Historians agree that the art of papermaking from fibrous materials was practiced by the Chinese in very early times. Just how early nobody knows. Tsai Lun of the Han dynasty is generally acknowledged to have invented a relatively modern papermaking technique in 105 A. D.
Papermaking was quite advanced before it was taken over and transported to Europe by the Arabs. Though paper imported from China was used in Mecca in 650 A.D., it was not until the Arab victory in 751 A.D. 646 years after Tsai Lun's invention—that other people began to learn how to make their own. Through Samarkand, the skill spread across Arab-controlled territory—to Baghdad, Egypt, Morocco and Spain.
The Tang dynasty (618-906 A.D.) was one of the most powerful in Chinese history. In the first hundred years of Tang rule, the Chinese moved westward in a series of military victories until they came into conflict with the Arabs, who had moved eastward and established themselves in what now is Russian Turkestan.
The Tang general Kao Hsieh-chih twice crossed the Pamirs in 747-749 A. D. Tashkent, Ferghara and Gilgit paid allegiance to Tang. Kashmir and most of present-day Afghanistan were conquered. All might have gone well had not Kao killed the King of Tashkent. Tribes of the area turned to the Arabs, who sent troops from Bokhara and Samarkand to deal with Kao. The Chinese were defeated near Tashkent. Several thousand prisoners were captured and taken to Samarkand. Among these were the papermakers.
The date is important as marking the year paper was introduced to the West. Chinese records and Arab chronicles agree that the conquest of Tashkent by Kao was between the late winter of the 9th year of Tien Pao (750 A.D.) and the early spring of the 10th year. The battle outside Tashkent was in the seventh month of the 10th year (751 A.D.).
Papermaking was not the only skill represented among the prisoners taken to Samarkand. A later Tang traveler wrote: "In Yachulo (a town in Arabia called Aqula in Syriac) ... silk weaving, gold and silver smithies were all initiated by the Chinese. There were painters from Ching-chao, named Fan Shu and Liu Tzu; weavers from Ho-tung. named Yueh Huan and Lu Li." Quite probably all had been soldiers in Kao's army.
Papyrus Replaced
Paper mills grew in number in Samarkand. The knowledge of the Chinese craftsmen was abetted by adequate supplies of hemp, flax, and water. In 794, the Arabs established a second paper mill in Baghdad, also under the supervision of Chinese technicians. A third mill went up at Tihama on the southwest coast of Arabia and a fourth at Damascus, from where paper was exported to Europe.
By the 10th century, knowledge of paper making had spread throughout the lands under Islamic control. Paper replaced papyrus in Persia, Arabia, Syria, Egypt, and Spain.
Egypt's first paper mill· came into existence in the 10th century and probably was located at Cairo. From there papermaking raced along the Mediterranean coast through North Africa into Morocco. There were 400 mills in Fez in the 12th century.
The Spaniards were using paper in the10th century, but no mills were set up until the 12th. The earliest and presumably the first in Europe was set up through Moorish influence at Xativa (now San Filip in Valencia province.) Another was built in Toledo. Spain was the center of European papermaking until the decline of Moorish power.
Second among European countries was Italy, where paper mills were introduced as a result of the Arab occupation of Sicily. However, some historians maintain that papermaking skill was taken to Italy by the Crusaders, who learned it in Palestine. Fabriano in Ancona was the site of mills established between 1268 and 1276. These mills were to play an important role in the decline of Spanish papermaking. In 1340, Padua also become a papermaking town. The oldest known European document written on paper is from Italy. In Greek and Arabic, it is a Sicilian document dating to 1109 A. D.
France began using paper imported from Spain in the 13th century but had no industry of its own until the 14th. Records in the archives of the department of Aube show establishment of a paper mill in the vicinity of Troyes in 1348. Another mill went up at St. Cloud in 1376.
Germany got its first paper enterprise in 1390 at Nuremburg. The first English mill was established by John Tate near Hertford in 1490. The earliest American mill was built by William Rittenhouse at Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1960.
At the same time Europe was discovering paper, India was doing likewise and abandoning the use of cotton cloth, palm leaves, and bark as writing materials. India received papermaking skills near the end of the 12th century when the Moslems invaded the country for a second time. The industry was operated by Mohammedans, not by the Hindus.
When Cheng Ho, Ming dynasty eunuch who turned out to be the most famous sea adventurer in Chinese history, voyaged to India on his third expedition in 1412-1415, a fellow traveler wrote of a well-established paper industry there.
Old Documents
Dates of Chinese documents written on paper go back to the first years of the 2nd century—about the time that paper was invented by Tsai Lun. However, the dates are inaccurate. It is merely certain that these are the oldest papers in the world. Documents of the Epoch of the Five Dynasties (906-959 A.D.) and the Sung dynasty (960-1115) are the oldest documents for which dates are accurate.
Several thousand old documents have been discovered in northwest China in the last half-century. Many are in a remarkable state of preservation because of the dry, almost desert-like climate. None is exactly dated.
Swedish archeologist Sven Hedin unearthed a quantity of documents in the Sinkiang region in 1893. Fragments found in the ruins of ancient Lou-lan are dated but the accuracy is still debated. Dates include "the 4th year of Chia Ping" (252 A.D.), "the 2nd year of Hsien Hsi" (265), and "the 4th year of Yung Chia" (310). Another document is presumed to have been written in 200 A.D. Regardless of dating certainty, the documents found by Hedin are among the oldest ever written on paper.
Sir Mark Aurel Stein made three explorations of the area to the south of the Tien Shan range and west of Kansu province between 1900-1916 on behalf of the government of British India. On the first expedition, he found several paper documents written in Chinese, Sanskrit, and Tibetan. They date to the vang period (618-906 A.D.). On his second expedition, he found wooden tablets and paper documents in Chinese similar to those discovered by Hedin at Lou-lan.
In 1907, on the third expedition, Sir Mark found nine paper letters sealed in paper envelopes in the ruins of a spur of the Great Wall near Tun Huang. In the same area, 700 other ancient Chinese documents were unearthed. The nine letters were written in Sogdian, a language widely spoken during the first several centuries of the Christian era. Sogdiana was located in the area of today's Samarkand and Bokhara.
The letters are written on thin, translucent paper of a light brown color. It is believed they were personal letters sent home from China by travelers from Central Asia. Sir Mark concluded the paper was of the Han dynasty (207 B.C.-220 A.D.) and the writing as earlier than 153 A.D. This would make the letters the oldest inscribed on paper.
Accurate dating is impossible. Age of the letters was basically derived from the dates of wooden tablets discovered at the same site. With the Sogdian letters were found 111 dated tablets of the Han dynasty and 11 paper documents of the Tang dynasty. Since more than 100 of the wooden tablets were dated from 98 B.C. to 94 A.D., this would put them well before Tsai Lun's invention of paper in 105 A.D. The tablets thus cannot be relied upon to support any contention that the letters were written before 153 A.D.
More accurate guesses can be made by analyzing content of the letters. Hans Reichelt translated five of them into German in 1931. From the translations, scholars have estimated date of the letters as later than 311 A.D.
Second Calamity
One letter gives a brief account of a contemporaneous event:
"A great catastrophe had occurred which compelled the Chinese emperor to abandon Loyang, his capital, which was burned down."
Also mentioned was the capture of the emperor by Tartars.
From 105 to 153 A.D., no emperor of China was forced to leave his imperial capital. Nor was Loyang burned down within this period. Loyang was destroyed for the first time in 190 A.D., in the second month of the first year of Chu Ping. The ruler was Emperor Hsien of the Han dynasty. The premier sent the emperor to Chang-an and set fire to the palace in Loyang to prevent the emperor's return.
The second Loyang calamity was in 311 A.D., when the Tartar Liu Tsung attacked the capital in a time of famine. The emperor was captured by the Tartars while attempting to flee to Chang-an. Liu Tsung's men burned the imperial ancestral temples and official buildings at Loyang. The emperor subsequently moved to Ping Yang.
Since the events mentioned in the Sogdian letter correspond with these events, this particular missive must have been written shortly after 311.
Dates of the other letters are tentatively put at between 312 and 313.
Of other letters discovered by Sir Mark, about 100 documents from the Tun Huang area were hand copied Buddhist classics of the Tang dynasty.
Discoveries by others include paper documents of 399 A.D., found at Tufan by the Persian expeditions of 1902-1914; great quantities of printed and manually copied manuscripts of 1189-1331 in Chinese and the Si-hsia language at Kharo-Khoto in Ninhsia province by Russia's General Kozlov; the paper draft of a letter tentatively dated between 328-330 A.D. found at the ruins of Lou-lan by Tachibana, a member of the Japanese Otani expedition of 1909.
The Caves of the Thousand Buddhas at Tun Huang have yielded a vast store of old paper documents. The caves themselves were excavated in 366 A.D. during the Chin dynasty. A secret library in one of them was believed to have been sealed up about1000 A.D.
An itinerant Taoist priest named Wang wandered into the Tun Huang cave area in 1900. Using one of the caves as his quarters, he spent his time copying scriptures from the murals. One day he noticed a crack in the wall. Digging into it, he came upon a niche in which many sacred books were stored. Considering these documents his by right of discovery, he presented them to people who had helped him. Sir Mark Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot, the French archeologist, received large numbers of manuscripts from the priest.
Of 20,000 copies of hand written manuscripts of the Epoch of the Six Dynasties and the Tang dynasty, Sir Mark obtained 7,000, now housed in the British Museum. Pelliot received about 3,000 manuscripts, now kept in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Taahibana of the Japanese mission got. 400 manuscripts from the same cave. The remaining 8,679 manuscripts were taken to Peiping in 1910.
Oldest Paper
In 1942, Professors Lao Kan and Shih Chang-ju took part in a Sino-Swedish expedition to northwest China. They unearthed what may be the oldest paper ever found. It came from the bottom of a previously opened ditch under the watchtower of Tashkortei on the south side of Mt. Bayab Bogdo. It was wrinkled into a ball and of crude quality. The presence of many Han tablets in the same ditch led archeologists to surmise that the paper had been made in the time of Tsai Lun.
Accuracy in dating is doubtful. Lao Kan maintains that the paper may have been buried in the desert between 109 and 110 A.D. or not long after Tsai Lun's invention. The fragment is rough and thick, and there are no obvious striated lines or streaks. It probably was made without the use of a bamboo mold.
Just beyond the northwest territory of China, more discoveries were made: A paper written in Sanskrit in the 6th century was discovered in Kashmir by the French Citroen expedition. Three documents in Chinese were found by the Russians near Sinkiang. One was dated 706.
For several centuries after the introduction of papermaking to the West. Westerners believed that Oriental paper was made from cotton and that the use of rags in papermaking was a German or Italian invention of the 15th century. In fact, the early papers were never made from pure cotton, although fibers of raw cotton were used. Only after the nine Sogdian letters had been analyzed were European misconceptions rectified.
Oriental historian Joseph Karaback and botanist Jules Wiesner of the University of Vienna first examined and translated a number of old Arabic paper documents dating from 796 to 1388. After two years of chemical and microscopic research in 1885-1887, they found that the paper had been made from hemp or flax rags. Sizing came from wheat starch. Early European paper was made from hemp or flax, sometimes with a little cotton, but was sized with animal glue. The Viennese researchers theorized that Samarkand was the first to make paper from rags and that the Chinese then knew nothing about it
Europeans believed the quality of early Chinese paper to be poor. They thought that the surface was uneven and that sizing and loading were unknown to the early Chinese. They believed that the Arabs' had learned how to make paper from the Chinese and then had improved on the method. At the time no old Chinese paper had been discovered, while a great deal of Arab paper made from the 9th to the 15th century had been preserved and was available for study.
Use of Rags
Some Westerners believed that the Chinese made paper from mulberry bark and other raw fibers, and that they began using rags only when the original raw materials were found to be unavailable in Samarkand. However, the "Biography of Tsai Lun" of the Hou Han Shu said that rags and fishing nets were the raw materials used by Tsai Lun.
In 1900, Sir Mark Aurel Stein turned over findings of his first expedition to Wiesner from plant fibers. This brought into being another theory that the Arabs in Samarkand were not the first to use rags in papermaking, but that they were the first to use rags exclusively.
Proof by Analysis
In 1911, this theory was shattered when Wiesner proved that the nine Sogdian letters were made of pure flax rags. The manufacturing process was to pound woven flax material into a pulp. A frame was made of the relatively long fibers that were left after pounding. Openings in the frame then were filled with the beaten short fibers.
Results of Wiesner's research proved the recorded description of Tsai Lun's papermaking process to be correct. The making of paper from rags had been definitely pinned down as a Chinese invention.
Hedin provided seven square centimeters of paper made in 252 A.D. for chemical analysis. A German government testing station found the paper had been made from worn fabrics, mostly of hemp, and also ropes and nets. This also agrees with the account given in the biography of Tsai Lun. A small quantity of animal hair found in the analysis is regarded as foreign matter and accidental.
A summary of the examination of some 60 pieces of old paper from the Stein collection in the British Museum makes the following points:
* The oldest Chinese paper was made from pure rags. It was thin and translucent. The raw materials were well beaten, resulting in paper with a smooth surface. It was hard and of even texture. Most such paper was well sized and is satisfactory for use with a modern pen and ink.
* From the 5th to the 10th century paper generally was made from mulberry bark, ramie or a mixture of both. It was usually of light yellow color. From the second half of the 6th century to the 7th, the paper was of a golden yellow shade. Toward the end of the 7th century, paper become hard and brittle. Fibers were shorter but texture was for examination. Wiesner proved that part of the paper was made from rags and part still even. In the early years of the 8th century quality deteriorated. The disastrous insurrection of An Lu-shan probably had something to do with the arrested development of the industry. The paper is thick and flabby and of a dull color. Texture is uneven and resistance to ink poor. Toward the end of the 10th century, quality was inferior compared to earlier examples.
The significance of· China's introduction of paper to the world cannot be exaggerated. Without paper there would be no adequate records of the past, no real history, no science, and slight progress. The invention and development of paper was one of the landmarks in mankind's advance. Perhaps most interesting of all is the fact that papermaking processes of today differ very little—in basic essentials—from those the Chinese were using almost 2,000 years ago.