I was really excited to finally see one of the very last letterpress machines in Hong Kong the past weekend. Mr Lee, the owner of this letterpress machine, had introduced us the history of the industry and how the machine/system worked.

It’s actually quite sad to see one of the greatest Chinese invention dying in its own country, so I was glad to know that Mr Lee has been negotiating with the government to preserve this machine and also the lovely lead type.

There’s thousands of these Chinese lead type, and apparently there is no system in organizing them, no wonder it took them 3 hours to just arrange the type for a name card… and imagine when they had to do a book…

The last time the machine was running was for the shooting of the movie Echoes of the Rainbow (歲月神偷). Mr Lee was proudly showing us articles about his company and also photos he took with Simon Yam (任達華), who won the best actor award because of this movie.

Type specimen book, I love!

To learn more about Chinese letterpress, you can visit idsgn, an article written by a friend who was also there that day and did a much better job in describing the industry than I do.