The China Printing Museum is situated at No.25, Xinghua Beilu, Huangcun Town, Daxing District. It covers 3,000 square meters (0.74 acre), with a total exhibition area of 4,600 square meters (1.14 acres). It is the biggest printing museum in the world, divided into four exhibition halls and some specialized exhibition areas.
The exhibition hall on the third floor displays the origin of printing and ancient printing methods. With pictures, explanatory notes and articles, it introduces the origin, invention and development of printing and its introduction to other countries from the late New Stone Age to the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). The hall shows the well-known diamond sutra of the Tang Dynasty (618-907), the movable type made of certain kind of earth that was invented by Bi Sheng in the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127), and the rotary composing plate invented by Wang Zhen in the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368).
On the second floor, the exhibition hall traces the development of printing in modern times. It shows the evolution of four types of printing technology-relief, planographic, intaglio and stencil printing-and displays the achievements of printing after 1949. The hall also includes three specialized exhibition areas: paper currency printing, stamps printing, and printings in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan.
The hall of digital technology on the first floor focuses primarily on the historical leap from letterpress to offset printing. It contains a specialized exhibition area to show the excellent products of printing. The exhibition area of the German Gutenberg Museum displays a brief history of printing in Germany and Europe from the 15th century onward. A model of the wooden hand press invented by Gutenberg and the earliest font presswork in Europe-Bible is on display.
The underground floor features printing equipment that prevailed from 1865 to the 1990s. There are manually operated iron press, the hot-metal typesetting machine, and the phototypesetter. Displayed are also a lithographic printing press made in Austria in 1892 and a hulky offset press made in America in 1962. The latter weighs 45 tons (99,208 pounds) and is the only surviving one of its kind.
The China Printing Museum is a specialized museum reflecting the history of printing. The museum underscores the close relationship between printing and the advancement of civilization.
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Admission Fee:
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CNY 20
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Opening Hours:
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08:30-16:30 (Closed on Mondays)
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Bus Route:
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410, 456, 610, 631, 937 Zhi 6, 954, 968 to Qingyuan Xili, and then you could walk to the China Printing Museum.
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Beijing Museums:
