This is an excerpt from a documentary on Great Inventions of China made by the Taiwan based New Tang Dynasty Television. It traces the reasons that paper making became necessary, and shows examples of some of the traditional crafts that are used in the technique.
A follow-up will be shown next week on the invention on woodblock printing and its development, which took place during the Tang Dynasty. Both of these inventions seem to be related to the rise of Buddhism and helped in its propagation in the country.
If you would like to know more about these and other inventions made in China, please see this very interesting Wikipedia page giving an annotated List of Chinese Inventions.
from a different Wikipedia page:
Papermaking has traditionally been traced to China about 105 AD, when Cai Lun, an official attached to the Imperial court during the Han Dynasty (202 BC-220 AD), created a sheet of paper using mulberry and other bast fibres along with fishnets, old rags, and hemp waste.
Papermaking is considered to be one of the Four Great Inventions of Ancient China, since the first papermaking process was developed in China during the early 2nd century. During the Shang (1600–1050 BC) and Zhou (1050 BC – 256 AD) dynasties of ancient China, documents were ordinarily written on bone or bamboo (on tablets or on bamboo strips sewn and rolled together into scrolls), making them very heavy and awkward to transport. The light material of silk was sometimes used, but was normally too expensive to consider.
While the Han Dynasty Chinese court official Cai Lun is widely regarded to have invented the modern method of papermaking from rags and other plant fibers in 105 CE, the discovery of specimens bearing written Chinese characters in 2006 at north-east China’s Gansu province suggest that paper was in use by the ancient Chinese military more than 100 years before Cai, in 8 BC. It therefore would appear that Cai Lun’s contribution was to improve this skill systematically and scientifically, fixing a recipe for papermaking.
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