Still, although Gutenberg is most justly entitled to the honour of being considered the inventor of the Art of Typography, as now practised in Europe, he was not, in fact, the first who printed books from separate moveable types. In this, as in block printing, the Chinese again bear away the palm. For, singularly enough, it is ascertained that although the general mode of printing in China is, and always has been, from wooden blocks, yet separable letters were known to the Chinese as early as the Eleventh century. For a time, single characters made of clay and baked hard were used in that empire, but were soon abandoned for the mode now almost universally practised, except for the Imperial Calendar, published once a quarter, and the Pekin Gazette, issued daily, which are still wretchedly printed from moveable types made of a plastic gum. The account of the invention is too interesting to be omitted. In the period King-li (between 1041 and 1048) one of the people, a blacksmith named Pi-ching, invented another manner of printing with _ho-pan_, or tablets formed of moveable types. This name is still retained in the Imperial Printing Office at Pekin. On a fine and glutinous earth, formed into plates, Pi-ching engraved the characters most in use. Each character was a type. These he burnt in the fire to harden them. When he wished to print he took a frame of iron, divided interiorly and perpendicularly by strips of the same metal (Chinese being read vertically); this he laid on a table of sheet iron coated with a fusible gum composed of resin, wax, and lime; he then inserted the types, placing them one close against the other. Each frame, when filled, formed a tablet. This was brought near the fire to make the gum melt, after which a level piece of wood was pressed forcibly on the surface of the types, by which means they were pushed down into the gum and became firm and even as a stone. The tablets were then printed from in the usual manner. When a new character was wanted it was immediately prepared on the spot, and the inventor shewed the advantage of clay over wood; there was neither grain nor porosity, with a greater facility of separation from the gum when required for distribution. At Pi-ching’s death, all this apparatus was carefully preserved by his successors. Printing, however, went on in the old way, the reason being that the Chinese has not, as other languages, an alphabet made up of a few characters, with which all sorts of books may be printed, but a separate type is wanted for every word; and as the language is divided into classes of 106 sounds, so 106 cases (part of the furniture of a Printing Office) would be required, each one to contain a prodigious number of types, thus rendering the mechanical task of composing and distributing, one of enormous difficulty and labour. It was easier and cheaper to follow the usual method, and print either from blocks of wood or plates of stereotyped copper.[142]