When Lan Eucalyptus traveled to Taiwan, he saw a shop hidden in the alley, which was silent at first glance, but it was a "holy place" that many tourists and even cultural celebrities from all walks of life must go to. It is the world's last traditional Chinese lead character casting line - Sun Star Casting Character Line, which preserves the most complete letterpress printing culture.

The 66-year-old shopkeeper, Mr. Jieguan, looks ordinary, but he is full of legends.

He owns the world's oldest set of copper molds in italic leads; He refused to offer a consortium worth hundreds of millions of yuan, just to adhere to the original intention of "culture should belong to all people"; He relied on the sale of his ancestral property to support a small shop that had lost 20 million yuan since 95 years...... In order to protect movable type, Zhang Jieguan did a lot of things that ordinary people could not understand.

In the eyes of many people, he seems to be a "tragic hero" who uses his mantis arm as a car. But when I listened to him in person, I realized that he was so optimistic, so ordinary and so great.

"If the sun and stars are extinguished, it is equivalent to cutting off the lifeblood of letterpress printing, one of China's four great inventions."

"Someone must retain the body temperature of Chinese characters and the beauty of movable type culture."

The company is located on Taiyuan Road and has a history of more than 50 years. There is not much space here, and when you walk in, the field of vision is completely occupied by the tall pyramid-shaped lead frames, which are densely stacked with hundreds of thousands of lead words, as if walking into an ancient ruin.

Closer to the closer, the grains of lead glow silver under the lamp, small but weighty, enough to make everyone who is used to seeing screen paper slightly shocked.

In the past, books were embossed with these little typesetting. "The unique touch of a book printed in lead will make you enter the world of words." Like the martial arts I watched when I was a child, I can feel a faint bulge when I flick on it. It is the footprints left between the lines of the movable type, and it is the first memory of the fingertips of the previous generation of readers.

However, since the 90s, the popularity of computer typesetting has gradually declined the technology of movable type printing. When a family foundry went bankrupt and tons of copper molds were sold to scrap iron factories, Zhang Jieguan did not hesitate to take over his father's "mess".

In the most difficult time, Sunstar's monthly turnover was less than NT$1,000, which was less than 3/10,000 of its heyday.

The most unfortunate thing was that all of his collection of 300 printed in lead were flooded in a flood. In the face of heavy losses, Lao Zhang made up his mind: "Even if there is a loss, as long as there is a movable type printing factory in Taiwan, Sunstar cannot go out of business!" ”

It's not that he doesn't know how to be flexible, he just likes the heavy silver glittering lead characters since he was a teenager, and likes the sound of seven cha seven cha when operating a typewriter. "I'm willing to be a 'fool' and keep these seeds of 'beauty'."

Sunstar has preserved the complete font of Song, Kai and Hei from the Republic of China for three generations since the 58th of the Republic of China, and the font size is seven sizes from the first number to the sixth number, adding up to about 120,000 copper molds and more than 300,000 lead characters.

Every morning at 7 o'clock, Zhang Jieguan began the work of casting. Make a fire, burn the furnace to 350C, wait for the lead block to melt into a pool of shiny lead water, and then carefully pour it into the copper mold of the casting machine, cool, demold, trim, polish, and become a beautiful grain of lead movable type.

The process seems to be a one-time brush, but there is a lot of attention to detail in it.

Before casting the lead letter, the copper mold should be engraved. The copper mold used to be carved by hand, but now it is machine-efficient, but the difficulty has not been reduced at all, because it is to imitate the charm of hand-carved by machine.

"In order to completely preserve the early glyphs, the carved copper mold must be 95% consistent with the old lead characters." In 2005, Zhang Jieguan began to complete the work of repairing molds and casting characters on his own, until 2008, when volunteers joined.

"What I really want to keep are the glyphs of Chinese characters left by Chinese masters before the Japanese occupation. These glyphs have not been repaired by the Japanese, and they have the unique beauty of Chinese calligraphy, which cannot be expressed by computers. ”

Engraving copper molds requires the master to understand calligraphy and have high aesthetics. Those old glyphs are also beautiful and ugly in Zhang Jieguan's eyes, and there are various subtle differences in the center of gravity, structure and strokes.

Engraving and casting under the machine, burying your head is a whole day. Others seemed to be working hard, and he felt like he was taking an art class. "I cast words for 8 hours, that is, I watched art for 8 hours!"

In addition to repairing the copper mold, he has another goal - >>