Wellington poet Ya-Wen Ho tells Voices why a collection of lead typefaces is so precious to the New Zealand Chinese community.
New Zealand's longest surviving Chinese type collection is made of over 300,000 metal typefaces, has about nine font variations and about three character typefaces.
Ya-Wen Ho, poet and a researcher at Victoria University's Wai-te-ata Press, has been working on re-organizing, cleaning and transferring this collection from their cases that have suffered the damage of time and weather.
"We very much believe that the legacy of this collection lives on through use."
Ya-Wen Ho at the studio at Wai Te Ata Press, Victoria University of Wellington Photo: Kadambari Raghukumar/RNZ
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Between the 1950s and 70s, the letter collection was used to print the Growers Journal - the longest-running Chinese Language publication in New Zealand.
The collection was rediscovered in a Pukekohe onion-packing shed in 2007.
Eventually, in 2016, Victoria University was given the guardianship of the collection in agreement with the Dominion Federation of New Zealand Chinese commercial growers.
Photo: Kadambari Raghukumar/RNZ
This month, Dr Sydney Shep, a Reader in book history and the printing press, and Ya-Wen plan to host "The Voice of Kai-Shu - A Typographic Journey" at Wai-te-ata Press - an exhibition supported by the Ministry of Culture in Taiwan.
The exhibition coincides with Chinese Language Week and celebrates the Kaishu or "regular" script, adopted widely across Taiwan in the early twentieth century as the de facto face of Taiwan and its people.
It's also the script that the Growers Journal was printed in.
"I think it's very hard to ever imagine that you would spend your time working on a Chinese language letterpress collection in New Zealand," says Ya-Wen of her involvement.
Founded by editor Dan Chan, the journal and covered things like market news, cultivation techniques, articles and ads and literary pieces as well, all printed in full-form Chinese characters.
"I have a particular connection to full form because I was born in Taipei and all of my Chinese language learning has been through full form."
"When I saw this, it was there was a real sense of like, oh, a little piece of home very far away from home. How do I connect to this?"
To use these again, the whole collection needs to be cleaned of decades of debris and dust. It’s not just all really intricate, but can be super heavy being made of lead.
But still, seems like a dream for font fiends like Ya-Wen.
"We want to set that up so everything is ready for the community to come in and actually use this collection to print things are special to them."
