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300
A Million Prayers
It wasn't until the 3rd century that the secret art of papermaking began to creep out of China, first to Vietnam and then Tibet. It was introduced in Korea in the 4th century and spread to Japan in 6th. -
400
Korea
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Feb 11, 600
Japan
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Jan 1, 651
The Journey to the West
Papermaking spread slowly throughout Asia to Nepal and later to India. It made its true push westward in 751AD when the Tang Dynasty was at war with the Islamic world. During a battle on the banks of the Tarus river, Islamic warriors captured a Chinese caravan which happened to include several papermakers. They spirited them away to Samarkand, which soon became a great centre for paper production. -
Feb 11, 1456
Gutenburg
When Johann Gutenburg perfected movable type and printed his famous bible in 1456, he not only spread the word of Christianity, but also sparked a revolution in mass communication. The birth of the modern paper and printing industry is commonly marked from this date. -
Mass Production - Fourdriner
The demand for paper also created the need for greater efficiency in production. In the late 18th century the labours of Nicholas Luis Robert resulted in the creation of a machine that could produce a seamless length of paper on a endless wire mesh with squeeze rollers at one end. Perfected and marketed by the Fourdrinier brothers, the new machine made papers soon replaced traditional single sheets made by hand -
The father of true paper - T'sai Lun
Paper as we know it today comes from another source - China. Excavations of tombs of the former Han Dynasty (207BC-9AD) have revealed silk cloth bearing the texts of Lao Tzu - the father of Taoism (born in 604BC). In 105 AD, Han Emperor Ho-Ti's chief eunuch T'sai Lun experimented with a wide variety of materials and refined the process of macerating the fibre of plants until each filament was completely separate. The individual fibres were mixed with water in a large vat. Next, a screen was sub -
Spreading the Word
n Europe, the use of papyrus had dropped out in the 9th century. The preferred medium for the artists and literati of the time was the smooth and lustrous parchment. However, parchment - made from animal skin - was extremely expensive. In fact, it has been estimated that a single bible hand written on parchment required the skins of 300 sheep.
