Taiwan's Letterpress Culture: How Movable Type Pressed Public Language onto Paper

30-Second Overview: A piece of lead type must first be cast, then sorted, set, inked, and pressed before it becomes a newspaper, church bulletin, textbook, government document, or business card. The story of Taiwan's letterpress culture is not about packaging pre-digital technology as nostalgia, but about asking how public language was once manufactured, who had the power to reproduce it at scale, and what fonts and human hands are worth preserving once the machines stop turning.

In the area around Taiyuan Road in Datong District, Taipei, Ri Xing Type Foundry organizes lead type by radical on shelves. The characters there are not abstract font files, but heavy, metallic objects that must be picked up and identified. The copper dies are mirror-image (forward), but the cast lead type is reversed left-to-right like a reflection, only returning to the familiar direction the reader sees at the moment of printing. This small reversal reminds us that text never appears on paper directly; it is separated by an entire path composed of materials, processes, and labor. ^{1 2}

📝 Curator's Note

Viewing lead type as an early font file misses the most critical difference: digital fonts can be copied instantly, but lead type first requires someone to break language down into discoverable, castable, and reusable objects.

Don't Rush to Write Letterpress as Nostalgia

The "history of printing" is often written as the history of machine progress: from woodblock to movable type, from lead type to planographic printing, and from computer typesetting to digital printing. This line is not wrong, but it easily hides the people. Letterpress relies on type foundries to provide character grains, on sorters to find the needed characters among tens of thousands of lead types, on compositors to fix the grains into the layout, on pressmen to adjust ink and pressure, and on binders to turn loose paper into portable publications. Hung Tung-han's interview clarifies this division of labor: after a client makes a request, the type foundry sorts the characters, the printing house composes and proofs, and then mass printing begins. ³

Therefore, Taiwan's letterpress culture cannot be directly equated with Taiwan's publishing culture. Publishing culture concerns how books, newspapers, and ideas circulate; letterpress brings the gaze closer to the material conditions of text. It asks: How much does it cost to produce a font set? Who can afford a factory? Which language has enough readers? What characters can be cast into a complete, reusable set of lead type? When these conditions change, the public language that can be printed also changes.

The existing entry on The Church News can guide readers into the context of newspapers and religious publishing, while The History of Taiwanese Literature fills in writers, works, and literary fields. This article focuses on the machines and people between these two domains, because for an idea to become a circulate publication, it must first find a text technology capable of stably reproducing it.

The First Thread: A Machine and a Church Newspaper

Taiwan's modern letterpress was not suddenly invented by a local factory. The National Palace Museum's Industry History archive notes that in 1880, the British Presbyterian Church brought metal movable type printing and copperplate printing to Taiwan. In 1885, the Polyglave Press (Ju Zhen Tang) edited and published The Tainan Church News using Romanized spelling (POJ). This publication later became the predecessor of The Church News. What is important is not just its early date, but that it used Vernacular Script (POJ) to give a Taiwanese language existing in oral speech a form of regular publication. ⁴

Justfont's compilation of printing history provides finer temporal details. In 1821, Tainan already had the Songyunxuan Woodblock Printing House, but during the Qing dynasty, most printed materials still relied on imports from Quanzhou, Xiamen, and other places. In 1880, after Reverend James L. Maxwell left Taiwan, he donated a movable type printing press and equipment. George Mackay returned to Scotland the following year to learn operation. In 1885, this machine produced the first lead type publication made in Taiwan. The article also reminds us that early movable type technology was not simply brought over from Europe; it only became a local publishing capability after intersecting with Taiwan, Latin alphabets, Vernacular Script, church organizations, and reader demand. ⁵

Here lies a point easily simplified. One cannot write a printing press as a magical tool that automatically brings literacy, freedom, or modernization. The machine provides the possibility of reproduction, but whether to print, what to print, and which alphabet to use is still influenced by organization, funding, education, religious purposes, and the political environment. Movable type allows Vernacular Script to appear regularly, but for Vernacular Script to enter readers' lives, it still relies on editors, missionaries, local users, and a sustainable publication system. ^{4 5}

Difference to Preserve: Sources offer two narratives for the year of the first printing press: 1880 and 1881. 1880 points to the context of equipment donation and arrival, while 1881 is often used to refer to the time the machine arrived with the British Presbyterian Church or began operation. This article does not force these into a single answer but retains the year discrepancy according to different sources. ^{4 5 6}

The Second Thread: Newspapers Bring Lead Type into Urban Time

In 1898, The Taiwan Daily News introduced movable type and lithographic printing presses. In 1923, the circulation of The Taiwan Minbao increased the reading population. The newspaper industry's need for large-scale printing brought letterpress deeper into the daily life of Taiwan's cities. These dates are not merely a chronology of newspaper history; they explain how lead type began to be bound to fixed publication cycles, news time, and reader expectations. Yesterday's events had to be set for today; today's pages had to be delivered to the streets tomorrow. The printing factory thus became part of the city's time. ⁴

The power of newspapers comes not only from content but also from their ability to reach the hands of many strangers simultaneously. Newspapers bring local news, political commentary, commercial advertisements, and new knowledge together on the same page, transforming text from individual reading into material processed collectively by society. This explains why the printing industry has never been a neutral service sector. When a certain language, newspaper, or political viewpoint can be stably reproduced, it has the opportunity to form a readership, further influencing how people imagine themselves belonging to a place or a society.

The limitations of letterpress are equally important. The sheer number of Chinese characters means a usable set of movable type may require tens of thousands of character grains or more, incurring costs for production, classification, storage, and retrieval. Justfont's compilation points out that while movable type can be reused, it is not necessarily cheaper than woodblock in a Chinese character environment. This technological contradiction gives Taiwan's letterpress a dual face of industrial scale and manual reliance. ⁵

Putting existing data together reveals a clearer numerical thread: In 1898, newspapers introduced movable type and lithographic equipment; in 1923, The Taiwan Minbao expanded its circulation; in 1969, Ri Xing Type Foundry was established; after 1986, computer typesetting gradually became popular; around 2000, letterpress exited most daily production. These years should not be misread as five sudden breakpoints; they are more like time markers of changing publication demand, equipment investment, font supply, and workforce demographics. ^{4 7 2}

Wanhua's Factories, and an Apprentice's Two and a Half Years

After 1930, privately operated Taiwanese letterpress printing houses gradually appeared. Names such as Puwen, Zhongnan, Fengyuan, and Luo Printing Office show that the printing industry was no longer just a display of foreign technology, but an industry maintained jointly by local workers and enterprises. Post-war, printing resources from Shanghai and the aid construction of the 1950s brought changes in technology and equipment, making the 1950s to 1970s the prosperous period of letterpress. ⁴

Hung Tung-han's life history makes this industrial history more than just factory counts. Hung Tung-han entered Tianlu Printing in Taipei as an apprentice at age fourteen. Wanting to learn a trade to help support his family, he first washed clothes for his master for two and a half years before gradually learning the actual craft of printing. At thirty, he founded Dongxin Printing. Later, under the impact of digital printing, he still maintained the factory's operation with his wife and a senior compositor. Hung Tung-han mentioned in interviews that current orders mostly come from government agencies, schools, and overseas clients. The factory uses semi-automatic printing presses to handle demand and employs four inks: red, blue, green, and black. Letterpress is not a craft frozen in the past; it awkwardly stitches old processes with new equipment. These details reveal another side of letterpress: it is not a pure artistic cultivation, but a livelihood for many people through dangerous, arduous, and long-trained work. ³

The dangers in letterpress factories should not be romanticized. Hung Tung-han described the operation of the paper cutter: one person stands above the machine to lower the blade, while another places the paper. If the hand is a step too slow, serious injury can occur. Printing work involves lead, ink, machinery, noise, and long hours of standing. The so-called "warmth" of paper has, behind it, the physical cost of workers. ³

Wanhua became a gathering place for letterpress not because it was naturally suited for nostalgia. It was close to publishing, commerce, transportation, and labor populations, allowing type foundries, printing houses, and binders to exchange orders. Clients did not need to send documents far; printers could exchange technology and networks within the same urban web. When digital typesetting appeared, this local division of labor was rewritten by faster equipment and fewer people. The disappearance of the industrial cluster is thus also the disappearance of urban work memory. ³

📝 Curator's Note

What letterpress is most easily hidden by the nostalgia filter is that it was once a work with risks, class differences, and physical costs. When the apprenticeship system disappeared, what vanished was not just slow work, but who had the opportunity to learn the technology as a livelihood.

After 1949, Lead Type Moved with People

The Academia Sinica Digital Collections article records that in 1949, Hsu Hung-chang arrived in Taipei from Xiamen, bringing Shanghai-style regular script (Kai) copper dies and a hand-cranked type casting machine, establishing Fengxing Type Foundry. Shanghai-style characters, being traditional, aesthetic, and sturdy, were used by official units and private enterprises. This story pulls post-war printing history back from the abstract "technology transplant" to a person crossing the sea with copper dies and tools. Fonts are not stateless software files; they are material assets that can migrate with people, machines, and capital. ¹

Fengxing Type Foundry exited in 1968 due to competition from electric type casters, but the regular script copper dies it left behind entered later lead type production through recasting and reuse. Ri Xing Type Foundry preserves three complete font families: Song (Ming), Kai (Regular), and Hei (Gothic), each with seven size dimensions. The Academia Sinica Digital Collections project (2007–2012) commissioned Ri Xing to recast donated copper dies into lead type, followed by photography, font scanning, and interviews with practitioners. Thus, this project was not simply photographing old objects, but placing copper dies, lead type, practitioner interviews, and font scans into the same preservation work. ¹

This is particularly critical for Taiwan's font culture. As copper dies and lead type in newsrooms and printing houses gradually scattered, the Traditional Chinese movable type preserved by Ri Xing is not just a store's inventory, but possibly one of the few places in the Chinese-speaking world where a complete font system can still be observed. This judgment must retain the source's limitations and should not be expanded into an unsupported claim of "the only one in the world." A more prudent statement is: it allows researchers to see on-site how Traditional Chinese movable type is preserved, cast, and reused. ^{1 7}

Ri Xing's official data states that Ri Xing was founded in 1969. After 1986, computer typesetting gradually became popular in Taiwan, and around 2000, letterpress almost completely shriveled. The National Palace Museum's case page supplements that Ri Xing's main work includes casting, sorting, and supplementing characters, preserving three Traditional Chinese font families (Song, Kai, Hei), divided into seven sizes from Initial Size to Size 6. Since these data come from preservation group case records and the entity's own statements, the article can use them to explain how the preservers understand their position, but does not rewrite self-statements directly into an unverified industrial census. ⁷

The Digital Age is Not the Opposite of Letterpress

After the start of automated industry in the 1970s, letterpress gradually lost its cost advantage. In the 1990s, the popularization of computers and digital information allowed planographic and digital printing to replace lead type with speed, price, and typesetting flexibility. This turning point is often written as "old technology eliminated by new technology," but for practitioners, it was more like a simultaneous change in client demand, workforce numbers, delivery speed, and education methods. Hung Tung-han's factory workforce shrank, yet orders still came from government agencies, schools, and overseas clients, showing that letterpress did not suddenly hit zero on a certain day, but retreated from the mainstream industry to positions of special demand and cultural experience. ^{4 3}

The New Taipei City Government's exhibition report provides another angle. The exhibition placed Ri Xing Type Foundry, Ri Yu Printing, designers, and poets in the same space. From selecting characters, designing, typesetting, paper selection to printing methods, the audience understood that a book is not just about author and reader, but involves a chain of professionals determining touch and reading rhythm. Chang Chieh-kuan and Lin Chin-jen operated antique proofing presses and cylinder printing presses on-site, transforming letterpress from factory daily labor into public education. ⁶

The "revival" here cannot be understood only as making everything look old. Taiwan Panorama reports that Ri Xing's font reproduction project combines volunteers with graphic design backgrounds, using computer programs to repair damaged fonts. This is an interesting hybrid: using digital tools to preserve lead type is not a betrayal of letterpress, but an acknowledgment that preservation itself requires new technology. The cultural life of lead type lies not only in it continuing to be placed in printing presses, but in its contours, proportions, faces, and history being able to be studied, reproduced, and reused. ²

What to Preserve, Who Uses It

Ri Xing's official article shared the National Palace Museum's image and text data survey records in 2023, along with a ten-minute complete video record of the casting process. The Ministry of Culture's English case page describes Ri Xing as an interactive museum where visitors can personally print, listing training content for casting, copper die maintenance, and typesetting. ⁸. This action is important because part of letterpress knowledge lies not in the finished product, but in the sequence of processes, hand angles, machine sounds, and the master's judgment of lead liquid or die status. Text data can tell us process names; video and oral history come closer to how the body executes the process. ⁹

Preservation thus has at least four levels. First is objects: casting machines, copper dies, lead type, type cases, and printing presses. Second is fonts: Kai (Regular), Song (Ming), Hei (Gothic), and different size faces. Third is technology: casting, sorting, typesetting, proofing, ink adjustment, and binding. Fourth is social relations: masters and apprentices, clients, printing houses, designers, schools, and visitors. Preserving only the first level risks turning letterpress into static exhibits; preserving only the fourth level may lose the concrete objects that allow people to understand the technology. ^{1 6 9}

This table also explains why letterpress preservation cannot just ask "can the machine still move?" An old machine without people who know how to operate it may just be a large metal object. A set of lead type without users who can read radicals and font differences may just be neatly arranged inventory. Conversely, a group of designers who love the raised paper surface, if they do not know how character grains are cast, selected, and fixed, may only leave behind a superficial retro style.

How a Text Becomes a Public Good

The most valuable aspect of Taiwan's letterpress culture to re-understand is that it turned the "text" from an abstract symbol into a production problem of public goods. The Church News gave Taiwanese Vernacular Script (POJ) the form of regular publication; newspapers brought news and political commentary into urban time; post-war printing houses massively reproduced textbooks, documents, and commercial information; Ri Xing allows part of the Traditional Chinese font system to still be seen in the digital age. Each segment is not simply technological progress, but the result of language, readers, funding, and workers jointly deciding. ^{4 5 1}

This also connects letterpress to The History of Taiwan Advertising. Advertising needs to quickly create recognizable text for shops, products, and events; printing houses turn this text into flyers, signs, tickets, and catalogs. It also has an uncomfortable link with The Taiwan White Terror, as Hung Tung-han's interview mentions that during the Martial Law period, when printing government-related documents, even if it was just a proofing error misspelling a political figure's name, the compositor might still be required to explain. Printing is not a transparent pipeline standing outside politics; those who control text reproduction may also bear the political consequences of text errors. ³

Equally impossible to ignore is that letterpress once made certain languages easier to see, while potentially excluding others and their users. Which characters had complete grains, which dialects had stable publishing institutions, which readers could afford newspapers—these were never natural results. When discussing preservation, if we only say "everyone likes the warmth of paper," we flatten the class, language, and political differences in this history.

📝 Curator's Note

The invisible choice of preservation is whether to treat letterpress as a "viewable antique" or as a "still usable public technology." The former preserves form; the latter must leave behind fonts, processes, master-apprentice relations, and users together.

Whether to Keep the Fire Burning

Ri Xing Type Foundry's current situation provides an answer that is not romantic, but very practical. Letterpress can be preserved as cultural assets, used by designers for creation, allowed students to personally typeset through tours and workshops, and have fonts scanned into searchable digital data by researchers. These uses need not exclude each other; the real question is whether each use acknowledges the existence of other levels. Treating lead type only as good-looking retro material ignores process and labor. Treating it only as untouchable museum artifacts lets movable type lose the condition of being "alive." ^{7 2 9}

Therefore, the future of Taiwan's letterpress is not necessarily a return to 1960s production volumes. What is more worth asking is whether preservers, font designers, printing artisans, schools, archives, and general readers can form new relationships of use. When students set their own names at Ri Xing, when designers use reproduced fonts to make new publications, when researchers preserve both the shape of copper dies and the master's oral history, lead type is no longer just something left from the past, but re-participates in the present.

From this perspective, letterpress has not truly lost to the digital age. It lost its mainstream position in mass production, leaving behind a question harder for digital interfaces to replace: How does text gain credibility in materials, bodies, and social relations? Characters on a screen can be copied infinitely, but they do not automatically tell us who designed the font, who maintained the library, who decided what is worth printing, and what kind of text allows a group to recognize themselves.

The next page of Taiwan's letterpress culture may not be more factories, nor necessarily all old machines reconnecting to the production line. It is more likely a new project of public memory, putting objects, fonts, processes, and human stories together, letting readers know that a publication does not start with pressing the print button on a blank document. It starts with a cast lead type, starts with an apprentice willing to stay, starts with a group believing a certain text is worth printing repeatedly.

Further Reading

• The Church News: Starting from Vernacular Script and church publishing, understanding how letterpress intersects with Taiwan's language, religious organizations, and periodicals.
• The History of Taiwanese Literature: Placing printing technology back into the long context of writers, publishing, and literary publicness.
• The History of Taiwan Advertising: Observing how lead type enters commercial flyers, tickets, signs, and urban consumer information.
• The Taiwan White Terror: Understanding the uncomfortable but indispensable relationship between printing, publishing, and political censorship.

References

This article is primarily written based on the following nine specific article pages and institutional article pages. All footnotes point to article detail pages or specific content pages of institutions, not media homepages or search pages.

Image Sources and Licenses

This article embeds five remote images from Wikimedia Commons, none of which were downloaded to the project or modified in content. The first four images were taken by Johan Jönsson (Julle) under CC BY-SA 4.0 license. The fifth metal movable type image was taken by Norro under CC BY-SA 3.0 license. When using, please retain the author's name, First File Page, Second File Page, Third File Page, Fourth File Page, Fifth File Page, CC BY-SA 4.0 License Terms, and CC BY-SA 3.0 License Terms. The images present the type racks inside Ri Xing Type Foundry, not statistical charts of all Taiwan's letterpress factories or the complete historical picture.