Complete set of lead type at Ri Xing Typography, one of the last factories in Taiwan to produce traditional Chinese type.
But in practice, it was not suitable for Chinese—a language with over 45,000 unique characters. Typesetting in Chinese took “minding p’s and q’s” to a whole new level, and accuracy was challenging when characters were essentially compounds of many radicals and ideograms. Running a Chinese letterpress shop required an enormous storage space and basic literacy of at least 4,000 commonly used characters.
read more about the demise of movable type in China