mportance of salt will be understood if we
remember that a grown-up person in China uses an average of twelve
pounds of salt per year. The salt tax was the top budget item around
A.D. 900.

South-eastern China was also the chief centre of porcelain production,
although china clay is found also in North China. The use of porcelain
spread more and more widely. The first translucent porcelain made its
appearance, and porcelain became an important article of commerce both
within the country and for export. Already the Muslim rulers of Baghdad
around 800 used imported Chinese porcelain, and by the end of the
fourteenth century porcelain was known in Eastern Africa. Exports to
South-East Asia and Indonesia, and also to Japan gained more and more
importance in later centuries. Manufacture of high quality porcelain
calls for considerable amounts of capital investment and working
capital; small manufacturers produce too many second-rate pieces; thus
we have here the first beginnings of an industry that developed
industrial towns such as Ching-te, in which the majority of the
population were workers and merchants, with some 10,000 families alone
producing porcelain. Yet, for many centuries to come, the state
controlled the production and even the design of porcelain and
appropriated most of the production for use at court or as gifts.

The third important new development to be mentioned was that of
printing, which since _c_. 770 was known in the form of wood-block
printing. The first reference to a printed book dated from 835, and the
most important event in this field was the first printing of the
Classics by the orders of Feng Tao (882-954) around 940. The first
attempts to use movable type in China occurred around 1045, although
this invention did not get general acceptance in China. It was more
commonly used in Korea from the thirteenth century on and revolutionized
Europe from 1538 on. It seems to me that from the middle of the
twentieth century on, the West, too, shows a tendency to come back to
the printing of whole pages, but replacing the wood blocks by
photographic plates or other means. In the Far East, just as in Europe,
the invention of printing had far-reaching consequences. Books, which
until then had been very dear, because they had had to be produced by
copyists, could now be produced cheaply and in quantity. It became
possible for a scholar to accumulate a library of his own and to work in
a wide field, where