3

ArticlesJoshua Marshman and the First Chinese Book Printed
with Movable Metal TypeMA Min*Abstract
In 1998 in an essay published in Lishi yanjiu, I once discussed the pioneering
efforts of Joshua Marshman and Joannes Lassar in the early nineteenth
century to produce a Chinese translation of the Bible in Serampore, India. In
this essay I mentioned that the Gospel of John 若翰所書之福音, translated andprinted by Marshman and Lassar in 1813, “was in fact the first Chinese bookprinted using movable metal type.”1 Today, fifteen years later, I have not yet
seen any new discoveries requiring that I revise my assertions, and recently I
had an opportunity to visit Serampore, to inspect what remains of the oldMission Press, and to collect some books and materials preserved there. This
experience greatly enhanced my understanding of this episode of history.
Hence, here I would like to use the materials I have at hand to discuss inmore detail the early Chinese books printed with movable metal type and theachievements of the missionaries at Serampore in printing Chinese.

1

A Review of Previous Findings

At the end of the sixteenth century, modern Western printing technology
spread to China—about this there is no dispute. But when were Chinese
books first printed using movable metal type? It is here that we find inaccuracies.
It is often held that printing Chinese books with movable metal type beganwith Robert Morrison. For example, Zhang Shudong et al., in their General
History of Chinese Printing, assert, “Robert Morrison (1782–1834), a memberof the London Missionary Society, was the first Protestant missionary whoentered China to propagate Christianity and who brought with him the means
for making modern movable metal type.” And in their chronology of major
	  * The Third President of the Society; Professor and President of Central China Normal
University.
1 Ma Min 马敏, “Maximan, Lasha yu zaoqi de ‘Shengjing’ Zhongyi” 马希曼、拉沙与早期的《圣经》中译 (Marshman, Lassar, and the Translation of the Bible into Chinese),
Lishi yanjiu 历史研究 1998, no. 4.

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events, they write,
1814: Robert Morrison establishes a press in Malacca.
1815, August 5: Cha shisu meiyue tongji zhuan 察 世 俗 每 月 統 紀 傳(Chinese Monthly Magazine), the first modern periodical in Chinese,began publication.
1815: The British printer P. P. Thomas cuts movable metal type andbegins printing Morrison’s Dictionary of the Chinese Language in Macau.
“This is the first time that Western movable-metal-type printing technology was used to compose and print a Chinese book within China’s
borders.”
1819: The press in Malacca established by Morrison et al. uses Chinese
movable metal type to print the first Chinese Old and New Testament
Bible.2
Xiong Yuezhi, in his Dissemination of Western Learning and Late Qing
Society, writes that in 1822 the British printer P. P. Thomas “used printing
equipment with Chinese movable type to print [Robert Morrison’s]
Dictionary of the Chinese Language 華英字典.”3
Zhang Xiumin, in his History of Printing in China (vol. 2), provides us
with the following facts: Robert Morrison compiled his Dictionary of theChinese Language in Macau, and the East India Company agreed to publish
it. The printer P. P. Thomas then traveled from London to China around 1814,
bringing with him printing equipment, movable type, and other necessary
materials. After he arrived, several Chinese character engravers started thetedious task of cutting movable type on tin-alloy slugs. From 1815 to 1822
this team printed 600 copies of the six-volume dictionary at a cost of 12,000
British pounds. But to produce the movable type, the printers used the traditional Chinese method of cutting, and not the Western method of casting.4
Wan Qiying, in his History of China’s Modern Printing Industry, notesthat an English work, Joshua Marshman’s Elements of Chinese Grammar 中
国 言 法, was printed in Serampore in 1814. In this book, which includes theoriginal and a translation of Daxue 大學 (The Great Learning) as an appendix,
2 Zhang Shudong 张 树 栋 et al., Zhonghua yinshua tongshi 中 华 印 刷 通 史 (A General
History of Chinese Printing) (Beijing: Yinshua Gongye Chubanshe, 1999), pp. 426,
996.
3 Xiong Yuezhi 熊月之, Xixue dong jian yu wan Qing shehui 西学东渐与晚清社会 (The
Dissemination of Western Learning and Late Qing Society) (Shanghai: Shanghai
Renmin Chubanshe, 1994), p. 121.
4 Zhang Xiumin 张 秀 民, Zhongguo yinshua shi 中 国 印 刷 史 (A History of Printing in
China) (Hangzhou: Zhejiang Guji Chubanshe, 2006), vol. 2, p. 445.

﻿Joshua Marshman and the First Chinese Book Printed with Movable Metal Type5the characters appear to have been printed with movable metal type.5 And Fan
Muhan as well, in his Modern History of Printing in China, mentions that
before Robert Morrison published his dictionary in Macau from 1815 to
1823, Joshua Marshman (1768–1837), an English Baptist missionary, hadalready published his Elements of Chinese Grammar in Serampore in 1814.6
A chronology of major events in the field of publishing in China statesthat in 1819 Robert Morrison, at his press in Malacca, published 新舊約中文聖 經 (The Old and New Testaments of the Bible, in Chinese), the first
Chinese edition of the Bible and also the first Chinese book printed withmovable metal type.7
And finally, Wu Min, in his History of Modern and Contemporary Printing
in China, presents the following view:
Western missionaries were the first to introduce Western movable metal
type and copper matrices to China. In 1807 the English missionary
Robert Morrison arrived in Macau, where he translated the New
Testament into Chinese. He also recruited Cai Gao 蔡 高 and other character engravers to cast type and print in Guangzhou, but the local
authorities prevented him from proceeding. He then transferred theoperation to Malacca, where his team engraved copper matrices, casttype, composed type, and in 1819 printed the New Testament in
Chinese. From what we know, this was the first Chinese book printed
with movable metal type.8
The views above all differ in particular matters. But whatever date they
offer for the first Chinese book printed with movable metal type—be it 1814,
1815, 1819, or 1822—they are all later than 1813, when Joshua Marshman,in Serampore, printed the Gospel of John in Chinese using movable metal
type.
Because of all this confusion, it is all the more important to delve intoand clarify this significant bit of history.

5 Wan Qiying 万 启 盈, Zhongguo jindai yinshua gongye shi 中 国 近 代 印 刷 工 业 史 (AHistory of China’s Modern Printing Industry) (Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin
Chubanshe, 2012), pp. 11–12.
6 Fan Muhan 范 慕 韩, ed., Zhongguo yinshua jindai shi 中 国 印 刷 近 代 史 (A Modern
History of Printing in China) (Beijing: Yinshua Gongye Chubanshe, 1995), p. 69.
7 Fang Ming 方鸣, compiler, Jinxiandai Zhongguo chuban shi dashi biannian 近现代中
国出版史大事编年 (A Chronology of Major Events in the Modern and Contemporary
History of Publishing in China), Zhongguo chuban 中国出版 1991, no. 2.
8 Wu Min 伍 敏, Zhongguo jinxiandai yinshua shi 中 国 近 现 代 印 刷 史 (A History ofModern and Contemporary Printing in China) (Beijing: Zhongguo Da Baikequanshu
Chubanshe, 1993).

Journal of Cultural Interaction in East Asia Vol. 6 2015

6

2

The Baptist Missionary Press at Serampore

In 1792 the Baptist Church in Britain established its own Baptist
Missionary Society, the first protestant missionary organization in Europe andAmerica. In November 1793 William Carey, one of the founders of thismissionary society, and John Thomas, a missionary, arrived in Calcutta, India,
to spread the gospel. Thus began the nineteenth-century Protestant missionary
movement that spread throughout the world.
Because the Baptist Church was separate from the Anglican Church, theofficial Church of England, the English colonial authorities in India forbade
the Baptists to proselytize in Calcutta. Having no alternative, Carey moved to
Mudnabatty, about thirty miles north of Malda, where he undertook thesuperintendence over an indigo factory. Only after the Baptist Church sent
follow-on missionaries like Joshua Marshman and William Ward, etc. to India
in 1799, who went to the Danish colonial settlement at Serampore without
any stay in Calcutta, did the missionary work begin and later it was joined by
Carey and his family. Thus they all together established the mission post at
Serampore.
At the Serampore mission post, the missionaries opened up a boarding
school to support themselves and also established a press to publish a translation of the Bible. Carey thought that they should open and run a press (1)to help the missionaries support themselves and also to expand their interactions with the society, (2) to publish and distribute translations of the Bible in
the languages of the East, and (3) to provide jobs for local converts toChristianity.9 Carey, Marshman, and Ward divided up the work. Carey
oversaw translating the Bible into the various dialects of India. Marshman,
who once served as a primary school teacher, managed the boarding school.
And Ward, who had experience in printing, ran the press. Under Ward’s
supervision, the press, after its formal establishment in 1800, developed
steadily. From 1801, when it published a Bengali translation of the New
Testament, to 1832, the Mission Press at Serampore published over 210,000
volumes of religious and secular works in forty different languages. Its mostremarkable accomplishment was that it cut character punches and then thematrices to cast the movable metal type for numerous native Indian languages
and Chinese, thereby showing that it was possible to use this modern Western
metal-type technology for printing books in the languages of the East.
To realize the ambitious plan that the Serampore mission post set for itself
in 1804 of translating the Bible into all the languages of the East, Marshmanand his son in 1805 began studying Chinese under Joannes Lassar, and in the
9 Sunil Kumar Chatterjee, William Carey and Serampore, 2nd enl. ed. (Serampore,2004), p. 168.

﻿Joshua Marshman and the First Chinese Book Printed with Movable Metal Type7

same year Marshman explored how the Mission Press might begin printing
Chinese.
Chinese printing at Serampore passed through several stages of development. The first was when, in 1806, the press printed sample pages of Genesis
and the Gospel of Matthew using carved woodblocks, but this was nothing
more than a trial run. Then from around 1808 the press hired a Chinese man
at a salary of 4 pounds per month to supervise Bengal natives carving
Chinese movable wooden type (each character measuring 1.6 to 1.8 centimeters square), in order to print The Works of Confucius, which included
passages from the Analects along with Marshman’s translations into English.
This involved carving the entire Analects, cutting the blocks into columns oftext, composing the Chinese wooden type with the metal type of the English
translation, and then printing. Published in 1809, The Works of Confucius
consisted of chapters 1 to 9 of the Analects, with the original text,
Marshman’s English translation, and annotations.10 This was the first detailed
English introduction to the Analects since the days of the Catholic missionaries in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. Because the Chinese
movable wooden type was large and the white space around the English
metal type was generous, this quarto-size book ended up with 725 pages.11
As the fruit of his study of Chinese, Marshman in 1809 wrote andpublished Dissertation on the Characters and Sounds of the Chinese
Language. The movable wooden type used for the Chinese characters in thiswork were rather small. It seems that a complete woodblock was carved andthen cut into individual characters, in contrast to the columns of Chinese text
used for composing with large characters.12 This method of cutting woodblocks to produce small characters in movable wooden type was also used tosupply type for uncommon characters when printing the Chinese translationof the Bible.
Because the size of Chinese movable wooden type was so large, printing
with such type consumed lots of paper, and since such type broke easily, thetype often had to be re-carved. Hence, Chinese movable wooden type was notvery practical. For this reason, to print the earliest translations of books of the
Bible, the Gospel of Matthew (1810) and the Gospel of Mark (1811), theBaptist Mission Press at Serampore used traditional woodblock printing technology, the same technology used by Robert Morrison at nearly the same time
10 Joshua Marshman, The Works of Confucius, vol. 1 (Serampore: Mission Press, 1809).
11 See Ma Min 1998, and Su Jing 蘇精, “Malisun yu Zhongwen yinshua chuban” 馬禮遜 與 中 文 印 刷 出 版 (Robert Morrison and the Printing and Publishing of Chinese)(Taipei: Taiwan Xuesheng Shuju, 2000), p. 144.
12 Joshua Marshman, Dissertation on the Characters and sounds of the Chinese
Language (Serampore: Mission Press, 1809).

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in Guangzhou to secretly print Acts of the Apostles. Around 1811 themissionaries at Serampore thought of using Western metal-type technology tocast Chinese metal type. Relying on local craftsmen under the guidance ofseveral Chinese men, the missionaries produced two plates of Chinese
movable metal type. On one plate, the characters were 0.8 centimeters square,and on the other plate, the characters were 0.5 centimeters square, muchsmaller than the Chinese movable wooden type used for The Works ofConfucius. But the Chinese sorts cast were all for commonly used characters;
uncommon characters were still manually carved.13 In a relatively short spaceof time, the Mission Press at Serampore overcame many difficulties and maderapid progress. Earlier, in 1808, the missionaries—seeing how timeconsuming, troublesome, and expensive woodblock printing was—thoughtthat printing the whole Bible in Chinese was a distant and impracticalaffair.14 But four years later, in 1812, they optimistically declared that theMission Press was ready to use Chinese movable metal type to print theentire Bible in Chinese.15 Then during the night of March 11, 1812, a hugefire consumed the Mission Press at Serampore. While the press suffered agreat lose, the punches and matrices of the languages of the East (including
Chinese), accumulated with much effort, managed to survive with the resultthat the press could quickly resume its printing operations in these languages
with movable metal type.16 A milestone achievement attesting this revival wasthat in 1813 it printed, for the first time using movable metal type, theGospel of John, translated into Chinese by Joshua Marshman and Joannes
Lassar.

3

The Gospel of John, the First Chinese Book Printed with WesternStyle Metal TypePrior to 1813, translations and publications of the Bible in Chinese byProtestant missionaries along the coast of China and at Serampore were alldone using traditional Chinese woodblock printing, the time-honored methodof Chinese book publishers for producing books (figure 1). In 1810 RobertMorrison published 耶穌救世使徒行傳真本, a Chinese translation of Acts of theApostles, which he based on a manuscript that he brought with him fromEngland, 四史攸编耶稣基利斯督福音之会编 (Harmony of the Gospels), a manu13 Su Jing 2000, p. 144.
14 Memoir Relative to the Translations of the Sacred Scriptures (Dunstable: J. W. Morris,
1808), p. 15.
15 Memoir Relative to the Translations of the Sacred Scriptures (Dunstable: J. W. Morris,
1812), p. 16.
16 John Clark Marshman, The Life and Times of Carey, Marshman, and Ward (1859;
reprinted by the Council of Serampore College, 2005), vol. 1, p. 469.

﻿Joshua Marshman and the First Chinese Book Printed with Movable Metal Type9

script translation of a portion of the New Testament by Jean Basset (1662–
1707), a French Jesuit missionary. Morrison’s work was printed by woodblock and bound by a traditional string binding as a single volume, and it
opens with a preface by Morrison. At present a copy is held by the Bible
Society’s Library at the University of Cambridge. The same year, atSerampore, Marshman and Lassar published a Chinese translation of the挑 所 著. For this book, 95 folios were
Gospel of Matthew titled 此 嘉 語 由 𠲚 啝printed by woodblock and bound by a traditional string binding into a single
volume. In 1811, again at Serampore, they published a Chinese translation of
the Gospel of Mark titled 此嘉音由𠲚嘞所著. Here 56 folios were printed bywoodblock and bound by a traditional string binding into a single volume. In
short, prior to 1813 the Serampore missionaries had yet to discover how to
use Western movable-type printing technology to print Chinese books.

Figure 1 ‌The opening pages of Robert Morrison’s translation of theGospel of John, printed with traditional woodblocks in 1813.

But 1813 was a turning point. For, as mentioned above, it was during thisyear that, after much exploration and many trials, the Mission Press at
Serampore, under Marshman, finally succeeded in using Western movablemetal-type printing technology to print what was probably the first Chinesebook printed with movable metal type, the Gospel of John 若 翰 所 書 之 福 音(figure 2).

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Figure 2 ‌The opening pages of The Gospel of the Apostle John, printed withmovable metal type at the Mission Press at Serampore in 1813.

I saw a copy of this translation of the Gospel of John in the Bible Society’s
Library at the University of Cambridge. Printed in 1813 at Serampore, thistranslation has 36 two-page folios printed with movable metal type, divided
into 21 chapters, bound by a traditional string binding into one volume, andcovered with a yellow wrapper. At the end of the volume were the threeletters of John, but only 7 two-page folios of these letters remain. This libraryalso has a copy of the 1814 reprint with the title 耶穌救世使徒若翰所書福音(The Gospel of John, a Disciple of Jesus Christ), also with the three letters ofJohn at the end. In addition, in the Angus Library of Regent’s Park College at
the University of Oxford, I saw another copy printed in 1813. This copy, of
72 folios divided into 21 chapters and printed with movable metal type, wasbound in the Western style in one volume and has the English title The
Gospel of the Apostle John. Both the printing and the binding were finely
done.
Marshman thought that a remarkable achievement of the Baptist Mission
Press at Serampore was that it could use movable metal type to print Chinesetranslations of the Bible. He thought that movable metal type was not only
attractive, clear, and durable, but also more convenient than traditional woodblock printing, for it permitted insertions and deletions, allowed multiple
printings and large print runs, and was low-cost and much less expensive than﻿Joshua Marshman and the First Chinese Book Printed with Movable Metal Type 11

woodblock printing.17 According to Marshman’s calculations, printing withmovable metal type saved about two-thirds of the cost of traditional woodblock printing.18
Marshman also pointed out that if the same Biblical text were printed at
Serampore using movable metal type and woodblock printing, the cost of
printing with movable metal type, from the casting of type to the finishedpages, would be only one quarter of that of woodblock printing, and that if
one compares printing with metal type at Serampore with Morrison’s printingof Biblical texts by woodblock in China, the former method costs only a thirdof the latter method.19
On the significance of Marshman’s using movable metal type to print
Chinese materials, John Clark Marshman, Marshman’s son, had this to say in
his Life and Times of Carey, Marshman, and Ward:
This [printing with movable metal type] is one of the most memorable
improvements made in Chinese printing since its invention, twenty
centuries ago; not only because it admits of the revision of a work as it
passes through the press, but also on the ground of economy…. This
improvement, which originated, and was, to a considerable extent,
matured at Serampore, before it was taken up by other missionary
bodies, forms an era in the history of Chinese literature; and it will,
doubtless, be adopted by the Chinese themselves, when their stationary
civilisation, of which the block printing is a very apt emblem, begins toyield to the impulse of European improvement.20
According to John Clark Marshman, in producing metal type, the Mission
Press at first had assistance from local craftsmen. But only after John
Lawson, missionary and printer, joined the Serampore Mission in 1812 did thepress started producing fine, practical type. Early on, in 1807, Marshman
wrote a letter to the London headquarters of the Baptist Church asking for
Lawson’s help in the efforts of the press at Serampore at printing Chinese. In
1811, after he was baptized and became a member of the Baptist Church,
Lawson, together with his wife and several missionaries, went first to
Calcutta, where he stayed nearly a year owing to a series of setbacks before
he finally obtained permission to proceed to the mission at Serampore. Hisarrival at Serampore led to a breakthrough at the Mission Press in the development of Chinese printing with movable metal type, opening the way for it
17 A Memoir of the Serampore Translations for 1813 (Kettering: J. G. Fuller, 1815), pp.
16–17.
18 Letter from Dr. Marshman to Dr. Ryland, December 1813.
19 A Memoir of the Serampore Translations for 1813. Quoted in Su Jing 2000, p. 145.
20 John Clark Marshman 1859/2005, vol. 2, pp. 63–64.

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to print large quantities of Chinese books.21
There were two ways of making Chinese movable type. One way was tomake individual Chinese movable type as needed. This way involved one oftwo methods. Either an artisan would cut movable type on a slug of a leadand tin alloy, as the British printer P. P. Thomas did in Macau in 1815.22 Or
the printer would use a Chinese woodblock to cast a metal plate, which
would then be cut into individual pieces of Chinese type, as the British
missionary Samuel Dyer did in about 1833 in his early attempt to produce
Chinese type in Malacca. The other way of producing Chinese type was firstto produce character matrices, from which the printer casts movable type.
Here too there were two methods for doing this. Either the artisan would cut
intaglio regular-character matrices to cast type, as the German missionary
Karl Gützlaff did on copper plates for 4,000 characters, which were then sent
to Serampore for casting type—an effort that did not reach fruition. Or theartisan would cut high-raised, character mirror images on steel punches,
which were then used to punch intaglio characters in copper-alloy matrices,and these matrices were in turn used to cast movable metal type.23 For
example, Dyer, later in his career, primarily used this method to make steel
movable type. Before his death, he cut 1,845 pieces of large type and somepieces of small type. In 1833 the Chinese Repository reported that someone
in India (quite possibly Serampore) cast Chinese movable metal type, perhaps
by using steel punches and matrices.24
We lack explicit statements of the method that the Baptist missionaries
at Serampore used to produce metal type. But from the terms used in sundry
scattered sources, we can infer that in the first stage of adoption, artisans
were probably cutting type on slugs of a lead and tin alloy, as Thomas did,and that in the second stage of adoption, artisans had developed stamping
technology, as indicated by the appearance of terms like “punch” and“matrix” in our sources. Hence, artisans working in the Western tradition
were no longer cutting characters, like their Chinese counterparts, carving
woodblocks. Rather, they adapted the Western method of casting type (a pointthat requires further evidence).

21 John Clark Marshman 1859/2005, vol. 2, p. 63.
22 There is insufficient evidence to support He Shengnai’s claim that Thoms, at
Marshman’s request, went to Macau to “cut character matrices and cast Chinesetype” (Zhuang Yu 莊 俞 and He Shengnai 賀 聖 鼐, eds., Zuijin sanshiwu nian zhi
Zhongguo jiaoyu 最近三十五年之中國教育 [Education in China in the Last Thirty-fiveYears] [Shanghai: Shangwuyin Shuguan, 1931]).
23 See Su Jing 2000, p. 4.
24 See Fan Muhan 1995, pp. 65–69.

﻿Joshua Marshman and the First Chinese Book Printed with Movable Metal Type 13

4

The Printing of Chinese after 1813

The Mission Press at Serampore, after establishing a method for printing
Chinese using movable metal type and printing the Gospel of John and thethree letters of John in Chinese, printed a number of other Chinese works
with movable metal type in rapid succession.
In 1814 the Mission Press printed and published Marshman’s Elementsof Chinese Grammar, an English work on Chinese grammar. This systematic
study of Chinese presents the system of writing, pronunciation, and grammarof the language, and appears to be the earliest work in English on Chinese
grammar.25 It is worth noting that though this book was written in English, it
quotes as examples a considerable amount of Chinese from the Chinese classics, including the Four Books, the Five Classics, and Zhu Xi’s Sishu zhangju
jizhu 四書章句集注 (Collected Annotations of the Four Books). These example
sentences were printed with metal type and inserted in the English text.
Appended at the end of Elements of Chinese Grammar is Daxue 大 學 (TheGreat Learning) in the original, along with an English translation done by
Marshman’s son, John Clark Marshman, and reviewed by Marshman himself.
This bilingual work has attached to it an explanation of the characters.
Hence, though this is an English work, we can regard it as an example ofChinese printing in our analysis.
In 1815, a year after the appearance of Elements of Chinese Grammar,
the Mission Press at Serampore published an important work in the history of
missionary activity in China, Robert Morrison’s Grammar of the Chinese
Language.26 Like Marshman, Morrison used English grammatical analysis toanalyze Chinese grammar. The book covers pronunciation, nouns, numbers,
pronouns, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections, as wellas provincial dialects, syntax, and prosody at the end. Morrison covers
Chinese verbs in particular detail, devoting a third of the book to the topic. In
this book many Chinese examples are printed alongside their English translations, and the Chinese is printed with fine movable metal type. The fact thatMarshman’s and Morrison’s Chinese grammars were published at nearly thesame time has led scholars to wonder whether Marshman, in his Elements ofChinese Grammar, borrowed from Morrison’s Grammar of the Chinese
Language. But in fact, Marshman and Morrison each maintained his own
point of view, even to the point of engaging in intense rivalry. In my view
25 Joshua Marshman, Elements of Chinese Grammar (Serampore: Mission Press, 1814).
This work, often called Clavis Sinica, has a total of more than 600 pages. Since it
was published a year earlier than Robert Morrison’s Grammar of the Chinese
Language, it is considered the first Chinese grammar in English.
26 Robert Morrison, A Grammar of the Chinese Language (Serampore: Mission Press,
1815).

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and from the evidence I have seen, though Morrison had finished his manuscript in 1811 and publication was delayed in India till 1815, and though
Marshman was responsible for publishing Morrison’s grammar, Marshman did
not borrow from Morrison, and there were reasons for the delay.27 The relevant point here is that in 1812 the British Select Committee at the Factory at
Canton (that is, the governing board of the Guangdong office of the British
East India Company) recommended that Morrison publish his Grammar of theChinese Language in far away India because the Mission Press at Serampore
had already succeeded in using movable metal type to print Chinese at abasic level and had applied this technology to printing the Chinese Bible andrelated Chinese books.
After 1815 the Mission Press entered a highly productive period in translating the Bible into Chinese and printing and publishing this work. In thefollowing years it printed in Chinese several books of the Bible and ultimately the whole Bible:28
1815–1822 The New Testament, printed with movable metal type and boundby a traditional string binding in one volume, from the Gospel of Matthew 使
徒馬寶傳福音書 to Revelation 若翰顯示之書.
1816 Genesis 神造萬物書, printed with movable metal type and bound by aWestern hardcover binding in one volume.
1817–1821 The Old Testament, printed with movable metal type and boundby a traditional string binding in four volumes. Genesis to Deuteronomy 摩西復示律書 was printed in 1817; Job 若百書 to the Song of Solomon 所羅門之詩
歌 in 1818; and Isaiah 先知以賽亞之書 to Esther 依士得耳之書 in 1821.29
1822 The Bible, printed with movable metal type and bound by a Western
hardcover binding in two volumes. Volume 1 contains Genesis to Esther, andvolume 2 contains Job to Revelation. This was the first complete Bible
published in Chinese.
1823 Genesis and the other books of the Bible 神造萬物書與以至百多書, a
27 For a detailed analysis, see Ma Min 马 敏, “Yufa shu: Maximan shifou chaoxi
Malixun—19 shiji chu zaoqi Yingguo chuanjiaoshi zhi jian de yi chang zhenglun”
语法书：马希曼是否抄袭马礼逊？―― 19 世纪初早期英国传教士之间的一场争论 (In His
Grammar, Did Marshman Copy Morrison? A Controversy over Two British
Missionaries in the Early Nineteenth Century), in Tao Feiya 陶 飞 亚 and Liang
Yuansheng 梁元生, eds., Dongya Jidujiao zai quanshi 东亚基督教再诠释 (Hong Kong:
Zhongwen Daxue Chubanshe, 2004).
28 I compiled the following list from works that I found in the Angus Library of Regent’s
Park College at the University of Oxford.
29 The most detailed account of missionaries’ translation and publication of the Bible
in Chinese before 1830 can be found in “Chinese Version of the Bible,” Chinese
Repository 4 (1835), no. 6.

﻿Joshua Marshman and the First Chinese Book Printed with Movable Metal Type 15

revised version, printed with movable metal type and bound by a Western
hardcover binding in one volume.

5

The Importance and Legacy of Chinese Printing at the Mission
Press

From the nineteenth century, Western movable-metal-type printing technology, first developed by Johannes Gutenberg, continuously entered China
and began to affect the traditional woodblock-printing industry. There wereseveral sources from which Western printing technology penetrated China.
One was the early attempt at printing Chinese with movable metal type by
Marshman and others at the Baptist Mission Press in Serampore. Others werethe continuing efforts of Morrison, Thomas, William Milne, John RobertMorrison (son of Robert Morrison), and Dyer of the London Missionary
Society at Macau, Malacca, Penang Island in Malaysia, and Singapore.
Though the Chinese type that Dyer produced became the main font of themodern China printing market, and though his method for cutting Chinese
type has been passed down, it was the Baptist missionaries at Serampore who
first introduced printing with movable metal type to China.
In fact, the influence of the missionaries at Serampore was not as somescholars imagine it. Because Marshman and other missionaries were printing
Chinese in far off India, their influence on modern Chinese printing technology was quite limited. Rather, the printing achievements of the Serampore
missionaries influenced missionaries in China through frequent correspondence among missionaries and continuous communication among missionarysocieties.
Let me first make one point clear. Thought the missionaries at Serampore
engaged in printing Chinese with movable metal type only for a short while,
their total print volumes and the areas over which their print materials were
distributed were much more significant than previously thought. For example,
Morrison’s Grammar of the Chinese Language had a first printing in 1815 of
500 copies, most of which ended up in China. To give another example, whenin 1822 Marshman and his colleagues printed the first Chinese Bible using
movable metal type, they printed 1,600 sets of the Old Testament and 3,000
sets of the New Testament.30 This was followed by frequent reprintings ofeither the whole Bible or portions of it. Many of these Chinese Bibles printed
by the Mission Press at Serampore found their way to Southeast Asia andChina and had a definite influence on churches in China, especially Baptist
missions in China, which used the translation by Marshman and Lassar over
30 “Brief Review of the Translation and Printing of the Sacred Scriptures by theSerampore Brethren,” 1824.

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Journal of Cultural Interaction in East Asia Vol. 6 2015a long period. In 1843, when Protestant missionaries in China met in Hong
Kong to discuss translating an authoritative version of the Bible, theDelegates Version, the translation by Marshman and Lassar was listed as animportant reference translation.
Next, we must also look at the important influence that Marshman’s
printing with movable metal type at Serampore exerted on Morrison’s notionsof printing.
Like the Catholic Jesuit missionaries before him, Morrison, after he arrived
in China in 1807, greatly appreciated traditional Chinese woodblock printing
and thought that it was the most appropriate method for printing Chinese
books, In fact, his early translations of portions of the Bible he had printed bywoodblock. From 1811 he gradually came to know about the efforts ofMarshman and his fellow missionaries at Serampore to print the Bible withmovable metal type, and he received a sample printed with such type, butthese efforts did not impress him. Only in 1815, when the board of directorsof the London Missionary Society sent him a letter asking him to compare
the advantages and disadvantages in China of printing with woodblocks
versus printing with movable metal type, did Morrison begin to consider thisissue in earnest, but his conclusion was that woodblock printing was far
superior to movable-metal-type printing. In Morrison’s view, woodblock
printing had the following advantages:• Woodblock printing requires less effort for composition and reduces thepossibility of printer’s errors.
• Carving characters in wood is cheaper than casting characters in type.
Moreover, woodblocks stand up better to burnished woodblock printing
than type stands up to letterpress printing.
• Woodblocks can be stored and used for reprinting.
• Characters printed with woodblocks can be printed evenly on thin Chinese
paper. Characters thus printed are pleasing to the eye. Hence, woodblock
printing is better suited to printing the Chinese classics.31
Morrison also criticized the missionaries at Serampore for stating thatprinting with movable metal type was much cheaper than printing withwoodblocks, saying that their statements did not accord with the facts. He
regarded with great distain their commercial self-promotion.32
However, from the mid-1820s Morrison had a change of attitude toward
31 See Su Jing 2000, pp. 14–15.
32 Archives of the London Missionary Society, South China, 1.4.B, Morrison to Burder,
Canton, October 11, 1815. Quoted in Su Jing 2000, p. 146.

﻿Joshua Marshman and the First Chinese Book Printed with Movable Metal Type 17

printing with movable metal type. He no longer held that woodblock printing
was the only way to print Chinese. Rather, he thought that casting movable
metal type and using modern Western printing technology was the basic way
to develop the Chinese printing industry, and he himself began to support andtry out movable metal type for printing Chinese books. He even hoped that
Britain would become the first country to produce Chinese movable metal
type.33
Morrison’s change of attitude had many reasons, but among them we must
include the fact that through his long dispute with the missionaries at
Serampore over the proper means of printing Chinese, he gradually experienced the state-of-the-art nature and convenience of printing with movable
metal type. For example, in his Grammar of the Chinese Language, which hehad printed at the Mission Press in Serampore, the characters in the text andon the cover are finely done and in no way inferior to characters produced bytraditional Chinese woodblock printing. Though there is no clear record,
Morrison must have had an opportunity to view a copy of the Chinese Bible
printed with movable metal type at Serampore through many channels, especially through the British and Foreign Bible Society, which supported his
efforts and those of Marshman to translate the Bible into Chinese over an
extended period of time, and such a Bible must have left a deep impression
on him. But Morrison did mention that he received the Chinese grammar
book that Marshman had mailed to him, as well as portions of the Chinese
Bible printed at Serampore and transmitted to him by a friend. Though
Morrison withheld praise of the translation quality of these portions of theChinese Bible, he had nothing negative to say about print quality. If I may
venture a hypothesis, it may have been Morrison’s secret desire to match andsurpass the print quality of the Mission Press at Serampore at a site in China.
Corroborating this view is the fact that he wholeheartedly advocatedmovable-metal-type printing late in his career, and the fact that he greatly
supported the efforts of his son John Robert Morrison and his successor
Samuel Dyer to print Chinese with movable metal type.
Hence, even though it was the missionaries of the London Missionary
Society, including the pioneering Robert Morrison, who introduced Western
printing with movable metal type to China, we must not forget the initialefforts of Joshua Marshman and other Baptist missionaries in far-off India.
After all, history is the result of multiple efforts emanating from multiple
sources. It is the responsibility of historians to objectively clarify thecomplexly intertwined and mutually influencing connections of history, andnot only to discuss the successes and failures of the great men of history.
33 See Su Jing 2000, p. 16.