Papyrus is a tall herb, which looks a bit like a reed and can grow to 4 meters high.
The hometown of this plant is in Egypt.
Thousands of years ago, the fertile alluvial plains on both sides of the Nile were covered with its footprints, but now it has long since disappeared in Egypt. In Africa, only a few areas in Sudan and Syria are still growing, and the last batch of papyrus in Europe is on the verge of withering and drying up on the Ceylon River near Siracusa, Sicily.
This is mainly caused by river pollution.
People deplore the decline of papyrus.
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 days when there was no paper in ancient times, people used paper to record the first pages of the history of human civilization.
According to research, about 5000 years ago, Egyptians used papyrus to make "paper". They broke the papyrus stems into filaments, folded them into two layers, and then glued them together. The quality of papyrus made by this method is quite good, and it has become the main export product of Egypt. Most classical Greek literary works are written on papyrus.
It is much more convenient to write on this papyrus "paper" than to carve it on clay boards, silver boards or tortoise shells.
This invention of the Egyptians was later spread to Europe.
Before artificial paper made in China was introduced to Europe, papyrus was the most commonly used paper in Europe.
This is a tropical tree called Bedo Tree. Its DBH is often around 1 m and its height is more than 20 meters. This tree looks like a palm tree, while others look like palm trees.
This kind of tree has many palmately divided leaves clustered at the top of the tree, which is very huge. One leaf with petiole is two or three meters long.
This kind of leaf was used by ancient Indians to make paper.
India is the birthplace of Buddhism, and there are many temples.
In those temples, scriptures written by Bedouin leaves are often preserved, which are called Bedouin scriptures.
Myrica rubra leaves used for writing must be collected from Bedouin trees over 8 years old.
Bedouin leaves are tubular and light brown. They are cut from the petiole and spread out to form a fan.
Each leaf has 30 thick veins, and nearly 30 small leaves can be obtained by removing the veins with a knife.
This banded leaflet is more than 2 meters long, with one end slightly wider and the other end slightly narrower.
This blade can't be used, it must be specially made.
People first roll up the leaves and put them in a large pot and boil them in water.
Then take it out to dry.
In order to make the leaves elastic and not easy to break, it is necessary to hang the dried leaves on a wooden stick, press both ends of the leaves with both hands and grind them up and down, so that the surface of the leaves will be ground off and become white and smooth.
After this processing, each scallop leaf is cut according to the required size, gathered together, burned a hole in the scallop leaf with a red-hot iron bar, and sewn up with a rope.
Strictly speaking, the scriptures on Bayeux are not written, but "engraved".
People use a thin iron pen to carve words on leaves, and then use ink to paint on leaves, that is, "color".
This ink is a mixture of black soot from oil lamps and cinnamon oil. After smearing, it can not only leave clear handwriting on the notch, but also have the functions of moisture-proof, anti-corrosion and moth-proof for laurel leaves.
Perhaps because the "paper" of laurel leaves has the advantage of easy long-term preservation, people still use laurel leaves to write long after the invention of real paper.
Around the Spring and Autumn Period, people in China began to write with silk.
It is much more convenient to write on silk with ink than bamboo slips, and silk is light and soft and can be rolled up.
Now sometimes a book is called a book, which comes from this.
Unfortunately, this kind of "silk paper" is very useful, but it is expensive.
In the Han dynasty, a piece of silk was equivalent to 720 Jin of rice, which most people could not afford.
So until the Han Dynasty, "silk paper" and bamboo slips were also used by people at the same time.
Cai Lun was a eunuch and emperor in the Eastern Han Dynasty.
His job is to supervise the manufacture of royal vessels.
For these positions, it is natural to consider saving money.
Expensive silk is also under consideration in Cai Lun.
Can you find a writing material that can replace silk? It is not only as light and easy to write as silk, but also very cheap.
The so-called floating means that when people use inferior cocoons that are not suitable for spinning to make silk cotton, they first boil the secondary cocoons in water, then spread them on the table and soak them in the river, and then rotten them into silk cotton with a stick.
Women engaged in this kind of manual labor are called "mobile mothers".
Cai Lun found that during the bleaching process, some residual silk floc stuck to the mat. After drying, the remaining flocs were peeled off to form a thin layer of six thin flocs.
Some poor people who can't afford silk use this kind of wadding to write; But the words written on it are very vague.
Because silk products are expensive, most people can't afford to wear them. At that time, there was no cotton, and ordinary people could only wear hemp products.
People peel off hemp skin and still use the methods of rinsing and ramming in water to make hemp yarn suitable for spinning.
In this process, there will still be pits on the mat.
Cai Lun found that some people also write with hemp chips.
"Well, this is a way, maybe we can try.
"So, Cai Lun became a" drifter ".
He collected the silk wadding and hemp wadding left on the mat and put them in water to continue rinsing and beating, which made them very bad. Then he fished them out with a cushion to filter the water, and after drying, they became thin and thin flocs.
Write with it, and the effect is similar to silk.
Paper was born.
Now the left part of the word "paper" also shows that the original paper is directly related to silk.
Cai Lun also found in the experiment that the paper made of hemp wadding is as good as that made of silk wadding, or even stronger.
This, of course, made him very satisfied, because silk is a valuable thing, and silk floss is not as easy to obtain as hemp wool.
Cai Lun also thought that, since retting and pounding hemp is time-consuming and laborious, it is easier to get and pound useless rags, broken fishing nets and bark.
After a period of exploration, Cai Lun finally invented a mature papermaking process: bark, rags, old fishing nets and so on. Is collected, soaked, mashed and silted, then soaked and cooked with plant ash solution to remove colloid, grease and pigment, and then further mashed to make them paste.
Then, take out this mushy pulp and spread it thinly on the bamboo curtain to dry, and it becomes soft paper.
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In the first year of Yuan Xing in the Eastern Han Dynasty (A.D. 105), Cai Lun dedicated his papermaking method to the emperor. Han and Emperor, who was ill in bed, appreciated it very much and ordered it to be popularized throughout the country.
Later, Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty named Cai Lunlong Hou Ting for his contribution to the invention of paper.
China's papermaking was later spread to Korea, Japan, India and * * *, and then to Europe via North 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 remained in the history of world science and technology.
According to statistics, there are about 12000 kinds of paper with different uses in the world, which meet the needs of human beings in all aspects.
Some of these papers were invented consciously, and some were born unintentionally; Some inventions applied for patents and left the name of the invention, while others did not know who the inventor was, leaving only his invention.
Since Cai Lun invented paper, the paper-making materials used by people, whether rags, broken nets, bark, wheat straw, rice straw, reeds, Russian hair and wood, are all fiber materials, and stone paper is the first paper made of non-fiber materials.
What kind of new papers will be published in the future? We can't predict, but what is certain is that the pursuit of human beings is endless, and so is the invention of paper.