The Origin of Paper

cross-woven into a mat and then pounded into a hard thin sheet. As the papyrus plant requires subtropical conditions to grow, papyrus was not much used in Europe at that time; instead, the main material used for writing was parchment. This was made from animal skin and was extremely expensive. In fact, it has been estimated that a single book written on parchment required the skins of 300 sheep. The skins had to be specifically prepared by drying them and they were then stretched on a special frame. It is not known when parchment was first introduced, but it was the main writing material in Europe for hundreds of years. Paper, which is made from pulp, rags, and fibers of plants, seems to have been invented in China and is considered to be one of the Four Great Inventions of Ancient China. In 105 AD, under the Han Dynasty emperor Ho-Ti, a government official in China named Ts’ai Lun was the first to start a papermaking industry. Ts’ai Lun seems to have made his paper by mixing finely chopped mulberry bark and hemp rags with water, mashing the mixture flat with a stone mortar, and then pressing out the water and letting it dry in the sun. He may have based his idea on bark cloth, which was very common in China and also made from…