Why was western printing superior to Asian printing?
One thing that doesn't get mentioned often is that the West had a "simpler" alphabet of 26 characters, 10 numbers, and a few punctuation marks (~20). Ok, add uppercase, and you're still at about 80 individual, distinct characters.Chinese or Korean, on the other hand, needed many more characters. Creating the movable types for them was not an easy feat. Certainly more difficult than with the German equivalent.In particular for Korea: Hangul [0], which is a "simpler" language that gradually took over Hanja [1] in Korea, was "created" only in the 15th century, not before. Earlier than that, even if Korea has the equivalent of "printing", the complexity of it was higher than the one experienced with the west alphabet.[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja