Cai Lun and the First Paper

In the yard of a workshop in the capital, Luoyang, lay a pile of things nobody wanted.

There were a few rags, faded and fraying into threads at a touch. There was an old fishing net, its mesh rotted through, still smelling of the river. There were handfuls of hemp fiber swept up from the floor. And there was tree bark, peeled off and left lying there, dry and curled and hard as wood.

Anyone who suggested burning the whole pile would have been talking sense. Instead, one man stood looking at it for a long time.

His name was Cai Lun. He was an official in the palace of the Han, the dynasty then ruling China, in charge of the court's workshops. Many of the things made for the palace passed through his hands. He knew the craftsmen, he knew the kilns, and he knew the sound of pestles and chisels from morning to night.

Yet what weighed on his mind was not swords or knives. It was writing.

In those days, there were mainly two ways to keep words for later generations. The first was to split bamboo into thin slips, write one line of characters down each slip, and then tie the slips together with cord into a bundle. The second was to write on silk.

Both ways had a snag, and people of the time said so plainly. Silk was costly, bamboo slips were heavy, and neither was convenient to use.

One old story shows just how heavy.

In an earlier age, a man named Dongfang Shuo came to the capital, Chang'an, for the first time and wrote a petition to the emperor. That one petition used 3,000 writing tablets. When it was carried into the palace, it took two men together to lift it, and even then it was a strain. The emperor read it a little at a time, marking where he stopped. It took him two whole months to finish.

And that was only one petition. A whole book was something else again. Books in those days did not sit neatly in the palm of a hand. They had to be hauled and loaded onto carts.

Silk was light. It rolled up small, and ink looked beautiful on it. The only trouble was that silk cost far too much to use widely. Silk was kept for truly precious things, and the writing of ordinary people stayed on bamboo.

Now, back to the pile of castoffs in the yard.

Cai Lun looked at it and saw something nobody else saw. Fiber.

Rags were fiber. Fishing nets were fiber. Hemp was fiber. Tree bark, peeled thin, was fiber too. He wondered what would happen if those fibers were pulled fully apart and spread evenly in a thin layer, and what that layer would turn into once it dried.

He had everything soaked soft. Then boiled. Then pounded with wooden and stone pestles, pounded until the jumble could no longer be recognized and only a wet pulp remained. The pulp was mixed into a great deal of water and stirred. Soon the whole vat turned as cloudy as the water left from rinsing rice, with countless tiny fibers floating in it.

Then came the most beautiful step.

A worker dipped a mold with a mesh surface into the vat and lifted out a thin layer of water. He shook it gently so the water ran out through the mesh. The water left, and the fibers stayed. On the mold lay a thin film, wet and soft, so delicate a hard touch would tear it. It was pressed until it drained. It was hung up to dry. It was peeled away.

A sheet of paper.

In the year 105, Cai Lun presented this new thing to the emperor. The emperor praised it, and from then on nobody at court wanted to use anything else. Nine years later, he was made a marquis, with the land of Longting as his fief. People of his time then named the paper after his title. They called it the paper of Marquis Cai.

One thing needs to be said clearly and fairly. Cai Lun was not the first person in the world to make paper.

When archaeologists opened old tombs, they found paper inside that was several hundred years older than his. At Fangmatan, in Gansu, there was a tomb from early in the Western Han, the earlier part of the Han dynasty. In that tomb, a piece of paper lay right on the chest of the person buried there. Water had seeped in and destroyed nearly all of it, leaving only a scrap about the size of a matchbox. On that scrap, the lines of mountains, rivers and roads could still be made out. It was a map.

So paper already existed. But it was rough and scarce, not something just anyone could get. What Cai Lun did was turn a clumsy, costly thing into something thin, strong and cheap. It could be made in great quantities, and it would never run short of materials, because the materials were the very things people threw away.

That fragile thing traveled far. Following merchants and travelers, it crossed into Central Asia, to the Korean Peninsula and to India. The craft of papermaking passed from hand to hand. In each new place it met the trees and plants of that place, and people there thought up their own way. By about the 12th century, papermaking had reached Europe.

In the land where it was born, papermaking went a long way too. In Jing County, in Anhui, there is Xuan paper, made especially for calligraphy and painting. It comes from the bark of the blue sandalwood tree mixed with straw, and it goes through more than 100 steps. A single batch takes more than two years from start to finish. It takes ink very evenly and can be folded again and again without its grain breaking.

Vietnam has a paper craft of its own, grown from a tree of its own soil.

Vietnamese papermakers did not use blue sandalwood bark. They used the bark of the dó tree.

The dó bark was brought home, soaked in water until soft, boiled, and then pounded. It was pounded long and evenly. In the Bưởi area beside West Lake, the old village of Yên Thái had a whole quarter given over to pounding dó. The sound of its pestles beat steadily from before dawn. It was so steady that the people of Thăng Long, the city now called Hanoi, put it into their folk verses. To speak of the capital was to speak of two things together: the surface of West Lake, smooth as a mirror, and the rhythm of the pestles of Yên Thái.

After the pounding, the worker mixed the pulp with water and added a little glue boiled from the mò plant, so the fibers would cling together. Then came the lifting of the sheet. The mold was dipped into the vat and lifted out, and the hands tilted it so the water drained away. A thin layer of fiber was left on the mold. It was pressed. It was dried in the sun. Then the sheets were peeled off one by one.

That motion is exactly the one the worker made in the workshop yard in Luoyang long ago. Between the two lie so many mountains and rivers, and so many lifetimes. Two crafts, two kinds of tree, two streams of water, two different pairs of hands, and yet they share one wonderfully simple idea. Pull the fibers out, spread them thin, let the water go and the fibers stay.

Dó paper is thin but strong, and it takes ink evenly. It resists damp and mold, and termites and insects rarely harm it. People copied books, wrote poems and practiced calligraphy on dó paper. At Tết, the Lunar New Year festival in Vietnam, people paste Đông Hồ prints on their walls. These are colorful folk prints made with carved wooden blocks, and they too are printed on dó paper, coated with powdered scallop shell.

Every year, as Tết draws near, this story comes to a close in a place that many people pass.

A row of low tables is set out along the street. An old scholar sits behind one, with an inkstone of jet black ink in front of him and a stack of bright red paper at his hand. The person asking for a written character stands waiting. They softly say what they hope for in the new year, and then they watch in silence.

The scholar dips his brush. Lifts it. Sets it down. The first stroke of ink sinks into the paper, and the paper drinks it in and holds it fast, never letting it spread by even a hair.

Traced far back to its roots, that red sheet is still just a few fibers of tree bark, pulled out, pounded fine, spread thin and dried. It is a close relative of that pile in the workshop yard long ago, the pile people nearly burned.