The Road of Paper

In the year 105, at the imperial court in Luoyang, a palace official named Cai Lun presented the emperor of China with a new paper. It was made from tree bark, hemp, old rags and fishing nets. The emperor approved it, and people called it Marquis Cai’s paper.

From that court, paper took almost fourteen hundred years to reach England. Merchants carried it across Central Asia. The offices of Baghdad took it up, Egypt gave up papyrus for it, and North Africa passed it on to Muslim Spain. Italy changed the way it was made, and from there it crossed the Alps and went on north.

Did Cai Lun invent paper?

No, though tradition long said so. The Chinese court history that tells his story notes that before him people wrote on bamboo slips or on silk, and that the silk was already called zhi, the word for paper. Archaeologists have found paper made from plant fibre at sites about three centuries older than Cai Lun. It was coarse, and much of it was used for wrapping.

What Cai Lun did was make paper better, partly from things people threw away. His report had a name and a date, while the older sheets are known only from excavations. Within a century or two, paper was China’s ordinary writing material.

Who first carried paper west?

The Sogdians, a merchant people from the country around Samarkand. They traded along the Silk Road, and some of their families lived in China. In 1907 an archaeologist found a bag of their letters in a watchtower on the old Chinese frontier wall, west of Dunhuang. The letters were on paper, and one was addressed to Samarkand.

The letters were never delivered. One reports that Luoyang, the city of Cai Lun’s paper, had been sacked, and that dates the bag to about 313. Two centuries after Cai Lun, Central Asian merchants were writing home on paper.

They used it at home as well. When an Arab army took a mountain fortress near Panjakent in 722, a local ruler left his archive behind, and some of its documents are on paper. For a long time, it seems, paper travelled west as goods, ahead of the people who knew how to make it.

Did Chinese prisoners teach Samarkand to make paper?

That is the famous story. In 751 an Arab army fought a Chinese one in the Talas valley, in Central Asia, and took prisoners. Among them, the story goes, were papermakers, who set up the craft in Samarkand.

The battle is history; the papermakers are probably legend. The earliest account of them that survives was written nearly three centuries later. Chinese records of the battle never mention them, and the Sogdians had been writing on paper for four hundred years already. Historians treat it as a good story, not as the moment paper reached the Islamic world.

What is certain is that Samarkand paper became famous. In the late 10th century a Persian geography said the city made paper “which is exported all over the world”. And the papermakers of the Islamic world worked mainly from old rags, where Chinese paper was made mostly from the fibre of bark and plant stems.

Why did Baghdad switch to paper?

In Baghdad, under the caliph Harun al-Rashid, who ruled the Islamic empire from 786 to 809, paper took the place of parchment, made from animal skin, in the government offices. According to a history written six centuries later, parchment had run short, and a minister from the powerful Barmakid family proposed paper instead. It may be more legend than record.

Whatever the reason, by 891 the city had a stationers’ market of more than a hundred shops.

How did Egypt give up papyrus?

Egypt had made papyrus, from a plant that grows along the Nile, for three thousand years, and supplied it to the whole Mediterranean. Yet in the 10th century it turned to paper. Dated paper documents appear there in the early 900s, and within a few decades dated papyri grow rare.

By the end of that century, paper was counted among Egypt’s main products. In 1047 a Persian traveller described the shops of Fustat, the old city beside the new Cairo. The shopkeepers, he wrote, supplied a container for whatever they sold, “whether glass, pottery, or paper”. Paper had become an ordinary shop good.

How did paper reach Europe?

It went west along North Africa and crossed into Spain, then largely under Muslim rule. Fez, in Morocco, was an important papermaking centre by the 11th century. A chronicle written in the 14th century boasts that the city once had four hundred paper workshops. No one can check the number, and the evidence points to paper made by hand, not in mills.

Christians in northern Spain had that paper early. The Missal of Silos, an 11th-century book for the Mass, is usually counted as the oldest surviving European book written partly on paper.

Then came Xàtiva, a town near Valencia. In 1154 the Arab geographer al-Idrisi wrote that it made paper with no equal anywhere in the world, sent both east and west. When the Christian king James I of Aragon took the town in 1244, its Muslim papermakers carried on working. A royal grant of 1282 records a water-powered paper mill there, one of the earliest on record.

What did Italy change about paper?

In Fabriano, a town in central Italy, papermakers are first named in notaries’ records of 1282 and 1283. By the 14th century the town led Italian papermaking. It is credited with three changes, none with a firm date.

First, rows of water-driven hammers, like those the local wool-fullers used, beat the rags into pulp. Second, sheets were coated with animal gelatine instead of starch, which sealed the surface so that ink did not spread. Third came the watermark: a wire figure fixed to the mould left a thinner line in the sheet, visible against the light. The earliest known watermarks, on paper of 1282, are usually credited to Fabriano.

Why did paper take so long to reach the north?

Europe could buy paper long before it made its own, and not everyone trusted it. In 1231 the emperor Frederick II ordered that public acts in his kingdom of Sicily be written on parchment.

The first documented paper mill in Germany began work on 24 June 1390. Ulman Stromer, a Nuremberg merchant, set it up in an old mill on the river Pegnitz, outside the city walls. He brought craftsmen from Italy to build and run it. Within a few generations, the printers of northern Europe would need paper in quantity.

When did England make its own paper?

In the 1490s John Tate, a London merchant, turned Sele Mill, an old watermill on the River Beane just outside Hertford, into the first paper mill known in England. Around 1495 the printer Wynkyn de Worde used its paper for an English edition of a medieval encyclopaedia. In verses at the end of the book, he thanked Tate for making it.

King Henry VII’s household paid a reward “at the pulper-mylne” in 1498. Yet the mill did not last: it had stopped by about 1500, and the Dartford mill of 1588, often called England’s first, came nearly a century later. The Bodleian Library in Oxford holds a copy of de Worde’s encyclopaedia.

From a court in Luoyang to a mill in Hertford, paper moved with merchants, officials and craftsmen, and several of the places that took it up changed the way it was made. The libraries that kept what was written on it are gathered in our atlas.