The European tradition is that Johann Gutenberg invented printing in Mainz in 1439. He did not. He invented movable metal type and it is very important that precise distinction always be used.
At the dazzling Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, China’s invention of printing 1,968 years ago was celebrated by thousands of performers hoisting tiles bearing Chinese characters above their heads. These squares symbolized the imprinted clay blocks used during the infancy of Chinese printing.
Bi Sheng devised movable clay block type in 1040 — it was made of baked clay and it is described by the Chinese scholar Shen Kuo (1031–1095).
In a sense the Olympic Show also celebrated the modern day Big Sheng, the scientist Wang Xuan (1937-2006), shown in our illustration, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering
Wang developed a large-scale integrated circuit capable of efficiently storing compressed information in hanzi and a five-stroke input method in 1975. He went on to devise a laser-printing system for characters. Much, much more, all utterly fascinating, HERE.
Source: China Daily