chinese has a huge number of characters: in the region of 50,000.p186 because of this, printing methods were never really successful in china, despite their early invention. in the 14th century wang tzhen had sixty thousand wood block characters cut, a huge investment in time and money. he printed 100 copies of a local gazette, and was author of a treatise on agriculture and other technical works. even with printing machines from europe in the 19th century, the process was hampered by the huge number of characters, which slowed the "composition" to a snail's pace.