This new book is a richly-illustrated introduction to the printed scroll from 868 CE of the Diamond Sutra in Kumarajiva's Chinese translation—what one of the authors, Frances Wood, carefully characterized in a radio interview as “the world's earliest securely-dated printed book.” A mouthful, but more accurate than the old sign over the British Museum's copy of the Gutenberg Bible that used to proclaim it as “The Earliest Printed Book.” Bragging rights aside, how this copy of the Diamond Sutra traveled from Dunhuang in northwestern China to the Conservation Section of the British Library in London is a fascinating story that has been retold very well and succinctly in this book, published upon the completion of seven years of restoration work on the scroll.

Chapter 1 gives a brief account of how Aurel Stein in 1907 became the first of the Western explorers to examine the Buddhist art in the hundreds of caves near the Dunhuang oasis and succeeded in taking away some twenty-four cases of documents and five more of paintings and art objects from what was prosaically designated Cave 17. The second chapter describes the discovery of the trove of documents and paintings in that cave and their partial dispersal abroad before the Chinese government had the remaining materials shipped to Beijing in 1910.

The third chapter, after a capsule summary of Buddhism, discusses the Mahayana text known somewhat inaccurately in English as the Diamond Sutra. The scroll was most likely meant for chanting, suggested by both the Kumarajiva translation favored for this purpose and a brief “mouth purifying” passage to be recited before the sutra itself, found right after the frontispiece illustration. Chapter 4 introduces the reader to the basics of technologies involved in woodblock printing: papermaking, block cutting, and printing. Chapter 5 recounts the arrival of Stein's cases of Dunhuang documents in London and their cataloguing. Ironically, it was not Stein with his very rudimentary Chinese, but his rival, the great French sinologist Paul Pelliot, who, after examining a selection of the documents, recognized the significance of the Diamond Sutra scroll as the earliest dated printed book.

The sixth and last chapter offers an engrossing account with telling illustrations of the history of restoration and conservation work done on the scroll over the last hundred years by the British Museum and then the British Library. As described by Mark Barnard, the Manager of the Conservation Section at the British Library, the most recent efforts, completed in 2010, constituted a highly painstaking project. In fact, the work done shows how restoration work so often needs to address problems that arose not just from the original condition of the object, but also from previous restorations. Removing the five layers of lining, adhesive residues, and heavy paper patches from the original printed sheets (the oldest repairs having been made before the scroll was placed in Cave 17 in the early eleventh century) under a carefully controlled environment required eighteen months, to be followed by some 1,000 hours of work realigning the many fractured and distorted sections of the seven panels making up the scroll. Surely the restorers have earned as much religious merit as the donor who originally paid for the making of the scroll! Finally, as Barnard notes, the decision remains whether to reassemble the newly restored panels into a scroll or to store them more safely as separate flat sheets. Inevitably, it is a compromise between restoration and conservation—to return the printed paper as close as possible to its original physical condition, but not to reconstitute it as a scroll used for chanting.

For scholars working on Buddhism, the history of the East Asian book, or the Silk Road, much of the contents of this short book will be familiar, with the exception of the last chapter. Nevertheless, it is worth acquiring for the photographs that vividly illustrate the text, including a reproduction of the entire Diamond Sutra scroll across twelve pages of the book. The work serves as a good introduction for teaching purposes and for the many readers who still think that the Gutenberg Bible is the earliest printed book in the world.