Despite these advances, movable type printing never gained the amount of widespread use in East Asia that woodblock printing had achieved since the Chinese Tang Dynasty in the 9th century. With written Chinese, the vast amount of written morpheme characters impeded movable type's acceptance and practical use, and was therefore seen as largely unsatisfactory. Furthermore, the European printing press, first invented by Johannes Gutenberg (1398–1468), was eventually wholly adopted as the standard in China, yet the tradition of woodblock printing remains popular in East Asian countries still.