Printing for Profit: The Commercial Printers of Jianyang, Fujian (Song-Ming)

The social history of the printed book in China is explored by focusing on three families of commercial printers (Liu, Yu, and Xiong) in the Jianyang area of northwestern Fujian during the Song (960-1279), Yuan (1279-1368) and Ming Dynasties (1368-1644). The study includes an analysis of the topical distribution of known Jianyang imprints (those extant and those recorded in annotated bibliographies), a detailed examination of the social and cultural milieus of the printers, as well as discussions of the impact of the printed text on readers from different segments of society based on the kinds of books most frequently published in Jianyang (the Classics, Histories, philological works, medical texts, encyclopedias, and illustrated works of fiction). The longevity and wide geographic scope of the Jianyang book trade make the findings from this study useful for considering how the printing of scholarly and popular works affected the ways by which knowledge was transmitted and disseminated in imperial China as whole.