A DISCOURSE OF CHINA
Characters are eminent: which done, with great facilitie and celeritie they print off leaves at pleasure, one Printer often 1500. in one day; so ready also in cutting, that to mee Ours seeme to spend as much time in composing and correcting. This course is more accommodated to their great Characters then to ours, whose little letters are not easily cut in woodden Tables. They have this commoditie also, that keeping these Tables by them, they may with little labour adde or take away words or sentences: and need not at once print off any more Copies then present use or sale requireth. Wee doe this with Bookes of our Religion or European Sciences, printing them at home by our China servants. Another way. They have another way of printing Characters or Pictures printed before in Marble or Wood, laying on a leafe of Paper moist, and on that a woollen Cloth, whereon they beate with a Hammer till the Paper insinuates it selfe into the voide spaces and lineaments of the Characters or Picture: after which they lightly colour that leafe with Inke or other colour, those delineations onely remayning white, and retayning the Prototype-figure. But this is for grosser Pourtraitures.
Painting, graving, founding.They are much addicted to pictures, but nothing so cunning in painting, founding, graving, as Europeans. They make magnificent Arches with figures of men and beasts, and adorne their Temples with Idols and Bells, but their Genius otherwise generous and ingenious enough, for want of commerce with other Nations, is herein rudely artificiall. Shadowes and Oyle in picturing are to them unknowne, and their Pictures therefore have no more life of Art then Nature. In Statues, themselves seeme Statues for all rules of Symmetry any further then by the eye, and yet will be doing in huge (indeed) Monsters of this kinde, in Earth, Brasse, and Marble. Bells. Their Bells have all woodden Hammers, which yeeld a woodden sound, not comparable to ours, nor seeming capable of those of Iron. Musikall instruments. They have variety and plenty of Musicall Instruments, yet want Organs and all that have Keyes. Their Strings are made of raw Silke, and know not that419
