Mingti, Songti, Minchotai — same thing
Three names. One style. A 19th-century missionary print shop at the centre of all of them.
The standard book serif of East Asian typography is not one name. In Taiwan and Hong Kong it is Mingti (明體). In mainland China it is Songti (宋體). In Japan it is Minchōtai (明朝体). Three names implying descent from either the Ming or the Song dynasty.
Neither implication is accurate.
The shape we call Mincho descends much more directly from 19th-century missionary lead type — specifically the 美華書館 (American Presbyterian Mission Press) in Shanghai, under the American printer William Gamble in the 1860s. Gamble standardised the form in electrotype, which was cheap to produce and cheap to distribute. It spread across China and Japan precisely because it was easy to manufacture, not because it was calligraphically correct.
The Qing scholar 錢大鏞 noticed the problem at the time. In Ming Wen Zai he wrote:
“Old books were written by skilled calligraphers… only in late Ming did engraving artisans create what was called Songti — vulgar and inferior.”
He was the first person on record to draw a typographic line between hand-drawn and tool-drawn calligraphic forms — four hundred years before the same distinction came to matter in font editing software.
How the three names diverged is a distribution story, not a design story. Mainland China and Hong Kong kept Songti from the dominant local naming tradition. Taiwan inherited Mincho via Showa-era Japanese phototype imports: Japanese vendors shipped film fonts under their own labels, and those labels never got removed. The name stayed, in Japanese, on Taiwanese type, for decades.
justfont, Taiwan’s type foundry, has stated the resolution as plainly as it deserves:
「明體跟宋體都一樣，無論稱呼哪一個，意義是一樣的」 — “Mingti and Songti are the same — whichever name you use, the meaning is identical.”
For a FontLab user designing a CJK serif, the practical implication is that the style is settled across all three names, but the local conventions are not. Preferred radical proportions, stroke contrast, where the brush memory shows — these draw differently in Tokyo, Taipei, and Beijing. Three names, one style, three sets of subtly different strokes.