Which Chinese dynasty invented movable type printing?

Which Chinese dynasty invented movable type printing? The answer is the Song dynasty. During the Northern Song period, the artisan Bi Sheng developed movable type between about 1039 and 1048. His system used individual characters made from fired clay, which could be arranged, inked, pressed onto paper, and then rearranged for another page.

The invention was recorded by Shen Kuo in his 1088 work Dream Pool Essays. This matters because the surviving historical account comes from a contemporary Song intellectual rather than from a surviving original printing workshop. Chinese printing already had a long history of woodblock production, so movable type was an important extension of existing technology rather than the beginning of printing itself.

Movable type did not immediately replace woodblocks in China. Written Chinese uses thousands of characters, making the storage and organization of a complete type collection difficult and expensive. Woodblocks could be more efficient for repeatedly printing an entire book. Later innovators improved the method: Wang Zhen experimented with wooden type during the Yuan dynasty, and bronze movable type appeared in the Ming dynasty. The Song answer identifies the dynasty in which the original innovation was made.