Samuel Dyer (1804-1843) was a missionary sent to China by the London Missionary Society of the Protestant Church of England. Dyer applied for membership in the London Missionary Society in 1824, and while he was in Islington he had the opportunity to learn Chinese from the large number of Chinese books kept at the mission of Robert Morrison (1782-1834).
Unlike Morrison and Joshua Marshman (1768-1837), Dale had a background in Latin movable metal type while at Islington, and was very familiar with the processes of printing, character punch engraving, and casting. When Morrison returned to England during his time there (1823-1825), he strongly advocated the use of Western movable metal type technology to produce movable Chinese characters. As a result, the London Missionary Society decided to send three more missionaries to the East, one of whom was Dyer.
Early experiments with Chinese characters
In the course of learning Chinese, Dyer realized that carving character punches for thousands of Chinese characters was a huge challenge that would not only take enormous effort and time, but also require huge financial support. Therefore, it was crucial to determine the character set of Chinese characters. So, Dale tried to calculate the Chinese character set around 1826 with two students who were studying Chinese. Through their calculations, they determined that the Chinese version of Morrison's Bible contained about 3,600 Chinese characters, and the New Testament alone contained 2,600. Dale then also determined the approximate cost of carving the Chinese character punches before traveling to India. The cost of each character punch ranged from 10 shillings to £2. This meant that the set of Chinese characters needed for the Bible would cost about £1,800 just to engrave the character punches, not including the production of character molds and casting of lead characters.
Before Dale left England, inspired by the native English practice of passing wood engraved plates and then casting them into metal coats of arms, an idea arose: "Why not cast movable metal characters on wood engraved plates, from the usual Chinese printing method?" Dale then realized the feasibility of this method: prepare a set of wood carving plates, use the wood carving plates to cast lead plates, then use the lead plates to cast metal plates, and then saw the metal plates into lead characters of equal size. In this way, metal movable characters for Chinese characters could be obtained without carving a character punch.
On August 8, 1827, Dale arrived in Penang and decided to stay behind to assume the responsibility of the Chinese missionary department. Dale began to try out his previous idea of making movable Chinese characters by combining wood carving plates in 1828. First, 700 different Chinese characters were written in proper scale by Dale's Chinese teachers in Penang. The wooden plates were then carved in Melaka with reference to the written Chinese characters and sent back to Penang for review. After the review, the carved wooden plates were sent to London for casting and were sawn into individual metal movable characters. Eventually, the movable characters were sent back to Penang and in January 1829, the first five experimental wood engraved plates were sent out. It was not until two years later, in March 1831, that Dale received the Chinese characters. Although the entire process took a great deal of time in shipping and much of the work was out of Dale's control, the end result exceeded Dale's expectations.
Calculation of Chinese character sets and character frequencies
After achieving some results in the experiments with living Chinese characters, Dale began to count the character set of Chinese characters, which had not yet been done by missionaries. First, Dale determined the range of characters to be counted. Because the character set was intended to produce the Chinese fonts used in the compilation of Christian treatises and the revision of the Bible in Penang, most of the Chinese works on Christianity published by missionaries were chosen, including the Chinese translation of the Bible and some gospel sheets by Morrison and William Milne (1785-1822). Dale felt it necessary to include the local works that were closest in style and thought to the Chinese, though not counting characters that were never needed in Christian treatises. In the end, Dyer selected 14 works with which he was very satisfied, and listed 13 titles in the introduction to A Selection of Three Thousand Characters being the Most Important in the Chinese Language: The Analects of Confucius, Three Kingdoms The Gospel of Matthew, The Gospel of Chu Tzu, The Gospel of the State, The Standard, The Rituals of the Holy Book of the People, The Journey to the West, The Exhortation to the World, The Book of the Soul, The Treatise of Zhang Yuan, The Explanation of the New Holy Book, and The Ten Commandments. These selected books include Chinese translations of Christian books, Chinese books written by missionaries, Confucian classics, and widely circulated Chinese novels. Of these, the Confucian classics were closest in thought to the Christian books, while the Chinese novels were similar in writing style.
After more than two years of calculations, Dale determined that no more than 5,000 characters would satisfy almost all the purposes of a Christian missionary; adding about 1,800 more characters would satisfy almost any literary book in print. In addition, to obtain a practical character set, Dyer calculated the frequency of character occurrences when calculating the required character variety: "From my records, I found that the character variety for twenty pages of the four books (of Confucius), or two and a half sheets of printed paper, was, nearly or approximately, 703 character varieties; of which 309 characters appeared only once. The variety of characters added to the twenty pages of the Three Kingdoms (they contain much more than in the same number of pages of the first four books) is 929 character varieties, of which 400 occur only once. The number of character types added again in the twenty pages of the Gospel of Matthew is 225, of which 91 appear only once. The calculation of the additional character species in the 20 pages of Juzi is not complete, but I expect it to be a very small fraction; after counting 10 different authors, the additional characters will be reduced to almost nothing. I'm almost inclined to think that no more than 2,500 or 3,000 characters appear multiple times, on average, in twenty pages, with a few thousand more appearing only once."
Using this statistic, Dale believes that most Chinese consists of only about 1,200 character species; the rest appear only occasionally, but a complete Chinese character set contains about 13,000-14,000 character species.
While calculating the Chinese character set and character frequencies, Dell also attempted to produce Chinese character fonts without using character punches. While this process was successful in later, small-scale experiments, there was a serious dilemma: a frequently used font would last roughly five or seven years before it had to be recast. Unless they had a way to cast living Chinese characters in India, getting a new typeface every seven years would be a big challenge and expensive. After six years of reflection, Dale made up his mind, "No matter how successful our current program is, we should start doing character punch engraving." To facilitate the engraving of the character punch, Dale used his understanding of the structure of Chinese characters: "Numerous Chinese characters are made up of two distinct parts, the 'radicals' and the 'parts,' and these parts can be cast separately without the slightest damage."
After determining the character set and priority of Chinese characters, Dell divided Chinese characters into six main categories based on their characteristics: non-divisible characters, characters that can be vertically divided into two-thirds and one-third, characters that can be vertically divided into three one-thirds, characters that can be vertically divided into two-and-a-half equivalents, characters that can be horizontally divided into two-and-a-half equivalents, and characters that can be vertically divided and again horizontally divided into one-fourth. And on top of that, he subdivided similar kanji together. Dale eventually developed a systematic result, the "Recalculation of Several Books as a Collection of Printed Characters," which can be regarded as a manual for carving Chinese character punches and casting Chinese characters in living form. Although the scope of his calculations was limited to parts of 14 books, his results are of good reference value and laid the foundation for later missionaries to produce Chinese character scripts.
Dell's Kanji characters
Dell developed two options for creating Chinese character metal movable type: one for temporary fonts and the other for permanent fonts. The permanent font was prepared for when the temporary font was consumed. The temporary typeface was made using the method obtained from Dale's early experiments with movable Chinese characters. Dyer achieved success with this plan in a small-scale experiment around 1831. However, the production of the temporary typeface had many defects. First, because of the soft texture of the wood plates themselves, many of the tiny strokes within the complex Chinese characters could be lost. And the inherent textures, imperfections, and unevenness of the carved wood plates are retained on the metal plates during casting. Second, temporary fonts can only be recast from scratch after five to seven years of use at the same time and expense. Therefore, Dell only considers fonts produced in this way as temporary fonts. Having fully realized the importance of character punches and dies for Chinese typefaces, Dyer declared at the end of 1832, "Character punches are the basis of permanence, and the engraving of one for any one character will furnish a sufficient number of living characters in Malacca, Canton, England, or anywhere else, and that for any character."
Dell's permanent font consists of two typefaces, a large 24-point character (a live size of approximately 8.65 mm) and a small 13.5-point character (a live size of approximately 4.85 mm). The small print is a little larger than a quarter of the large print's live size. Dyer's large type project began in Penang in 1833, when Dyer hired several Chinese workers to engrave type punches for the large type, based on the Song type in the Bible printed in Melaka in 1827 using wood engraving plates. The engravers had to follow Dale's previous statistics on character set and frequency to engrave accurately, and the characters were engraved in order of importance, with the less frequent characters first engraved on blank lead characters until they were engraved into steel characters when necessary.
In order to ensure the quality of the character punch engraving, Dell and the character punch engraving workers agreed that each character punch must be completely satisfactory, otherwise it will be re-engraved. Whenever Dell receives a completed engraved character punch it is carefully inspected to ensure that only beautiful and well engraved characters are passed. Dell's criteria for determining the best characters were the Kangxi Dictionary and the Chinese characters carved in Malacca, as well as the opinions of many authorities. Compared with the Parisian split characters engraved by Marcellin Legrand at the same time, although the quality of the Parisian characters seems to be exquisite, they are not suitable for printing books used by the Chinese. The shapes of the characters are too rigid and disproportionate, and the parts of the characters are misplaced during the reassembly process. In contrast, Dyer's Chinese characters were relatively more aesthetically pleasing and structurally sound. Upon his return to England in 1839, Dyer also made a side trip to Paris to visit Le Grand's movable type printing house and became confident in the quality of his own Chinese typeface. Dyer had bluntly stated that at least half of the characters in the Paris movable type had improper forms. However, for European scholars Parisian movable type had done very well and received much praise, but never from the Chinese. As Dyer commented, "There is no doubt that the characters are Chinese, but the taste shown in their application is French."
Whereas Dyer's Chinese movable type wanted to be thoroughly Chinese in style, there was no other Chinese type based on Western movable type technology that could match it in quality, at least in the 19th century.
At the end of 1835, at the request of the London Missionary Society, Dyer moved from Penang to Melaka to take over the printing department. Dyer lived in Melaka for about four years and continued the Chinese character punch and movable type production in Penang. During this time, the development of Chinese characters with movable metal characters came to an important turning point. The trustees of the London Mission changed their attitudes towards the Chinese character metal type and actively requested Dale to produce Chinese characters. The change in attitude of the London Mission was largely due to competition from the Royal Printing House in France and the expert advice on movable Chinese characters provided by Walter Henry Medhurst (1796-1857), another missionary who had worked on printing and typesetting.
In 1834, under the direction of Jean-Pierre Guillaume Pauthier (1801-1873), Legrand engraved 15-point Chinese characters at the Royal Printing House in France using the split-joint movable type, the set of characters mentioned earlier as the Paris split-joint movable type. The University and the Tao Te Ching adopted the Paris type in 1837 and 1838, respectively. The American Presbyterian Publishing House also ordered a complete set of character models as early as 1836. Thus, the development of Chinese movable characters in France stirred up the London Missions' sense of competition to some extent. However, understanding Chinese and its printing problems was difficult for the trustees of the London Mission, but Metroth's advice changed their view of Chinese type. during Metroth's return to England from 1836 to 1838, he explained in detail to the London Mission the advantages and disadvantages of Legrand's and Dyer's typefaces. Meadows also mentioned that Dyer was very skilled in type making and suggested that Dyer create another small size typeface. This would not only compete with Legrand's typeface, but also reduce certain printing costs. In addition, in the environment where missionary work was forbidden in China, it would be possible to print small size missionary books that would be easier to carry and conceal. The Council eventually accepted Madduth's professional advice and volunteered Dell to produce a smaller size Chinese typeface. After receiving the request from the London Missionary Society, Dyer began producing character punches in smaller sizes.
Dyer left England again in 1841. At that time, the London Missionary Society believed that the time had come for missionaries to enter the interior of China, so they sent Dale to Singapore for a quicker trip to China. 1842, Dale arrived in Singapore, and because the Singapore mission station was well equipped, he then began producing Chinese character punches, mainly in small 13.5 point characters, with an average production of 40 characters per month.
On March 29, 1842, Dale sent his father a sample of 13.5 point small typeface from Singapore. on August 29, 1842, the Qing government and Britain signed the unequal treaty, the Treaty of Nanking, which ended the First Opium War (18391842). Thereafter, Protestant missionary activities in China entered a new era. The London Missionary Society called missionaries to Hong Kong to discuss their deployment in mainland China. When Dyer went to Hong Kong, he had completed 1,540 large type movable characters, less than half of the estimated 3,232 characters, and only about 300 small type fonts, far from complete.
During the London Missionary Society's meeting in Hong Kong, Dale was appointed by the London Missionary Society to go to Fuzhou, Fujian, to open a mission there, considering that he had studied the Hokkien dialect. Unfortunately, after the conference, Dale died in Macau on October 24, 1843, at the age of 39. He was buried near Morrison's tombstone in the Macau Christian Cemetery. After Dale's death, Alexander and John Stronach consulted with the engravers and decided to continue producing Dale's Chinese characters. In a letter dated January 7, 1845, Alexander mentions that 370 new character dies and 1,226 character punches that had not yet been made into character dies were produced. In other words, the number of characters had reached 3,041 by then. He also mentioned that he had made some progress on the small character type, but was still working on the large character type and hoped to complete it as much as possible. in 1846, when Alexander left Singapore for Xiamen, he handed over all the type and presses to the Hong Kong preaching station, as designated by his headquarters. At that time, the number of characters reached 3,891, including both large and small type fonts. at the end of 1846, William Gillespie (1792-1868), who was in charge of the printing establishment in Hong Kong, reported to Arthur Tidman (1792-1868) of the Foreign Secretariat of the London Missionary Society that the set of characters for large type amounted to more than 4,200, while the characters for small type only 400.
Cole's Succession and Refinement
In 1847, Richard Cole, who was familiar with printing and movable type techniques, transferred from the Meihua Book House to the London Missionary Society Press in Hong Kong to inherit Dale's Chinese type. At that time, it was clear to the missionaries from the London Missionary Society in Hong Kong that "there was no one in China comparable to Mr. Cole" in the production and printing of movable Chinese characters, and they believed that Cole could effectively make up for the loss caused by Dale's death. Thus, by the end of 1847, Cole was continuing to produce Dale's Chinese characters. That same year, John Fullerton Cleland, one of the missionaries of the London Missionary Society, unabashedly examined the living characters that Cole had inherited: "After a thorough examination of the character punch, it was found that many characters had been passed as good, which were so irregularly shaped that if we wished to provide other missionaries with provide type for other missionaries and produce a readable volume for ourselves, they would have to be completely re-engraved. In fact, in spite of the care we took afterwards, we kept hearing complaints that the work had been done too carelessly."
From Cleland's comments, it appears that Cole may have reengraved Dale's "irregularly shaped type" and improved the quality of Dale's type to some extent. As the missionaries expected, Cole's arrival greatly accelerated the production of Dyer's two sets of movable Chinese characters. in 1849, 2,410 small 13.5-point character punches were cut and 1,800 character dies were struck. In the same year, the British and American missionaries in China completed a new edition of the Chinese Bible, which provided an opportunity for the use of Dell's typefaces. However, neither of Dyer's fonts was sufficient to print the new edition of the Chinese Bible. With the support of the London Missionary Society, each typeface was increased to 4,500 characters in 1850. By 1851, Cole had essentially completed the two Chinese fonts, each with 4,700 characters, sufficient for printing ordinary Chinese books. a letter from John Chalmers (1825-1899) to Tidman in 1857 mentions the exact set of characters for both fonts, both amounting to 5,584, and he also mentions another , the Bourgeois movable type made specifically for marginal notes, which had a character set of 328. By 1865, the character set for both large and small type reached 6,000, and was then retained until 1873, when it was sold. In the 1860s, these two sets of Chinese character fonts were reproduced using electroplating by BuLi Jiang of Mei Hua Shu, and became Mei Hua Shu's No. 1 and No. 4 characters, which were sold throughout the country and used in large numbers for printing.
To summarize Dell's contribution to Chinese character fonts, the first two aspects are the statistics of Chinese character set and character frequency, and the other is the practice of Chinese character metal movable type. The calculation of character sets and character frequencies for Chinese characters is valuable. Although the scope of the character set and word frequency calculations is limited to 20 pages of 14 books, and most of the books selected are contemporaneous missionary texts written in Chinese, which ultimately results in a character set that is not very accurate. It is worth noting that Dale's statistical scope includes secular works, suggesting that he may have considered using his Chinese character font for general purposes. Some scholars have called Dale the designer of the collocated characters, but I do not think so. The concept of collocated characters is itself a characteristic of the composition of Chinese characters, and a certain understanding of Chinese characters inevitably leads to the recognition of the collocated concept. However, Dale's method of counting and classifying Chinese characters is based on a deep understanding of Chinese characters. He does not simplify the understanding of the splitting and combining thinking of Chinese characters, as the sinologists at the Wang Li Institute of Printing in France did, but classifies Chinese characters through an understanding of their characters, increasing the efficiency of the engraver without destroying the structure of the characters themselves.
In addition to the investigation of character sets and character frequencies, another contribution of Dale was the production of metal movable characters for Chinese characters. There are mainly temporary characters and permanent characters. Temporary movable type is a combination of engraved plates and casting of whole plates cut into metal movable type, while permanent type is produced by engraving a character punch, stamping out a character mold, and then casting out a lead character. Temporary fonts can be seen as experiments to produce permanent fonts, and this allows Dale to fully understand the importance of character punches and dies for Chinese character fonts. It also shows that 19th century Chinese typefaces were in the process of adapting to Western movable metal type technology, and it was only through constant discussion and experimentation by missionaries that the need for Chinese movable metal type to exist in mass printing was finally established. The permanent type was again divided into 24-point large characters and 13.5-point small characters. Before Dale's death, the large characters were basically completed, and only a small amount of small movable type was made, and later on, Cole carried out the quality improvement and character perfection, so some scholars call Dale's small characters as Cole's style, and there is some truth to it. It is also called Hong Kong characters because it was completed in Hong Kong. After being copied by the Meihua Bookstore, it was more widely used and became one of the main fonts for Chinese movable type printing in the 19th century. Although the initiators of these two sets of typefaces were Western missionaries, they cannot be fully credited to the missionaries. The Chinese were involved in the engraving of the character punch and the casting process to give the typeface its aesthetic properties. These are subject to more in-depth study.
Article Source:艺术与设计
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