1: Medieval Chinese Information Orders: Paper, Stone, and Wood Reconsidered

Due to the relative scarcity of material survivals, historiographies of medieval China (Dunhuang excluded) have paid scant attention to major shifts in the materialities of textual cultures. Historians often discuss paper and its influence, but rarely consider the impact of transitions from rag-based papers to ramie, hemp, and bast fibers. Similarly, while public inscriptions on stone matured from the Late Han to the Sui, their role as textual support for “publication” is often overlooked. Meanwhile, the rise of rubbings from stone is often neglected in our earliest discussions of woodblock printing. This paper will present a new chronology for considering the interplay between the material textual supports of paper, stone, and wood. By considering examples from Dunhuang, the Shōsō-in in Nara, and Korea, I argue that shifts in media practices did not lead to “evolution” but rather to different forms of interplay and interdependence. Continued experimentation and exploration led to a media ecology that was durable and dynamic, and one that quite remarkably, continued until being challenged by Industrial modernity. By reframing the history of writing materials as a non-linear system of coexisting media, this study complicates standard narratives of technological progress. It also highlights how material choices shaped not only textual preservation, but the very forms through which knowledge and authority were made legible across early East Asia.