0868-12-01 00:00:00
Nearly 600 years before Gutenberg, Chinese monks were setting ink to paper using a method known as block printing, in which wooden blocks are coated with ink and pressed to sheets of paper. One of the earliest surviving books printed in this fashion — an ancient Buddhist text known as “The Diamond Sutra” — was created in 868 during the Tang (T’ang) Dynasty (618-909) in China. The book, which was sealed inside a cave near the city of Dunhuang, China, for nearly a thousand years before its discovery in 1900, is now housed in the British Library in London.
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