Technology & Medicine › Medieval › Movable type (Bi Sheng)
Jikji and Korean metal movable type
July 1377 (Goryeo Korea)· Book, artwork, monument or document· Communication & computing
Well documentedSolid records, physical evidence or scientific consensus.
A Korean Buddhist text printed in 1377 at Heungdeok Temple, the oldest surviving book printed with movable metal type.
See it on the Technology & Medicine map →How it works
Jikji (직지) is short for a long title meaning roughly 'the essentials of Seon (Zen) teaching selected by the monk Baegun.' Monks at Heungdeok Temple in Cheongju printed it in July 1377 from cast metal characters. Korea had printed with metal type since at least 1234, but those books are lost. Of Jikji's two volumes, only the second survives. A French diplomat collected it in Seoul, and it is now held by the National Library of France.
Why it mattered
It proves Korea printed with metal type decades before Europe, though in Korea movable type stayed mostly a government and temple craft rather than a mass-market industry.
How we know
The surviving volume's closing note records the date and temple. Excavators identified Heungdeok Temple's site in 1985. UNESCO added Jikji to its Memory of the World register in 2001.
Still unknown or debated
Whether Korean metal type influenced Gutenberg is unproven and widely doubted. Korea and France still disagree over where the book should be kept.
Connections (2)
▸Movable type (Bi Sheng) was cast in metal in Korea for Jikji and Korean metal movable typeWell documented
The connection
Bi Sheng in Song China made movable type from baked clay around 1040. Korean printers took the idea further by casting characters in bronze, which lasted longer and printed more crisply. By 1377, monks at Heungdeok Temple used such type to print Jikji, the oldest metal-type book that survives.
When and how
China's Bi Sheng around 1040, described by the scholar Shen Kuo; Goryeo Korea cast metal type by 1234; Jikji was printed in Cheongju in July 1377.
How we know
Shen Kuo's Dream Pool Essays (about 1088) describes Bi Sheng's method; Korean records note a 1234 metal-type book; Jikji's closing note records its printing.
Debates and open questions
How Korean printers learned of Chinese movable type, and exactly when they first cast metal type, is unclear; some scholars argue for dates before 1234.
▸Jikji and Korean metal movable type was printed 78 years before the Gutenberg BibleWell documented
The connection
Jikji shows that Korea printed with movable metal type about 78 years before Gutenberg finished his Bible in 1455. No evidence shows the Korean method reached Mainz. Korean printing mainly served state and temple needs in small runs, while Gutenberg's commercial presses printed for a market.
When and how
Cheongju, Korea, July 1377, and Mainz, Germany, about 1454–1455; the comparison became famous after the Korean librarian Park Byeong-seon brought Jikji to world attention in Paris in 1972.
How we know
Both dates are firmly documented by the books themselves and by contemporary records; what is uncertain is any connection between them, which no evidence supports.
Debates and open questions
Some writers suggest knowledge of Asian printing traveled west along Mongol-era trade routes, but no document links Korean type to Mainz; most historians see independent invention.