East Asia’s tradition developed independently of other book-making traditions, with its own particular evolution of forms. Its first forms of continuous writing were on long vertical strips of bamboo or wood, which were bound together with hemp, silk, or leather into a scroll. Scrolls made from lighter, but expensive silk also existed.

A set of these strips was called a ce, written pictographically as 册, a word still in use, now referring to a physical book unit. The term for a scroll, juan 卷, also still is in use, but shifted in usage to now be more similar in meaning to “chapter.”

After several continuous but transitory developments shown here, such as the accordion-style format, the commercial market settled on the durable and economic xianzhuang shu 綫裝書 “thread-bound book.” Stacks of folded single sheets of paper, printed on one side from carved woodblocks, were placed on top of, not inside each other, and held together between simple paper cover sheets, easily made and easily repaired.

Surviving Chinese bamboo or wooden written slips, literary, administrative, or funerary, mostly date to the fourth century BCE, although their much earlier existence is inferred. In the 1930s an expedition to Juyan (Ejina or Edsen-Gol, Inner Mongolia) uncovered 30,000 such items, now held at the Academia Sinica, Taibei. That institution created this replica, uniquely showing how such strips were bound together. The text is a military inventory from the late first century CE, written in clerical-cursive script.

Gift of the National Palace Museum, Taibei, 1996

East Asian Library Special Collections, PL2448 .J88

For further reading

Galambos, Imre. “Manuscripts and printing: East Asia.” In Brill’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism, edited by Jonathan A. Silk, vol. 1, 968-78. Leiden: Brill, 2015.

Written texts mention a period when light, but expensive, written silk scrolls existed alongside bamboo slips. In the Princeton University Library, we have no such early examples, but we do have this 19th-century garment, with more than half a million miniature characters. The text is made of more than 700 “eight-legged” exemplary essays, widely used as preparation for the civil examinations. Persistent rumors call this a “cribbing” garment, but it could not have been used that way; perhaps candidates wore it to be inspired?

Photograph by Heather Larkin, 2004

Gest Collection, JQ1512.Z13 E878

For further reading

Plaks, Andrew H. “Research on the Gest Library ‘Cribbing Garment’: a very belated update.” East Asian Library Journal 11, no. 2 (2004): 1-39. Accessed May 20, 2025. https://library.princeton.edu/eastasian/EALJ/plaksandrewh.EALJ.v11.n02.p001.pdf

The discovery in Dunhuang, China in 1900 of a walled-off cave with thousands of manuscripts prompted an international race to acquire its contents, and the works found their way to collections all over the world. One such scroll was acquired by Guion Gest, later founder of Princeton’s Chinese collections. It is a Buddhist sūtra dating to the seventh century, exemplifying the paper scroll form.

East Asian Library Special Collections, DS797.28.D864 P85 Peald S1

For further reading

Chen Huaiyu, and Nancy Norton Tomasko. “Chinese-language texts from Dunhuang and Turfan in the Princeton University East Adian Library.” East Asian Library Journal 14, no. 2 (2010): 1-208. Entry G. 025. Accessed May 20, 2025. https://eal.lib.princeton.edu/EALJ/chen_huaiyu.EALJ.v14.n02.p001.pdf

Woodblock printing enabled printing on demand; the original blocks would be stored for future printing. The carving of the Buddhist Qisha Canon (with an extraordinary 6,000 volumes), named after the location of the organizing temple, was untypically paid for by contributions from average believers, and thus took roughly 100 years. Blocks for the volume shown here were cut in 1238, but the illustration dates from 70 years later. The printing was probably done in the 15th century, and the rebinding is later still. Princeton owns more than 5,000 volumes of this Canon, and it is one of highlights of the Gest Collection.

Gest Collection, TC513/2198, vol. 156

For further reading

Chia, Lucille. “The life and afterlife of Qisha Canon (Qishazang).” In Spreading Buddha's word in East Asia: the formation and transformation of the Chinese Buddhist Canon, edited by Jiang Wu and Lucille Chia, 181-218. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

Originally, folios, with their texts printed on one side, were folded in the middle with the text facing inwards, the blank side outwards: thus blank pages followed text pages, in the so-called “butterfly-binding” style. Considered somewhat undesirable, printers soon began to fold the opposite way, hiding the blank sides. However, this could create problems for illustrations needing a full page; and thus occasionally one still might encounter a butterfly binding, as here in a late painting manual.

Gest Collection, TC223/709Q vol.10-13

For further reading

Sze, Mai-mai (tr. and ed.) The Mustard Seed Garden manual of painting, 1679-1701. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956. Zhang, Gillian Yanzhuang. “Making a canonical work: a cultural history of the Mustard Seed Garden manual of painting, 1679-1949.” East Asian Publishing and Society 10, no. 1 (2020): 73-113.

The basic Chinese printing technologies were simple, and alongside commercial publishers, private printing also flourished. The standard thread-bound volume shown here was printed by Zhu Zaiyu, a scholarly prince specializing in mathematical music theory. He additionally wrote on dance; the ritual dances illustrated here are in the shape of Chinese characters. This text was translated by Amiot, a French Jesuit missionary, and is thought to have informed Western choreography.

Gest Collection, TA141/278Q

For further reading

Standaert, Nicolas. “Ritual dances and their visual representations in the Ming and the Qing.” East Asian Library Journal 12, no. 1 (2006): 68-181. Accessed May 20, 2025. http://eal.lib.princeton.edu/EALJ/standaert_nicolas.EALJ.v12.n01.p068.pdf

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