At the beginning of April, Xiao Ruxun received a gift from the newly established Ministry of Education.
The Minister of Education was appointed by Kong Shangxian, the patriarch of the Kong family in Qufu, but he only held this position in Qufu.
The actual person in charge of this department was a few of Xiao Ruxun's trusted officials. At the moment, there was really nothing important to do in this department, and there was no need to add any scholars to it, because they were responsible for the innovation of printing.
Although movable type printing had been invented in the Northern Song Dynasty, this technology had not played as big a role in the past hundreds of years, from the Song Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty.
Most of the time, it was used as a supplement to engraving. Unlike the dozens of letters in English, there were too many Chinese characters and too many fonts, and the cost of printing with movable type was really high.
There was also a very practical reason. After the Song Dynasty, a large number of books in China were the Four Books and Five Classics, and the engraving had been well preserved. There were very few new books. Under the control of the government's educational guiding ideology, movable type printing was really not that useful.
Engraving and printing didn't need to be literate, but the staff of movable type printing needed literate people to make typesetting and find mistakes, and the cost suddenly went up.
Its advantage was that it could increase efficiency and reduce cost when printing a large number of books, but if it was only a few dozen or a few hundred books, the actual cost was much higher.
There were too many Chinese characters and fonts, and the scope of application was not large, and the actual demand was small. Clay type and wooden type were easy to damage, and copper type was not used in large quantities because of the shortage of copper in China.
The Qing Dynasty once cast a set of tens of thousands of copper type, but later because of financial difficulties, they melted it to make copper coins.
Due to various reasons, the role of movable type printing in ancient times was not as big as modern people think, but it had a great impact in the West. The influence of Gutenberg's invention of movable type printing was far greater than the influence of Bi Sheng's invention of the clay type printing.
Xiao Ruxun learned that there were printers in the Changzhou area who used copper and lead raw materials to make movable type, so he sent people to Changzhou to find them and bring them back to the capital, asking them to improve the technology of movable type with the support of the Daqin government.
Xiao Ruxun asked them to bring all the copper movable types they had to the government. After looking at them, he realized that they were just copper movable types and not copper molds that could be used repeatedly. The cost was too high for him to bear, so he ordered for new copper molds to be made.
He sent officials with good calligraphy to write standard regular characters, and made copper molds according to this standard. Old craftsmen who had experience in making molds were sent to military factories to guide them.
After making a set of copper molds, it could be used repeatedly many times to make a large number of movable type. The books that Xiao Ruxun needed were definitely not only the Four Books and Five Classics. The existing engraving could not meet his needs, so he needed a large number of movable type in preparation for printing all kinds of books in the future.
At the same time, Xiao Ruxun also ordered the craftsmen to improve the ink used in printing, and to study the ink as the goal.
Xiao Ruxun told them that in the continent of Europe, more than a hundred years ago, the Western Continent had already made the type that could be used on a large scale, and even the type printing press.
They used lead alloy as raw material, lamp black and linseed oil as printing ink, and the quality of the books produced was very good.
This had a great impact on the subordinates and officials. They could not believe that outside of the Celestial Empire, there was actually a country that had mastered such advanced cultural means.
Although there was no related technology, the wisdom of human beings really could not be underestimated.
After Xiao Ruxun gave the direction and requirements, the officials of the Ministry of Education all started to work. In order to get the emperor's commendation and appreciation, as well as to maintain the dignity of the Celestial Empire, they worked hard day and night. Finally, at the beginning of April, the first thread-bound Three-Character Classic printed with type was sent to Xiao Ruxun.
After Xiao Ruxun looked through it, he found that the quality of the book was indeed very good and very beautiful, so he was very happy to go to the Ministry of Education to watch the officials operate on the spot.
At present, there were only hundreds of made copper molds and type, and what looked like a printing press.
Xiao Ruxun went up and fiddled with it. It felt similar to a suitcase. The paper was fixed on one side, and the type was painted with ink on the other side. When the two sides were closed and opened, it was a very good piece of paper with words on it.
As for the ink, Xiao Ruxun also looked at it. It was no longer simple ink, but had the feeling of ink, and was a little sticky. As for what was inside, Xiao Ruxun did not ask. He just let them continue to do this. If they needed anything, they could directly send the request to the Ministry of Revenue.
In addition to these things, Xiao Ruxun also found a group of Confucian scholars in Northern Zhili and the three southeastern provinces who had experience in educating children. He asked them how they taught children to read. The answer he got was very consistent, it was the method of two characters tangent, such as red, Hu Lang Qian, and using Chinese characters as phonetic symbols.
This method was much better than the earlier method of phonetic symbols. However, since the word tangent represented the initial consonant, it should only represent the consonant, but in fact, each Chinese character represented a complete syllable.
Since the word tangent represented the final consonant, it should only represent the vowel. However, there were very few Chinese characters that began with a vowel, so it was often necessary to borrow Chinese characters with consonants as the word tangent.
Of course, the more important thing was that learning was relatively slow, and it was difficult to spread it on a large scale. The difference in local accents was also very big, and there were some problems in communicating with each other.
Although there were official languages in all dynasties, Xiao Ruxun hoped to promote official languages to all parts of the country. People in the country could speak official languages, and they could communicate in official languages without the communication problems of accents.
After realizing the limitations of the method of pronouncing two characters tangent, Xiao Ruxun thought of Chinese Pinyin and the Western alphabet, which was very suitable for phonetic symbols. He also thought of Ricci, who was still in Myanmar.
This guy could learn Chinese as an Italian, and Xiao Ruxun wanted to know his learning method.
Moreover, Xiao Ruxun vaguely remembered that Ricci had worked with someone to make the first Roman phonetic symbol plan for Chinese characters in history, which seemed to be specially used to help missionaries learn Chinese.
Xiao Ruxun summoned Ricci from Myanmar to the capital and asked him about his learning method of phonetic symbols for Chinese characters using Roman characters. Ricci was very surprised and honored, and immediately told him his method of learning Chinese.
Xiao Ruxun roughly observed Ricci's method and found that he did use the method of phonetic symbols for Chinese characters similar to the modern 26 English letters, but there were no double letters such as zh and ch. Ricci said that this method could be used to phonetic symbols for Chinese characters.
However, there was a slight difference from modern Pinyin, and the difference was not big. It was probably a problem of the accent.
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