These trays of movable typesets were previously used in Kuon Ying Press (冠英印务局), a printing shop based in Kampar—a town in Perak, Malaysia. Printing started in China from the 8th century onwards and involves the carving of text and illustrations (mainly for Buddhist text) on a wooden block to print a single page. From the 12th century onwards, printers started using wooden movable types for printing as the movable types can be quickly assembled and reused. Before the recent advent of computers, the printing still require the use of movable typesets (now made of lead), of which each typeset was a single character or alphabet. Typesetters would carefully select the characters by hand to form the words and arrange them before printing. Kuon Ying Press has a complete set of movable typesets of various font sizes, featuring a full range of around 100,000 chinese characters, which is very rarely found today. The set in the National Collection features typesets of the larger font sizes.Kuon Ying Press was established in the 1920s and printed a variety of materials ranging from cinema tickets to wedding invitation cards for the local community. Kuon Ying Press also served as a half-way house for immigrants from the founder’s hometown in China (Heshan, Guangdong) who stayed at the shop while they search for jobs in Malaya. The shop remained in operation during the Japanese Occupation and might have printed for the Japanese army as well.
