Chapter 744 - 088 What medicine is in the gourd?_1
"Young Master Ma is truly jesting. If you passed the imperial examinations, that would be the result of your many years of hard work, not something that could be decided by just a word or two from me. If that were the case, wouldn’t I be more powerful than Guanyin Bodhisattva? Instead of toiling and bustling about, I should just set up a small stall by the roadside and say nice things to scholars heading to the capital for their exams—wouldn’t that make more money? Haha."
Lin Yuan laughed, and the conversation turned back to the topic of book printing.
As she flipped through the books, although there were still some printing marks around each character, for the current technology, it was already quite remarkable. More importantly, Lin Yuan had read this article from beginning to end and did not find a single typo—there was just no punctuation, spaces were used to separate the sentences.
Noticing her meticulous examination, Ma Junying thought she was curious about the book printing process and started to share with her some of the experiences they had during printing.
Lin Yuan didn’t say much but listened quietly. To avoid trouble, when Xia Zheng had initially proposed to make her idea of movable type printing public, Lin Yuan had not agreed. After all, as a simple peasant girl, it was already shocking enough that she could cook; if word spread that she could also print and had even solved many problems that learned people had failed to resolve for years, wouldn’t she be inviting trouble for herself?
Taking advantage of Ma Junying’s pause, Lin Yuan voiced the questions she had been harboring for the past few days, "Young Master Ma, does our Imperial Court have something that specifically records characters? Like collecting all the characters together?"
"Oh, you’re talking about a character repository," Ma Junying, being one of the top students in the school, was very clear about these things and introduced them to Lin Yuan with ease.
In the Imperial Court, the place dedicated to recording characters was called the scriptorium, where all characters were documented, much like a dictionary today. However, whether the classification was based on phonetics or radicals, she wasn’t sure.
In any case, as long as something recorded characters, their printing of templates would be much easier—just take out the characters from the scriptorium. Moreover, as Ma Junying revealed, among the several scholars that Xia Zheng had sent to him, one had been an official in charge of the scriptorium, which made things even more convenient.
After introducing these matters to Lin Yuan, Ma Junying’s brow creased imperceptibly. Although the Dayong dynasty had been established through military power, it did not value martial affairs over literary ones, so even though that scriptorium official was aged, he wasn’t someone ordinary people could invite. Xia Zheng might be wealthy, but not all things could be bought with money.