At the time when our ancients were carving characters on oracle bones, the ancient Egyptians were already using lightweight papyrus to record text.
Papyrus is a tall herbaceous plant that looks a bit like a reed and can grow up to 4 meters high. The homeland of this plant is Egypt. Thousands of years ago, the fertile alluvial plains on both sides of the Nile River were covered with its footprints, but now it has long been extinct in Egypt. In Africa, it only grows in a few areas in Sudan and Syria. The last batch of papyrus in Europe is in Sicily. The area near Syracuse on the Zion River is dying and drying up. This is mainly caused by the pollution of river water.
People deplore the decline of papyrus very much. This is not only because it is an excellent raw material for papermaking, but also because it is a good friend of mankind. In the ancient paperless days, people used it to record the first few pages of the history of human civilization.
According to research, the Egyptians used papyrus to make "paper" about 5,000 years ago. They broke the papyrus stems into filaments and dried them in the sun, then stacked them in two layers. Then it was glued together. The papyrus made in this way was of very good quality and became Egypt's main export product. Most of Greece's classical literary works were written on papyrus.
Writing on this kind of papyrus "paper" is much more convenient than engraving on clay tablets, silver tablets or tortoise shells. This invention of the Egyptians later spread to Europe. Before artificial paper from China was introduced to Europe, papyrus was the most commonly used "paper" by Europeans.
This is a large tropical tree called the bedo tree. The diameter at breast height is often about 1 meter, and the tree is more than 20 meters tall. The shape of the tree is somewhat like a palm, and some is like a palmtail. This kind of tree has many palm-shaped split leaves clustered on the top of the tree, which are very huge. A leaf with petioles is as long as two or three meters. It was this leaf that ancient Indians used as paper.
India is the birthplace of Buddhism and has many temples. In those temples, sutras written by Bedouin leaves are often preserved, which are known as "Bedo Sutras". The bay leaves used for writing must be picked from bay leaves that are more than 8 years old. The leaves of Bedo are rolled into a tube shape and are light brown in color. They are cut from the petiole and spread flat into a fan shape. There are 30 thick and hard veins on each leaf. If you remove the veins with a knife, you can get nearly 30 small leaves. This small ribbon-shaped leaf is more than 2 meters long, slightly wider at one end and slightly narrower at the other end.
This blade cannot be used and must be made by special water retting. People first roll up the leaves and steam them with water in a large pot. Then take it out to dry. In order to make the leaves flexible and not easy to break, hang the dried leaves on a wooden stick, hold both ends of the leaves with both hands, and pull them up and down to wear off the surface of the leaves and make them white and smooth. After such processing, each piece of bay leaf is cut according to the required size, gathered together, and a hole is made in the bay leaf with a red-hot iron rod so that it can be threaded and stapled with a rope.
Strictly speaking, the scriptures on the Bayeux are not written on them, but "engraved" on them. People use a fine stylus to carve characters on the leaves. After carving, they smear the leaves with ink, which is called "coloring". This ink is mixed with black soot from an oil lamp and cinnamon oil. After application, it can not only leave clear writing on the scratches, but also protect the bay leaf from moisture, corrosion and moth. Perhaps because of the advantage of Bayeux "paper" being easy to preserve for a long time, people still used Bayeux leaves to write long after the invention of real paper.
Around the Spring and Autumn Period, Chinese people began to use "silk" woven from silk to write. Writing on silk with ink is much more convenient than writing on slips, and the silk is light, soft, and can be rolled up. Nowadays, a book is sometimes called a volume, which comes from this.
Unfortunately, although such "silk paper" is very useful, it is expensive. In the Han Dynasty, a piece of silk was equivalent to the price of 720 kilograms of rice, which was beyond the reach of ordinary people. Therefore, until the Han Dynasty, "silk paper" and bamboo slips were still used by people at the same time.
Cai Lun was a eunuch in the Eastern Han Dynasty and served as Shang Fangling. His job is to supervise the manufacture of imperial artifacts. In these positions, it is natural to consider saving money. Expensive silk was also among Cai Lun's considerations.
Is it possible to find a writing material that can replace silk? Not only is it as light and easy to write as silk, but it is also very cheap.
The so-called floating wadding means that when people use inferior cocoons that are not suitable for spinning and weaving to make silk cotton, they first boil the secondary cocoons in water, then spread them on mats and soak them in the river water. The stick rotted into silk cotton. Women who engage in this manual work are called "piao mothers".
Cai Lun found that during the bleaching process, some residual silk wadding stuck to the mat. After it dried in the sun, he peeled off the remaining wadding and it became a thin layer. flakes. Some poor people who could not afford silk used this kind of wadding to write; however, the words written on it were very blurry.
Because silk products are expensive, ordinary people cannot afford to wear them. There was no cotton at that time, and the only things ordinary people could wear were linen products. People peel off the skin of hemp and still use the method of rinsing and pounding in water to make linen yarn suitable for weaving. During this process, linen wadding will also be left on the bamboo mat. Cai Lun discovered that some people also used hemp flakes to write.
"Well, this is a way, maybe you can try it." So Cai Lun became a "piao". He collected the silk wadding and linen wadding left on the bamboo mat, rinsed and pounded them in water until they were very pulpy, then picked them up on the mat to filter out the water, and dried them into pieces. Thin, fine flakes. Using it to write, the effect is almost the same as silk.
Paper was born. The " " part on the left side of the word "paper" also shows that the original paper was directly related to silk.
During the experiment, Cai Lun also found that paper made from mashed flax wadding was as good as paper made from silk wadding, and was even stronger. This of course made him very satisfied, because silk was a valuable item and silk wadding was not as easy to obtain as linen wadding. Cai Lun also thought that since it takes time and effort to mash and mash the hemp, wouldn't those useless rags, fish nets, bark, etc. be easier to obtain and easier to mash.
After a period of exploration, Cai Lun finally invented a mature paper-making process: collecting bark, rags, old fishing nets, etc., soaking them, mashing them, and sanding them, and then using plant ash liquid Soak and cook to remove gum, oil, pigment, etc., and then mash them further to make them into a paste. Then, the paste-like pulp is taken out and spread thinly on the bamboo curtain to dry, and it becomes soft paper. 7
In the first year of Yuanxing of the Eastern Han Dynasty (AD 105), Cai Lun reported his papermaking method to the emperor. Emperor He of the Han Dynasty, who was ill and bedridden, appreciated it very much and ordered its use throughout the country. Later, Emperor An of the Han Dynasty named Cai Lun the Marquis of Longting because of his merits in inventing paper.
my country's papermaking technology was later introduced to North Korea, Japan, India and Arabia, and then to Europe via northern Africa. The invention of papermaking is one of the most outstanding contributions of the Chinese nation to world civilization. Cai Lun's name has also been left in the history of world science and technology.
According to statistics, there are more than 12,000 types of paper with different uses in the world, which meet various human needs. Some of these papers were invented consciously, and some were born unintentionally; some inventions were patented and the name of the invention was left behind, while some did not know who the inventor was and only his invention was left behind.
Since Cai Lun invented paper, the papermaking raw materials used by people, whether they are rags, broken fishing nets, bark, wheat straw, straw, reeds, wool, or wood, are all fiber materials. Stone paper is the first A paper made from non-fibrous raw materials. What kind of new paper will come out in the future? We cannot predict, but what is certain is that human pursuits are endless, and so are the inventions of paper.