Block printing in China (before 9th century CE):
The Chinese were printing texts by carving entire pages of text into wooden blocks, inking them, and pressing them onto paper. The Diamond Sutra (868 CE) is the oldest known printed book with a date.
Movable type in East Asia (11th century CE):
Around 1040 CE, Bi Sheng in China invented movable type using clay pieces. Later, Koreans improved on this using metal movable type by the 13th century (the Jikji, printed in 1377 in Korea, is the oldest known book printed with metal movable type).
Europe before Gutenberg:
In Europe, block printing of images and playing cards was done by the 14th and early 15th centuries. However, it was mostly for pictures or single sheets, not for large-scale book production.
Gutenberg’s key breakthrough (around 1450s) was combining movable metal type, oil-based inks, and a mechanical press (adapted from wine/oil presses) into a system that allowed efficient, mass production of books in Europe.
So Gutenberg didn’t “invent printing” from scratch — but his system was the first in Europe to make books widely and cheaply available, and that’s why he gets the credit.
