The Diamond Sutra, oldest dated printed book

The story

A monk and a walled-up cave

At the beginning of the 20th century, in the desert of north-western China, near the oasis of Dunhuang, there lived a Taoist monk named Wang Yuanlu. He looked after a group of caves cut into the rock, the Mogao caves, where for more than a thousand years Buddhist monks had painted walls and statues. Dunhuang had been for centuries a key stopping place on the Silk Road, the caravan route that joined China to the West.

In 1900, while he was doing some work, Wang discovered a small room hidden behind a painted wall. Inside, piled up to the ceiling, were tens of thousands of scrolls of paper, silk and other materials: religious texts, documents, letters, contracts and drawings, written in Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit and other languages. The room had been sealed, perhaps around the year 1000, and forgotten. Today we call it the “Library Cave”.

The oldest scroll

The news reached the Europeans. In 1907 a Hungarian-British archaeologist, Aurel Stein, visited the place, persuaded Wang to show him the manuscripts and to sell them to him for a small sum, and carried off a great quantity to London. Among the scrolls was one about five metres long, made of seven sheets of paper glued together: the “Diamond Sutra”.

It is a Buddhist text in which the Buddha explains to his disciple Subhuti that the things of this world are like dreams and bubbles of water, that they should not be thought eternal, and that whoever understands this is freed from suffering. The name recalls that its truth is as sharp as a diamond, able to cut through illusion.

But what makes this scroll special is something else: it was not copied by hand, but printed. Each page was carved on a wooden block, in relief, inked and pressed onto the paper. This is the technique of woodblock printing. The scroll opens with a finely carved picture showing the Buddha seated and speaking to Subhuti, surrounded by monks and gods.

To print, the master carver worked on a smoothed wooden block on which a copyist had pasted a thin sheet with the written text. The carver cut away all the wood around the characters, which were left standing in relief. Then, with a pad, he spread the ink, laid a sheet of paper on top and pressed it down with a cloth. One block could give thousands of copies.

A certain date

At the end of the scroll there is an inscription saying that the text was made “with reverence by Wang Jie, for universal free distribution, in memory of his parents”, and giving the date: the thirteenth day of the fourth month of the ninth year of the Xiantong era, which corresponds to 11 May 868. For this reason the Diamond Sutra is the oldest printed book with a certain date that has come down to us.

It is not, however, the oldest printing of all: some printed fragments, without a date, found in Korea, Japan and China, are older by one or two centuries. But among complete, dated books it is the first. The fact that the picture and the text are so well made shows that the art of printing was already advanced: it was not an isolated experiment, but the outcome of earlier attempts.

Where it is today

The scroll is kept at the British Library in London, and it is one of its treasures. For some time China has asked for the manuscripts taken from Dunhuang to be returned, while others argue that in London they were saved from destruction. One solution found by scholars has been to take photographs of all the documents and make them available to anyone on the Internet, through the International Dunhuang Project, based in London.