, 197.
Ip, The Life and Times, 200.
Zhang Xichen, Mantan Shangwu yinshu guan, Wenshi ziliao xuanji 43 (1964): 84, says the
idea, which included the suggestion that editors merely copy entries from the Encyclopaedia
Britannica (Da Ying baike quanshu), was introduced to the firms editors at a dinner at Wangs
home in 1921. Each entry was limited to 20,000 to 30,000 words; the collection was later
called Baike quanshu (Encyclopaedia), presumably copying the Chinese name for the Britannica.
Ip, The Life and Times, 201-2, citing Hu Shi, traces the original plan to Zhang Yuanji and Gao
Mengdan.
Melvil Dewey created his decimal system for book classification in 1876.
Drge and Hua, La rvolution du livre, 25-27. For more on the effort to introduce scientific
management, see 28-30.
Zhang, Mantan Shangwu, 89.
Chien, The Commercial Press, 34. About one-seventh of the workers were women.
For English-language coverage of the printers place in the Shanghai labour movement, see
Jean Chesneaux, The Chinese Labor Movement 1919-1927, trans. H.M. Wright (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1968); Elizabeth J. Perry, Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese
Labor (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); and S.A. Smith, Like Cattle and Horses:
Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895-1927 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
Shangwu yinshu guan zhigong yundong shi, 19-20.
Mao, Daolu, 1: 153.
Ibid., 1: 155-56.
Ibid., 1: 158.
Ibid., 1: 194-95.
See Jin Liren and He Shiyou, Yang Xianjiang zhuanji (Nanjing: Jiangsu jiaoyu chubanshe, 1991).
The Shanghai Printing Workers Union, organized in February 1925 and called Yinlian for
short, was located at 24 Huaxing Lane off Zhejiang North Road.
Mao, Daolu, 1: 207-9.

Notes to pages 222-25

59 This summary comes from Chien, The Commercial Press, Appendix I.

60 Shangwu yinshu guan zhigong yundong shi, 30-33.
61 Chen Yun joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1924. After 1949, he became a leading
member of the Chinese Politburo.
62 For a fictionalized account of this counterrevolution, see Andr Malraux, Mans Fate, trans.
H.M. Chevalier (New York: Random House, 1961).
63 Ip, The Life and Times, 218.
64 Mao, Daolu, 2: 2, and Ip, The Life and Times, 220.
65 Wu, with Cai, Li, and Zhang Renjie, was regarded as one of the Four Elder Statesmen of the
Guomindang; all had sided with Chiang Kai-shek against Wang Jingwei in 1927. In the early
1900s, Wu had founded a revolutionary publishing house called Shijieshe (World Society)
and was known for his efforts to standardize the national language. Like Li, Wu was a former
anarchist. Li was the leader of the Chinese work-study movement in France. See BDRC, 3:
416-19, and BDRC, 2: 319.
66 Ip, The Life and Times, 221.
67 However, as Perry, Shanghai on Strike, 113-14, explains, once the Nationalists hold on Shanghai was broken by the Japanese in 1937, Communist Party organizers returned to the Commercial Press. Between April 1938 and December 1941, more than three dozen new members
joined its cell.
68 Song, Ji Shanghaishi shuye gonghui, 37-38.
69 This summary is based on Jiangsu sheng chuban shizhi bianmu weiyuanhui bianjibu, eds.,
Jiangsu Minguo shiqi chuban shi (Nanjing: Jiangsu Renmin chubanshe, 1993), 191ff.
70 Chien, The Commercial Press, 26.
71 Ibid., 201. Drge and Hua, La rvolution du livre, 89, citing Wang Yunwu, reveal that Wang
believed that the Chinese were not a nation of readers, in part because Shanghai publishers,
unlike cigarette manufacturers, were insufficiently aggressive at marketing. By 1935, the Commercial Press introduced a book of the week promotion with discounts. Wanyou wenku was,
in fact, an extension of the Baike xiao congshu and Baike quanshu series that Wang had started
issuing in the 1920s to great commercial success, says Ip, The Life and Times, 202. Drge, La
Commercial Press, 55, notes that the first series of the Wanyou wenku, made up of 1,010 titles in
2,000 volumes, cost 360 yuan; if purchased separately, the titles would have cost from 1,0002,000 yuan. Ibid., 56, records that Lu Xun dismissed the Wanyou wenku as mere eye powder.
Ibid., 50-52, regards the 1930s as lge dor of congshu production. While Wang concentrated on issuing collections of modern writings, Zhang Yuanji took responsibility for collections of traditional works such as the Sibu congkan (Primary Series, 1920; Second Series, 1934;
Third Series, 1936) arranged according to the traditional bibliographic classifications.
72 Ibid., 107-8.
73 Chien, The Commercial Press, 47.
74 Ibid., 44, Table 2.
75 Drge, La Commercial Press, 98-99, indicates that in 1934, the Commercial Press achieved four
times its 1931 output; in 1936, output reached six times the 1931 figure. Still, in terms of the
total number of titles produced, China ranked sixteenth worldwide, behind Switzerland.
76 Chien, The Commercial Press, 42.
77 When the Anti-Japanese War ended, Wang was in Chongqing, where he had developed close
ties to the Nationalist government. In 1946, he was appointed minister of economic affairs
and then, in 1948, minister of finance; in the latter capacity, he was responsible for the introducing the disastrous gold yuan (Zhonghua jinyuan) monetary reform that precipated the
final collapse of Chinas economy. In 1949, he followed Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan where he
filled numerous roles for the Nationalists before 1964, when he resumed his publishing work
with the Taipei branch of the Commercial Press. Meanwhile, Zhu Jingnong (1887-1951),
Wangs student and Hu Shis classmate at China College, took charge of Shanghais operations from 1946 to 1948. A former Beijing University professor, at Wangs invitation Zhu had
worked as an editor at the Commercial Press from 1923 to 1927 along with directing the
firms Shanggong Elementary School. After serving the Nationalist government in Nanjing
and Chongqing in numerous education-related positions, Zhu returned to publishing until

347

348 Notes to pages 225-30

78
79
80

81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90

91

92
93
94

95
96

97
98

99

forced to leave under pressure from pro-Communist employees and Zhang Yuanji, who, on
behalf of the Commercial Presss board, dismissed both Wang and Zhu in 1948. Zhu died in
the United States.
Zhonghuas registered English name was Chung Hwa, but for purposes of orthographic uniformity, I use the pinyin version in this book.
Wu Tiesheng, Jiefangqian Zhonghua shuju suoji, in Zhonghua shuju bianjibu, eds., Huiyi
Zhonghua shuju (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1987), 1: 71.
According to ECCP, 1: 542-43, the unusual surname originated when an ancestor surnamed
Fei was taken in by a family surnamed Lu. One of Lufeis ancestors was Lufei Chi (d. 1790),
a jinshi, Hanlin compiler, chief collator, and then assistant director of the Siku quanshu project.
He also served in the imperial printing shop (Wuyingdian). Hounded by repeated charges
that books under his care vanished or were improperly edited, Lufei Chi was deprived of all
ranks and offices. He also had to pay more than 10,000 taels for preparing the three copies of
the Siku quanshu deposited in southern libraries as a penalty for his poor management. At the
time of Lufei Chis death, the Qianlong emperor, patron of the Siku quanshu project, confiscated all of his familys wealth except 1,000 taels, saying Lufei had begun life with that much
but had accumulated 20 or 30 times that amount as a result of his mismanagement of the Siku
quanshu project.
Thus, Lufei was a distant relative of Bao Tianxiaos Jinsuzhai boss, Kuai Huailu.
WH, 86. Pooling 1,500 yuan, the two men opened their bookstore on Wuchangs Huangjie.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid. Ip, The Life and Times, 152, citing Lufeis self-compiled chronological biography (nianpu),
says that Lufei was a member of the Revive China Society.
Michael Wai-mai Lau, Wu Wo-yao (1866-1910): A Writer of Fiction of the Late Ching
Period (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1968), 35.
WH, 86.
According to SMA, 313.1.23, Shanghai shuye shanghui yilianbiao, 1917, the shop was in
Xishun Lane.
WH, 88.
My repeated efforts to view this publication, which first appeared in March 1906 and lasted
only three issues, in the Shanghai Municipal Library and the Shanghai Municipal Archives
were unsuccessful.
Strikingly, this practice would not be revived by the Nationalists until 1942. After the war,
selected publishers were granted government contracts to print textbooks. See Chien, The
Commercial Press, 88-89.
Quoted in WH, 90.
Ibid., 89. According to WH, only three or four lessons were issued, but they made people
open their eyes (yixin ermu).
Ibid., 90. This view of money as incentive is repeated in JSF, 324. In about 1910, Gao also
offered Lufei his niece in marriage, adding another level to Lufeis debt. See Yao, Zhongguo
bianjishi, 294.
Quoted in WH, 90.
Ibid., 91. Lufei proposed this reform in place of the then-prevailing five, four, five, three, and
three/four system to reduce by six years the length of schooling and make educated persons
more quickly available to society.
Quoted in WH, 91.
Ip, The Life and Times, 104-5. Although Zhang eventually supported the republic, Ip points
out that Zhangs friend Liang Qichao did not and that Zhang Yuanji was also amicable with
Zhao Zhujun, chief shareholder of Shenbao, and a strong constitutional monarchist. Lufei,
meanwhile, was busy organizing his new company and trying to distance himself from the old
constitutionalist-oriented publishers by attacking them in newspaper ads.
It is not clear exactly when Lufei and his group began their secret editorial team. According
to ibid., 152, they began in October 1911, around the time of the Wuchang Uprising, and
this view makes sense. Lufei had had several disappointments concerning unpublished textbooks, and it seems unlikely that he would have devoted himself to a new set without some
guarantee that they would find a market. Ip, outraged that Lufei, this very man whom the

Notes to pages 230-32

100

101

102

103
104
105

106

107
108
109

110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117

118
119
120

121
122
123
124
125

Commercial Press so trusted, would stage the unexpected coup, maintains convincingly
that Lufei found it easier to recruit Commercial Press editors once the stock market collapsed
in the wake of the uprising, eating up funds that Xia Ruifang had misappropriated from the
firms capital assets.
Yao, Zhongguo bianjishi, 295, says that they had to go to Japanese printers because Chinese
were afraid to print the anti-Qing textbooks even in the comparative safety of the International Concession.
WH, as well as Yao Fushen, all claim secrecy had been kept so tight that the Commercial Press
was at first caught completely unaware by the new textbook company but then offered Lufei
a monthly salary of 400 yuan to abandon his fantasy of revolutionary entrepreneurship.
According to Wu, Zhonghua, 1: 75, Zhonghuas assets, which started with 25,000 yuan,
grew to 600,000 by 1914, 1 million by 1915, 1.6 million by 1916, 2 million by 1925, and 4
million by 1937. Under the hyperinflation of the post-war years, Zhonghuas assets were
evaluated at 10 billion, and this amount doubled to 20 billion in 1950.
JSF, 324.
Wu, Zhonghua, 1: 72.
Ibid., 1: 73. Dai Kedun took charge of the editorial department until January 1913, when Fan
Yuanlian arrived. Shen Yi was head of the elementary textbooks section, with Yao as head of
the middle school and teachers college textbooks section.
Ibid., 1: 72-73. According to both Wu Tiesheng and JSF, Zhonghuas first editorial, administrative, business, and printing shop offices were located at 29A,B East Broadway in the Hongkou
district.
Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei dangshi yanjiu shi and Shanghaishi zonggonghui, eds., Zhonghua
shuju zongchang zhigong yundong shi (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 1991), 3.
However, according to a document written by Chen Xiegong and cited by Wu Tiesheng, Lufei
did not actually start work until 17 February 1912.
WHs view that Shen Zhifang moved from the Commercial Press to Zhonghua from its start
is supported by Zhu Lianbaos Wo suozhidaode Shijie shuju, Wenshi ziliao xuanji 15 (1963):
1-43. Wu, Zhonghua, 1: 73, maintains that Shen did not make the final move until 1913.
JSF, 324, probably basing himself on Wu, concurs.
This personnel roster comes from JSF, 325. WH, 94, says that Wang Meiqiu was head of the
editorial office.
WH, 94. The elliptical logic, cadence, and spirit of this sentence suggest that it was influenced by sections three and five of the Daxue (Great Learning).
JSF, 324, reports that Zhonghua issued forty-four different titles for use in elementary schools
and twenty-seven for middle schools and teachers colleges.
Zhonghua shuju zongchang zhigong yundong shi, 8.
Ibid., 9. In 1927, business manager Chen Xiegong assumed the print shop directorship.
Yao, Zhongguo bianji shi, 296.
Wu, Zhonghua, 1: 72.
Ibid., 1: 71-72. See also Ip, The Life and Times, 154, and WH, 95. Zhonghua mobilized public
opinion against the Commercial Press so successfully that the latter felt compelled to terminate its partnership with the Japanese. The Commercial Presss capital had increased from
200,000 to 1.5 million yuan during the partnership.
Ip, The Life and Times, 156, citing Lufei.
WH, 94.
Wu, Zhonghua, 1: 73. The editorial department was established in 1912. When Fan left in
1916 to assume the position of minister of education, Dai Kedun stepped back into the shoes
of chief editor for nine years, followed by Lufei (five years). In 1932, Shu Xincheng (18931960) took over. See JSF, 324.
WH, 95.
Zhonghua shuju zongchang zhigong yundong shi, 8.
WH, 94-95.
Wu, Zhonghua, 1: 73.
William C. Kirby, China Unincorporated: Company Law and Business Enterprise in
Twentieth-Century China, Journal of Asian Studies 54, 1 (1995): 49, states that a new commercial code based on German law was issued in 1914. Of the four categories of companies,

349

350 Notes to pages 232-36

126
127
128
129
130
131

132
133
134
135
136
137

138
139
140
141

142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153

154

the true corporation (gufen youxian gongsi) was the option selected by Zhonghua, just as it
had been by the Commercial Press and would be by World Books.
Yao, Zhongguo bianji shi, 296.
JSF, 324.
Ibid., and Wu, Zhonghua, 1: 73, state that Zhonghuas print shop was on Hardoon Road
off Jingan Temple Road. See also Zhonghua shuju zongchang zhigong yundong shi, 8.
Zhonghua shuju zongchang zhigong yundong shi, 8, 11.
Wu, Zhonghua, 1: 73.
After becoming a director of Zhonghua, Liang Qichao published his Da Zhonghua (Great
China) through the firm. At the same time, Zhonghua was bringing out numerous journals
intended to meet head-on competition from the Commercial Press.
Wu, Zhonghua, 1: 73, and JSF, 324. According to Wu, 1: 75, by the 1930s, Zhonghua had
about fifty branches and over 1,000 sales kiosks.
Lu Runxiang, Ding Fubao yu chuban gongzuo, in CBSL 3 (1984): 63.
Wu, Zhonghua, 1: 73.
Carl Crow, Handbook for China (Shanghai, Hong Kong, Yokohama, Singapore: Kelly & Walsh,
1916), 87-88, slightly rearranged here for style.
Wu, Zhonghua, 1: 74.
Song Yaoru, better known to non-Chinese as Charley Soong, was an American-educated Chinese Christian, Shanghai businessman, Bible publisher, and patriarch of one of the most
influential families in modern Chinese history. See BDRC, 3: 141-42. All of his six children,
including Song Meiling (Mme. Chiang Kai-shek), were educated in the United States. Hu Shi
was one of Soongs English students.
Identified only as Maosheng yanghang. See Zhu, Shijie shuju, 2; Wu, Zhonghua, 1: 7475; and WH, 154.
Private use of company funds was not uncommon in Chinese business circles then, as suggested by Xia Ruifangs activities noted earlier.
WH, 154.
Shen Jifang was originally an English secretary at the Commercial Press where he became
very intimate (jieyi xiongdi) with Shen Zhifang. He had been investing in Zhonghua since it
first opened. See WH, 154. Shen Jifang was also related to the future overseeing director
Wang Boqi. In March 1949, just months before the Communist takeover of Shanghai, Wang
was listed as an overseeing director of Zhonghua Books, along with several high-level Nationalist officials, gangster-statesman Du Yuesheng, and two relatives of Lufei Kui. See SMA,
Zhonghua shuju youxian gongsi xianren dongshi (jiancharen) mingdan, (30 March 1949),
90: 499, 15.
WH, 99.
Wu, Zhonghua, 1: 74.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Shi served as head of Zhonghua from April to June 1917.
Wu, Zhonghua, 1: 74.
This view originates with Wu Tiesheng. According to WH, 99, the plan was to rent Zhonghuas
facilities to the Commercial Press.
WH, 99.
Wu, Zhonghua, 1: 74.
JSF, 325.
Yu Youren was the editor and founder of the Shanghai paper Minlibao, a military officer, and
a Republican official (from 1930 to 1964, he headed the Nationalists Control Yuan). Between 1914 and 1918, when he left Shanghai, he founded and ran a Shanghai bookstore,
Minli Book Company, as a front for pursuing Nationalist Party opposition to Yuan Shikai.
During this period, he became well known in the Shanghai book world. He was also a founder
of Shanghai University. See BDRC, 4: 74-78.
On H.H. Kung, see BDRC, 2: 263-69. Kung eventually became Nationalist minister of finance. His involvement with Zhonghua lasted until at least the late 1940s, when his name on
a list of shareholders including Lufei Mingzhong and Shu Xincheng, head of Zhonghuas

Notes to pages 236-40

155
156
157
158

159
160
161
162
163
164

165

166
167

168
169
170
171

172

editorial department from 1932 and chief editor for the 1936 publication Cihai, indicates
that Kung was still a director of the firm and owned the lions share, in terms of value, of the
firms stock. His 6,300 shares were worth 99,984 yuan; Du Yueshengs 11,800 shares were
valued at 86,634 yuan, suggesting that different shares had different values. See SMA, Zhonghua
shuju gufen youxian gongsi dengji shixiangbiao (1949), 90: 499, and SMA, Zhonghua shuju youxian
gongsi xianren dongshi (jiancharen) mingdan, (30 March 1949), 90: 499, 15.
WH, 99.
Ibid.
Wu, Zhonghua, 1: 74.
Xiong Shanghou, Lu Feikuei xiansheng, in Zhonghua shuju bianjibu, eds., Huiyi Zhonghua
shuju (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1987), 1: 2, says Lufei advocated the view that when education is corrected, the country will flourish (jiaoyu de dao, ze qi guo qiang sheng) in his early
publications. This view is reflected in WH, 87.
Wu, Zhonghua, 1:74.
Ibid., 1: 99. At the same time, Wang Hanqi, general manager of Xinwen bao, invited Lufei to
join the paper as chief editor.
SMA, 313.1-79, Shanghai shuye shanghui nian zhou ji niance mulu (Jiading: n.p., 1924),
7-8.
WH, 100.
Zhonghua shuju zongchang zhigong yundong shi, 50.
Wu, Zhonghua, 1: 77. Study and office supplies manufactured and sold by Zhonghua included classroom models; musical instruments; glass implements; Chinese typewriters (using
Song script); clocks featuring the day, month, and time; equipment for physics and chemistry
classrooms; briefcases; and even sports equipment.
According to Wu, Zhonghua, 1: 78, Zhonghua was forced into diversification by the proliferation of smaller publishing companies that, issuing noncopyrighted texts on cheap paper
with poor quality printing, lacked Zhonghuas high overhead. These smaller firms, rather
than buying their machinery from abroad as did the Commercial Press and others, may have
been buying the machines produced by the manufacturers profiled in Chapter 3. Zhonghuas
profit margin on published materials was already quite low. In the mid-1910s, publishers had
to sell at least 3,000 copies of journals to meet their expenses, says CYL, 1: 377, but everything above that ceiling was profit. In the 1930s, a print-run of 3,000-5,000 copies was considered good; fewer than 2,000 lost money. This diversified operation employed a great many
of the 10,000 persons ibid., 1: 79, claims worked for Zhonghua between 1912 and 1949.
Wu, Zhonghua, 1: 76.
Ibid., 1: 77. By 1932, Zhonghua already owned the most up-to-date colour printing presses in
East Asia, including double-colour offset presses, prepress machines, and electric rotary presses,
all imported from Germany.
Ibid., 1: 75.
Ibid., 1: 76.
Zhonghua shuju zongchang zhigong yundong shi, 9.
According to Drge, La Commercial Press, 95, in spite of Ministry of Education stipulations
that publishers should use only Chinese-made paper after 1931, a modern Chinese paper
mill, Wenqi zaozhi gongsi, under the supervision of Wang Yunwu did not go into production
until 1939. In the 1930s, most Chinese paper imports came from Japan.
WH, 101, 103-4. Since 1932, when Japan bombed the city of Shanghai, Lufei had been
publishing articles urging his fellow countrymen to brace for war. In August 1937, when the
Japanese renewed their aggression against Shanghai, Zhonghuas Shanghai plant and editorial department were forced to halt work. Along with Shu Xincheng, head of the editorial
department, and Wang Jinshi, printing plant director, Lufei arranged to have part of the
printing machinery shipped to the Kowloon plant, which was then expanded. Likewise, manufacture of military products was increased once Baoan Industries was relocated to Kowloon.
Most of the rest of the physical plant was moved to Kunming. Wu Jingyuan was left in charge
of Shanghai operations, and most workers were let go. Lufei also contributed 50,000 yuan for
national defence through the government-run Booksellers Same-Industry Association. In November 1937, Lufei left Shanghai for Hong Kong, from where he ran Zhonghuas operations
throughout south China. For the next two years, Lufei sought a merger with the Commercial

351

352 Notes to pages 241-43

173
174
175
176

177
178
179
180

181

182

183

184

185
186
187

188
189
190

Press, Kaiming, and other publishing firms but was eventually dissuaded by Shu Xincheng. At
the same time, he started planning Zhonghuas postwar publishing activities, concentrating
on historical, educational, and language materials. He died of heart failure on 9 July 1940
after flying back from a national educational conference in Chongqing.
Chen Cunren, Yinyuan shidai shenghuo shi (Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 2000), 255. Chen
was a famous herbal doctor who published with World Books.
Zhu, Shijie shuju, 1.
Ibid.
Zhu, Shijie shuju, 1. As late as 1917, Huiwentang was listed as a partnership, rather than a
corporation. Its retail operation was located in Qipanjie, but between 1914 and 1917, it
opened a lithographic printing plant in Penglus Jiuyuan Lane. See SMA, 313.1.23, Shanghai shuye tongye yilianbiao, (1914-29), 9B.
Zhu, Shijie shuju, 2.
WH, 151.
Ibid.
Zhu, Shijie shuju, 2. According to CYL, 1: 376, Shanghais antiquarian book trade was
dominated by Shaoxing natives until the late 1910s, undoubtedly giving Shen Zhifang an
advantage in his early operations with the Fulunshe.
Traditionally scorned for having served two dynasties, the Ming and the Qing, Qian was
eventually condemned by the Qianlong emperor in 1768-69 for his criticisms of the Manchus.
Works carrying these judgments were destroyed on the emperors orders but continued to
attract underground interest, and this interest provided Shen with his market in the early
1900s. For more on Qian Qianyi, see Frederic Wakeman, Jr., The Great Enterprise: The Manchu
Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1985), 2: 1096-98, and ECCP, 148-50.
Called my pupil by Qian Qianyi, Jin Shengtan was a native of Suzhou particularly well
regarded for his critical writings on the novel Shuihu zhuan (Outlaws of the Marsh) and on the
play Xixiang ji (Romance of the Western Chamber) among other early Chinese literary works. Jin
was implicated in the Laments in the Temple (kumiao) protest against the Qing in 1661 and
was executed the same year. See ECCP, 1: 164-66 and Patricia Sieber, Theaters of Desire: Authors,
Readers, and the Reproduction of Early Chinese Song-Drama, 1300-2000 (New York: Palgrave, 2003).
Fang was a prominent literatus and native of Tongcheng, Anhui, who, despite having been
punished for alleged involvement with an anti-Manchu cabal in 1711, spent a number of
years in charge of the Wuyingdian. A master of the guwen style, he was later regarded as the
titular founder of the Tongcheng School known for its prose style and adherence to the teachings of Zhu Xi. See ECCP, 1: 235-37.
Gong, a native of Hangzhou, was a palace-level official known as a poet and reformer who,
like Fang Bao, worked in the Wuyingdian. An opponent of foreign trade conducted at Canton, he was a friend of Lin Zexu; through his written attacks on current affairs and Qing
administration, he acquired a far-reaching reputation and influenced late-nineteenth-century
reformers Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. His son Gong Cheng was an expert in the Manchu
and Mongol languages and lived in Shanghai from 1850 to 1870, where he was known to
Wang Tao. In 1860, Gong Cheng worked as a secretary to Thomas Wade, British minister to
Beijing and future professor of Chinese at Cambridge University. See ECCP, 1: 431-34.
Chien, The Commercial Press, 24. The Fulunshe existed from 1910 to 1913.
In 1917, the Gushu liutongchu partnership was still held by Chen Liyan. See SMA, 313.1.23,
Shanghai shuye tongye yilianbiao,(1914-29), 9B.
Shen would gain similar praise in 1926-27 when he published, far in advance of either the
Commercial Press or Zhonghua, works by the pre-Nanjing Nationalist Party. In the late
1920s and 1930s, World Books would be lauded again when it published works by Communists. Perhaps precisely because of Shens boldness in each of these periods, one suspects
his motives.
Zhu, Shijie shuju, 2.
Ibid. See also WH, 152.
Yao, Zhongguo bianji shi, 295, quoting from Zheng Yimeis Shubao hua jiu (Shanghai: Xuelin
chubanshe, 1983), attributes this statement to Lufei Kui, who gave it to Xia Ruifang, Gao
Mengdan, and Zhang Yuanji.

Notes to pages 243-45

191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198

199

200
201
202

203

204
205
206
207

208

209

210

211

Zhu, Shijie shuju, 2, corroborates Wu Tieshengs evidence cited above.

CYL, 1: 376.
Ibid. The three years mentioned by Bao seem to have been from 1912 or 1913 to 1916.
Ibid.
Baos criticism was that excessive numbers of daguan had been issued and that readers would
sour on them.
During the Han dynasty, General Han Xin was granted the title Huaiyin.
CYL, 1: 376.
Bao compromised to his own benefit, for Shens eye was sharp and certain; the journal
lasted three years, a respectable duration for magazines at that time (in the late 1890s, many
folded after one or two issues). The success of the journal enabled Bao to abandon teaching,
a profession he had been pursuing at Shi Liangcais Nzi canye xuexiao (Boys and Girls
Sericulture Academy) and Yang Baishis Chengdong nxue (Girls School), to establish his
reputation as a writer and editor.
Bao says that pretty girls had already become such a common marketing gimmick for Shanghai
magazines that the nickname for periodicals was gallery of girls (fengmian nlang). See CYL,
1: 377.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Cited in Zhu, Shijie shuju, 2, and repeated more or less word for word by WH, 155, with
one difference: Zhu provides no date. WH claim that the events began in 1918, a date that
seems to be questionable since, in WHs own view, Shen left Shanghai in 1917. Chen,
Yinyuan shidai shenghuo shi, 255, another contemporary informant who published with Shen,
states that Shen was forced to leave Shanghai to avoid a gambling debt of 24,000 yuan
incurred at a Hankou Road establishment against money Shen had casually borrowed from
Zhonghua.
As Sherman Cochran, Three Roads into Shanghais Market: Japanese, Western, and Chinese Companies in the Match Trade, 1895-1937, in Wakeman and Yeh, eds., Shanghai Sojourners, 35-75, has shown, the late 1910s were the critical formative years in Chinas match
business and Shen/Huangs interest in the match business may reflect this history.
WH, 155.
Ibid. Baoshan Road, of course, was the address of the Commercial Presss manufacturing
plant and editorial offices. Shens rooms were located in Yipin Lane.
Zhu, Shijie shuju, 2, says that Shen began his new operations with a newspaper.
According to CYL, 1: 382, who did some editing work for Dadong, Dadong was a second
example of a Shanghai publishing firm run by Shaoxing natives, Shens World Books being
the first. WH, whose account of Shens resurrection is presented above, do not seem to have
read Baos account, for Bao clearly states that Shens nephew, Shen Junsheng, was a prominent individual at Dadong.
Li Shizeng, the senior Nationalist Party official who bought a controlling share in World
Books in the 1930s, wrote in a small 1946 history of the firm that Shen was influenced by the
1905 journal named Shijie zazhi in his choice of the name World Books. That journal was
started by Li, Wu Zhihui, and Zhang Renjie. See Zhu, Shijie shuju, 3. As for the publishers
use of the globe as his trademark, see Chen Qiaosun, Xiaotan chuban biaoji, CBSL 1
(1982): 141.
Ibid. Zhu, Shijie shuju, 32, says between 1921 and 1925, World brought out 1,150 titles
for an annual average of 230; 1926-33, the firms golden years, 2,043 for an annual average
of 255; 1934-45, 2,095, or 174 per year; and 1946-49, 292, or 73 per year. Throughout its
29-year history, World published a total of 5,580 titles.
The other firm was Xia Jijiang shuju. See WH, 156. On early investors, see Zhu, Shijie
shuju, 22, 27-28. Many of the new stockholders were Shens acquaintances from book and
paper businesses. They included Wei Bingrong (owner of Guangyi shuju who would remain
with Shen until the late 1930s), four others from the book business, and five paper
merchants.
Zhu, Shijie shuju, 3-4, 27-28. Under the Nationalists, the monetary unit before 1933 was
the silver tael (yinliang); after 1933, it became the silver dollar (yuan). See Chien, The Commercial Press, 22. Recall that, in 1902, the Commercial Press was incorporated with 50,000

353

354 Notes to pages 245-46

212
213

214
215

216

217

218

219
220
221

222

Qing-dynasty yuan (and would be worth five million in 1922); Zhonghua was started in 1912
with 25,000 yuan. Directors of this early board were Shen Zhifang, Wei Bingrong, Lin Xiuliang,
Mao Chunqing, and Zhang Liyun, with two supervisors. After the mid-1920s, the board was
comprised of nine or eleven persons, including a manager of a traditional bank (qianzhuang)
and Yan Duhe (World Books textbook editor). Zhu, 31, reports that, between 1921 and
1937, Worlds capital investment grew from 25,000 yuan to 730,000 yuan.
Ibid., 22.
The importance of architecture and building design to the ways in which Shanghais Westernized firms marketed themselves as early as the 1880s is discussed in Chapter 2. It does not
seem too farfetched to suppose that Shen, a master of marketing, was trading on Dianshizhais
old architectural reputation, which included a red-walled Western-style building, discussed in
Chapter 2.
Zhu, Shijie shuju, 3-4, 27-28.
The first three departments mentioned above were headed by He Runsheng, Lin Junhe, and
Li Chunrong. Xiang Hesheng was in charge of the accounting office, and Wang Defeng was
responsible for the wholesale department. Zhu Lianbao, whose memoirs are frequently cited
in this chapter, joined World Books in 1921 to direct the mail order department. This department performed three services for customers; two of them were the same as those provided by
the foreign publishers on which Shanghais Chinese publishers almost certainly modelled
their own mail-order operations. First, it sold merchandise to customers outside Shanghai.
Second, its branch stores throughout China bought local publications for sale by mail to
Shanghai customers unable to find them in the city. Third, it printed ads, wrapping paper,
business forms, etc., presumably for customers outside Shanghai. See ibid., 4.
Ibid., 4, 12-13. See also WH, 168. The first printing plant, on Hongjiang Road in the Zhabei
district, was directed by Zhang Yunshi and Wang Chunbao, and it burned in the winter of
1925 when fire spread from a neighbouring tobacco warehouse. Nearly all the printing machinery was lost at this time. Worlds second printing plant, contemporary with the first and
home to the editorial office until 1926, was located on Xiangshan Road, also in Zhabei. The
second plant was run by Shens brother, Lianfang. After compensation by the insurance company, Shen rebuilt on a greater scale on a ten-mu (1.6-acres) property he had bought in 1924
in Dalianwan Road. In the spring of 1926, the general office, editorial department, and printing plant were consolidated in the new factory. It was expanded steadily and by 1932 was five
storeys high, equipped with seventeen full-page Miehle presses (about one-third of all those
then in China). During the Japanese occupation, the main plant was occupied by the Japanese Report Office (Baodaobu). After 1949, the Communists nationalized the printing plant,
calling it Shanghai Xinhua Printing Plant (Shanghai xinhua yinshuachang).
Zhu, Shijie shuju, 4. While he was stabilizing World, Shen Zhifang also ran the Gonghe
(Republic) Book Depot with Ping Jinya to copy successful publications by other publishers.
For instance, if another publisher was successful with a certain knights-errant (wuxia) novel,
Gonghe would produce one mimicking it. Gonghe eventually failed, however, and was merged
into World. See WH, 156.
World is notorious for its publication of love stories, adventure books, all sorts of sinister
conspiratorial tales (heimu xiaoshuo), and seedy tales of romance and riches. The translation
petty urbanites is borrowed from Wen-hsin Yehs Progressive Journalism and Shanghais
Petty Urbanites, 186-238.
Zhu, Shijie shuju, 5.
JSF, 328.
The five were: Kuaihua, a biweekly edited by Li Hanqiu and Zhang Yunshi; the weekly Hong
zazhi, edited by Yan Duhe and Shi Jiqun; Yan Duhe and Zhao Tiaokuangs weekly Hong Meigui;
Jiang Hongjiaos monthly Jiating zazhi; and Shi Jiqun and Cheng Xiaoqings Zhentan shijie, a
biweekly. See WH, 158. These periodicals content was chiefly of recreational mandarin
duck and butterfly variety.
Zhu, Shijie shuju, 6-7. Prior to the appearance of the World Books version of lianhuanhua
shu, these works were known as small books (xiao shu) or small peoples books (xiaoren
shu); they represented one of the first truly innovative aspects of Shanghai publishing in the
period after the lithographic illustrated magazines. Finely illustrated, more than six well-known
traditional novels were brought out in this form, each in twenty or twenty-four chapters, all of

Notes to pages 246-48

223

224
225

226

227

228
229

230
231
232
233

234
235
236

237
238
239

which could be bought separately. Their innovative importance has been noted by Rong
Zhengchang, Lianhuan tuhua sishinian, 1908-1949, in ZCSB, 287-89, and by A Ying, Cong
Qingmo dao jiefang lianhuanhua, in ZXCS, 4: 2: 400-6. Zhu says that the illustrations were
drawn by Chen Danx and four others who had gotten their start as textbook illustrators.
After six lianhuanhua books, World abandoned the project, but it was eventually picked up by
other publishers. In the early 1990s, one could still buy lianhuanhua books published in Shanghai
a decade before.
Zhu, Shijie shuju, 3. This rate of growth was only a quarter of Zhonghuas in its first two
years. Not all were useful additions to the firm. In its early phase, when money was short,
Shen Zhifang was forced at least once to go to an old-style bank (qianzhuang) for a loan.
Concern from the bankers that they might lose their money led them to propose that one of
their own employees be employed by World in the business office so that, if anything started
to go wrong, the bank would get its money out early. Shen was forced to agree but regretted
the decision for a long time. See WH, 165.
Ibid., 159.
His eye for business led to bad blood with Kaiming shudian, Zhonghua, and Huiwentang
after 1930. In fact, Shen seems not to have thought very highly of many of his colleagues in
the book business. His closest friends, besides Wei Bingrong and Zhou Juting of Guangyi,
were L Ziquan and Wang Youtang of Dadong, Chen Liyan of the Gushu liutongchu, Ping
Jinya of Zhongyang shudian, and Tu Sicong of the World Map Study Society (Shijie yudi
xueshe). See Zhu, Shijie shuju, 21.
Shen brought in twelve editors from the Commercial Press, nine from Zhonghua, and one
from Dadong. Zhu Lianbao himself was hired from Zhonghua. See Zhu, Shijie shuju, 5, and
WH, 164.
Zhu, Shijie shuju, 21, discusses the cost of Shens haughtiness, tying the outsider position
of World Books in Shanghai publishing circles to it. Zhu says that, once Shen was replaced by
Lu Gaoyi, Worlds status rose. See also WH, 165.
Zhu, Shijie shuju, 9.
JSF, 329. Hu Renyuan lost the chancellorship of Beijing University to Cai Yuanpei in 1916
when Hus patron, Yuan Shikai, died. Following the May Fourth Incident, however, Hu, who
had made money in the Malayan rubber business and had been dean of the universitys
engineering school, had been temporarily reappointed chancellor in Cais place.
The text was titled Xinxuezhi chu gao xiao ben (New Method Introductory Middle and Elementary Text).
JSF, 159. The first series was Gongren keben (Textbooks for Workers); the second was titled
Nongmin keben (Textbooks for Peasants).
Zhu, Shijie shuju, 9-10.
Ibid., 18. The series was called Minzhong keben (Textbook for the People). According to James
E. Sheridan, Chinese Warlord: The Career of Feng Y-hsiang (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1966), 74 ff., Feng Yuxiang, the Christian General, was best remembered by his former
subordinates for his competence in training troops, and that training included military, vocational, and moral instruction.
Zhu, Shijie shuju, 10.
WH, 161.
According to (ROC) Ministry of Education, Jiaokeshu faxing gaikuang, 1919-1925, in
ZXCS, 1: 268, the front was called Gongmin, but Zhu Lianbao, citing several unnamed old
Commercial Press and Zhonghua workers, believes that its true name was Guomin. Strikingly, Gongmin shuju was also the name of Wang Yunwus original bookstore. In 1921,
when Wang, the future general manager of the Commercial Press, joined the Press, Gongmin
was worth 40,000 yuan. Gongmins assets were merged with those of the Commercial Press.
See Zhu, Jiefangqian Shanghai shudian (2), in CBSL 2 (1983): 148, and Zhang, Mantan
Shangwu, 84.
Zhu, Shijie shuju, 9-10, tallying with ZXCS, 1: 268, states that the Commercial Press invested three-quarters of the total (400,000 yuan) and that Zhonghua put in one-quarter.
For a brief history of Guomin shuju, see Zhu Lianbao, Jiefangqian Shanghai shudian (8), in
CBSL 8 (1987:2): 110.
WH, 162.

355

356 Notes to pages 248-51

240
241
242
243

244

245
246

247
248

249
250

251
252

Ibid., 161.
Ibid., 162.
Ibid., 163. Weis printing firm was known as Wenhua yinshuju.
Zhu, Shijie shuju, 10-11, citing Yue Sibings article Shinianlai de guoyu yundong, Shijie
zazhi zengkan shinian (n.p.: n.p., 1931). Yue also comments although the book publishers
actively used the National Language Movement to make money, their contributions should
not be overlooked. When the Movement began, Zhonghuas manager Lufei Kui knew that
the [goal] would have to be realized. [For this reason], he participated in the national Standard Pronunciation Conference, established a special National Language school, produced
gramophone records for National [Language] pronunciation [instruction, and] published a
large number of National Language books ... Superficially, the Commercial Press appeared to
be left somewhat behind, but it caught up, with results at least as good as Zhonghuas.
Shen was by no means the first in Shanghai to discover that the Republican Revolution was
good for the publishing business. According to Zhang, Zai chuban jie, 127-28, the period
1925-27 was the Golden Age of Shanghais New-Book Industry. The local warlords Sun
Chuanfang and Li Baozhang had little interest in interfering with the publishers of the International Concession, he says. The first to respond was Zhang Bingwen, a publisher-merchant
in charge of the Pacific Printing Company. He edited and printed an anthology of Sun Yatsens writings. After printing it, he took it personally to Canton, where he earned 80,000100,000 yuan for it. His success was soon imitated by Dazhong huju and Changjiang shudian.
In fact, says Zhang, anyone who could get their hands on printing machinery, no matter who
they were, could immediately get rich. The wealth soon spread to printers. As long as you
had some way to print, there was no need to worry that there would not be a market.
Zhu, Shijie shuju, 16-17. They covered topics such as national political issues, the Three
Peoples Principles, the agrarian question, and the unequal treaties. See also WH, 166.
Although distributed chiefly in the south, one work did travel north to Shandong. Mistakenly
bound using the cover for Middle School Chinese Literature, 500 copies of Worlds printing of
Elementary Introduction to the Peasant Movement were sent to a school in Jinan. When the school
discovered that the contents of the books received were red (chihua), they returned the
books to Jinan and asked for an exchange. An examiner in the Jinan post office seized the
package. Almost immediately the military police were sent to surround Worlds Jinan branch,
where they arrested the manager, Guo Mengzhi, and other employees. The accountant escaped and contacted Worlds main office in Shanghai. Director Sun Gaomei and several World
managers telegraphed the Shandong warlord, Zhang Zongchang (The Dogmeat General,
[Chinese, gourou jiangjun], 1881-1932), and his publicity chief, seeking the employees release. Eventually, all but Guo were freed. Guo was not liberated until the Northern Expedition army arrived in Jinan. See Zhu, Shijie shuju, 17.
Ibid. Zhu notes that Pan Lianbi, a Shanghai police chief, was on Shen Zhifangs payroll.
Ibid., 5-6. Mao Dun, under the name Xuan Zhu, published ten works on literature with
World. Yang, using the pseudonym Li Haowu, published three works, including one of the
first in Chinese to employ Marxist dialectical materialism in educational research, a work that
appeared in 1929. By 1931, it had gone through four editions. See WH, 167.
Zhu, Shijie shuju, 9. World paid Yu 300 yuan per month, a sum that was picked up by Yus
secretary.
World led Guangzhi to reprint several important old titles, including Wu Woyaos Vignettes
from the Late Qing, Henhai (Sea of Regret), Jiuming jiyuan (The Strange Injustice of Nine Murders), and Dianmu qidan (Strange Accounts of the Electrical Craft). See WH, 168.
Zhu, Shijie shuju, 7.
World Books was to represent Chens interests in Shanghai (although Chen did open a retail
outlet of his own on Nanjing Road), and Chen was to assist with sales of Worlds books in
Singapore. Yu Runsheng was sent out from Shanghai to manage a bookstore in Singapore.
Profits were to be reckoned at years end. Before long, Chen was investing the profits of his
Shanghai activities in World; World reciprocated by printing 10,000 copies of Chens book of
medical prescriptions, called Yanfang xinbian. Chen distributed the work overseas. See Zhu,
Shijie shuju, 7, and WH, 169. Worlds ties to Chen Jiageng himself also led to close ties

Notes to pages 251-52

253

254
255
256
257

258
259

260
261
262

263
264

with Xiamen University, which Chen founded and ran singlehandedly from 1921 to 1937.
The Commercial Press, too, maintained close ties with Xiamen University.
Other investors listed by Zhu, Shijie shuju, 22-24, 27-28 and WH, 170, are the big businessmen or professionally prominent Guan Jiongzhi, Sun Gengmei (a judge in Shanghais
Mixed Court, invited to invest in World by his nephew Liu Fuxun who worked in one of
Worlds printing plants and eventually became Shen Zhifangs assistant), Suns colleagues in
the legal profession Huang Hanzhi (also a well-respected philanthropist) and Lu Zhongliang;
Wang Yiting (a well-known calligrapher invited by Huang Hanzhi); Zhu Yingjiang (a lumber
merchant); and Gu Xiangyi (a grain merchant). Investors from the world of banking included
Wu Yunrui (manager of Jincheng Bank); Qian Yongming; and eight others. Many eventually
joined the board of directors, but Zhu Lianbao ingenuously insists that World remained a
private corporation free of the government, although not free of bureaucratic capitalists, until
1945. Other directors from the 1921-34 period, not yet mentioned here, were Shen Lianfang
(head of the World printing plant and Shen Zhifangs brother), Wu Nanpu (newspaper owner),
Zhang Yunshi (World editor), Xu Weinan (World editor), Zhu Shaoqing (World editor), Li
Chunrong (World manager), Lin Junhe (World manager), three merchants, and a fishmonger.
The bank went bankrupt in either 1934 (WH, 171) or 1935 (Zhu, Shijie shuju, 24).
Zhu, Shijie shuju, 24.
Ibid., 25.
Lu Gaoyi was brought to World Books in 1933 by his Zhijiang University (Hangzhou) classmate, Lin Handa, who proposed Lu for the recently vacated position of Shens secretary. Lu
was then head of the middle school affiliated with Zhijiang University. Lin himself had first
come to Shen Zhifangs attention in about 1923 when he submitted a winning essay to a
World-sponsored English-language writing contest. After graduating in 1924, Lin began teaching
at Siming Middle School in Ningbo. In 1928, he joined Xiamen University professor Xiao
Bingshi in working on an English textbook series that they then proposed to World. Shen,
remembering Lins prize essay, offered Lin a position as head of the English-language editorial
office, a position that had just been vacated by editor Yan Duhe, who left for a job with a
newspaper. During his tenure, Lin was chief editor of at least five English-language textbooks.
After 1937, Lin went to America to study but returned when the war ended to teach at
Huadong University, eventually becoming a dean at Zhijiang University. By the late 1940s,
Lin Handa was a member of Worlds board as well as an outside editor. See Zhu, Shijie
shuju, 7-8.
Ibid., 25. Jincheng Bank had invested 60,000-70,000 yuan in World.
Ibid. Although Li signed on for 500,000 yuan, he paid only 50,000 at first. His directorship
was voted down by the stockholders, and, in a last bid to retain independent control, Shen
Zhifang redistributed shares. After organizing an investment group including Hu Yuzhi, Du
Yuesheng, and three others, each of whom was supposed to contribute 50,000 yuan to Li in
an effort to take control of World, Li tried to evaluate the true financial situation at World.
Neither he nor his investment group, with the exception of Du Yuesheng, ever did contribute
to World. Du paid 50,000 yuan from his Zhongguo Tongshang Bank in an effort to add to his
reputation as a patron of culture. Between 1935 and 1946, Li Shizengs group did dominate
Worlds board. It included new investors Li himself, Chen Hexian (erstwhile Jiangsu provincial education chief), Du Yuesheng, and seven others; the only independents were Shen, Lu
Gaoyi (who brought Li into the firm), Lu Zhongliang (former judge and then a lawyer), and
Wei Bingrong (the Guangyi shuju merchant who had been with World since 1921 and who
had aided it materially during the final textbook war). See Zhu, Shijie shuju, 28.
Ibid., 9, 26, and WH, 171.
His library was named the Cuifenge (Pure Fragrance Pavilion). See WH, 172.
Ibid. This date of his death comes from WH with one modification. All sources agree that
Shen died in 1939 except WH. WH say that Shen died at age fifty-eight; he could only have
been fifty-eight if he died in 1939.
Zhu, Shijie shuju, 32. Zhu says that World had at one time had over 1,000 professors and
teachers on its payroll helping with curriculum and textbook content.
JSF, 328.

357

358 Notes to pages 258-73

Conclusion
1 Although it is clear that the combination of editing, printing, and marketing in a single firm
distinguishes Chinese print capitalism from Anglo-American versions, comparison with modern continental European, Japanese, and Korean publishing operations must await future
studies.
2 Technically, the treaty-port system was finished by 1945; the Japanese invasion terminated
European privileges in 1941 and the Americans ended their claims in 1943. Britains renunciation followed. Still, after 1945, when the Western powers returned, it was hard to break
old habits.
3 From its second-storey balcony, Peoples Liberation Army general Chen Yi (1901-72) declared
the establishment of the Peoples government in 1949.
4 Jean-Pierre Drge, La Commercial Press de Shanghai, 1897-1949 (Paris: Memoires de lInstitut
des Hautes tudes Chinoises, 1978), 111, 124-25. In 1946, by contrast, a year after the
Second Sino-Japanese War ended and after the Shanghai publishers had straggled back from
their inland exiles, only 16 percent of Chinas published books would originate in Shanghai.
5 Marc Bloch, Technology and Social Evolution: Reflections of a Historian, in Sabyasachi
Bhattacharya and Pietro Redondi, eds., Techniques to Technology: A French Historiography of Technology (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1990), 87.
6 Ibid.
7 JSF, 330.
8 SUN, 2: 1181, 1202. SUN estimates that Shenbao employed 100 workers in 1894.
9 Liu Dajun, 1933-nian Shanghai minzu jiqi gongye yu Shanghai de qita zhuyao gongye de
bijiao, from Zhongguo gongye diaocha baogao, in SMJG, 2: 602.
10 Ibid.
11 Shanghai Municipal Council, Annual Report 1935 (Shanghai: North China Daily News Publishing, 1935), 56. This figure refers to the area of Shanghai, known as the International
Concession, administered by the British and Americans and does not include the surrounding
area administered by Chinese authorities or the French Concession.
12 Sun Yat-sen, cited in Sun Zhongshan xiansheng tan chuban gongzuo, in CBSL 20 (1990:
2): 125.
13 See Sun Yat-sen, Yu haiwai Guomindang tongzhi shu, in Hu Hanmin, ed., Zongli quanji
(Shanghai: Minzhi shuju, 1930), 3: 346.
14 Zhang Xianwen and Mu Weiming, eds., Jiangsu Minguo shiqi chubanshi (Nanjing: Jiangsu Renmin
chubanshe, 1993), 142-43.
15 Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), 178.
16 Luo Jialun, Jinri Zhongguo zhi zazhi jie, in ZXCS, 1: 79-86.
17 Ting Sheng, Chubanjie de hunluan yu changqing [1925], in ZXCS, 1: 241.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., 1: 245-6. For a historical example of a publishing operation that combined a shared
political mission with incorporation, see Ling Arey Shiao, Bridging Influence and Income:
May Fourth Intellectuals Approaches to Cultural Economy in the Post-May Fourth Era
(unpublished Association of Asian Studies conference paper, 2003), which discusses Kaiming
shudian, founded in 1926. Also, see below.
20 Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 14501800, trans. David Gerard (London: New Left Books, 1976), 12.
21 Paul Chauvet, Les Ouvriers du livre en France: Des origines la Rvolution de 1789 (Paris: Librairie
Marcel Rivire, 1956); P.H. Noyes, Organization and Revolution: Working Class Associations in the
German Revolutions of 1848-1849 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 195. On printers active in the German revolutions of 1848, particularly Karl Marxs associate Stephan
Born, see 27, 128-60, 192-202. Charles A. Ruud, Russian Entrepreneur: Publisher Ivan Sytin of
Moscow, 1851-1934 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1990), discusses in considerable detail the impact of Moscows printers, nicknamed the Sytintsi after
their employer, in the citywide printers strike of 1903 and the revolution of 1905; see Chapters 4 and 5. On the role of printing in state-building in this period, see Wolfram Siemann,
The German Revolution of 1848-49, trans. Christiane Banerji (New York: St. Martins Press,
1998), Chapter 7. On managements view of the modern German publishing business, see

Notes to pages 273-78

22
23
24
25
26

27
28
29
30
31

32

Gary D. Stark, Entrepreneurs of Ideology: Neoconservative Publishers in Germany, 1890-1933 (Chapel

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981). Finally, in the United States, printers importance in society has been acknowledged through economic and sociological studies rather
than historical ones. See Elizabeth Faulkner Baker, Displacement of Men by Machines: Effects of
Technological Change in Commercial Printing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933); Jacob
Loft, The Printing Trades (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944); Seymour Martin Lipset et al.,
Union Democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union (New York: Free
Press, 1956); and Maggie Holtzberg-Call, The Lost World of the Craft Printer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992).
Linda Shaffer, Mao and the Workers: The Hunan Labor Movement, 1920-1923 (Armonk, NY:
M.E. Sharpe, 1982), 144.
Ibid., 149.
Parks Coble, The Shanghai Capitalists and the Nationalist Government, 1927-1937 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard Council on East Asian Studies, 1986), 59.
Not surprisingly, they are also absent from an eighteenth-century novel that discusses print
culture, Wu Jingzis Rulin waishi (The Scholars).
Mao Dun, Wartime, in Mao Tun, Spring Silkworms and Other Stories, trans. Sydney Shapiro
(Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1956), 167. See also Mao Dun, You di er zhang, in Mao
Dun quanji (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1984), 8: 288-311.
In Rulin waishi, Wu Jingzis character Ma Junshang, the model-essay editor from Hangzhous
Literary Expanse Bookshop, is presented as bland and conniving if also warm-hearted.
Mao Dun, Wo zouguo de daolu (Hong Kong: Sanlian shudian, 1984), 2: 264.
Mao Dun, Shaonian yinshua gong, in Mao Dun quanji (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe,
1984), 4: 177.
Ibid., 4: 220.
Mao Dun draws a contrast between the kind of apprenticeships necessitated by Shanghais
capitalist society and the kind of work-study options available in a socialist society such as the
Soviet Union.
In addition to Mao Duns early work, subsequent examples of pro-Communist fiction in
which printers play prominent roles include Yang Mo, The Song of Youth (1958), trans. Nan
Ying (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1978), and Gao Yunlan, Annals of a Provincial Town
(1959), trans. Sidney Shapiro (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1980). Memoir literature,
interestingly, comments not on print workers but on bookshop workers and editors. See Jung
Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (New York: Anchor Books, 1992), esp. 118-20;
Liang Heng and Judith Shapiro, Son of the Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1983); and
Luo Zi-ping, A Generation Lost: China under the Cultural Revolution (New York: Avon, 1991).

359

Selected Asian-Language Bibliography

Abbreviations
CBSL
Chuban shiliao (Shanghai) 1-31 (1982-93).
CYL
Bao, Tianxiao. Chuanyinglou huiyilu. 2 vols. Hong Kong: Dahua chuban she, 1971
[1959].
DSZ
Dianshizhai huabao. Canton: Renmin chubanshe, 1983 [1884-98].
GGZ
Ge, Gongzhen. Zhongguo baoxue shi. Taipei: Taiwan hseh-sheng shu-ch, 1982
[Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1927].
HSN
He, Shengnai. Sanshiwu nian lai Zhongguo zhi yinshu shu. In Zhang Jinglu,
ed., Zhongguo jindai chuban shiliao, chubian, vol. 1. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1957.
[Originally published in Zuijin 35-nian zhi Zhongguo jiaoyu. Shanghai: Commercial
Press, 1931].
JSF
Ji, Shaofu, et al., eds. Zhongguo chuban jianshi. Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 1991.
MGRB
Minguo ribao (Shanghai) 1917-19, 1926-27.
SMA
Shanghai Municipal Archives. Shanghaishi shuye tongye gonghui (1864-1949),
S313.1-4.
SMJG
Jingji suo, Zhongguo shehui kexue yuan, ed. Shanghai minzu jiqi gongye. 2 vols.
[Beijing]: Zhonghua shuju, [1979].
SUN
Sun, Yutang, ed. Zhongguo jindai gongye shi ziliao, di yi ji, 1840-1895. Series 2. Part
2, 2 vols. Beijing: Kexue chubanshe, 1957.
SXSJ
Shanghaishi Xinsijun lishi yanjiuhui yinshu yinchao zu, ed. Zhongguo yinshua shi
ziliao huibian. 3 vols. [Luoyang?]: n.p., [1990?].
WH
Wang, Zhen, and He Yueming. Zhongguo shi da chubanjia. Taiyuan: Shuhai
chubanshe, 1991.
YW
Yiwen yinshua yuekan/The Graphic Printer, 1937-1940 (Shanghai). Reprint ed. Shanghai: Shanghaishi xinsijun lishi yanjiuhui yinshua yinchao zu, 1985.
ZCSB
Zhang, Jinglu, ed. Zhongguo chuban shiliao, bubian. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1957.
ZJCSC
Zhang, Jinglu, ed. Zhongguo jindai chuban shiliao, chubian. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju,
1957.
ZJCSE
Zhang, Jinglu, ed. Zhongguo jindai chuban shiliao, er bian. Shanghai: Qunlian
chubanshe, 1954.
ZXCS 1-4 Zhang, Jinglu, ed. Zhongguo xiandai chuban shiliao. 4 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju,
1954-59.
ZYS
Zhang, Xiumin. Zhongguo yinshua shi. Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 1991.
Interviews
Shanghaishi Xinsijun lishi yanjiuhui yinshu yinchao zu. May 1993, Shanghai.
Song, Yuanfang. Multiple interviews. 1991-93, Shanghai.
Wang, Zhen. Shanghai cishu chubanshe, March 1992, Shanghai.
Zhang, Shunian. Multiple interviews regarding his father, Zhang Yuanji, and the Commercial
Press, 1991-92, Shanghai.

Selected Asian-Language Bibliography 361

Archival Sources
SMA. 1914 Shuye gongsuo zhiyuan biao. 313.1.23. (1914).
. Chongjian Chongde gongsuo zhengzi (xiaoyin). 313.1.99: Documents 1-8. (1878-1910).
. Guanyu shuye gongsuo yin xin Guomin kuailan yi ji gongsuo kuaiji bu, etc., 313.1.86.
(1914-16).
. Jiayin dingsi jian sannian zhi baogao. 313.1.2. (1914-17).
. Jin jiang ben gongsuo shoufu gekuan kailie. 313.1.80: Documents 1-3. (September 1890).
. Jingji jingcha di yi dui. 27: 90. (1943-45).
. Qingchao benye shangtuan ... jinian zhaopian. 313.1.51. (1911).
. Qingchao shuye shanghui er dong mingdan. 313.1.27. (1907-9).
. Shanghai shuye Chongdetang gongsuo xianxing guize caogao. 313.1.2. (n.d.).
. Shanghai shuye shanghui nian zhouji niance mulu. 313.1-79. Jiading: n.p., 1924.
. Shanghai shuye shanghui zhangcheng. Includes Banquan zhangcheng. 313.1.3.
(1906-11).
. Shanghai shuye shanghui zhangcheng. 313.1.3. (1911).
. Shanghai shuye shanghui zhangcheng. 313.1.3. (1915 revision).
. Shanghai shuye shangtuan tongzhi xinshilu. 313.1.23.
. Shanghai shuye tongye yilanbiao. 313.1.23. (1914-29, 1917).
. Shuye gongsuo huiyi jilu bu. 313.1.88. (1917-27).
. Shuye gongsuo huiyuan ruhui zhiyuanshu. 313.1.62. (24 May 1923-7 July 1927).
. Shuye gongsuo quanti zhiyuan (huidong) de zhaopian. 313.1.29. (1917).
. Shuye gongsuo zongdong Gao Fengchi zhuan ci Zongshanghui daibiao. 313.1.33. (1919).
. Shuye shanghui xiehui, shuye youyi xiehui, Shanghai shuxi tuanti lianhehui, Suzhou chi
caiyin tongye guilie. 313.1.41. (July 1915).
. Shanghai shuye gongsuo. Shanghai shuye gongsuo luocheng quanti dahui kaihui ci.
313.1.2.8. (1915).
. Shanghai shuye tongye. Shanghai shuye tongye yilanbiao, 1914. 313.1.23. 1914-29.
. Shanghai shuye tongye. Shanghai shuye tongye yilanbiao, 1917. 313.1.23. 1914-29.
. Suzhou Chongde gongsuo. [In-house notice.] 313.1.99, 1: 2B. (1874).
. Suzhou Chongde gongsuo. [Untitled document.] 313.1.99, 2. (1864-1909).
. Zhonghua shuju gufen youxian gongsi dengji shixiangbiao. 90: 499. (1949).
. Zhonghua shuju youxian gongsi xianren dongshi (jiancharen) mingdan. 90: 499. (30
March 1949).
Published Sources
Ba, Jin. Ba Jin zixu. Ed. Chen Qiongzhi. Beijing: Tuanjie chubanshe, 1996.
Bai, Mu [trans.]. Yinshuashu jiangzuo, er. In Yiwen yinshua yuekan/The Graphic Printer (Shanghai) 2, 2 (1939): 37-39.
Beijing tushuguan, ed. Minguo shiqi zong shumu, 1911-1949. Beijing: Shumu wenxian chubanshe,
1986, 1994.
Chen, Cunren. Yinyuan shidai shenghuo shi. Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 2000.
Chen, Guoqiang. Ershi niandai mo de Nanjing shudianye. Jiangsu chubanshi zhi 5 (1991: 1):
113-17.
Chen, Lifu. Chengbai zhi jian: Chen Lifu huiyi lu. Taipei: Zhengzhong shuju, 1994.
Chen, Pingyuan, and Xia Shaohong, eds. Ershi shiji Zhongguo xiaoshuo lilun ziliao. Vol. 1 (18971916). Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1989.
Chen, Qiaosun. Xiaotan chuban biaoji. CBSL 1 (1982): 141-43.
Du, Jiutian [Shangwu]. Gonghui shi. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1938.
Fan, Muhan, ed. Zhongguo yinshua jindai shi, chu gao. Beijing: Yinshua gongye chubanshe, 1995.
Fan, Quan. Zhongguo chubanjie jianshi. Shanghai: Yongxiang yinshuguan, 1936.
Fan, Xizeng, ed. Shumu dawen buzheng. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1963 [1876].
Fang, Houshu. Zhongguo chuban shihua. Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe, 1996.
Fang, Xing, and Tang Zhijun, eds. Wang Tao riji. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1987.
Feng, Shaoting, and Qian Gendi, eds. Chuangjian shuye gongsuo qi. CBSL 10 (1987: 4):
41-42.
. Shanghai shuye gongsuo chuciding dingzhangcheng. CBSL 10 (1987: 4): 43-44.

362 Selected Asian-Language Bibliography

. Shanghai shuye gongsuo zhiyuan mingdan. CBSL 10 (1987: 4): 42-43.

Fu, Yijiu. Zongli Yamen dangan suo jian Woguo zaoqi youpiao yinxing shiliao. Dangan yu
lishi (1986: 2): 1-3.
Fu, Yunsen, ed. Xin zidian. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1912.
Gezhi huibian. 1876.
Gong, Chanxing. Xinwen huajia Wu Youru: Jiantan Wu Youru yanjiu zhong de jige wenti.
Meishu pinglun. N.p.: n.p., [1991?]: 68-75.
Gu, Tingpei. Shanghai shudian jiuzhi. Shanghai difangshi ziliao 6 (1988): 49-50.
Gu, Yulu. Shanghai tianzhujiao chuban gaikuang. CBSL 10 (1987: 4): 30-34.
Gu, Zuyin. Shangwu menshibu de kaijia chuangju. CBSL 5 (1986): 27-29.
Han, Qi, and Wang Yangzong. Qingchao zhi shiyin shu. [Source unknown, collected in
Ricci Institute Library, University of San Francisco.] N.p.: n.p., 1991.
He, Buyun. Zhongguo huozi xiaoshi. In Shanghai Xinsijun lishi yanjiuhui, yinshua yinchao
fenhui, ed., Huozi yinshua yuanliu, 66-88. Beijing: Yinshua gongye chubanshe, 1990.
Hu, Daojing. Shanghai tushuguan shi. Shanghai: Shanghaishi tongzhiguan, 1935.
. 1933-nian de Shanghai zazhijie. In Shanghai tongshe, ed., Shanghai yanjiu ziliaoxu, 2135. Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1935.
. Wo dushu zai Shanghai de tushuguan li. In Tang Weikang, Zhu Dalu, and Du Li, eds.,
Shanghai yishi, 96-104. Shanghai: Wenhua chubanshe, 1987.
Hu, Juemin. Suzhou baokan liushi nian. Jindaishi ziliao 61 (1986): 130-48.
Hu, Yuzhi. Wo de huiyi. [Nanjing]: Jiangsu Renmin chubanshe, 1990.
Huang, Hanmin, and Lu Xinglong. Jindai Shanghai gongye qiye fazhan shilun. Shanghai: Caijing
daxue chubanshe, 2000.
Ichinose, Yuichi. Shin-dai Rurisho- sho-shi ni kan suru hitotsu ko-satsu. Shisen: Historical and
Geographic Studies in Kansai University 77 (1988): 25-39.
Ji, Chuangmei. Zhongguo shuiyin muke banhua. Taipei: Xiongshi tushu gufen youxian gongsi,
1990.
Jiang, Wenhan. Guangxuehui shi zenma yang yige jigou. Wenshi ziliao 43 (1964: 3): 1-42.
Jiangsu sheng chuban shizhi bianmu weiyuanhui bianjibu, eds. Jiangsu Minguo shiqi chuangshi.
Nanjing: Jiangsu Renmin chubanshe, 1993.
Jin, Liren, and He Shiyou. Yang Xianjiang zhuanji. Nanjing: Jiangsu jiaoyu chubanshe, 1991.
Ka, Te [Thomas Francis Carter]. Zhongguo yinshua shu de faming he ta de xichuan. Trans. Wu
Zeyan. Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1957.
Laodong jie (Shanghai). Reprint ed. [Beijing?]: Gongren chubanshe, 1958.
Li, Baijian. Zhongguo chubanshi. Beijing: Zhongguo shuji chubanshe, 1991.
Li, Jianqing. Minchu Shanghai wentan. Shanghai difangshi ziliao 4 (1986): 202-17.
Li, Xiangbo. Wo he Zhonghua shuju Shanghai yinshuachang. In Zhonghua shuju bianjibu,
ed., Huiyi Zhonghua shuju. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1987. 1: 193-206.
Liao, Hecheng, and Chen Mengxiong. Kaibi caolai de chubanjia Zhang Yuanji. Zhongguo
qiyejia liezhuan (Beijing) 2 (1988): 171-93.
Lin, Heqin. Ziben yu yinshua shiye. Yiwen yinshua yuekan 1, 12 (1937). Reprinted in Yan
Shuang, ed. Zhongguo yinshua shi ziliao huibian. Shanghai: Shanghaishi xinsijun lishiyanjiuhui,
yinshua-yinchao zu, n.d. 1: 120-23.
Lin, Kanghou, ed. Shanghaishi hanghaolu tulu. Shanghai: [Fuli yingye gongsi], 1939.
Liu, Hecheng. Zhang Yuanji xiansheng shengping zhanlan. In Zhang Yuanji yishi zhuanji zhi
er, 26-32. Haiyan: Zhengxie wenshi ziliao gongzuo weiyuanhui, 1992.
Liu, Longguang. Zhongguo yinshuashu de gaige. Yiwen yinshua yinchao 1, 4 (1937). Reprinted in Yan Shuang, ed. Zhongguo yinshua shi ziliao huibian. Shanghai: Shanghaishi xinsijun
lishi yanjiuhui, yinshua yinchao zu, n.d. 1: 84-96.
. Zhongguo yinshuashu de yange, xia. Yiwen yinshua yuekan/The Graphic Printer (Shanghai)
1, 2 (1937): 4-7.
Liu, Mingkui, and Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan jindai shi yanyiu hui, eds. Zhongguo gongren
jieji lishi zhuangkuang (1840-1949). Vol. 1. [Beijing]: Zhonggong Zhongyang dang jiao
chubanshe, 1985.
Lu, Erkui, et al., eds. Ciyuan. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1915.
Lu, Runxiang. Ding Fubao yu chuban gongzuo. CBSL 3 (1984): 63-64.

Selected Asian-Language Bibliography 363

Lu, Xun. Lu Xun quanji. Vol. 2. Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1989.

Mao, Dun. Shaonian yinshua gong. Mao Dun quanji. Vol. 4. Beijing: Renmin wenxue
chubanshe, 1984. 119-222.
. Wo zouguo de daolu. 3 vols. Hong Kong: Sanlian shudian, 1989.
. You di er zhang. Mao Dun quanji. Vol. 8. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1984. 288311.
Mao, Zedong. Zhongguo geming he Zhongguo gongchandang. Mao Zedong xuanji. Beijing:
Renmin chubanshe, 1955 [1939]. 2: 615-50.
Meng, Tao [pseud.]. Chubanjie yipie. Dushu yu chuban (Shanghai: Shenzhou guoguangshe)
1 (1933): 5-10.
Miao, Zipeng. Jin bainian lai de keshu yu cangshu. Shanghai difangshi ziliao 4 (1986): 17985.
Mo, Anshi. Yangwu yundong. Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 1961.
Ping, Jinya. Shanghai chubanjie suowen. Shanghai difangzhi shi ziliao 4 (1986): 218-44.
Quanguo Zhongyi tushu lianhe mulu. Beijing: Zhongyi guji chubanshe, 1991.
Ren, Jiayao. Zhili tushu chuban faxing gongzuo de Zhang Jinglu. Zhongguo qiyejia liezhuan
(Beijing) 5 (1991): 140-50.
Saoye shanfang, ed. Saoye shanfang shumu. Shanghai: Saoye shanfang, 1917.
Shanghai chubanzhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, ed. Zhengji Shanghai chuban shiliao qishi. CBSL
11 (1988: 1): 87, 34.
Shanghai difang shi ziliao. Vol. 4. Shanghai: Shehui kexue yuan chubanshe, n.d.
Shanghai tongshe, ed. Shanghai yanjiu ziliao, xubian. Shanghai: Shanghai shudian yinhang,
1984.
Shanghai xian xuzhi. [Taipei]: Chengwen chubanshe, 1970 [1918].
Shanghai yanjiu zhongxin and Shanghai Renmin chubanshe, eds. Shanghai 700 nian. Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 1991.
Shanghai zhinan. Shanghai: Zhongguo huaan hequn baoshou youxian gongsi, 1923.
Shanghai zhizaochang shangbu lan. [Shanghai]: Lianhe zhengxin, 1947.
Shanghaishi chuban gongzuozhe xiehui, eds. Shanghai chuban shiye de gouqu, xianzai, he
jianglai. In Shanghaishi chuban gongzuozhe xiehui, ed., Shanghai shuzhan, teji, and Shanghai chuban gongzuo, 127-31. Shanghai: n.p., 1984.
Shanghaishi nianjian. 2 vols. [Shanghai]: n.p., 1936.
Shanghaishi nianjian. 4 vols. [Shanghai]: n.p., 1937.
Shanghaishi shuye tongye gonghui. CBSL 4 (1987): 45-49.
Shanghaishi Xinsijun lishi yanjiuhui, yinshua yinchao fenhui, ed. Diaoban yinshua yuanliu.
Beijing: Yinshua gongye chubanshe, 1990.
. Huozi yinshua yuanliu. Beijing: Yinshua gongye chubanshe, 1990.
Shangwu yinshu guan, ed. Chuban zhoukan (Shanghai) (new series) 75 (1934), 151-74
(1935-36).
. Shanghai zhinan. Shanghai: Shangwu yinshu guan, 1923.
. Shangwu yinshu guan bei hui ji. [Shanghai]: Commercial Press, 1932.
. Shangwu yinshu guan fuye hou gaikuang. [Shanghai]: Commercial Press, [1934].
. Shangwu yinshu guan jiushi nian, wo he Shangwu yinshu guan, 1897-1987. Beijing: Commercial Press, 1987.
. Shangwu yinshu guan jiushiwu nian, wo he Shangwu yinshu guan, 1897-1992. Beijing: Commercial Press, 1992.
. Shangwu yinshu guan zhile. [Shanghai]: Commercial Press, 1929.
. Zuijin sanshiwu nian zhi Zhongguo jiaoyu. [Shanghai]: Commercial Press, [1937].
Shangwu yinshu guan dashiji. Beijing: Commercial Press, 1987.
Shehui ribao. 1936.
Shen, Zuwei, ed. Jindai Zhongguo ziye: Zhidu he fazhan. Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexue yuan,
1999.
Shenbao. 1876, 1887.
Shenbao gaikuang. Shanghai: [Shenbao?], 1935.
Shenbao nianjian. [Shanghai]: Shenbao chuban, 1933.
Shenbao nianjian. [Shanghai]: Shenbao chuban, 1934.

364 Selected Asian-Language Bibliography

Shenbao nianjian. [Shanghai]: Shenbao chuban, 1935.

Shi, Meicen. Zhongguo yinshua fazhan shi. Taipei: Taiwan Shangwu yinshu guan, 1966, 1986.
Shou, Ming. Shanghai fangyan shiye tan. Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1992.
Shu, Xincheng, et al., comp. Cihai. 2 vols. Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1936-37.
Song, Yuanfang. Ji Shanghaishi shuye gonghui. CBSL 10 (1987: 4): 37-50.
. Yinggai yanjiu Zhongguo chubanshi. CBSL 11 (1988: 1): 73-74.
. Zhongguo jindai chuban dashiji. CBSL 19-24 (1990: 1-1991: 2).
Song, Yuanfang, and Li Bojian. Zhongguo chuban shi. Beijing: Zhongguo shuji chubanshe, 1991.
Song, Yunrong. Kaiming jiushi, Wo suo zhidao de Kaiming shudian. Wenshi ziliao xuanji 31
(1962: 10): 1-30.
Su, Jing. Jindai cangshu 30 jia. Taipei: Chuan-chi wen-hsueh chu-pan she, 1983.
Sun, Dianqi, ed. Liulichang xiaozhi. Beijing: Beijing guji chubanshe, 1982 [1962].
Sun, Yat-sen. Sun Zhongshan xiansheng tan chuban gongzuo. CBSL 20 (1990: 2): 125.
Suzhou lishi bowuguan, Jiangsu shifan xueyuan lishixi, and Nanjing daxue Ming Qing yanjiushi,
eds. Ming Qing Suzhou gong shang ye beike ji. [Nanjing?]: Jiangsu Renmin chubanshe, 1981.
Tao, Shuimu. Zhejiang shangbang yu Shanghai jingji jindaihua yanjiu, 1840-1936. Shanghai: Sanlian
shudian, 2000.
Tao, Xisheng, ed. Xu Yuzhai [Xu Run] zixu nianpu. Taipei: Shihuo chubanshe, 1977.
Tongzhi Shanghai xianzhi. Wumen: n.p., 1871.
To-puro Ko-gyo-shi Hensan linkai, eds. To-kyo- Purosesu seihan ko-gyo-shi. To-kyo-: To-kyo- Purosesu
ko-gyo-shi kyo-do- kumiai, 1974.
Wang, Bomin. Zhongguo banhuashi. Taipei: Lanting shudian, 1986.
Wang, Hanzhang. Kanyin zongshu. ZJCSE, 363.
Wang, Hewu, et al., eds. Qicai xiangyan pai. Shanghai: Shanghai kexue jishu wenxian chubanshe,
1998.
Wang, Jiarong. Shangwu yinshu guan chuangban ren Xia Ruifang. Zhongguo qiyejia liezhuan
(Beijing) 2 (1988): 162-70.
. 1930-nian qian Shangwu yinshu guan de faxing. Jiangsu chuban shi zhi 9 (1992: 2):
42-48.
Wang, Jingyu, ed. Zhongguo jindai gongye shi ziliao de er ji, 1895-1914 nian. Series 2, Part 2, 2
vols. Beijing: Kexue chubanshe, 1957.
Wang, Qingyuan, Mou Renlong, Han Xiduo, eds. Xiaoshuo shufang lu. Beijing: Beijing tushuguan
chubanshe, 2002 [1987].
Wang, Shounan, ed. Wo suo zhidao de Wang Yunwu xiansheng. Taipei: Taiwan Commercial Press,
1975.
Wang, Shucun. Xiju nianhua. 2 vols. Taipei: Yingwen hansheng chuban youxian gongsi, 1991.
Wang, Tao. Yingruan zazhi. Taipei: Hua-wen shu-chu, [1875].
Wang, Yunwu. Shangwu yinshu guan yu xin jiaoyu nianpu. Taipei: Taiwan Shangwu yinshu guan,
1973.
Wang, Zhen. Lufei Kui nianpu. CBSL 26 (1991: 4): 80-88, and 27 (1992: 1): 66-75, 85.
. Shijie shuju chuangbanzhe Shen Zhifang. Zhongguo qiyejia liezhuan (Beijing) 4 (1990):
137-49.
. Zhonghua shuju chuangbanzhe Lufei Kui. Zhongguo qiyejia liezhuan (Beijing) 4 (1990):
125-36.
Wanguo gongbao/Chinese Globe. (Old Series) 1870-82 (New Series) 1892, 1895-96, 1898-1902,
1904-6.
Wei, Yungong. Jiangnan zhizao ju ji. [Taipei?]: Wenhai chubanshe, n.d. [orig. 1897].
Wen, Yi. Wang Yunwu he Shangwu yinshu guan. Zhongguo qiyejia liezhuan (Beijing) 2 (1988):
194-207.
Wu, Fuhui. Dushi shiliu zhong de haipai xiaoshuo. N.p.: Hunan jiaoyu chubanshe, 1995.
Wu, Guifang. Qingji Shanghai de yinshi wujia. Dangan yu lishi (1988: 4): 96-98.
Wu, Ping. Sheng Xuanhuai yu Yuzhai cangshu. Dangan yu lishi (1988: 2): 99-102.
Wu, Tiecheng. Shanghaishi nianjian. [Shanghai]: n.p., 1935.
Wu, Xiaomin, and Wu Cheng. Zujie wenhua de chuangkou: Shanghai wenhuajie. Shanghai
shifan daxue xuebao (1986: 2): 16-20.
Wu, Woyao. Ershinian mudu zhi guai xianzhuang. 2 vols. Taipei: Shih-chieh shu-chu, 1962.

Selected Asian-Language Bibliography 365

Xia, Dongyuan. Yangwu yundong shi. Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1992.
Xie, Juzeng. Shili yangchang de ceying. Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 1983.
Xiong, Yuezhi. Shanghai guangfang yanguan shilue. In Tang Zhenchang and Shen Hengchun,
eds., Shanghaishi yanjiu, er bian, 176-211. Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 1988.
. Shanghai yu xixue chuanbo, 1843-1898. Lishi yu dangan (1989: 1): 44-54.
Xu, Dingxin. Jiu Shanghai gongshang, huiguan, gongsuo, tongye gonghui de lishi kaocha.
Shanghai yanjiu luncong 5 (1990): 79-113.
Xu, Fang. Minguo Jiangsu yinshua ye congtan. Jiangsu chuban shi zhi 9 (1992: 2): 35-41.
Xu, Renhan. Jiu Shanghai shuye zayi. Dangan yu lishi (1987: 3): 84-87.
Xu, Run. Xu Yuzhai zixu nienpu. Ed. Tao Xisheng. Taipei: Shihuo chubanshe youxian gongsi,
1977.
Xu, Wan. Woguo zhi zhi ji yinshua. Baoxue jikan 1 (1935): 2. In Shanghaishi xinsijun lishi
yanjiuhui yinshua yinchao zubian, ed., Zhongguo yinshua shi ziliao huibian. 3 vols. [Shanghai]:
n.p., n.d. 1: 72-74.
Xue, Xunsheng. Shanghai geming yizhi ji jiniandi. Shanghai: Tongji University Press, 1991.
Yan, Shuang, ed. Zhongguo yinshua shi ziliao huibian. Vol. 1. Shanghai: Shanghaishi xinsijun
lishi yanjiuhui, yinshua-yinchao zu, n.d.
Yang, Licheng, and Jin Buying, eds. Zhongguo cangshujia gailue. Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe,
1971 [Hangzhou, 1929].
Yang, Shouqing. Zhongguo chubanjie jianshi. Shanghai: Yongxiang yinshu guan, 1946.
Yao, Fushen. Zhongguo bianji shi. Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 1990.
Yao, Gonghe. Shanghai xianhua. Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 1989 [1917].
Yao, Xinbao. Shanghai chuban ye jishi. In Shanghaishi chuban gongzuozhe xiehui, ed.,
Shanghai shuzhan, teji and Shanghai chuban gongzuo, 132-35. Shanghai: n.p., 1984.
Yao, Wendan, ed. Shanghai xian xuzhi. Taipei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1970 [1918].
Ye, Dehui, ed. Shulin zhanggu. Kowloon: Chungshan Books, 1972.
. Shulin qinghua. Taipei: Shih-chieh shu chu, 1961 [1911].
Yu, Yueting. Woguo huabao de shizu Dianshizhai huabao chutan. Xinwen yanjiu ziliao congkan
(1981: 5): 149-81.
Zhang, Chunhua, Qing Rongguang, and Yang Guangpu. Hucheng suishi quge, Shanghai xian
zhuzhi ci, Songnan yuefe. Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 1989 [late 1800s].
Zhang, Hongxing. Zhongguo zui zao de xiyang maishu yaolan. Dongnan wenhua (1991: 4):
124-30.
Zhang, Jiangcai, ed. Jingjin fengtu congshu. N.p.: Shuangqilou, 1938.
Zhang, Jinglu. Zai chuban jie ershi nian. Hankou: Shanghai zazhi gongsi, 1938.
Zhang, Kaiyuan, et al. Zhongguo jindai shi shang de guan shen shang xue. Wuhan: Hubei renmin
chubanshe, 2000.
Zhang, Keming. Tushu zazhi shencha weiyuanhui kangzhanqian de Guomindang. Jiangsu
chuban shi zhi 9 (1992: 2): 49-53.
Zhang, Shunian, ed. Zhang Yuanji nianpu. Beijing: Commercial Press, 1991.
Zhang, Xichen. Mantan Shangwu yinshu guan. Wenshi ziliao xuanji 43 (1964: 3): 61-105.
Zhang, Xiumin. Zhongguo yinshu de faming ji qi yingxiang, fu Zhongguo jin bainian chuban ziliao.
Taipei: Wenshizhe chubanshe, 1988.
Zhang, Zhongli, ed. Jindai Shanghai chengshi yanjiu. Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 1990.
Zhao, Jiabi. Gongtong nuli banhao Chuban shiliao daifa kan ci. CBSL 1 (1982): 1-2.
Zhao, Junhao. Zhongguo jindai zhi baoye. 2nd ed. Shanghai: Shenbao, 1938.
Zheng, Shao. Xu Run yu lunchuan zhaoshangju. Shanghai yanjiu luncong. Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 1991. 241-60.
Zheng, Yimei. Qingmo Minchu de jiaoke shu. Dangan yu lishi (1986: 2): 95ff.
. Qingmo Minchu wentan yishi. Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 1987.
. Shanghai jiuhua, Part 2. Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua chubanshe, 1957.
. Shubao hua jiu. Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 1983.
Zheng, Zhenwen. Wo suozhidao de Shangwu yinshuguan bianyisuo. Wenshi ziliao xuanji 53
(1965): 140-65.
Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei dangshi yanjiu shi and Shanghaishi zonggonghui, eds. Shanghai
jiqi ye gongren yundong shi. Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 1991.

366 Selected Asian-Language Bibliography

. Shanghai Shangwu yinshu guan zhigong yundong shi. Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe,
1991.
. Zhonghua shuju zongchang zhigong yundong shi. Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 1991.
Zhonghua shuju bianjibu, eds. Huiyi Zhonghua shuju. 2 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1987.
. Zhonghua shuju tushu yuekan 1-13 (1931-32).
Zhou, Yuhong. Shanghai nianjian. Shanghai: Huadong tongxunshe, 1947.
Zhu, Bangxing, Hu Linge, and Xu Sheng, eds. Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong. Shanghai:
Shanghai Renmin chubanshe, 1984.
Zhu, Lianbao. Jiefangqian Shanghai shudian, chubanshe yinxiangji, yi, er. CBSL 1-10 (198287).
. Jinxiandai Shanghai chubanye yinxiang ji. Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 1993.
. Wo suozhidao de Shijie shuju. Wenshi ziliao xuanji 15 (1963): 1-43.
Zhu, Linlin. Lin Yuezhi yu jianjie chuanjiao. Dangan yu lishi (1985: 2): 81 ff.
Zhuang, Suyuan. Tushanwan yinshu guan xiaoji. CBSL 4 (1987: 4): 35-36.
Ziyou tan (Shenbao supplement). 1 December 1932-3 October 1938.
Zou, Zhenhuan. Xishu zhong yi shi de mingzhu shidai zai Shanghai xingcheng de yuanyin ji
qi wenhua yiyi. Fudan xuebao (shehui kexue ban) (1992: 3): 87-93.

Selected Western-Language Bibliography

Abbreviations
APMPAR American Presbyterian Mission Press. Annual Report. Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1888, 1890-92, 1894, 1896-98, 1900-23.
BDRC
Boorman, Howard L., ed. Biographical Dictionary of Republican China. 5 vols. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1967.
CLS
Christian Literature Society. Annual Report. Shanghai: [various publishers], 190237, 1940-48.
CMS
Chicago Manual of Style. 13th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
CR
The Chinese Repository (Canton). 2nd ed. Vol. 1 (May 1832-April 1833) to Vol. 20
(January-December 1851). Vaduz: Kraus Reprint.
ECCP
Hummel, Arthur W., ed. Eminent Chinese of the Ching Period. 2 vols. Washington,
DC: USGPO, 1943.
MPC
McIntosh, Gilbert. The Mission Press in China. Shanghai: American Presbyterian
Mission Press, 1895.
NCH
North China Herald (Shanghai). 1875, 1884, 1887, 1888-91, 1893, 1895-97, 1899,
1901, 1903, 1905.
SMC
Shanghai Municipal Council, ed. Annual Report. Shanghai: North China Daily
News Publishing, 1891-1939.
TPP
United States Government Printing Office. Theory and Practice of Presswork. Washington, DC: USGPO, 1962.
Archival Sources
Fryer, John. Correspondence and Papers. C. 1861-1921. CB-968. Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.
Published Sources
Adas, Michael. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and the Ideologies of Western
Dominance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989.
Alcock, Sir Rutherford. The Peking Gazette. Frasers Magazine (London), New Series, 7
(1873): 245-56, 341-57.
Alford, William P. To Steal a Book Is an Elegant Offense: Intellectual Property Law in Chinese Civilization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
London and New York: Verso, 1991.
Arnold, Julian, ed. Commercial Handbook of China. Vol. 1. Washington, DC: USGPO, 1919.
Auden, W.H., and Christopher Isherwood. Journey to a War. New York: Random House, 1939.
Bacon, Francis. The New Organon and Related Writing. Ed. Fulton H. Anderson. Indianapolis:
Bobbs Merrill, 1960.
Baigrie, Brian S., ed. Picturing Knowledge: Historical and Philosophical Problems Concerning the Use
of Art in Science. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1996.
Bailey, Paul J. Reform the People: Changing Attitudes towards Popular Education in Early TwentiethCentury China. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990.
Baller, F.W., ed. and trans. The Sacred Edict. Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press,
1892.

368 Selected Western-Language Bibliography

Bastid-Bruguire, Marianne. Currents of Social Change. In John K. Fairbank and KwangChing Liu, eds., The Cambridge History of China: Late Ching, 1800-1912, [Part] 2: 535-602.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Bennett, Adrian A. John Fryer: Introduction of Western Science and Technology in Nineteenth Century
China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University East Asian Research Center, 1977.
Bergre, Marie-Claire. The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937. Trans. Janet Lloyd.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Berry, W. Turner. Printing and Related Trades. In Charles Singer et al., eds., A History of
Technology, 5: 683-715. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959.
Blackford, Mansel G. A History of Small Business in America. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2003.
Bloch, Marc. Technology and Social Evolution: Reflections of a Historian. In Sabyasachi
Bhattacharya and Pietro Redondi, eds., Techniques to Technology: A French Historiography of
Technology, 83-90. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1990.
Box, Ernest. Native Newspapers. In Eleventh Annual Report [of the Guangxue Hui/Society
for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge among the Chinese], 38-46. Shanghai: n.p., 1898.
Braudel, Fernand. Capitalism and Material Life 1400-1800. Trans. Miriam Kochan. New York:
Harper and Row, 1973.
Bray, Francesca. Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Britton, Roswell S. The Chinese Periodical Press, 1800-1912. Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, 1933.
Brokaw, Cynthia J. Commercial Publishing in Late Imperial China: The Zou and Ma Family
Businesses of Sibao, Fujian. Late Imperial China 17, 1 (1996): 49-92.
. The Publishing Industry of Sibao: Commerce in Culture in Late Imperial China. Paper
presented at the Colloquium on Printing and Culture in China, UCLA Center for Chinese
Studies, 25 February 1995.
. Woodblock Printing and the Diffusion of Print in Qing China. Paper delivered at the
First International Scientific Conference on Publishing Culture in East Asia, Tokyo, 8-10
December 2001.
Brook, Timothy. The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998.
Bundock, Clement J. The National Union of Printing, Bookbinding, and Paper Workers. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1959.
Burlingame, Roger. Technology as Cause in History, Technology: Neglected Clue to Historical Change. Technology and Culture 2, 3 (1961): 219-39.
Byrd, Cecil K. Early Printing in the Straits Settlements 1806-1858. Singapore: National Library,
1970.
Carter, Thomas Francis. The Invention of Printing in China and Its Spread Westward. Revised by
L. Carrington Goodrich. New York: Ronald Press, 1955 [1925].
Chan, Wellington K.K. Merchants, Mandarins, and Modern Enterprise in Late Ching China. Cambridge, MA: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1977.
. The Organizational Structure of the Traditional Chinese Firm and its Modern Reform.
Business History Review 56, 2 (1982): 218-35.
. Selling Goods and Promoting a New Commercial Culture: The Four Premier Department
Stores on Nanjing Road. In Sherman Cochran, ed., Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial
Culture in Shanghai, 1900-1945, 19-36. Ithaca: Cornell East Asian Studies, 1999.
Chandler, Alfred K. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1978.
Chang, Chung-li. The Chinese Gentry: Studies on Their Role in Nineteenth-Century Chinese Society.
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1955.
Chartier, Roger, ed. The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.
Chauvet, Paul. Les Ouvriers du livre en France: Des origines la Rvolution de 1789. Paris: Librairie
Marcel Rivire, 1956.

Selected Western-Language Bibliography

Chesneaux, Jean. The Chinese Labor Movement, 1919-1927. Trans. H.M. Wright. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1968.
Chia, Lucille. The Development of the Jianyang Book Trade, Song-Yuan. Late Imperial China
17, 1 (1996): 10-48.
. The Jianyang Book Trade in the Ming. Paper presented at the Colloquium on Printing
and Culture in China, UCLA Center for Chinese Studies, 25 February 1995.
. Printing for Profit: The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Fujian (11th-17th Centuries). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002.
Chien, Florence. The Commercial Press and Modern Chinese Publishing 1897-1949. MA
thesis, University of Chicago, 1970.
The China Intelligence Agency. Trade List and Native Whos Who of Shanghai 1916. Shanghai:
China Intelligence Agency, 1916.
Chow, Kai-wing. Writing for Success: Printing, Examinations, and Intellectual Change in
Late Ming China. Late Imperial China 17, 1 (1996): 120-57.
Chow, Tse-tsung. The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1967.
Christian Literature Society. No Speedier Way: Golden Jubilee of Christian Literature Society for
China, 1887-1937. Shanghai: Christian Literature Society for China, 1938.
Clair, Colin. A History of European Printing. New York: Academic Press, 1976.
Clapham, Michael. Printing. In Charles Singer et al., eds., A History of Technology, 377-410.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957.
Clunas, Craig. Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
Coble, Parks. The Shanghai Capitalists and the Nationalist Government, 1927-1937. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard Council on East Asian Studies, 1980.
Cochran, Sherman. Encountering Chinese Networks: Western, Japanese, and Chinese Corporations in
China, 1880-1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
, ed. Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900-1945. Ithaca: Cornell
East Asian Studies, 1999.
. Three Roads into Shanghais Market: Japanese, Western, and Chinese Companies in the
Match Trade, 1895-1937. In Frederic Wakeman, Jr., and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds., Shanghai
Sojourners, 35-75. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1992.
Cohen, Paul A. Between Tradition and Modernity: Wang Tao and Reform in Late Ching China.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard Council on East Asian Studies, 1974.
Cohn, Don J., ed. and trans. Vignettes from the Chinese: Lithographs from Shanghai in the Late
Nineteenth Century. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1987.
Comparato, Frank. Chronicles of Genius and Folly: R. Hoe & Company and the Printing Press as a
Service to Democracy. Culver City: Labrynthos, 1979.
Conningham, Frederic A., ed. Currier & Ives Prints. New York: Crown Publishers, 1949.
Correspondence: The Press in China. Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal (Fuzhou) 3, 3
(1870): 81-82.
Crook, Nigel, ed. The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia. Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1996.
Crow, Carl. Handbook for China. 2nd ed. Shanghai, Yokohama, Hong Kong, and Singapore:
Kelly & Walsh, 1916.
. Handbook for China. 4th ed. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1925.
Culp, Robert. The Ideological Infrastructure of Citizenship: Schools and Publishing. In
Culp, Articulating Citizenship: Community, Civility, and Student Politics in Southeastern
China, 1912-1937. Unpublished manuscript.
Cutter, Robert Joe. Tsung-shu. In William H. Nienhauser, Jr., et al., eds., The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, 810-13. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.
Darnton, Robert. The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopedie, 17751800. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1979.
. The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes from French Cultural History. New York: Basic
Books, 1984.

369

370 Selected Western-Language Bibliography

. The Literary Underground of the Old Regime. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1982.
Davis, John Francis. The Chinese: A General Description of the Empire of China and Its Inhabitants.
London: Chas. Knight & Company, 1836.
Dick, Hugh G., ed. Selected Writings of Francis Bacon. New York: Random House, 1955.
Dolezelova-Verlingerova, Milena, ed. The Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Century. Toronto and
Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1980.
Drge, Jean-Pierre. La Commercial Press de Shanghai, 1897-1949. Paris: Memoires de lInstitut
des Hautes tudes Chinoises, 1978.
Drge, Jean-Pierre, and Hua Chang-ming. La Rvolution du livre dans la Chine moderne: Wang
Yunwu, diteur. Paris: Publications Orientalistes de France, 1979.
Edgren, Soren, ed. Chinese Rare Books in American Collections. New York: China Institute of
America, 1984.
Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural
Transformations in Early Modern Europe. 2 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1979.
Elman, Benjamin A. A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000.
. From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.
Esherick, Joseph W. Reform and Revolution in China: The 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
Faber, Ernst. Christian Literature in China: Its Business Management. In Records of the General Conference of the Protestant Missionaries of China, 551-55. Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1890.
Farwell, Beatrice. Lithographs and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Feather, John. A History of British Publishing. London: Routledge, 1988.
Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 14501800. Trans. David Gerard. London: NLB, 1976.
Ferguson, Eugene S. Engineering and the Minds Eye. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.
Feuerwerker, Albert. Chinas Early Industrialization: Sheng Hsuan-huai (1844-1916) and Mandarin Enterprise. New York: Atheneum, 1970 [1958].
Fortune, Robert. Three Years Wanderings in the Northern Provinces of China. London: John Murray,
1847.
Fox, Celina. Graphic Journalism in England during the 1830s and 1840s. New York: Garland,
1988.
From Spontaneous Revolts to the Forming of Party Organizations [at Zhonghua Shuju].
Ed. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Elizabeth J. Perry. Chinese Studies in History 27, 1-2 (199394): 87-90.
Fryer, John. General Editors Report. In Records of the General Conference of the Protestant
Missionaries of China, 715-17. Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1890.
Furth, Charlotte. A Flourishing Yin: Gender in Chinas Medical History 960-1665. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Gamewell, Mary Ninde. The Gateway to China: Picture of Shanghai. New York: Revell Company,
1916, esp. Chapter 8.
Gao, Yunlan. Annals of a Provincial Town (Xiaocheng chunqiu). Trans. Sidney Shapiro. Beijing:
Waiwen chubanshe, 1980.
Golas, Peter. Early Ching Guilds. In G. William Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial
China, 555-80. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977.
. Tin Mining in 19th and 20th Century China: High Production, Low Technology. In
Tsui-hua Yang and Yi-long Huang, eds., Jindai Zhongguo kejishi lunji/Science and Technology in
Modern China, 261-94. Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 1991.
Goodrich, Luther Carrington. The Literary Inquisition of Chien Lung. Baltimore: Waverly Press,
1935.
Guangxuehui (Society for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge among the Chinese). China Bookman/Chubanjie (Shanghai) (1918-37).

Selected Western-Language Bibliography

Gutman, Herbert G. The Reality of the Rags-to-Riches Myth: The Case of the Paterson,
New Jersey, Locomotive, Iron, and Machinery Manufacturers, 1830-1880. In Stephan
Thernstrom and Richard Sennett, eds., Nineteenth Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban
History, 98-124. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969.
Guy, R. Kent. The Emperors Four Treasuries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
Hamilton, Gary G., and Chi-kong Lai. Consumerism without Capitalism: Consumption and
Brand Names in Late Imperial China. In Henry J. Rutz and Benjamin S. Orlove, eds., The
Social Economy of Consumption, 253-79. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989.
Handbook of Chinese Manufactures. Shanghai: Foreign Trade Association of China, 1949.
Hao, Yen-ping. The Commercial Revolution in Nineteenth-Century China: The Rise of Sino-Western
Mercantile Capitalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Hay, Jonathan. Painters and Publishing in Late Nineteenth-Century Shanghai. In Ju-hsi
Chou, ed., Art at the Close of Chinas Empire, 134-88. [Tempe]: Arizona State University
Phoebus Occasional Papers in Art History, 1998.
Headrick, Daniel R. The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth
Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.
Hegel, Robert E. Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Henriot, Christian. Shanghai 1927-1937: Municipal Power, Locality, and Modernization. Trans.
Nol Castelino. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993 [1991].
Hershatter, Gail. The Workers of Tianjin, 1900-1949. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986.
Hesse, Carla. Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1810. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
Hirsch, Rudolf. Printing, Selling, and Reading 1450-1550. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1974.
Hirth, Friedrich. Western Appliances in the Chinese Printing Industry. Journal of the China
Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (Shanghai) 20 (1885): 163-77.
Ho, Ping-ti. The Ladder of Success in Imperial China: Aspects of Social Mobility 1368-1911. New
York: John Wiley, 1964.
Holt, W.S. The Mission Press in China. Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal 10, 3 (1879):
206-19.
Holtzberg-Call, Maggie. The Lost World of the Craft Printer. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1992.
Hongs and Homes: A Complete Directory of Shanghai. [Shanghai]: Francis C. Millington, 1928.
Howsam, Leslie. Cheap Bibles: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the British and Foreign Bible
Society. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Hu, Shu Chao. The Development of the Chinese Collection in the Library of Congress. Boulder:
Westview Press, 1979.
Huang, Joe C. Heroes and Villains in Communist China: The Contemporary Chinese Novel as a
Reflection of Life. New York: Pica Press, 1973.
Huffman, James. Creating a Public: People and Press in Meiji Japan. Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press, 1997.
Huters, Theodore et al., eds. Culture and State in Chinese History: Conventions, Accommodations,
and Critiques. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.
Ip, Manying [Ye-Song Manying]. A Hidden Chapter in Early Sino-Japanese Co-operation:
The Commercial Press-Kinko-do- Partnership, 1903-1914. Journal of International Studies
(Sophia University, Tokyo) 16 (1986): 23-43.
. The Life and Times of Zhang Yuanji, 1867-1959. Beijing: Commercial Press, 1985.
Israel, Paul. From Machine Shop to Industrial Laboratory: Telegraphy and the Changing Context of
American Invention, 1830-1920. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
Jennett, Sen. The Making of Books. 4th ed. New York: Praeger, 1967.
Jobling, Paul, and David Crowley. Graphic Design: Reproduction and Representation since 1800.
New York: Manchester University Press, 1995.
Johnson, Linda Cooke, ed. Cities of Jiangnan in Late Imperial China. Albany: SUNY Press,
1993.
Jordan, Donald A. Chinas Trial by Fire: The Shanghai War of 1932. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2001.

371

372 Selected Western-Language Bibliography

Jordan, John O., and Robert Patten, eds. Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth Century British
Publishing and Reading Practices. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Judge, Joan Evangeline. Print and Politics: Shibao and the Culture of Reform in Late Imperial
China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
Kahan, Basil. Ottmar Mergenthaler: The Man and His Machine. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll
Press, 2000.
Kahn, Harold. Excursions in Reading History: Three Studies. Taipei: Academia Sinica, Institute of
Modern History, 1993.
Kann, Eduard. The Currencies of China. Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, 1927.
Kapr, Albert. Johann Gutenberg: The Man and His Invention. Trans. Douglas Martin. Aldershot,
UK: Scolar Press, 1996.
Keenan, Barry. Lung-men Academy in Shanghai and the Expansion of Kiangsus Educated
Elite, 1865-1911. In Benjamin A. Elman and Alexander Woodside, eds., Education and
Society in Late Imperial China, 1600-1900, 493-524. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1994.
Kenwood, A.G., and A.L. Lougheed. Technological Diffusion and Industrialisation before 1914.
New York: St. Martins Press, 1982.
Kilgour, Frederick G. The Evolution of the Book. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
King, Frank H.H. Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1845-1895. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1965.
Kirby, William C. China Unincorporated: Company Law and Business Enterprise in
Twentieth-Century China. Journal of Asian Studies 54, 1 (1995): 43-63.
Ko, Dorothy. Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in 17th Century China. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1994.
Kornicki, Peter. The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1998.
Kotenev, A.M. Shanghai: Its Mixed Court and Council. Shanghai: North China Daily News and
Herald, 1925.
Kranzberg, Melvin, and Carroll W. Pursell, Jr., eds. Technology in Western Civilization. 2 vols.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.
Kubler, George A. A New History of Stereotyping. New York: n.p., 1941.
Lach, Donald F. Asia in the Making of Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965, 1: 2;
1977, 2: 3.
Lach, Donald F., and Edwin J. Van Kley. Asia in the Making of Europe. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1993, 3: 1, 3: 4.
Laffey, Ella. The Making of a Rebel: Liu Yung-fu and the Formation of the Black Flag Army.
In Jean Chesneaux, ed., Popular Movements and Secret Societies in China, 1840-1950, 85-96.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972.
. Social Dissidence and Government Suppression on the Sino-Vietnam Frontier: The Black
Flag Army in Tonkin. Ching-shih wen-ti 4, 2 (1979): 113-25.
Lai, Chi-kong. The Qing State and Merchant Enterprise: The China Merchants Company,
1872-1902. In Jane Kate Leonard and John R. Watt, eds., To Achieve Security and Wealth:
The Qing Imperial State and the Economy, 1644-1911, 139-55. Ithaca: East Asian Program,
Cornell University, 1992.
Lau Wai-mai, Michael. Wu Wo-yao (1866-1910): A Writer of Fiction of the Late Ching
Period. PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1968.
Lee, Leo Ou-fan. Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China 1930-1945.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Lee, Leo Ou-fan, and Andrew J. Nathan. The Beginnings of Mass Culture: Journalism and
Fiction in the Late Ching and Beyond. In David G. Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, and
Evelyn S. Rawski, eds., Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, 360-98. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1987.
Li, Jui. The Early Revolutionary Activities of Comrade Mao Tse-tung [1957]. Trans. Anthony W.
Sariti. Ed. James C. Hsiung. White Plains: M.E. Sharpe, 1977.
Link, Perry. Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese
Cities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.

Selected Western-Language Bibliography

Liu, Lydia. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity China,
1900-1937. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Lives of Chinese Martyrs (Excerpt). Ed. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Elizabeth J. Perry.
Chinese Studies in History 27, 1-2 (1993-94): 119-22.
McAleavy, Henry. Wang Tao: The Life and Writings of a Displaced Person. London: The China
Society, 1953.
McElderry, Andrea L. Shanghai Old-Style Banks (chien-chuang), 1800-1935: A Traditional Institution in a Changing Society. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Center for Chinese Studies,
1976.
McGaw, Judith A. Most Wonderful Machine: Mechanization and Social Change in Berkshire Paper
Making, 1801-1885. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.
McIntosh, Gilbert. Discussion. In Records of the General Conference of the Protestant Missionaries
of China, 582-83. Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1890.
MacKenzie, Donald, and Judy Wajcman, eds. The Social Shaping of Technology. Milton Keynes
and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1985.
MacKinnon, Stephen R. Press Freedom and the Chinese Revolution in the 1930s. In Jeremy D. Popkin, ed., Media and Revolution: Comparative Perspectives, 174-88. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995.
Madison, Charles A. Book Publishing in America. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966.
Mahdi, Muhsin. From the Manuscript Age to the Age of Printed Books. In George Atiyeh,
ed., The Book in the Islamic World: The Written Word and Communication in the Middle East,
1-16. Albany: SUNY Press, 1995.
Malraux, Andr. Mans Fate. Trans. Haakon M. Chevalier. New York: Random House, 1961.
Mann, Susan. Local Merchants and the Chinese Bureaucracy, 1750-1950. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1987.
Mao, Dun. Wartime. In Mao Tun, Spring Silkworms and Other Stories, 164-88. Trans. Sydney
Shapiro. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1956.
Mao, Qihua. Cherish the Present, Achieved at Great Cost. Ed. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and
Elizabeth J. Perry. Chinese Studies in History 27, 1-2 (1993-94): 94-106.
Marker, Gary. Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700-1800.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Marshman, Joshua. Elements of Chinese Grammar. Serampore: Mission Press, 1814.
Martin, W.A.P. A Cycle of Cathay: Or, China, South and North, with Personal Reminiscences. New
York: Revell Company, 1900, esp. Chapters 6 and 7.
Marx, Karl. Capital. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. New York: Modern Library,
n.d. [1906].
Medhurst, Walter Henry. China: Its State and Prospects. Boston: Crocker & Brewster, 1838.
Meisner, Maurice. Maos China; A History of the Peoples Republic. New York: Free Press, 1977.
Meng, S.M. The Tsungli Yamen: Its Organization and Functions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University East Asian Research Center, 1962.
Minami, Ryo-shin. Mechanical Power and Printing Technology in Pre-World War II Japan.
Technology and Culture 23, 4 (1982): 609-24.
Moran, James. The Composition of Reading Matter: A History from Case to Computer. London:
Wace, 1965.
. Printing Presses: History and Development from the Fifteenth Century to Modern Times. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1973.
Morrison, Robert, comp. Dictionary of the3 Chinese Language in Three Parts. Macao: East India
Companys Press, 1815.
Mumby, Frank Arthur, and Ian Norrie. Publishing and Bookselling. 5th ed. London: Jonathan
Cape, 1974 [1930].
Narramore, Terry. Making the News in Shanghai: Shen Bao and the Politics of Newspaper
Journalism, 1912-37. PhD dissertation, Australian National University, 1989.
North China Daily News (Shanghai). 2-28 April 1927, 27-30 January, 1-12 February 1932.
North China Daily News and Herald (Shanghai). The Shanghai Directory 1939: City Supplement
Edition to the China Hong List. Shanghai: North China Daily News and Herald, 1939.
North China Desk Hong List. Shanghai: North China Daily News Printing Office, 1903.

373

374 Selected Western-Language Bibliography

Painter, George D. Studies in Fifteenth Century Printing. London: Pindar Press, 1984.
Pan, Francis K. One Year of Rehabilitation of the Commercial Press, Ltd. [Shanghai]: [Commercial
Press], 1933.
Perry, Elizabeth J. Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.
Porter, Robin. Average Monthly Earnings of Workers in Shanghai, 1930-1940. Appendix
1B in Industrial Reformers in Republican China [spring-summer 1994 issue of Chinese Studies in
History], 180-81. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.
Pott, Francis L.H. A Short History of Shanghai. Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, 1928.
The Printed Word in Shanghai. China Journal 12, 5 (1930): 240-42.
Protestant Missions. Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal (Shanghai) 8, 4 (1877): 307-8.
Rankin, Mary Backus. Elite Activism and Political Transformation in China: Zhejiang Province,
1865-1911. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986.
Rao, Jingying. The Shanghai Postal Workers Union: Sample of a Yellow Union. Ed. Jeffrey
N. Wasserstrom and Elizabeth J. Perry. Chinese Studies in History 27, 1-2 (1993-94): 148-61.
Rawski, Evelyn S. Economic and Social Foundations of Late Imperial Culture. In David G.
Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, and Evelyn S. Rawski, eds., Popular Culture in Late Imperial
China, 3-33. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
. Education and Popular Literacy in Ching China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1979.
Rawski, Thomas. Economic Growth in Prewar China. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1989.
Reed, Christopher A. Re/Collecting the Sources: Shanghais Dianshizhai Pictorial and Its
Place in Historical Memories, 1884-1949. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12, 2
(2000): 44-71.
Remer, Rosalind. Printers and Men of Capital: Philadelphia Book Publishers in the New Republic.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.
Reynolds, Douglas R. China, 1898-1912: The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan. Cambridge, MA:
Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1993.
Rhoads, Edward J.M. Merchant Associations in Canton, 1895-1911. In Mark Elvin and
G.Wm. Skinner, eds., The Chinese City between Two Worlds, 97-118. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1974.
Rickett, W. Allyn, ed. and trans. Guanzi: Political, Economic, and Philosophical Essays from Early
China: A Study and Translation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Roberts, David. From an Antique Land: Travels in Egypt and the Holy Land. New York: Weidenfeld
and Nicolson, 1989 [1842-49].
[ROC] Ministry of Industry and Bureau of Foreign Trade. China Industrial Handbooks: Chekiang.
Series 2. Shanghai: Ministry of Industry and Bureau of Foreign Trade, 1935.
. China Industrial Handbooks: Kiangsu. Series 1. Shanghai: Ministry of Industry and Bureau
of Foreign Trade, 1933.
Roddy, Stephen J. Literati Identity and Its Fictional Representations in Late Imperial China. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1998.
Rogers, Everett M. Diffusion of Inventions. New York: Free Press, 1962.
Rosenberg, Emily S. Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion,
1890 to 1945. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.
Rosenbloom, Joshua L. Economics and the Emergence of Modern Publishing in the United
States [1825-35]. Publishing History 29 (1991): 47-68.
Rudolph, Richard C. A Chinese Printing Manual [includes a translation of Imperial Printing
Office (Wuyingdian) Manual for Moveable Type (Peking, 1777)]. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie
Press, 1954.
Rungta, Radhe Shyam. The Rise of Business Corporations in India 1851-1900. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970.
Rrup, Reinhard. Historians and Modern Technology: Reflections on the Development
and Current Problems of the History of Technology. Technology and Culture 15, 2 (1974):
161-93.

Selected Western-Language Bibliography

Ruud, Charles A. Russian Entrepreneur: Publisher Ivan Sytin of Moscow, 1851-1934. Montreal
and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1990.
Sabel, Charles F., and Jonathan Zeitlin, eds. World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production
in Western Industrialization. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Salisbury, Harrison E. The New Emperors: China in the Era of Mao and Deng. Boston: Little,
Brown, 1992.
Sarkowski, Heinz. Springer-Verlag: History of a Scientific Publishing House. Trans. Gerald Graham. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1996, [vol] 1.
Schwartz, Benjamin. In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1964.
Scranton, Philip. Endless Novelty: Speciality Production and American Industrialization, 1865-1925.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Senefelder, Alois. The Invention of Lithography. Trans. J.W. Muller. New York: Fuchs & Lang
Manufacturing Company, 1911.
Seybold, John W. The Philadelphia Printing Industry: A Case Study. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1949.
Shaffer, Linda. Mao and the Workers: The Hunan Labor Movement, 1920-1923. Armonk, NY:
M.E. Sharpe, 1980.
Shiao, Ling Arey. Bridging Influence and Income: May Fourth Intellectuals Approaches to
Cultural Economy in the Post-May Fourth Era. Paper presented at the Association of Asian
Studies Annual Conference, 29 March 2003.
Sieber, Patricia. Theaters of Desire: Authors, Readers, and the Reproduction of Early Chinese SongDrama, 1300-2000. New York: Palgrave, 2003.
Singer, Charles, et al., eds. A History of Technology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957.
Smith, S.A. Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895-1927. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2002.
Stark, Gary D. Entrepreneurs of Ideology: Neoconservative Publishers in Germany, 1890-1933. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981.
Steinberg, Mark D. Moral Communities: The Culture of Class Relations in the Russian Printing
Industry, 1867-1907. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
Steinberg, S.H. Five Hundred Years of Printing. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press; and London:
British Library, 1996.
Sterne, Harold E. Catalogue of Nineteenth Century Printing Presses. Cincinnati: Ye Olde Printery,
1978.
Stevens, Edward W., Jr. The Grammar of the Machine: Technical Literacy and Early Industrial
Expansion in the United States. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
Stranahan, Patricia. Molding the Medium: The Chinese Communist Party and the Liberation Daily.
Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1990.
Su, Ching. The Printing Presses of the London Missionary Society Among the Chinese.
PhD dissertation, University College, University of London, 1996.
Sun, Tsung-tien [Sun Congtian]. Bookmans Manual [1812]. Trans. Achilles Fang. Harvard
Journal of Asiatic Studies 14, 1-2 (1951): 215-60.
Tan (Taam), Cho-Yan. The Development of Chinese Libraries under the Ching Dynasty, 16441911. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1935.
Taubert, Sigfried, and Peter Weidhaas, eds. Book Trade of the World. Munich: K.G. Saur, 1981.
Tawney, R.H. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. New York: Mentor, 1954.
Taylor, William R. In Pursuit of Gotham: Culture and Commerce in New York. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992.
, ed. Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World. New York:
Russell Sage Foundation, 1991.
Tebbel, John. Between Covers: The Rise and Transformation of Book Publishing in America. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
. A History of Book Publishing in the United States. 4 vols. New York: R.R. Bowker, 1972.
Ting, Lee-Hsia Hsu. Government Control of the Press in Modern China, 1900-1949. Cambridge,
MA: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1974.

375

376 Selected Western-Language Bibliography

Trebing, Harry M., ed. The Corporation in the American Economy. Chicago: Quadrangle Books,
1970.
Tsien, Tsuen-Hsuin. Paper and Printing. Volume 5: 1 of Chemistry and Chemical Technology. In
Joseph Needham, ed., Science and Civilisation in China. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1985.
Twitchett, Denis. Printing and Publishing in Medieval China. London: Wynkyn de Worde Society, 1983.
Twyman, Michael. A Directory of London Lithographic Printers 1800-1850. Journal of the
Printing Historical Society 10 (1974-75): 1-55.
. Early Lithographed Books. London: Farrand Press & Private Libraries Association, 1990.
. The Lithographic Hand Press 1796-1850. Journal of the Printing Historical Society 3 (1967):
3-51.
. Lithographic Stone and the Printing Trade in the Nineteenth Century. Journal of the
Printing Historical Society 8 (1972): 1-41.
. Lithography 1800-1850. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.
. Lithography: The Birth of a New Printing Process. In The Bicentennial of Lithography, 514. San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1999.
Tyler, Ronnie C. The Mexican War: A Lithographic Record. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1973.
Waara, Carrie. Invention, Industry, Art: The Commercialization of Culture in Republican
Art Magazines. In Sherman Cochran, ed., Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in
Shanghai, 1900-1945, 61-90. Ithaca: Cornell East Asian Studies, 1999.
Wakeman, Frederic E., Jr. The Fall of Imperial China. New York: Free Press, 1975.
. The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
. Policing Shanghai 1927-1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Wakeman, Frederic E., Jr., and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds. Shanghai Sojourners. Berkeley: Institute of
East Asian Studies, 1992.
Wakeman, Geoffrey. Victorian Book Illustration: The Technical Revolution. Newton Abbot: David
& Charles, 1973.
Wang, David Der-wei. Fin-de-sicle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 18491911. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Scribners, 1958.
Wei, Wen Pin. The Currency Problem in China. New York: Columbia University Press, 1914.
Weimerskirch, Philip J. Lithographic Stone in America [1807-1970]. Printing History 11, 1
(1989): 2-15.
Widmer, Ellen. The Huanduzhai of Hangzhou and Suzhou: A Study in SeventeenthCentury Publishing. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 36 (1996): 77-122.
Wilkinson, Endymion. The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
East Asian Research Center, 1975.
Williams, Edward Thomas. China: Yesterday and Today. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1928.
Williams, S. Wells. Movable Types for Printing Chinese. Chinese Recorder and Missionary
Journal (Shanghai) 6 (1875): 22-30.
. The Middle Kingdom. New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1848.
Wong, V.L. Libraries and Book-Collecting in China from the Epoch of the Five Dynasties to
the End of the Ching. Tien Hsia Monthly 8, 4 (1939): 327-43.
Wu, Ching-tzu [Wu Jingzi]. The Scholars. Trans. Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang. New York:
Grosset and Dunlap, 1972.
Wu, K.T. The Chinese Book: Its Evolution and Development. Tien Hsia Monthly (Shanghai) 3 (1936): 25-33, 137-60.
. The Development of Typography in China during the Nineteenth Century. Library Quarterly 22, 3 (1952): 288-301.
. Ming Printing and Printers. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 7 (1943): 203-60.
Wu, Pei-yi. The Confucians Progress: Autobiographical Writings in Traditional China. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1990.

Selected Western-Language Bibliography

Wu, Wo-yao [Wo-jen]. Vignettes from the Late Ching: Bizarre Happenings Eyewitnessed over Two
Decades. Trans. Shih Shun Liu. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1975.
Wu, Youru. Selections from the Dianshizhai Pictorial. Trans. Don J. Cohn. Renditions: A
Chinese-English Translation Magazine 23 (1985): 47-70.
Wylie, Alexander, ed. Memorials of Protestant Missionaries to the Chinese. Shanghai: American
Presbyterian Mission Press, 1867.
. Notes on Chinese Literature. Shanghai and London: American Presbyterian Mission Press,
1867.
Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui. Between State and Society: The Construction of Corporateness in a
Chinese Socialist [Printing] Factory. Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 22 (1989): 31-60.
Ye, Xiaoqing. Popular Culture in Shanghai, 1884-98. PhD dissertation, Australian National
University, Canberra, 1991.
Yeh, Catherine Vance. The Life-Style of Four Wenren in Late Qing Shanghai. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 57, 2 (1997): 419-70.
Yeh, Te-Hui [Ye Dehui]. Bookmans Decalogue [1919]. Trans. Achilles Fang. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 13, 1-2 (1950): 132-73.
Yeh, Wen-hsin. The Alienated Academy: Culture and Politics in Republican China, 1919-1937.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
. Corporate Space, Communal Time: Everyday Life in Shanghais Bank of China. American Historical Review 100, 1 (1995): 97-122.
. Progressive Journalism and Shanghais Petty Urbanites: Zou Taofen and the Shenghuo
Weekly, 1926-1945. In Frederic Wakeman, Jr., and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds., Shanghai Sojourners, 186-238. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1992.
Zhao, Yuezhi. Media, Market, and Democracy in China: Between the Party Line and the Bottom Line.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998.
Zhou, Enlai. Zhou Enlais Speech in Shanghai When Receiving Participants of the Workers
Three Armed Uprisings and a Number of Model Workers (December 22, 1957) (Excerpt).
Ed. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Elizabeth J. Perry. Chinese Studies in History 27, 1-2 (199394): 113-18.
Zhu, Xuefan. The Shanghai Labor Movement and the Gangs. Ed. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
and Elizabeth J. Perry. Chinese Studies in History 27, 1-2 (1993-94): 131-47.

377

This page intentionally left blank

Index

Note: The letter f following a page number denotes a figure, t a table, and m a map.
A Ying, 209, 287n71
Academia Sinica, 224, 310n129
advertising, 77, 142, 154, 271, 316n219
Aiguo she (Patriotic Institute). See Cai
Yuanpei
Albion press, 35f, 42, 69, 70f, 305n60,
306n61, 314-15nn192,202
Alcock, Sir Rutherford, 7
American Board of Commissioners for
Foreign Missions, 30t, 32, 42, 43, 49,
50, 51, 68, 85, 131, 306n64
American Presbyterian Mission Press
(APMP), 28t, 30t, 42, 43, 44, 45, 4853, 50f, 69, 71, 99-100, 124, 131, 157,
305n51, 306nn65,70,71, 307n79,
308n98, 309nn103,109,110, 331n49;
advertisement for type-casting, 51f;
bought by Commercial Press, 86-87; and
founders of Commercial Press, 189, 191,
340n90; Gambles APMP (Song/
Meihua) fonts, 46f, 47, 53; philanthropic publishing, 43-44, 84; press
room, 75f; supplemental fonts, 47f;
using lithography, 62, 124
Anderson, Benedict, 8, 329n23
antiquarian bookselling, 17, 94, 180-81,
187, 242, 254, 312n155, 352n180
APMP. See American Presbyterian Mission
Press
apprenticeship systems, 23, 48, 62, 65,
95, 116, 133, 134, 141, 145-53, 158-60
passim, 175, 210, 241, 276-78,
283(#30), 306n69, 307n78, 331n55,
333nn94,96,98,100,
334nn102,104,105,112, 340n90,
359n31. See also machine shops; printing
workers
Arrow War, 40, 306n64
Bacon, Francis, 218, 236; on technology
as key to modernity, xi, 300n44
baihua, 217, 218
Baike xiao congshu, 219, 347n71
banned publications. See individual

publishers; Shanghai, publishing banned

works in
Bao, Tianxiao, 88, 91, 127, 168, 176,
191-93, 195, 197, 243, 262, 283(#30),
288(#78), 301n61, 328n134; appraisal
of Xia Ruifang, 192-94; on the Commercial Press, 215-16; on Wenhuajie, 208-9
Bao, Xianchang, 187, 189, 193, 217, 220,
224
Bao, Xianen, 187, 189
Baojinglou, 242
bed-and-platen press. See cylinder printing
machines
Beijing University, 216, 217, 221, 247,
250, 270, 281(#11), 347n77, 355n229
Beixin shuju, 282(#16), 287(#71),
344n13
Bergre, Marie-Claire, 9, 137
Bi, Sheng, 14
Big Three publishers. See individual
publishers; joint-stock limited liability
corporation; three legs of the tripod
Bloch, Marc, 263, 277
book publishing, 82, 82f, 110-11; book
lists and catalogues, 101-2, 108f, 114,
115, 169, 318n257, 321nn50,52, 33536n25; centralization in modern period,
11, 164, 191, 207, 261; Hanlin scholars
in, 116, 195-96; importance compared
with periodical publishing, 11, 211;
profits from, 7, 19, 21, 100, 110, 114,
179, 182, 190, 212, 239, 266, 267, 271,
342n118; salaries in, 191, 216, 220, 221,
227, 242, 323n75, 342n127, 349n101;
textbooks, 11, 100, 167, 170; textbooks
underwrite Shanghais modern publishing, 183, 200, 201-2, 203-4, 211-12,
230-31; wages in, 125, 149, 248, 249,
250, 305n50, 322n54, 331n55
book-trade training school, 174, 175
Box, Ernest, 101
boxwood plates, 28, 45, 59, 60, 199
bribery. See individual publishers; Lufei Kui;
Shen Zhifang

380 Index

Bridgman, Elijah Coleman, 42

British-American Tobacco Corporation
(BAT): 30t, 65, 83, 137
business organization: various types of
discussed, 162-63, 185-87, 267. See also
joint-stock limited liability corporation
Cai, Gao, 28t, 83, 303n24; cuts Malacca
font, 36
Cai, Yuanpei, 168, 196, 223, 224, 31011n129, 355n229; and Aiguo she (Patriotic Institute), 196-97, 342nn121, 125
calligraphy manuals, 101, 119, 252,
321n52
Canton (Guangzhou), 28t, 30t, 32, 36, 40,
42-43, 50, 61, 62, 66, 68, 69, 83, 84, 85,
111, 123, 125, 129, 168, 249, 283(#33),
299n30, 302n63, 304n28, 305nn51,60,
306nn61,64, 312nn147,150, 313n177,
320n32, 352n184, Canton System, 26
capitalism. See Chinese print capitalism
Carter, Thomas Francis: The Invention of
Printing in China and Its Spread Westward
(1925), 13, 15, 276, 301n53
cast-type matrices, 28t, 32, 41, 42, 43, 45,
46, 47, 49, 51, 53, 56, 57f, 60, 86, 130t,
141, 157, 277, 283(#29), 285(#54),
305n45, 307n89, 308-9n103
Chan, Wellington K.K., 165-66, 185
Chandler, Alfred, 163
Chang, Chung-li, 164
Changming gongsi, 181, 201, 227, 228
Changxing jiqi zhizao chang. See Chong
Shing
Chartier, Roger, 4-5, 257
Chen, Cunren, 322n54
Chen, Duxiu, 221, 284(#39)
Chen, Huageng, 79, 104, 262, 268
Chen, Jiageng (Tan Kah Kee), 250-51, 35657n252
Chen, Lifu, 224
Chen, Liyan, 242
Chen, Tianhua, 227
Chen, Yun, 222, 223, 347n61
Chen, Zhaoquan, 148, 150-52 passim. See
also Mingjing Machine Shop
Chiang, Kai-shek, 223, 224, 234, 236,
347nn,65,77
China College (Zhongguo gongxue), 167,
218, 347n77
Chinas Four Great Inventions
(Zhongguo sida faming), 300n44
Chinese Classics, 5, 107, 109, 111, 218,
226, 305nn49,54, 308n98, 321n52,
322n65, 326n119
Chinese print capitalism, 4, 9, 10, 17, 18,
21, 87, 158, 162, 161-202 passim, 199,

200, 203-56 passim, 205, 253, 257, 264,

265, 279; attacks on, 21, 268-79 passim;
capitalization of, 211, 267; combining
printing, publishing, and distribution in,
11, 116, 120, 125, 132, 196, 299n29,
358n1; complementarity of capital and
labour in, 184, 213; defined, 8-9, 258;
effects on labour, 146, 147-53, 160; fair
compensation, 23, 161, 164, 182-83,
199-200; opposition of capital and labour
in, 126, 220, 253, 254, 268, 272-79
passim; periodization in, 205; role of the
state in, 228, 237, 255, 256, 266, 268,
274; role of textbook market in transforming, 203-4, 230, 265
Chinese Scientific Book Depot, 201,
320n32, 322n64, 323n75
Chongde Guild (Chongde gongsuo), 172,
173, 174, 181
Chong Shing (Changxing jiqi zhizao chang)
type-casters, 54, 55f, 56, 310n121
chromolithography, 28t, 62
Chubanjie de hunluan yu chengqing,
270-71
Chubao, 227
Church Band (jiaohui pai), 196
Cihai, 3, 14, 83, 279, 297n1
civil service examinations, 5, 21, 52, 88,
127, 164, 167, 170, 226, 264, 298n11,
influence of abolition on booksellers
guild, 175
Cixi Taihou (Empress Dowager, Yehonala),
169
Ciyuan, 3, 12, 21, 214, 279, 297n1,
300n40, 345n27
Coble, Parks, 273
Cochran, Sherman, 163
coins: cast copper (tongqian), 313n177;
stamped copper (tongyuan), 313n177
Cole, Richard, 28t, 41, 43, 86, 305nn51,
54; and Hong Kong font, 41, 53
Collotype, 28, 64, 143, 280(#1), 283
(#30,32), 288(#78), 311n135, 313n168,
340n93
colour photogravure, 66
Columbian press, 30t, 68, 69, 314nn192,
193
Commercial Press, 11, 21, 24, 28, 45, 48,
52, 59, 62, 85, 126, 181, 188-99, 204,
208f, 212-25, 214f, 253, 259, 265;
absorbing rivals, 232; access to Western
technology compared with BAT, 137;
affiliated machine shops of, 139, 140,
143, 146; and April 1927 massacre, 223,
250; assets, 189, 195, 211, 216, 265;
buys Baoshan Road site, 199; and
collotype, 64, 199; as a corporation, 187,

Index

189, 195; diversification, 216; early days

of, 192; editorial offices similarity to
government office, 217; electric-powered
cylinder press, 74, 222; employees of,
192; establishing editorial office, 195,
196; font design, 53; founding of, 189;
Japanese attack (1932) on, 128, 156,
213, 225, 275-76; and Kinko-do-, 60; and
New Culture Movement, 217-18, 270;
and offset lithography, 63, 144, 222;
Oriental Library (Dongfang tushuguan)
of, 128, 345n24; origins of the name,
190; and photogravure, 65; production
compared with Zhonghua, World, 207,
256; rotary press, 222; roundtable
editorial system (yuanzhuo huiyi), 198;
statistical summary of titles, 225; and
textbook publishing, 189-90, 197-99,
203-4, 212; and tinplate, 64; unprepared
for 1911 Revolution, 215; and Wenhuajie,
207, 233
commissioned publishing, 117, 119, 124,
214
Communist Party, 220, 221-22, 223, 254,
274, 284(#43), 347nn61,67; expulsion
from Shanghai printing plants, 223
Congshu jicheng, 224
contractual publishing, 119
copperplate, 60, 64, 65, 176, 193,
313n176, 314n180, 318-19n7
copyright, 4, 23, 176-78, 184, 193, 194,
206, 207, 269, 286 (#61), copyright law,
206, 223, 337n48, lawsuits over, 242,
339n74. See also piracy
Creation Society, 270
Crow, Carl, 234
Cu ti font, 53-54, 310n120
Cultural Revolution, 22
Culture-and-Education Streets. See
Wenhuajie
Currier and Ives, 93, 112, 126
cylinder (bed-and-platen, flatbed presses)
printing machines, 30t, 67-69, 70-71,
70f, 72f, 73, 75f, 76, 222, 304-5n44,
315n199, 213, 316nn220,226, 31617nn235,236; and Daniel Treadwell, 70;
double- and multiple-cylinder, 74; gaspowered, 74; human-powered, 73; poetry
about, 73; steam-powered, 74; water
buffalo-powered, 71
Dadong shuju, 207, 209, 244, 245, 246,
252, 283(#30), 344n7, 353n207,
355nn225,226, Wenhuajie site of, 209f
Dai, Kedun, 230, 234, 349nn105, 120
Dalong Machine Shop, 148, 149, 157,
333n96, 334n103

Darnton, Robert, 133, 160, 272-73,

334n104
Daumier, Honor, 92, 95
Dewey library classification system, 219,
346n46
Dianshizhai Lithographic Bookstore, 28t,
62, 80-83, 81f, 82f, 90-91, 94-96, 102,
103, 104-16, 118, 119, 120-21, 124-25,
174, 106f, 285(#53), 318n257, 323nn67,
73, 324n88, 325n99, 326n119; advertisement, 108f; court case involving,
111-12; prices of publications, 323n73;
printing plant of, 81f, 113; workers of,
322n61; Xu Run on, 115
Dianshizhai Pictorial, 88-89, 93, 95-96, 101,
106, 112-13, 124, 213, 324n80,
328n134. See also prices
Ding, Fubao, 60, 227, 228, 288(#78),
310n120
Ding, Wenjiang, 239
distribution networks: of books, 11, 111,
113, 125, 161-62, 216, 221-23, 230,
250, 271, 283n34, 346n34; of Chinesemade printing presses, 134, 154-56. See
also individual publishers
Dongfang tushuguan. See Commercial
Press, Oriental Library
Dongfang zazhi/The Eastern Miscellany, 91,
122, 215, 222, 314n182, 318-19n7;
circulation of, 215
double-cylinder (flatbed) press, 70, 74, 77
Du, Yaquan, 198, 215
Drge, Jean-Pierre, 11, 224-25, 328n9; and
Hua Chang-ming, 346n40
Dyer, Samuel, 28t, 29, 31, 44, 45, 86, 277,
305n48; cast type, 41; stereotyping, 40,
67, 306n68
East India Company (EIC), 28t, 36,
306n72, 308n103, EIC/Thoms font, 40;
subvention for Morrisons dictionary,
304n28
editorial offices: Commercial Presss
establishment of, 195-99; Tongwen first
to establish, 116; Worlds, 354n216;
Zhonghuas establishment of, 230. See
also individual publishers
educational reform, after the Taiping
Rebellion, 164-71; and Chinese print
capitalism, 188, 199, 211-12, 266
electrolyte, 28t, 45-47, 59, 307n89, 30910n103, 106, 310n120; compared with
stereotype, 45
Ertong shijie (Childrens World), 221, 275
Erya tu, 115
exemplars, 97, 110, 111, 115, 118, 242,
286-87(#67), 320n31, 345n27

381

382 Index

Faber, Ernst, 99-100, 101, 309n106

facsimile, 28t, 56, 63
Fan, Yuanlian, 232-33, 234, 237,
349nn105, 120
Fang, Bao, 242, 352n184
Fangsong ti font, 54, 54f, 310n120
Fangtou ti font, 310n120
Farnham, J.M.W., 28t, 44, 94, 189, 307n79
Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin, 8,
11, 89, 132-33, 160, 254, 258, 272,
320n31, 330n41
Feiyingge huabao, 95-96, 324n81
Feiyingge huace, 95-96
Feiying Hall (Feiyingguan), 90-91, 118-21,
125, 213, 262, 326n119; lack of new
publications, 124-25
Feng, Jingru, 52, 181, 262, 341n114
Feng, Yuxiang, 246, 247, 355n233
Ferguson, John C., 145, 342n125
fiction, publishing of, 11, 103, 121, 126,
269, 318n257, 326-27n121, 327n122,
123, 328n135; fiction of technology, 277
First Anglo-Chinese War (First Opium
War), 16, 26, 36, 41, 43, 44, 306n74
First Sino-Japanese War, 103, 104, 112
flatbed press. See cylinder press
fonts, 27, 46, 47, 49, 50, 53, 54, 69,
306n67, 68, 307n92, 310n120, 323n76;
aesthetics of, 34, 37-40, 41, 45, 49, 56,
86, 87, 265; China exporting fonts to
global market, 50; Gambles APMP fonts,
46f; major Republican fonts, 54f;
nineteenth-century Western fonts, 46f.
See also individual fonts/printers
foremen-capitalists, 134, 141-43, 158-59,
329n19
foundries: in type production, 33, 34, 36,
41, 42, 44, 49, 50-51, 138-39, 317n236;
importance to publishing, 128, 131-32
Four Books, 5, 121, 218, 226, 308n98
four-corner system of classification, 219
Fryer, John, 201, 316n218, 319n20,
320n32
Fudan College, 167, 282(#18)
Fulunshe, 52, 242, 352nn180,185
Fun zazhi, 215
Fuwenge, 320n35, 326n122
Fuxing Copper Matrix Shop, 130t, 139,
155, 331n50
Fuzhou Road (Simalu, Fourth Avenue). See
Wenhuajie
Gamble, William, 28t, 41, 45-49, 50, 131;
Gamble Collection in the Library of
Congress, 308-9n103; Song/Meihua font,
47, 53; type case, 47-48, 48f, 308n96

Gao, Fengchi, 187, 189, 216, 340n90

Gao, Mengdan, 197, 198, 217-19, 228-29,
236; concern about Fujianese factions in
editorial office, 343n132; replaces Zhang
Yuanji as Commercial Presss editorial
director, 217
Ge, Gongzhen, 13, 63, 77, 108-9, 283(#30)
Gemingjun, 227
Gezhi huibian/Chinese Scientific and Industrial
Magazine, 74, 316n218, 319n20
Gillot, M., 59
Gong, Zizhen, 242
Gongchandang, 221
Gonghe zhong xiao xue jiaoke shu (Republican
Textbooks for Middle and Elementary
Schools), 215
Gongmin shuju, 355n236
Gongshang banyuekan, 132
Gongsi shangl (Company Law), 185,
335n2, 349n125
Gongyichang Machine Works, 130t, 142,
153, 331n50, 332n68
Grant, William A., 65
gravure printing, 27, 65
Gu, Yanwu, and Rizhilu, 114
Gu ti font, 222, 310n120
guandu shangban firms, 166
Guangbaisong zhai, 52, 126, 321n35,
328nn134, 8
Guanghua College, 167, 318n269
Guanghua shuju, 210, 281(#5)
Guangxuehui. See Society for the Diffusion
of Christian Knowledge
Guangzhi shuju, 52, 181, 194, 197, 250,
341-42nn114,118, 356n250
Guanshang kuailan, 175, 337n43
guilds, 151, 338n63; in Shanghai, 171-72,
336n29; in Suzhou, 172-73, 336n30. See
also individual guilds
Gujin tushu jicheng (a.k.a. Tushu jicheng),
115, 116-17, 309n107, 323n76,
325n103
Guomin shuju, 247, 248, 355n238
Guomindang. See Nationalist Party
Gushu liutong chu, 180, 242, 352n186,
355n225
Gutenberg, Johann (Ge-deng-bao, Gu-tengbao), 3, 12-16, 32; Chinese image of, 15f;
Chinese image of his press, 68f; method
of casting type, 33
Gutenberg revolution: in China 3, 6, 12-16,
21, 22, 23, 25-27, 32, 59, 83-84, 87, 129,
158, 161, 254, 257, 261, 264, 272, 27879; effect on Chinese library classification
systems, 220; in Europe, 4, 8, 11, 13-16,
298n7

Index

halftone, 45, 59
Hanfenlou (Fragrance-Harbouring Library),
213, 345n24
Hankou, 209, 227, 309n110, 320n32
Hanlin Academy, literati of, 116, 119, 167,
168, 189, 195, 196, 302n63, 348n80
Harrild & Sons, 30t; cylinder press, 71,
72f, 74, 83, 314-15n195, 316n219
Hatch, Lorenzo J., 65
He, Chengyi, 52, 181, 262, 341n114
He, Shengnai, 13, 36, 45, 60, 77, 81, 272,
274, 306n71, 308n96; on lithography,
81, 126
heliogravure. See photogravure
herd mentality (yiwofeng), 194, 199
Hirth, Friedrich, 115, 116, 323n73,
324n91, 325n103
history of the book, discussion of, 22, 13235, 158
Hoe, R., & Company, 68-69, 83, 299n29,
314-15n195, 316n232
Holt, W.S., 49-51, 53, 131, 306n64,
309n109
Hong Kong, 84; printing/publishing in, 26,
41, 42, 159, 238, 239, 305n50, 312n147,
328n5
Hongbaozhai, 121, 320nn23,35, 326n120,
327n125
Hongwen shuju, 121, 312n153, 32021n35, 326n119, 327n125
Hu, Renyuan, 247, 250, 355n229
Hu, Shi, 217, 218, 270, 282(#22),
284(#39), 310n129, 350n127
Hu, Yuzhi, 190, 215, 223, 346n34,
357n259
Huang, Sheng, 41, 42, 86
Huaying jinjie (English-Chinese Primer),
191
Huiwentang, 241, 285(#56), 32627nn122,123,125, 352n176, 355n225
Huizhou, 7, 111-12, 299n19
Hujiang Machine Shop, 130t, 154,
334n122
Hundred Days of Reform, 88, 89, 129,
169, 201, 226
Hushang shuju, 30t, 74, 76, 85
Huxley, T.H., 192, 234
Industrialization, 133, 331n54; changing
terminology for commerce and industry,
165-66; complementarity of public
service and compensation, 165-66, 171,
182, 183, 184; and cultural industries,
128, 132, 143, 158, 176, 184, 188, 192,
201; negative impact on literati values,
176-77

Ingle, Henry, 71; Ingle cylinder press, 74

intaglio media, 27, 28t, 32, 44, 64, 65, 66,
85, 233, 239; copperplate, 29, 64, 65;
color photogravure, 29; photo- and
heliogravure, 29, 65 (see also photogravure); presses, 130t
intellectual property. See copyright
Ip, Manying, 197-98, 219, 229, 308n96,
328n4, 342nn123,125
Jesuits, 62, 64, 79-80
Jiang, Weiqiao, 167, 197, 198, 342n124
jiang ti font (also workman font),
304n36
Jiangnan Arsenal, 44-45, 52, 60, 137, 138,
147, 201, 316n218, 319n20, 320n32,
335n25
Jiangsu Provincial Educational Association,
167, 168
Jianye Machine Shop, 54, 55f, 310n121,
315n199
Jiaoyu zazhi/Educational Review, 215, 229, 237
Jiben jiaokeshu (Basic Textbooks), 224
Jin, Shengtan, 242, 352n182
Jinbu shuju, 242, 321-22n35, 327nn123,
125
Jincheng Bank, 251-52, 357nn253, 258
Jinsuzhai, 192, 341n107, 342n118
joint-stock limited liability corporation,
4, 9, 24, 162-63, 184, 185-86, 204, 265,
267; adaptation to China by Shanghai
publishers, 163, 185-88, 196, 201, 258,
265; Big Three publishers, 207, 209,
210, 232, 249, 343n2; influence of social
networks within, 163-64, 196, 219,
342n123; social mixing in, 266
Kaiming shudian, Xia Songlai and Wang
Licais, 52, 181, 323n74, Wang Xichens,
207, 209f, 219, 223, 275, 282(#20, 21,
27), 343n2, 344n13, 358n19
Kaishu ti font, 10, 37, 40, 199, 310n120
Kang, Youwei, 88, 91, 169, 242, 283(#30),
337n48
Kangxi Dictionary, 12, 43, 101, 110, 115-16,
214, 303n16, 310n120; as basis for
organizing dictionaries, 37; prices of, 101,
110; use in organizing fonts, 43, 48, 71
Kinko-do- (Chinese, Jingangtang), 60, 19798, 216
Knig, Friedrich, 22, 69, 314-15n195
Kung, H.H., 234, 236, 238, 239, 35051n154
Lee, Leo Ou-fan, 318-19n7; and Andrew J.
Nathan, 10, 129

383

384 Index

Legge, James, 41, 305n49, 312n147

LeGrand, M. Marcellin, 43, 44, 306n68
letterpress printing. See relief printing
Li, Hongzhang, 191, 324-25n91, 335n24,
339n79, 342n118
Li, Shengduo, 118-19, 121, 262, 268,
325n109
Li, Shizeng, 223, 252, 353n208
Li Yongchang Machine Shop, 141, 145,
155, 158, 159; and Li Changgen, 139,
140, 157, 262
Lian, Quan, 60, 187, 288(#78), 340n93
Liang, Afa, 304n28
Liang, Qichao, 52, 91, 96, 168, 169, 197,
233, 242, 269, 348n98, 350n131
Liangyou, 63, 122
lianhuanhua shu (serial-picture books), 246,
354-55n222; Xi youji as, 246
lianshi paper, 10, 113, 324n83, 341n113
libraries (including editorial, exemplar,
private), 6, 49, 71, 111, 115, 120, 128,
212, 213, 218, 220, 224-25, 242, 252,
259, 260, 286-87(#67), 321n51,
325n109, 326n113, 328n4, 335-36n25,
345nn24,26,27
library classification systems. See Dewey
library classification system; sibu/siku
library classification system
Lin, Heqin. See Yiwen yinshua yuekan/The
Graphic Printer
Lin, Shu, 214, 215, 345n29
Linotype, 47f, 57, 58, 59, 77-78,
310nn125, 127, 317n241
literacy, 5, 201, 229, 246, 266, 298n11,
319n20, 344-45n20
literati: conversion of value system by
corporate publishing, 164, 200, 266;
influence in Shanghai publishing, 11,
116, 164, 266-67; mental work compared
with physical labour, 73, 220; service
ethic or moral economy of, as compared
with commercial or industrial values, 6,
17-21, 23, 24, 116, 117, 161-62, 176,
226, 263-65 passim, 268-69; statedependent mentality among, 206, 279;
value system of, 87, 109, 113, 115, 127,
160, 203, 226, 263
lithographic publishers, 88-129 passim;
effects of Taiping Rebellion on, 164, 165;
numbers of, 97, 103
lithography, 23, 28, 28t, 30t, 61, 88-129
passim; compared with letterpress, 121,
215, 267; dependence on examination
system, 90, 120, 124, 264, 326n119;
Dianshizhais printing plant, 81f; early
use in Shanghai, 62, 79-83, 88, 97-104;

importance of reprints in, 90, 127, 264,

323n76; inefficiency of, 125-26; miniaturization via, 99, 110, 115, 116; outside
China, 92-94; presses, 27, 30, 79-83,
115, 130t; for printing books, 19, 82-83;
quality of, 103, 119; replacement by
letterpress, 103, 123, 126; role in establishing Chinese print capitalism, 29, 8991, 123-24, 176; Shanghais golden age
in, 88-129 passim; spread beyond Shanghai, 323n74; survival after 1905, 121-22,
126-27, 264; wages in, 322n54; Wenmings
use of for textbooks, 197
Liu, Longguang, 85, 318n269
Liulichang, 7, 52, 111, 262
loan method (daikuan fa) of publishing, 272
London Mission Press, 36, 41-42, 69, 70,
71, 73, 86, 104, 131, 157, 304n35,
305n47, 58, 306n72
London Missionary Society, 28, 31, 35,
304n35
Lu, Gaoyi, 252, 355n227, 357nn257,259
L, Ziquan, 207, 344n7, 355n225
Lufei, Kui, 181, 182f, 187, 203, 225-40
passim, 255, 262, 269; involvement with
Nationalist Party, 227, 230, 234, 237,
238, 240, 250; salary at Chubao, 227;
tries to bribe Shen Zhifang, 247
Luo, Jialun, 270
Ma, Duanlin, 66-67, 114
Macao, 26, 28t, 30t, 35-36, 40, 43, 61, 64,
69, 277, 303nn15,25, 304n28, 305n60,
306n61, 306nn65,71,72, 312n148
machine shops, 54, 128, 128-59 passim,
135, 265; apprenticeship system in, 141,
147-53; Commercial Press, 53, 128; and
the nation-state, 134; and print capitalism, 136; repair versus manufacture
discussed, 136; workers in, 139, 141,
147-53
McIntosh, Gilbert, 99-100, 101, 124
Major Brothers, 79-80, 94, 110, 112, 113,
119, 285(#53), 309n107, 316n219,
317nn254,255, 327nn129,130
Malacca, 28t, 31, 34, 35, 36, 40, 47,
303n25, 304n28; Cai Gao banished
to, 83
Manchu-language printing, 49, 50
manuscript prices, 170
Mao, Dun, 198, 215, 216-17, 220-23
passim, 250, 274-79 passim, 356n248
Mao, Xianglin: on lithography, 79
Mao, Zedong, 3, 21, 214, 221, 273, 278,
279; Mao Zedong xuanji, 318n269; Mao
Zhuxi ylu, 22

Index

mapmaking and/or publishing, 65, 98-99,

187, 239, 243, 313n176
Marshman, Joshua, 34-35, 303n20;
Chinese-language font of, 35f, 40, 304n42
Marx, Karl, 8-9, 299n26
Master-Acknowledgment Ceremony
(shifu xingli), 151
Mateer, J.L., 49
matrices, 28t, 32, 33, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46,
47, 49, 51, 53, 56, 57f, 60, 86, 130t,
139, 157, 277, 283(#29), 285(#54),
303n11, 305n45, 307n89, 309-10n103
May Fourth Incident, 217, 270, 301-2n61,
355n229
May Thirtieth Movement, 66, 222,
341n105
mechanization, 9, 23, 25-87 passim, 85-86,
91, 102, 129, 134, 136, 156, 159, 17677, 188, 203, 204, 265, 330n31
Medhurst, Walter Henry, 31, 42, 71, 86,
305nn55,57, 312n147, 315n211,
319n20; comparing printing technologies,
31-32, 42; using lithography, 61
medical publishing, 101, 103, 121-22, 126,
283(#34), 285(#47, 54), 286(#66, 67),
287(#73), 310n120, 321n52, 326nn120,
121, 122, 327nn123, 125, 356-57n252
Meihua font, 46f, 47, 53, 308-9n103. See
also American Presbyterian Mission Press
Meishu shenghuo, 63
Mengxuebao, 174
Mergenthaler, Ottmar, 22, 53, 57
Miehle cylinder printing machine, 30t,
74-78 passim, 78f, 83, 222, 316n225,
354n216
Milne, William, 35-36; favouring woodblocks to print Chinese, 303n25; and
Liang Afa, 304n28
mincho-tai (Mingchao ti font), 309-10n103
Mingjing Machine Shop, 130t, 135, 14447, 158-59, 262, 268, 277, 332n81,
333n87; and Commercial Press, 145;
effect of 1932 Japanese attack on, 156;
preparation for war, 157; workday at,
149-53; workers at, 147-53; and Xinwen
bao, 145-46, 152-53; Zhang Jinlin, 135,
141, 145, 147-53
miniaturization. See book printing/
publishing
Mitterer, Hermann Josef, star-wheel
planographic press, 79
Mixed Court, 111-12, 120, 235, 337n48,
339n74, 357n253
modernity: centralization and, 11, 131; in
printing, 25, 133; industrial forms of
work in defining, 80-81, 81f; language of,

166, 214; multifaceted, nonlinear path

to, 10-11; role of architecture in defining,
104-6, 107-8, 110, 113, 118, 120, 144,
277, 322n63; role of technology in
defining, 8-11, 90, 278
Monotype, 58-59, 130t, 277, 310nn123,
127
Montesquieu, 218
Morrison, Robert, 35-37, 304nn28, 35,
36, 312n147; Dictionary of the Chinese
Language, 36, 38, 38f, 39f; Morrison font,
36-40
motive power, 26, 125; gas, 74; human, 73;
kerosene, 139; steam, 74; water buffalo,
71, 73
movable type, 14-15, 23, 28, 31, 69, 33f,
34, 45-48, 49, 50, 304-5n44, 311n135;
early invention in China, 300-1n48; early
Shanghai firms, 52; effects of brushing
rather than pressing on, 66-67. See also
fonts
Nanjing, 7, 16, 52, 95, 102, 191, 203, 205,
206, 213, 232, 286(#64), 303n26,
308n98, 309n112, 313n177
Nanjing Road, 80, 94, 114, 119, 174, 192,
216, 231, 233, 235, 285(#57), 318n258
Nanshi, 44, 60, 97, 156, 174, 179, 189, 259
Nanyang Public Institute, 169; Cai Yuanpei
at, 196, 197; establishment by Sheng
Xuanhuai, 167; publication of Chinas
first modern textbooks, 167, 212, 230;
publications of Yan Fu, 214-15; other
publications, 215; Zhang Yuanji at, 16970, 194-95, 197, 341n107;
Napier, Lord William John, 61, 312n148
National Bible Society of Scotland, 85,
309n110
National Language Movement, 246, 249,
356n243
nationalism, 12-13, 14, 27, 216; Benedict
Anderson on, 8, 329n23
Nationalist government, 205, 206, 213,
223, 250, 254, 259, 260; ideological
conformity enforced by, 207, 211, 22324, 240, 273-74, 337n48, 338n64;
orders local governments to buy library
collectanea, 224; Shanghai publishers
print currency for, 147, 238, 239, 34546n33, 283(#30)
Nationalist Party, 203, 223; and Shanghai
publishing industry, 135, 211, 223, 234,
236, 238, 240, 252, 270, 273-74, 281
(#9), 284(#38), 286(#58, 62, 64),
287(#77), 346n34, 350n141, 350n153,
353n208, 357n259

385

386 Index

New Culture Movement, 136, 213, 21718, 219, 238, 246, 261, 270, 282(#16),
284(#39)
new-style learning/books, 90, 124, 127,
162, 168, 169, 175, 179, 181-82, 188,
191, 192, 201, 203-4, 210, 212, 220,
253, 254, 265, 278, 279, 281(#5),
338n64, 356n244; new studies, 194, 227
newspapers. See individual entries
nianhua, 6, 97, 284(#40), 287(#68)
Ningbo, 242, 301n56; APMP at, 28t, 30t,
43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 69, 73, 84, 86, 123,
305n51, 306n65; Ningbo natives in
Shanghai, 150, 187, 196, 324n90,
340n90, 342n123
North China Herald, 52, 88-127 passim,
138, 306n71, 310n125; as Xia Ruifangs
employer, 189
Northern Expedition, 205, 223, 238, 24950, 261, 356n246
old-style learning/books, 175, 180, 192,
201
offset lithography, 28t, 30t,, 56f, 61, 62,
63, 130t, 137, 142, 154, 156, 311n142,
313nn162,167, 322n57; and Commercial
Press, 63, 83, 144, 222; offset press, 63f;
spread from Shanghai, 313n165
paper: bamboo paper and lithography, 154;
Chinas inadequate production of modern,
153; improving Chinese production of,
134, 153, 154, 155, 267; guangjie, maobian,
maocao, maotai paper, 341n113. See also
lianshi
patronage: commercial, 9, 120, 245, 246,
247; governmental, 167, 204, 205, 211,
224-25, 232, 238, 240, 254, 256, 258;
transition from elite to mass-market, 25,
113, 184, 260
Penang, 28t, 40, 41, 43, 86, 277, 305n48
philanthropic (non-commercial) publishing,
6, 29, 43-44, 84, 115, 117, 118, 119,
189, 261, 269, 306n72
photoengraving, 28t, 59-60
photogravure, 28t, 65-66, 130t, 147, 158,
251, 314n182. See also intaglio media
photomechanical processes, 62-63, 79, 233,
313n172, 340n93
piracy, 100, 177, 184, 242, 331n47. See
also copyright
planography. See lithography
platen presses. See cylinder (bed-andplaten, flatbed presses) printing machines
pornography, 101

prejudice (racial/cultural): by Chinese

against Westerners, 175, 337n42; by
Westerners against Chinese, 189
Presbyterians. See American Presbyterian
Mission Press
prices (books, journals, etc.), 100, 101-2,
110, 114, 117, 177, 235-36, 245, 248,
286(#61); of Dianshizhai Pictorial 113,
323n73; Dianshizhais and Tongwens
compared, 115; lithographed and typeset
books compared, 323n70; lithographed
and woodblocked books compared, 98,
99, 101-2, 110, 320n32, 322n54,
323n73, 333n84
print capitalism, 8, 22, 25. See also Chinese
print capitalism
print commerce, 4, 6-8, 17, 19, 21, 22, 25,
89, 161, 200, 262, 258, 268, 302n62
print culture, 3, 4-6, 8, 11, 16, 17, 19, 22,
24, 87, 161, 163, 200, 203-4, 257-58,
261, 268, 274, 300n36
print runs, 32, 98, 110, 198-99, 308n102,
319n11, 351n165, 356n252, 344-45n20
printing: in China, 5, 6-7, 22, 25-87
passim; in the creation of modern China,
12-16, 24, 34, 37, 50, 54, 183, 230-31,
237-38, 266, 269-70, 278; and modern
civilization, 12, 15, 16, 87, 278
printing press, 3, 30t, 303n15, 306n61;
Chinese-made and distribution beyond
Shanghai, 23, 134, 154-56, 159; Gutenbergs press, 12, 14, 16, 68f, 129, 262;
manufacture in China, 23, 128-59 passim,
129, 130t, 131, 132, 133, 134-35, 142,
143-44, 146, 265; reinvention in the
nineteenth century, 25, 26, 83. See also
individual models
printing workers, 23, 25, 28, 36, 48, 49,
51, 52, 84, 97-98, 123, 125, 131, 274;
apprenticeships of, 44, 48-49, 52, 94,
189, 276-78, 307n76, 340n90; and the
Commercial Press, 192, 220-23; and
Dianshizhai, 113; exploitation of, 133,
268; leaving xylography for lithography,
102; numbers employed in Shanghai,
220, 260, 261, 267, 322n61; shortages
of, 50; strikes of, 220-23, 272; and
superstition, 307n91; and Tongwen, 115
Protestant printing, 306n72; compared
with Catholic printing, 29, 99, 309n106
publication law, 184, 337n48
Qian, Qianyi, 242, 352n181, 182
Qian, Yongming, 251, 252, 357n253
Qian, Zheng, 80, 111

Index

Qian Hanshu, 115

qianzhuang, 163, 353-54n211, 355n223
Qingchun zhi ge, 278
Qingdao, 99, 111, 197, 238
Qinglou huabao, 101
Qingxin Hall School (Qingxintang), 28t,
44-45, 48, 52, 94, 189, 307n79
Qingyibao, 226
Qiu, Ziang, 79, 80, 317n249
Qu, Yaang, 28t, 30t, 61, 62, 83, 312n147
Quanshi liangyan, 304n28
relief printing, 28t, 30t, 67-79; compared
with planography (lithography), 267;
impact on our understanding of the
Gutenberg revolution, 89; media, 27, 41,
43, 44, 45, 59, 84-86, 312n152; presses
157; superseding lithography, 103, 123,
126, 129
Renxue, 193, 194
Roman Catholic printing, 26, 36, 37, 64,
79, 264, 307nn76,78; compared with
Protestant printing, 44, 84
rotary presses, 30t, 67, 75-79, 130t, 146,
157, 222, 239, 262, 304-5n44, 31617nn226,235, 317n236, 318n256,
351n157; web-fed, 77f
Ruitai Machine Shop, 54, 56f, 63, 130t,
154-55, 158, 310n121; founded by Tian
Jiasheng, 143

sanjia dingli. See three legs of the tripod

Saoye shanfang, 101-2, 121, 173, 174,
214, 266, 287(#75), 320n29, 32021n35, 321n51, 323n70, 327n125
Scholars School (shusheng pai), 196
science publishing, 12, 162, 261, 275-76,
278, 300n41; social, 11, 214-15, 223, 282
(#16,23), 285(#45), 308n96, 340n93;
natural, 169, 198, 218, 231, 286(#61),
287(#77), 319n20, 335-36n25
scientific management, 219, 346n47
Second Sino-Japanese War, 21, 59, 225,
284(#42), 302n2, 358n4
Self-Strengthening Movement, 166, 167,
196, 276, 300n46; compared with Gutenberg revolution, 136-37
Senefelder, Alois, 61, 62, 83, 92, 311n144,
317n245
Serampore. See Marshman, Joshua
Shanghai, 16-17, 259-62; as Chinas
modern intellectual centre, 200, 233-34,
241, 254, 257, 261; Cantonese in, 114,
115, 117, 133, 241; centralization of
modern printing and publishing in, 130-

31, 135, 170-71, 207, 212, 254, 274;

identification with modernity, 88, 90,
129, 262; industrial fire in, 117-18;
machine shops in, 135-36; publishers
inside/outside the International Concession, 225, 233, 235, 245, 266; and
publishing, 8, 10, 41-42; publishing
banned works in, 193, 194, 226, 242,
249-50, 253, 338n51; sojourners in, 123,
178, 181, 187
Shanghai Booksellers Guild (1906), 162,
173, 174-81, 188, 336n30; and directors
Gao Hanqing, Tang Ziquan, and Ye Jiuru,
179
Shanghai Booksellers Same-Industry
Association (1930), 211, 224, 240, 268,
351n172
Shanghai Booksellers Self-Protection
Corps, 178, 179f, 338n56
Shanghai Booksellers Trade Association
(1905-6/1911), 4, 171, 180f, 181-84,
182f, 228, 237, 337n42
Shanghai Bookselling Merchants Federation (1928), 224
Shanghai General Labour Union, 223
Shanghai Municipal Council, 222, 260
Shanghai Printing Workers Union, 221,
346n57
Shaonian zazhi, 215
Shaonian yinshua gong (The Young
Printing Worker), 275-78
Shaoxing, 241, 308n98, 336n32, 342n143,
352n180, 353n207
Shen, Jifang, 235, 350n141
Shen, Junsheng, 207, 242, 244, 344n7,
353n207
Shen, Zhifang, 144, 182f, 203, 208,
209-10, 230, 235, 241-53 passim, 255,
262, 281(#2), 283(#34), 284(#36),
287(#72), 344nn7, 13, 352n180,
354n217, 355n223; 1917 legal problems,
235, 244; appraised by Bao Tianxiao,
243-44; bribing officials, 247; at Commercial Press, 241-43; involvement with
Nationalist Party, 251, 357n259; publishing pirated or rare books, 241-43; at
Zhonghua Books, 243-44
Shenbao, 30t, 50, 52, 74, 76-77, 80, 94, 97,
104, 105f, 111, 112, 131, 174, 236, 259,
285(#53), 306n71, 308n96, 315nn256,
257, 324n88, 326-27n122, 327n130,
348n98, 358n8; font, 309n107
Shenchang Calligraphy Studio, 52, 104,
105f, 113, 285(#53), 320-21n35, 32627n122

387

388 Index

Sheng, Xuanhuai, 145, 167-68, 170, 171,

195, 324-25n91, 335n24
Shenjiang shengjing tu, 81, 81f, 95, 105f
Shenzhou guoguangshe, 52, 64, 285(#45)
Shi, Liangcai, 236, 353n198
Shibao, 30t, 77, 215, 259
Shiji, 3, 77, 215, 218, 259, 283(#30)
Shiwubao, 96, 226
Shuowen, 119
shuyuan, 164, 166, 170, 172, 196, 336n31;
reestablishment of after Taiping Rebellion, 166, 335-36n25
Sibu beiyao, 310n120
Sibu congkan, 214, 345n27, 347n71
sibu/siku library classification system, 219-20
Siku quanshu, 345n27, 348n80
simplification of Chinese characters, 228,
229
Singapore, 31, 35, 315n202, 356-57n252
Sino-French War, 112, 261
Sinotype, 59, 130t
social mobility, 266; downward, 168;
upward, 200; Zhang Jian, 167-68; Zhang
Yuanji, 168-70, 200
Socit Asiatique, 43, 306n67
Society for the Diffusion of Christian
Knowledge (Guangxuehui), 99-100
Song, Yaoru (Charles Jones Soong), 234,
350n137
Song ti font, 37, 40, 46f, 47, 54. See also
American Presbyterian Mission Press
Songnan mengying lu, 82
Spencer, Herbert, 215, 218, 234
Stanhope, Charles Mahon, 304-5n44;
Stanhope press, 67, 68, 69, 83, 129,
314nn188, 192
state-run publishing, 205, 348n91
stereotype, 28t, 42-43, 57; clay, 28, 43,
76-77, 176, 304nn28, 35, 304-5n44,
306nn63, 71, 307n82; compared with
electrotype, 45; durability of, 67; papiermch stereotype (flong), 28, 45; plaster,
28, 44, 307n79; used as loan collateral,
236
subscription method of publishing (yuyue
fa), 116, 118, 272, 324n91
Sun, Yat-sen, 52, 184, 218, 227, 234, 236,
246, 270, 273, 341-42n114; Wang
Yunwu as secretary of, 218
Sun Wen xueshuo, 270
Suzhou, 6, 7, 48, 50, 97, 101, 172-74
passim, 178, 201, 244, 252, 352n182
Taiping Rebellion, 21, 44, 48, 84, 95, 97,
101, 161, 164, 168, 171, 173, 176, 264,
304n28, 308n98, 314n184

Tang, Mr. (Foshan), 66, 268, 314n184

Tang, Shaoyi, 233
Tangshi sanbai shou, 218, 226
Tao, Xingzhi, 247
technology: and capitalism, 9; and history,
13, 109, 263; invention/inventors, 27677; literature describing, 19, 73, 109,
275-78; Marxism on, 274; and modern
civilization, 12, 15, 16, 87, 263, 278; and
nationalism, 15, 183, 278; and printing,
9-11, 12; and value systems, 15, 275-77
technology transfer, 22-23, 25, 28-29,
30, 133, 137-38, 201; from China to
Germany in nineteenth century, 53;
from China to Japan, England, France
in nineteenth century, 50; from China
to the West before Gutenberg, 300-1n48;
and choice, 16, 22, 26-27, 29, 32, 86, 92,
122-23, 161, 258, 262, 279; dependency
problem, 51, 131, 133, 136, 143, 157,
159-60, 235-36; importance of Commercial Press in, 85; from Japan, 25-87
passim, 138-39; in overcoming dependency, 131, 157, 128-60 passim;
Shanghais centrality in, 84, 137; from
the West to China, 25-87 passim, 138
textbooks. See book publishing
textbook wars, 204, 247-49, 255, 271
Thank-Master Toast (xieshi jiu), 152
Thompson type-caster, 53, 56, 216, 332n64
Thoms, Peter Perring, 28t, 36-37, 40,
277; and EIC/Thoms font, 40, 42, 59,
304nn33, 42
Three Armed Uprisings, 223, 238
three-colour printing, 10, 28, 59, 199,
312n152
three legs of the tripod (sanjia dingli), 52,
202, 206, 207, 209, 210, 249, 309n114,
343n2
Tian, Jiasheng, 138, 140-42, 147, 154,
155, 156, 158
The Times (London), 22, 53, 67, 75-76,
309n117
tinplate, 28, 64, 313n175
Tongji University, 219
Tongmenghui, 230
Tongwen Press (Tongwen shuju), 90, 11418, 162, 214, 218, 309n109, 321n43,52,
322n61, 324-25n91, 326n119
Tongwenguan (Beijing), 41, 336n28
treaty ports, 16, 26, 84, 85, 112, 227, 25960, 358n2; Shanghai as, 9, 90, 165, 193,
199
Tushanwan, 28t, 30t, 307nn75, 78;
Catholic orphanage print shop at, 28, 44,
60, 62, 64, 79, 80f, 94

Index

Tushujicheng shuju, 52, 104, 116,

285(#53), 309n107
Twenty-Four Dynastic Histories, 20, 115,
118, 218, 309n107
type racks, 47-48, Figs. 1.8 and 1.9, 222,
277
type-casting, 32-34, 41, 43, 51f, 139, 140,
340n90; Dyers efforts (Penang font), 41;
type-casting machines, 52-53, 54-59,
128, 143, 144, 154, 155, 156, 332n68
type-cutting, 32-34, 36, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44,
66, 303n15
typewriter, Chinese, 345-46n33, 351n164;
Japanese, 310n127
typesetting, 32-33, 52-53, 57-59, 144, 222,
277, 308n96, 309n116, 340n90

Vignettes from the Late Qing, 19-21, 200,

227, 271, 274, 275, 279, 302nn62,63,
342-43n114, 356n250; and call for
useful books (see also Commercial
Press), 21, 188-99 passim, 271
Waijiao bao, 215, 342n126
Walter press, 30t, 74, 75, 76, 316n232
Wang, Licai, 52, 181, 309n112, 323n74
Wang, Mengzou, 187, 284(#39)
Wang, Tao, 42, 70, 71, 80, 82, 83, 86, 111,
262, 269, 305n58, 352n184; Manyou
suilu, 111; on printing processes, 46, 61,
73; Yingruan zazhi, 71
Wang, Yunwu, 203, 218-25 passim, 255;
appointed director of Commercial Press
editorial office, 218-19; appointed
general manager of Commercial Press,
224; compared with Zhang Yuanji and
Gao Mengdan, 219; hired by Sun Yat-sen,
218; involvement with Nationalist Party,
218, 220, 224, 225, 347n77
Wang, Zhengting, 233
Wanyou wenku, 224, 347n71
War: as a stimulus for publishing, 41, 93,
103, 112, 129, 143, 156, 213, 261, 264,
284(#42), 302n2, 314n182, 319n15;
destructive of publishing efforts, 21, 40,
128-29, 173, 225, 235-36, 237, 261,
286(#61), 314n184, 358n4
Washington press, 30t, 42, 68, 69,
314n192, 314-15n195
Wealth of Nations, 170, 214
wenfang sibao (four treasures of the scholars
studio), 17
wenhua, 203, 205, 207, 209, 301-2n61,
343n1
Wenhuajie, 16-22, 18m, 24, 187-88, 204,
205, 207-12, 241, 245, 247, 254, 259,

260, 261, 263, 270, 279, 280-88, 3012n61, 318n256, 338n62, 344n13; as a
continuum from industry to culture, 26162, 263
Wenhui bao, 189, 327n130
Wenming Books, 28t, 60, 62, 64, 85, 126,
144, 181, 183, 199, 212, 213, 227-34
passim, 242, 243, 244, 288(#78),
310n120, 340n93; as a corporation, 187;
printing textbooks with lithography, 197
Wenxian tongkao, 66-67, 114
Wenyutang, 173
Wharfedale press, 30t, 74; electric-powered,
74, 76
Williams, S. Wells, 42, 305n60, 306n72,
307n92
woodblock printing. See xylography
World Books, 24, 52, 204, 203-56 passim,
209f, 212, 241, 253; and April 1927
massacre, 250; assets of, 211, 245, 251,
259; bribing customers, 248; creating
specialized markets, 247; diversification
of, 251; employees of, 246; establishment
as corporation, 245; journals of, 246;
organization of, 245; printing operations
of, 245; production compared with
Commercial Press, Zhonghua, 207, 256;
publications of, 244-45; Red House in
Wenhuajie, 245; regional branches of,
246, 252; Shen Zhifangs first use of
name, 245; and textbook publishing,
246-49; total publications of, 252;
Wenhuajie site of, 207, 209f, 245, 251
Wu, Danchu, 197
Wu, Jingyuan, 236, 351-52n172
Wu, Tiesheng, 231, 235, 236
Wu, Woyao, 19, 201, 227, 271, 302n63,
341-42n114
Wu, Youru, 81, 95-96, 108-9, 115, 124,
173, 262, 286(#66), 320n22; and new
illustrators, 114
Wu, Zhihui, 223, 353n208
Wuchang, 226-27, 230, 313nn165,177,
323n174, 345n21
Wuxi, 178, 183, 187, 197, 228, 310n120,
313n172
Wuyingdian, 110, 115, 323n76, 348n80,
352n183,184
Wylie, Alexander, 42, 304n28, 315n211
Xi, Zipei, 174, 178, 181, 187, 262,
336n36, 338n67
Xia, Ruifang, 52, 174, 181-82, 189-91
passim, 193, 241-42, 262, 278, 336n36;
appraised by Bao Tianxiao, 192-93;
assassination of, 216, 346n34; and

389

390 Index

establishment of Commercial Press, 189,

340n90; invites Zhang Yuanji, 195, 197;
and Kinko-do-, 198; misappropriations of
company funds, 349-50n99, 350n139;
and textbook publishing, 189-90;
willingness to print banned books, 193
Xia, Songlai, 52, 174, 181, 309n112,
336n36, 338n67
Xiaocheng chunqiu, 278
Xiaoshuo yuebao, 215, 220, 221
Xiaoti Langxuan wenji, 114
Xibaipo, and Mao Zedong, 3, 214
Xieda Machine Shop, 130t, 139, 155,
330n43; founded by Chen Zhaoqing,
140-41, 331n50
Xin qingnian, 136, 217, 286(#65)
Xin shaonian, 275
Xin shidai jiaokeshu (New Era Textbooks),
224
Xin xuezhi jiaokeshu (New School System
Textbooks), 218
Xin zidian, 12, 214, 300n40
Xinhua shudian, 260, 354n216
Xingzhonghui, 52, 227, 341-42n114
Xinwen bao, 30t, 76, 136, 145, 146, 152,
259, 285(#55), 351n160
Xiuwen yinshuju, 28t, 45, 190-91
xylography (woodblock printing), 4, 9-10,
23, 27, 42-43, 46, 61, 133, 257, 263,
303n15, 303n20, 322n65; compared
with movable type, 31-32, 34, 36, 49;
displacement by lithography, 98-103,
109, 325n108; missionary use of, 43, 85,
99, 304n28, 319n20, 320n32; print runs,
110, 308n102; wages paid to cutters,
320n32, 322n54
Xu, Hongfu, 115, 126
Xu, Meikun, 221
Xu, Run, 52, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119,
126, 162, 262, 324-25n91
Xujiahui (Sikkawei/Zikawei), 44, 62, 94,
123, 332n59
Yadong tushuguan, 284(#39), 287(#70),
344n13; as a corporation, 187
Yan, Fu, 169, 170, 181, 191, 192, 193,
214-15, 218, 320n27, 341nn106,107,
342n118, 345n28
Yan, Zhong, 132, 137, 142
Yang, Xianjiang, 221, 223, 250
Yao, Gonghe, 114
Ye, Shengtao, 215, 276
yellow poplar printing plate. See boxwood
plates
yichu sansuo (one office, three departments)
management system, 216, 230

Yin, Youmo, 198

Yingwen zazhi, 215
Yiwen yinshua yuekan/The Graphic Printer, 14,
54, 83, 85, 301n51; Lin Heqin on
corporate model, 163, 186, 254, 269
You di er zhang (Wartime), 275
Youzheng shuju, 64, 283(#30), 32
Yu, Fu, 60, 64, 169, 181, 182f, 183, 187,
192, 197, 228, 231, 262, 268, 288(#78),
340n93
Yu, Youren, 91, 236, 250, 350n153
Yuan, Shikai, 65, 231, 269, 324-25n91,
337n48, 346n34, 350n153, 355n229
Yunlange, 95, 320n21
Zeng, Guofan, 95, 166-67; brother Zeng
Guoquan, 95
Zhang, Dai, 114
Zhang, Henshui, 245
Zhang, Jian, 167, 168, 170, 171, 174, 215,
340n92
Zhang, Jinglu: on Wenhuajie, 209-10,
282(#23), 283-84(#35), 334n105,
344n9
Zhang, Jinlin. See Mingjing Machine Shop
Zhang, Xichen, 219, 223, 275, 282(#20),
346nn34,45. See also Kaiming shudian
Zhang, Xiumin, 10, 84, 118
Zhang, Yinhuan, 117
Zhang, Yuanji, 168-70, 188, 262; as
editorial director of Commercial Press,
198, 213; joins the Commercial Press,
170, 197; as manager of Commercial
Press, 216-17; at Nanyang Public
Institute, 169-70; as supervisor, 217. See
also Commercial Press
Zhang, Zhidong, 90, 114, 145, 166-67,
313n177
Zheng, Zhenduo: 215, 221, 222, 223,
282(#19), 285(#51), 287(#73)
Zheng, Zhenwen, 218-19
Zhengkai ti font, 53, 283(#29), 310n120
Zhengzhong shuju, 224, 286(#64)
Zhongguo tushu gongsi (Chinese Library
Company), 52, 60, 174, 262; as a
corporation, 187
Zhonghua Books: 11, 24, 52, 126, 204,
212, 225-40, 253, 259; and April 1927
massacre, 238; annual sales of, 234;
assets of, 211, 232, 233, 234-35; Big
Eight Journals, 232, 238; as a corporation, 187, 232; discussing merger with
Commercial Press, 236; diversification of,
238, 239; editorial offices of, 349n106;
font design, 53; founding of, 230;
Hardoon Road site, 233, 235; Macao

Index

(Aomen) Road site, 239; and Mingjing,

147; near-bankruptcy of, 235; number of
employees of, 225, 232, 233, 239; print
shop of, 144-45, 233, 239; and printing
workers at, 220; production compared
with Commercial Press, 207, 231, 256;
profits of, 238, 239; regional branches,
232, 233, 238, 239, 244; sales of, 239,
244; total publications of, 239; and
Wenhuajie, 188, 207, 233, 208f; and
Wenming, 231, 232, 243
Zhonghua da zidian, 12, 232, 233, 300n40
Zhonghua xiaoxue jiaokeshu (Zhonghua
Primary School Textbooks), 231
Zhonghua zhongxue jiaokeshu (Zhonghua
Middle School Textbooks), 231
Zhou, Quanping, 270

Zhu, Jingnong, 347n77

Zhu, Lianbao, 244, 249, 250, 284(#36),
354n215, 355nn226,236, 357n253
Zhu, Tian, 56, 57f
Zhu, Xi, 5, 352n183
Zhuang, Yu, 197, 198
Zhuyin fuhao (Chinese phonetic alphabet),
222, 310n120
zinc-plate lithography, 61
Zizhi tongjian, 3, 119
Zongli Yamen, 41, 50, 117, 168, 169, 197,
335n24, 336n28
Zou, Rong: Gemingjun of, 227
Zuiliutang, 173, 320-21n35
Zuixin guowen jiaokeshu (Modern Chinese
Textbooks), 198, 211

391

This page intentionally left blank

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute

Selected Titles
Taxation without Representation in Rural China: State Capacity, Peasant Resistance, and Democratization, by Thomas P. Bernstein and Xiaobo L. Cambridge: Modern China Series, Cambridge University Press, 2003
The Reluctant Dragon: Crisis Cycles in Chinese Foreign Economic Policy, by Lawrence Christopher
Reardon. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002
Spanning Japans Modern Century: The Memoirs of Hugh Borton, by Hugh Borton. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2002
Korea Between Empires, 1895-1919, by Andre Schmid. New York: Columbia University Press,
2002
The North Korean Revolution: 1945-50, by Charles Armstrong. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2002
Consumer Politics in Postwar Japan: The Institutional Boundaries of Citizen Activism, by Patricia
Maclachlan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001
Chinas Retreat from Equality: Income Distribution and Economic Transition, Carl Riskin, Zhao
Renwei, Li Shi, eds. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001
Abortion before Birth Control: The Politics of Reproduction in Postwar Japan, by Tiana Norgren.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001
Cadres and Corruption: The Organizational Involution of the Chinese Communist Party, by Xiaobo
L. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000
Japans Imperial Diplomacy: Consuls, Treaty Ports, and War with China, 1895-1938, by Barbara
Brooks. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000
Nation, Governance, and Modernity: Canton, 1900-1927, by Michael T.W. Tsin. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1999
Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer, by Simon Partner.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999
Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan, by Gerald Figal. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1999
The Logic of Japanese Politics: Leaders, Institutions, and the Limits of Change, by Gerald L. Curtis.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1999
Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State and Logic of the Market, by
Dorothy Solinger. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999
Bicycle Citizens: The Political World of the Japanese Housewife, by Robin LeBlanc. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999

Set in Arrus and Futura by Artegraphica Design Co.

Text design: Irma Rodriguez
Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens
Copy editor: Dallas Harrison
Proofreader: Deborah Kerr
Cartographer: Eric Leinberger