During a period known as the Ch’ing-Li period in ancient China, the country’s current printing technique was further advanced and bettered with the invention of the movable type printing press accredited to an alchemist by the name of Pi Sheng who invented the innovation in his workplace. The old technique of woodblock printing instantly became replaced with a more modern version of the movable type as it was considered not only costly but was also an extremely labourious and time-consuming process. Even though this new edition of printing was much more convenient and efficient, there were many steps involved in order to print a replica of an existing document for example. First, each letter from the Chinese pictographic alphabet was separately imprinted onto a movable type block. Next, the block was hardened by fire so that it became durable. Then the pieces were laid out on an iron plate, smeared with a number of different materials that served a wide range of purposes, in such a way as to resemble the document that was to be copied. These materials were a mixture of resin, wax, burned paper ash and turpentine. Finally, an iron fence fastened the plate tightly, the blocks were heated to melt the mixture and the printing process began. The movable type printing brought positive advancement to China in the sense that people became more educated with supplementary books being printed easily and an expeditious rise was to be seen in the statistics of many different levels of education in the years that were to follow.