(The following is a post by Ryan Wolfson-Ford, Southeast Asia Reference Librarian, Asian Division. This is the first installment of a two-part series. Click here for part 2.)
Printing was invented over a millennium ago, around the year 700, in China during the Tang dynasty (618–907), before it spread across East Asia, Southeast Asia and the globe sparking a revolution in the dissemination of information in its wake. The Library’s collections contain some of the oldest surviving examples of this technology’s earliest history.