In the 1040s the artisan Bi Sheng made individual characters from fired clay, set them in an iron frame fixed with warmed resin, printed, then melted the frame to reuse the type. The process, recorded by the polymath Shen Kuo in his Dream Pool Essays of about 1088, was the world's first movable type, predating Gutenberg by some four centuries. Because written Chinese uses thousands of characters, woodblock printing often remained more practical at home, but the principle of reusable, rearrangeable type was Chinese in origin. Later Chinese and Korean printers extended it to wood and to metal type.
Reusable movable type cheapened the reproduction of registers, codes and treatises through which states recorded ownership and administered land, populations and growing cities.
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