This set of neatly-arranged typesets was used for the printing of birthday invitation cards and belonged to Kuon Ying Press (冠英印务局), a printing shop based in Kampar—a town in Perak, Malaysia. The invitation card lists the family members of the person celebrating his 91st birthday and is a rare example of a traditional Chinese birthday invitation card. Before the advent of computers, the printing of Chinese characters require the use of movable typesets, of which each typeset was a single Chinese character. 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. 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.
