Bi Sheng

Bi Sheng (died 1051) was a Chinese artisan and engineer during the Song dynasty (960–1279), who invented the world's first movable type. Bi's system used fired clay tiles, one for each Chinese character, and was invented between 1039 and 1048. Printing was one of the Four Great Inventions. Because Bi was a commoner, not an educated person, little is known about his life besides this invention.

Movable type printing Bi Sheng's invention was only recorded in the Dream Pool Essays by Chinese scholar-official and polymath Shen Kuo (1031–1095). The book provides a detailed description of the technical details of Bi Sheng's invention of movable type printing:

Bi Sheng also developed wooden movable type, but it was abandoned in favor of ceramic types due to the presence of wood grains and the unevenness of the wooden type after being soaked in ink.

After his death, ceramic movable type may have spread to the Tangut kingdom of Western Xia, where a Buddhist text known as the Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra was found in modern Wuwei, Gansu, dating to the reign of Emperor Renzong of Western Xia (r. 1125-1193). The text features traits that have been identified as hallmarks of clay movable type such as the hollowness of the character strokes and deformed and broken strokes. The ceramic movable-type also passed onto Bi Sheng's descendants. The next mention of movable type occurred in 1193 when a Southern Song chief counselor, Zhou Bida , attributed the movable-type method of printing to Shen Kuo. However Shen Kuo did not invent the movable type but credited it to Bi Sheng in his Dream Pool Essays. The ceramic movable type was also mentioned by Kublai Khan's councilor Yao Shu, who convinced his pupil Yang Gu to print language primers using this method.

The government official Wang Zhen improved Bi Sheng's clay types by innovation through the wood, as his process increased the speed of typesetting as well.

By 1490, bronze movable type was developed by the wealthy printer Hua Sui (1439–1513).

Wooden movable-type printing became widespread in the Qing dynasty (1644–1912), but did not replace woodblock printing, probably because of the expense of creating a font of so many pieces or the low cost of a copyist.

Legacy His gravestone was located in Hubei province in 1990. A park and museum opened on that site in April 2023.

Bisheng Subdistrict in Wenquan, Huanggang, Hubei is named for Bi Sheng. The Bi Sheng crater located in the LAC-7 quadrant near the northern pole on the far side of the Moon was named after Bi Sheng by the IAU on August 2, 2010.

He also appears in a commemorative stamp by the Liberian post office due to his invention of movable printing.