Printing from surfaces of wood, engraved in relief, is an art which appears to have been known in China from time immemorial. Its origin there is hidden in the obscurity of bye-gone ages: it may have been practised by the Chinese from the very commencement of their empire;[5] or the idea may have been derived at a later period from blotting-paper impressions of writings, or from tracings or rubbings of inscriptions, which travellers from ‘the flowery land’ may have taken, in foreign countries, on sheets of paper, such as are known to have been manufactured in China from times of a very remote antiquity, and which are to this day better adapted for such purposes than any papers elsewhere made. Such rubbings, forming a kind of papier-mâché castings,[6] would naturally suggest, not only the idea of stereo-blocks, whereon writings in reversed characters could be engraved in relief, but also the mode of printing, which, to the present day, prevails throughout the Chinese empire. With the fact before us, that the Chinese were, up to a certain period in their history, far ahead of all other nations, not even excepting the Egyptians, in the development of inventions which could only be the product of an advanced state of civilization, it is not unreasonable to conclude, (especially in the absence of positive information to help us in our researches), that the art of printing from blocks originated in China in the manner above stated. Whether such were the case or not, Du Halde, in order to establish its great antiquity, cites the following proverb, quoted by an old author as written by the Emperor Van Vong, who flourished 1120 years before Christ--“As the stone Me (a word signifying ink in the Chinese language) which is used to blacken the engraved characters, can never become white, so a heart blackened with vices, will always retain its blackness.” This quotation, however, not being very conclusive on the subject, he fixes the invention at fifty years before the Christian era. Father Couplet, Klaproth, and others, ascribe it to a much later date. “Under the reign of Mint-song,” writes Klaproth, “in the second of the years Tchang-hing (932) the ministers Fong-tao and Li-yu proposed to the Academy Koue-tseu-kien to review the nine king or canonical books, and to have them engraved upon blocks of wood, that they might be printed and sold. The emperor adopted the advice; but it was only in the second of the years Kouan-chun (952) that the engraving of the blocks was completed. They were then distributed and circulated in all the cantons of the empire.”