Printing in China meant a plank of pear or jujube wood, with text and picture cut into the same block, one page-opening at a time. Xylography was China's normal book technology for eight centuries before it was Japan's. What it produced at the very end of the Ming was something else: a commercial boom in illustrated fiction and drama, aimed at an urban readership that wanted its novels with pictures in them.
The window is narrow and it is the one that matters. Roughly from the Wanli era (1573–1620) through the Chongzhen (1628–44), the commercial workshops of Nanjing, Hangzhou, Huizhou and Suzhou produced illustrated editions of Shuihu zhuan, Jin Ping Mei, Xixiang ji and dozens of lesser titles whose pictures are still the images most readers see when they open those books today.
How a woodblock leaf was made
Three trades made one leaf. A designer supplied a brush drawing; a carver pasted it face-down on a planed block of pear or jujube and cut away everything that was not line, leaving each brushstroke standing as a raised ridge; a printer laid a sheet on the inked block and rubbed its back with a pad. The carver's task was to reproduce a drawing, not to invent a printing mark of his own, which is why the line on these leaves reads as calligraphy and not engraving. No press was involved at any point, and that dictated the paper: thin, soft, absorbent bamboo or xuan stock, printed on one side only, so a faint ghost of the picture often shows through from the back.
Colour, when a leaf had any, came after the line — brushed over the printed contour by hand, or, from the 1630s, printed from many small separately cut blocks, one per area of colour, each inked and wiped individually. The narrative novel leaves, the commercially dominant register, carried none at all: ink line on bare paper and nothing else.
Two hands on one leaf
The drawing the carver was copying had been made in two entirely different hands, and both survive the cutting. The first is calligraphic. Figures, robes, hair, trees, rock, cloud and drapery are drawn with a brush: strokes that enter with a slight bulb, swell where the cloth gathers at a sash, and lift cleanly off the paper at a hem or a beard's tip. Its finest register has a name, tiexian miao, "iron-wire line": the long, even, wiry robe contour that reads as taut cable rather than as the edge of a shape. Beards are drawn whisker by whisker. Rock takes sparse cun texture strokes.
The second hand is ruled. Every piece of built architecture — eaves, balustrades, steps, floor grids, window lattice, wall copings — is drawn dead straight against a straightedge, at constant weight, in parallel projection: receding edges stay parallel, nothing converges, a table's far edge is as long as its near edge, a round table a flattened ellipse rather than a perspectival one. Chinese painting treats this as a specialist genre with masters and a name of its own, jiehua, "ruled-line painting"; the illustrated book leaf simply puts both hands on one page.
There is no shading between them. Where a European engraver would build a grey with cross-hatching, these workshops cut a pattern that names the material instead — roofs as courses of tile arcs, walls as cracked-ice paving, robes as scattered dot-rosettes. Solid black is spent sparingly: on hair, on shoes, and occasionally on a supernatural mass such as the miasma boiling out of a demon prison in the Rongyu Tang Water Margin.
Anonymous, illustration to Jin Ping Mei, from 17th-century blocks. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
The paper is a participant
The most persistent habit of the tradition is what it leaves out. Bare paper does duty as floor, wall, air, moonlight and distance, and depth is built by stacking registers up the sheet with a band of untouched paper between them — figures on a terrace high on the leaf, emptiness across the middle, a garden and water at the bottom edge, nothing atmospheric joining them. A moonlit interior from the Rongyu Tang Water Margin has no light source drawn anywhere: the moonlight simply is the paper.
Interiors follow their own convention, and it is not the roof-removed aerial view of Japanese narrative painting: the Chinese room is furniture-framed and read through an open bay with the roof left intact — a tiled roof cutting the sheet on an oblique, a lattice window or standing screen closing the back as flat pattern, a balustrade at the front, a low table in parallel projection.
The artists who changed it
The Huizhou carvers, above all the Huang family of Qiuchuan, are the tradition's invisible authors. No carver signs the commercial novel leaves, so the lineage credited with raising the standard of the line is known from the literature and not from the pictures. Imperial work was signed: the Gengzhi tu names its cutter inside the picture, in a column set to the left of the painter's own credit; it names Zhu Gui of the Court of State Ceremonial as the man who cut the block.
Chen Hongshou (1599–1652) supplied the figure canon, and supplied it from painting: a long head with a high domed forehead, a body whose volume is fold rhythm and nothing else. His playing cards and drama illustrations are the source both Chinese and Japanese woodblock figure drawing descend from.
Hu Zhengyan (c. 1584–1674) ran the Ten Bamboo Studio in Nanjing and published its manual in 1633. What douban changed is not the palette but the unit: each small block being inked and wiped by hand, a single carved shape can grade from full colour to nothing while its contour holds it in place. His gonghua went further and printed nothing at all.
Jiao Bingzhen's Gengzhi tu of 1696, cut by Zhu Gui, is where parallel projection gives way — a Western-inflected diagonal recession, part of a documented current in Kangxi-era imperial printing known as taixi fa, the "Western method". Two generations later in Suzhou, Ding Liangxian left the clearest demonstration of grading one carved shape from one colour into another.
Afterlife: Japan, Europe, and the New Year door
Chinese colour printing travelled. The Ten Bamboo Studio Manual of 1633 and the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting of 1679 were the textbooks by which the technique reached Japan, where it fed the colour print Europe would later discover; in the nineteenth century the manuals reached Europe directly. Suzhou single-sheet prints were exported to Nagasaki and are an acknowledged ancestor of the early Japanese floating-world sheet, which is why the book leaf and not the single sheet is where the two traditions can be told apart. Inside China the technology never stopped: the nianhua New Year workshops at Yangliuqing and Taohuawu were still printing door gods from carved blocks into the twentieth century.
Where this leads
This article is the background reading. The same evidence base — seventeen validated leaves from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum and elsewhere, every file taken from the Met's open access or from Wikimedia Commons and checked before it was allowed to teach anything — is what our Chinese Woodblock comic style is built from and measured against: two line regimes, carved pattern instead of tone, and a third of the sheet left as paper. To see how a tradition becomes a set of testable rules, read the method.
