The History of Chinese Bookbinding

The history of Chinese bookbinding has always suffered
owing to a lack of material evidence. This site, by
combining textual descriptions with diagrams illustrating
binding techniques and photographs of the actual objects,
aims to give a comprehensive introduction to the different
kinds of Chinese bookbinding contained in the Dunhuang
collection of the British Library. Site contents: Some
characteristics of the Dunhuang booklets; Butterfly
binding (hudie zhuang); Stitched binding (xian zhuang);
The Chinese pothi (fanjia zhuang); Whirlwind binding
(xuanfeng zhuang); Concertina binding (jingzhe zhuang);
Wrapped-back binding (baobei zhuang); Bibliography.