The block printing technology in our country was probably invented in the seventh century, and reached its climax in the tenth century in the Song Dynasty. With the block printing technology, such procedures as writing samples,carving blocks, spraying the ink and printing were involved in the process of publishing a book, and it was always time-consuming and costly in the use of the material resources and manpower to print a work of great length. The procedures would have to be repeated if other books were to be published; hence our ancestors conducted active explorations and strived for improvements, which led to the eventual invention of the moveable clay-type printing technology by an ordinary man called Bi Sheng during the period of Qingli of the Northern Song Dynasty, as can be proved by the account of the book Dream Pool Essays by Bi Sheng's contemporary,Shen Kuo. From then on, the moveable type printing technology was applied, and it was 400 years earlier than that used in Europe when the German Gutenburg, for the first time, printed the Holy Bible with this very technology.During the period of Dade of the Yuan Dynasty, Wang Zhen learned to use the moveable wood types to print books, of which none has come down to the present day. The oldest moveable-type printed book in existence in China is Yushice in the Yuan Dynasty, which is now collected in the National Library of China. There are, because of the differences of the times and materials, different names for the moveable type printing,such as the moveable clay-type printing, magnetic printing, moveable wood-type plate, moveable copper-type printing, moveable lead-type printing and moveable zinc-type printing. In the years of Hongzhi of the Ming Dynasty, the moveable cop-per-type printing became prevalent in Wuxi, Suzhou, Changshu and Nanjing, Jian-gsu Province, but in the years between Tianqi and Congzhen of the Ming Dynasty when a social and economic decline was pervasive, lapsed into a low ebb due to its great economic cost, the corollary of which was that there were few moveable copper-type printed books handed down to the present day. There are over 100 kinds of books in existence which were printed with the cheap moveable wood types in the Ming Dynasty. In the late Ming Dynasty, the moveable wood-type printing gradually replaced the copper-type printing for the printing of the books.People at the time also learned to use the moveable zinc types to print books; un-fortunately, there was not any book of this kind left to the present day. The moveable wood-type printing was the mainstream in the Qing Dynasty, and a great number of books of this kind have been properly preserved. After the Opium War, the moveable zinc-type printing technology originating in the west was introduced into China. The new printing technology, given its great advantages over the traditional block printing and moveable type printing, replaced them gradually as the major type of printing books, and has been used to the modern times.