Additions to our collection of historic prints

18 Sep 2024

Recent additions to our collections

The Library has made a recent purchase of a very rare miniature wooden pagoda containing 24 lines of a printed Buddhist dhāraṇī (mantra). Many thousands of these pagodas were commissioned by the Empress of Japan, to be placed in temples throughout the country, but very few have survived the intervening thirteen centuries. Dating from around 770 CE, this is the earliest piece of printing now obtainable.  

We made a purchase from the same source in 2023; a rare 14th-century Chinese banknote, an example of the oldest extant paper currency. It was printed around 1375 during the reign of the first Ming emperor, Ming Taizu (1368-1398). It had a cash value of a string of 1,000 copper coins, or 1 kuan; it was obviously more convenient to use a single sheet of paper than a large quantity of coins. 

The Chinese invention of paper money was revolutionary: it was the origin of our modern paper- and credit-based financial system. The significance of the first 1 kuan banknote is shown by the fact that it featured in the British Museum project, ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’, selected by the Museum’s Director, Neil MacGregor, and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2010. 

Unfortunately, the over-printing of banknotes led to inflation in China. So, from around 1425, the use of paper banknotes gradually diminished and, although notes remained in circulation until the mid-16th century, the printing of paper currency ceased. 

We were keen to acquire the banknote, not only because of its importance in the history of finance, but also to demonstrate that printing developed in East Asia long before Johannes Gutenberg perfected moveable metal type in Germany in the 1450s. In fact, printing in East Asia stretched back many centuries before the Ming dynasty.  

No other library can boast perhaps the earliest piece of New Testament text in the world (the famous fragment of John’s Gospel from the 2nd century), one of the earliest examples of printing anywhere in the world (c.770), the first substantial book printed with moveable metal type (the Gutenberg Bible, c.1455), and the first book printed in England (Caxton’s first edition of the Canterbury Tales, c.1476), to say nothing of the Tootill notebook recording the running of the world’s first stored-program computer, here in Manchester in 1948.