lives and livelihoods
Papermakers
Early Chinese Paper
The invention of paper made
writing materials much cheaper
in China. This early example
of paper was used for
administrative purposes.
Meant to be read from right
to left and from top to bottom,
it gives accounts of grain
with the prices at the end of
each line. (© 2011 The British Library
(Or. 8212/499, recto).)
History shows us countless instances of one region’s invention spreading worldwide over the centuries and becoming
so common that we now take it for granted. One such
invention was paper, developed in China in around 100 c.e.
According to Chinese tradition, a courtier named Ts’ai Lun
(tsy loon) invented paper and presented it to the Han
emperor in 105 c.e. Earlier Chinese had written on bamboo
strips or on expensive materials such as silk. Ts’ai Lun produced his new writing material from vegetable fibers, as well
as tree bark, hemp, rags, and fishing nets, all of which were
relatively cheap.
The making of paper involved several steps. The raw
materials were ripped into fibers that were washed, cooked,
and mixed into a thick liquid. Workers then dipped rectangular wooden frames into the liquid to form thin sheets, which
they left to dry on the moulds before removing the resulting
sheets and bleaching and cutting them. We know little of the
Sima Qian, Father of Chinese
Dynastic History
individual workers involved, but they clearly had very specialized skills. Chinese sources praise several of them for having
refined the product over the centuries. One gave paper a
shining appearance, for example, and another discovered
that using a special tree bark made the paper ideal for calligraphy, the art of writing that Chinese much admired. Production by Chinese papermakers was enormous: in around
800 c.e. the finance ministry alone required half a million
sheets annually.
At first, the Chinese carefully guarded the technique of
papermaking, but they could not contain its spread. Traveling
monks took it to Korea and Japan, where people started to
produce the material in the early seventh century c.e. Later
that century, people in India read paper books written in
Sanskrit. Chinese prisoners captured in the 793 c.e. Battle
of Talas River (discussed in Chapter 9) taught people of
the Middle East how to manufacture paper, and one year
text, only about some five thousand Chinese characters long, but its influence on later Chinese and world literature has been immense.
The writing of history in prose flourished under the Han dynasty. China’s counterpart to
Greece’s Herodotus was Sima Qian (c. 145–90 b.c.e.), whose Records of the Historian has
defined our modern understanding of early Chinese history. The work ends with an autobiographical section in which Sima Qian dramatically recounts how he fell from the emperor’s
favor for backing a disgraced general. He refused to commit suicide, which would have been
considered honorable, accepting instead the punishment of castration so that he could continue his writing. So massive that no full translation in a European language exists, Sima
Qian’s history has 130 chapters containing more than half a million characters.
Whereas Herodotus had to rely heavily on secondary accounts from such sources as
Egyptian priests, Sima Qian could base his work on earlier Chinese writings, including
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later Baghdad opened its first paper mill. Because the Middle
East lacked the plant materials used in China, papermakers
found substitutes, mostly linen rags. Middle Eastern craftsmen produced increasing supplies of the paper, which was
useful for writing but also for wrapping and as decoration.
Europeans at first imported the material from Middle Eastern
centers of production such as Damascus, but by the fourteenth century they had founded paper mills of their own.
The earlier materials for writing—tree bark in India and parchment in the Middle East and Europe, for example—had longlasting popularity, but the relative cheapness of paper and its
ease of use finally made it the dominant medium for writing.
When Europeans invented the printing press in around 1450,
paper’s success as a writing tool was guaranteed.
For centuries, paper manufacture was the domain of
artisans who worked in small workshops and produced
sheets individually. In around 1800 two inventions revolutionized production. The primary basic material became
wood pulp, which is much more abundant than the rags and
bark in use earlier, and in 1798, the Frenchman NicholasLouis Robert invented a machine that combined all production steps. Once a time-consuming and expensive process,
papermaking became relatively quick and cheap.
Paper’s effect on culture was far reaching. Its use
allowed the written word to spread much more widely, and
the increased access to writing encouraged literacy. The use
of paper for pamphlets and newspapers in the modern period
made it possible for political ideologies to reach large audiences. Even today, when we rely on our computers for so
much of our communication, it is hard to imagine a world
without paper.
PaperMaking
c. 100 c.e.
Paper invented in China
300–400 c.e.
Paper becomes the dominant
writing material in China
600–610 c.e.
First paper in Korea and Japan
751 c.e.
First paper in Central Asia
793 c.e.
First paper in the Middle East
1300–1400 c.e.
First paper mills in Europe
c. 1450 c.e.
European invention of the
printing press
1798 c.e.
Frenchman Nicholas-Louis Robert
invents the papermaking
machine
questions to
consider
1. What writing materials existed before the invention
of paper?
2. How long did it take for papermaking to spread
all over Eurasia?
3. What explains the success of paper over other
writing materials?
For Further Information:
Bunch, Bryan H. The History of Science and Technology: A Browser’s Guide to the Great Discoveries,
Inventions, and the People Who Made Them, from the Dawn of Time to Today, 2004.
Tsuen-Hsuin, Tsien. “Paper and Printing.” In vol. 5, Science and Civilisation in China. Edited by Joseph
Needham, 1985.
Twitchett, Denis. Printing and Publishing in Medieval China. New York: Frederick C. Beil, 1983.
records of speeches and events, lists of rulers, and similar documents. From these sources, he
developed the idea that a sequence of dynasties had always ruled all of China, a tradition that
has continued in Chinese historical writing until modern times. He started with a mythological distant past, when sages brought civilization to humanity. Afterward the Xia, Shang, and
Zhou dynasties (discussed in Chapter 3) ruled the country as a whole. He even calculated the
dates when kings ruled and gave details on battles and other events. By suggesting that unified centralization under a dynasty was normal for the region, Sima Qian wanted to show
that Han efforts at empire building were in keeping with tradition.
Sima Qian’s history stops at around 100 b.c.e., but a family of scholars from the first
century c.e. carried on the tradition of dynastic history. The father, Ban Biao (bahn bi-ah-ow),
started a work called History of the Former Han Dynasty, and his son, Ban Gu (bahn gu), continued it. Finally, the emperor ordered Gu’s sister, Ban Zhao (bahn jow), to finish the work,
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