The German Johannes Gutenberg tends to be credited with inventing the printing press, but the Chinese again beat the West. Movable type was first used in China in the ninth century. However, movable type didn’t catch on in China due to a quirk of language – recombining the 80,000 characters of Chinese was simply not as efficient or timesaving a process as it was for European languages. Even after the introduction of Western printing presses from the sixteenth century onwards, woodblock printing remained more popular and convenient. It was not until the nineteenth century that movable type was more widely used in China and Korea.