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Soon after Gamble’s visit, fonts were being traded back and forth across the East China Sea. Japanese kanji, characters that have their own intrinsic meaning, were adopted from Chinese hanzi characters in around the fifth century, making the type usable in both countries.
Gamble taught Shozo electrotype casting, a method that allows shapes to be quickly and accurately replicated in metal, and the foundry began producing type. There, he met with Motoki Shozo, a translator at the Nagasaki Iron Mill (which, more than 65 years later, would be renamed Mitsubishi Heavy Industries). When one missionary, William Gamble, left China in 1869 to return to the U.S., he stopped over in Japan. “If you have to explain why a typeface is beautiful, then it isn’t.” Tan said the styles the missionaries created were looked down on by Chinese readers, who found them not to be calligraphic enough. In the 1800s, Western missionaries tried to use movable type to mass-produce spiritual texts, modeling their fonts off Mingti. Guan’geti soon morphed into what is known as Mingti today. “Overall,” Tan said, “it was a style that, while superficially retains a strong smell of calligraphic freedom, was, deep down, the most ready for mechanical reproduction.” Guan’geti was easy to copy by hand, and ultimately to engrave. The standard style for government, it basically translates to “official style.” Appearance-wise, it was sterile, a result of what Peiran Tan, an editor at The Type, a Chinese typography media collective, called the “smother the artistic spontaneity and irregularity of Chinese calligraphy.”
Starting from the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 B.C.) and lasting until the final Qing dynasty (1644–1912), calligraphers would paint in styles the emperors liked, who would not only collect works, but also produce their own.īy the start of the Qing dynasty, the favored style was called guan’geti. It was practiced only by scholars and aesthetic tastes were at the whim of emperors. Before mass reproduction, writing was mainly done in calligraphy - one of the six arts to be mastered in order to be the Chinese equivalent of a Renaissance man. Type and the way characters have been portrayed has always been political in China. However, for a variety of practical, aesthetic, and political reasons, woodblock printing remained the norm for centuries.
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Printing began with the carving of full pages onto blocks of wood - but artist Bi Sheng, who lived from 990 to 1051 A.D., invented movable type, where each character is carved on its own block that can then be rearranged to a custom order. Wilson LeeĪs any good Chinese student learned in Sunday language school or while living in a Chinese-speaking country, printing is one of China’s four great inventions (alongside paper, gunpowder, and the compass). Type designer Julius Hui’s passion project, Ku Mincho, is an attempt to radically rethink Chinese fonts. “I want my type foundry to be one that spreads this, so that it’s clearer for everyone what Chinese culture’s roots are.” “I think all typefaces should have a ‘traditional Chinese feel,’” Hui said. His research and dedication to the history of Chinese typography is, improbably, a revolutionary act.
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He intends to take it back to its roots before the influence of Japanese designers, and to free it from the cultural gravity of the mainland, where even typefaces come under the purview of the state.
Hui said that the point of the project is not just an exercise in aesthetics, but an attempt to “decolonize” Chinese type. To create it, Hui enlisted two of his former colleagues, Kin Cheung and Sammy Fung, who each have more than 30 years of experience in Chinese type design. Ku Mincho is a Mingti typeface, based on Ming dynasty calligraphy. “There’s no emotion behind them,” Hui told Rest of World. Most of the fonts on the market have gone through a process of convergent evolution to become blocky and conventional. Hui, who previously designed the New York Times’ Chinese logo and a custom typeface for tech giant Tencent, believes that Chinese type design has become stagnant and unoriginal. Now, forced to head home by the pandemic after only six months, he found himself with little paid work, but finally able pursue a passion project that he’d been sitting on for more than six years: Ku Mincho, a radical rethinking of Chinese type. The previous year, he’d quit his “too comfortable and steady” job at Monotype, one of the world’s largest type foundries, and moved to Munich. In 2020, type designer Julius Hui flew back to his native Hong Kong.