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Paper, an object so common in our daily lives today. It is used for writing, drawing, printing books, packaging, and even cleaning. However, going back nearly two thousand years to the Eastern Han Dynasty, the advent of a cheap, lightweight, and suitable-for-writing paper was no less than a nuclear explosion in information technology.
It not only transformed China but also enabled the Eastern civilization to outpace the rest of the world in the speed and reach of information dissemination for nearly a thousand years. Behind this, Cai Lun and his improved papermaking technique played a crucial role.
Information dissemination is both cumbersome and costly.
Before the widespread use of paper, recording and disseminating information for humans was truly a "physical labor". Take a look at our ancestors. They first inscribed characters on tortoise shells and animal bones (oracle bone script), and later cast characters on bronze wares (bronze script). These materials were either hard to find, extremely expensive, or very heavy. Clearly, they were not suitable for large-scale information replication and dissemination.
During the Spring and Autumn, Warring States and Qin and Han periods, the situation improved. Bamboo slips and wooden tablets became the mainstream writing materials. People would cut bamboo or wood into long and narrow pieces, write on them with ink and brush, and then bind them together with ropes to form books.
The idiom "learned enough to fill five carriages" sounds impressive, but the "five carriages" could at most hold the content of a few books nowadays. One can imagine that if a scholar wanted to bring some "substantial knowledge" when visiting a friend, how much manpower and resources would be needed.
It is said that Emperor Qin Shi Huang had to deal with official documents weighing as much as 120 jin every day. This was not merely handling official business; it was more like a form of physical exercise.
Of course, there were also high-end options - silk. This material was light, soft and had a great writing effect. It was definitely a "luxury item" at that time.
The price of a piece of silk was quite high, and it was beyond the reach of ordinary people. It was mainly used by the royal family, nobles and a few wealthy individuals. Using it to write letters, paint pictures or draw maps gave a sense of high class, but to use it for popularizing knowledge or large-scale information recording? The cost was prohibitively high.
Looking around the world, other civilizations also face similar predicaments. The ancient Egyptians had papyrus, made from the stems of the papyrus plant growing along the banks of the Nile. This paper was once the main writing material in the Mediterranean world, but it also had drawbacks: the raw material was limited in origin, it was relatively brittle, difficult to fold, and its preservation was affected by climate.
Europe, on the other hand, long used parchment, made from treated animal skins. Parchment was tough and durable, could be written on both sides, and lasted a long time. However, its production process was complex and the cost was extremely high; the value of a single book could even match that of an estate.
In conclusion, whether it was bamboo slips and silk scrolls in the East or papyrus and parchment in the West, before Cai Lun's improvement of papermaking, the media for information dissemination generally suffered from problems such as high cost, difficult production, inconvenience in carrying, and difficulty in popularization.
The flow of knowledge and information was tightly bound by these heavy or expensive carriers, moving slowly and within a narrow scope. This undoubtedly restricted the development of culture and the progress of society.
Were the ancients content with this? Clearly not. The demand for more convenient and cheaper information carriers has always existed.
The cheap writing revolution of turning waste into treasure
It was against this backdrop that Cai Lun of the Eastern Han Dynasty came onto the scene. It should be clarified that Cai Lun did not "invent" paper. Archaeological discoveries have shown that in the Western Han Dynasty, China already had relatively primitive plant fiber paper, such as the Baqiao paper made from hemp fibers.
However, these early papers were of rough texture, uneven surface and had unsatisfactory writing performance. Their production was also limited, thus they failed to widely replace bamboo slips and silk.
Cai Lun's remarkable achievement lies in his "improvement" and "innovation". According to the "History of the Later Han Dynasty", Cai Lun, whose courtesy name was Jingzhong, was a eunuch. He held a position in the imperial court and had the opportunity to come into contact with various crafts and resources.
He noticed that the "paper" and silk at that time were expensive, while bamboo slips were heavy and inconvenient. So he began to think about how to improve the papermaking technology.
In 105 AD, Cai Lun summarized the experiences of his predecessors and made bold attempts. Creatively, he proposed using tree bark, rags from hemp (waste from hemp), old rags, and used fishing nets - all of which were readily available and inexpensive waste materials - as raw materials for papermaking.
This is truly a stroke of genius in turning waste into treasure! He improved the entire process of soaking, pounding, scooping and drying: first, he cut the raw materials into small pieces, soaked them and steamed them to separate the fibers; then he pounded them into a pulp with a stone mortar; next, he scooped a thin layer of fibers from the pulp with a fine bamboo screen and drained the water; finally, he peeled off the wet paper and dried it in the sun or in an oven, and it became a smooth, thin sheet of paper suitable for writing.
This kind of paper made with new methods and raw materials has a significantly reduced cost and improved performance. It is smoother than the early hemp paper and more suitable for writing; it is much cheaper than silk and accessible to ordinary people; it is a hundred times lighter than bamboo slips and easier to carry and circulate.
Cai Lun presented this achievement and the paper he made to Emperor He of Han, Liu Zhao. The emperor highly praised his talent and ordered the promotion of his paper-making method. From then on, this kind of paper was called "Cai Hou Paper" and became popular throughout the country.
Cai Lun's contribution lay in his discovery of cheap and readily available raw materials and the refinement of a standardized production process. This made large-scale paper production possible and completely transformed the landscape of writing materials.
He was not the inventor who brought something from zero to one, but he was the key figure who pushed this technology from the "laboratory" to "industrialization". His improvements made paper truly have the potential to replace bamboo and silk as the mainstream information carrier. This was no less than a revolution in writing materials, and its significance cannot be overemphasized.
The "Information Superhighway" of a Thousand Years: The Eastern Advantage Laid by Paper
The advent of "Cai Hou Paper" had a profound impact on the progress of civilization in China and even the world. The first to benefit were China's cultural dissemination and administrative management.
With the availability of cheap and accessible paper, the threshold for the replication and dissemination of knowledge was greatly reduced. Books were no longer luxuries that only a few privileged elites could own.
Although there is still a long way to go before knowledge becomes accessible to the common people, at least among the scholar class and government institutions, the speed and breadth of knowledge dissemination have reached an unprecedented level.
Scholars could write books and copy classics more conveniently; the government could issue decrees and manage archives more efficiently. The popularization of paper laid a material foundation for the cultural prosperity of the Wei, Jin, Northern and Southern Dynasties that followed, as well as for the implementation of the imperial examination system in the Sui and Tang Dynasties.
It is hard to imagine how the vast Chinese classics could have been passed down without paper, and it is also hard to imagine how the huge empire could have operated effectively.
More importantly, for a long time, this technology was almost a "secret weapon" exclusively enjoyed by China. The dissemination of papermaking was a long and tortuous process. It reached the Korean Peninsula and Vietnam around the 4th century AD, and Japan in the early 7th century.
The westward spread was much slower. A widely circulated account holds that in 751 AD, the Tang Dynasty and the Arab Empire fought the Battle of Talas, where the Tang forces were defeated. Among the captured soldiers happened to be papermakers, and thus papermaking technology was introduced to the Arab world.
The Arabs quickly mastered and improved the technology and established paper mills in Baghdad, Damascus and other places.
Even so, it took several more centuries for papermaking to reach Europe. The Arabs brought papermaking to Europe via Spain and Sicily. It was not until the 12th century that the first paper mill in Europe was established in Spain.
It was only later that Italy, France, Germany and other places gradually mastered the papermaking technique. This means that from Cai Lun's improvement of papermaking (105 AD) to the time when Europe was generally able to produce its own paper, there was a gap of about a thousand years!
This thousand-year time gap means what? It means that while European monks were still carefully copying the Bible on thick and expensive parchment, worrying about ink seepage and limited writing space, Chinese scholars and literati had long been able to freely express themselves with brush and ink on light and inexpensive paper, creating poetry, prose, and copying the works of the Hundred Schools of Thought.
Government documents and archives, private contracts and account books, scholars' research insights, and artists' passionate paintings have all been produced, preserved and passed down more conveniently because of paper.
This undoubtedly provided a powerful "hardware support" for the continuous prosperity and leading development of Chinese civilization. It can be said that paper paved a "highway of information" that lasted for a thousand years in the Eastern world, while the Western world was long confined to "narrow paths".
