The Paper Trail
Alexander Monro Primus

(7/13/22-7/20/22)

JN:     

       This is the story of paper (unsurprisngly). When Marco Polo made his journey to what is now Beijing in 1275, he found out about Chinese paper, which the Mongols, who controlled the city at that time during Khan’s rule, had. Bringing back news of paper allowed for a much greater reach across all denominations. While paper is not used as a primary writing tool anymore, it still has countless uses, such as cardboard and toilet paper. With being one of the most environmentally destructive processes due to the amount of water it takes to process, paper outcompeted all other writing mediums, such as bamboo or parchment, over the years. The real advantage of paper versus those other mediums came from the simplicity it took to produce it, meaning all walks of life had access to it. 

       In 110 BCE, Cai Lun was the first person in China to refine the process for widespread use. Soon enough, much of China was using it, which brought about the spread of Buddhism and other religions and political ideas. By the 1400s, the technology in Europe advanced for movable type for even further reach by paper. But long before that, the history of paper intertwined itself with the history of written words, as the invention of writing became the first mode to record and relay ideas across time and space without falling prey to the telephone game.

       Around 5,000 years ago, Sumerians used clay tablets and became the first civilization to write words as opposed to symbols. Thousands of years later, Ancient Greece and Rome used papyrus to record their thoughts, but the material did not allow folding and writing on both sides, which made personal reading a rarity and served more for public reciting. Furthermore, the writing at the time did not allow for silent reading as spacing between words hadn’t become a thing yet (soitprobablyreadlikethis). Thus, papyrus, for which paper is named after despite being entirely different, did not dominate other popular forms of communication like oral. 

       Nonetheless, ancient civilizations created alphabets to write down their languages. Beginning with Phoenician in Syria to Aramaic and Hebrew, alphabets spawned all across the continent and beyond. One alphabet trumped the others, however, and from the Middle East came Arabic. 

       Due to its immortality and prevalence, it was not surprising that the concept of writing was created independently by the Sumerians, Chinese, and Mesoamericans. China revered its scripts as it was first used for divination and contained thousands of characters. Despite the many political upheavals in China, its writing endured. The Zhou dynasty, which lasted until 221 BCE, hosted the writing of Laozi as well as Confucius’s criticism of the moral decline of the dynasty and the tyranny that the rulers imposed. Most of his work was written on bamboo, as was the medium at this time, such as his most famous piece: The Spring and Autumn Annals. Eventually, the Zhou dynasty came to an end, and in its place sprouted the Qin dynasty, which united much of the country at the time. Despite the burning of any book detailing criticism of the rulers, such as Confucius’s (Fahrenheit 451 style), the dynasty encouraged literacy and books. However, fifteen years after the dynasty began, it ended. The resulting dynasty, known as the Han dynasty, governed according to Confucianism principles, and the scholars of the era, of which there were many, revived the classics. An imperial library was built, and books governed society, but the bamboo which the books were made from had its limitations, especially with transportation. 

       For a long time, no other options existed as other than accidental creations of paper, paper hadn’t become a thing. Then around 89 AD, Cai Lun discovered an efficient method for creating paper: mixing bark - initially from a mulberry tree but most vegetation fibers works - hemp, flax, and water, and then soaking the mixture so that it pulps, a process known as maceration (essentially the water takes out cellulose fibers from the plants and then those fibers are dried. The resulting substance is paper). With the empress’s funding, Cai Lun continued experimenting with paper, making it easier and cheaper to produce. While it wouldn’t overcome bamboo for the classics, such as Confucius’s Book of Documents, due to it seeming too cheap for the elite, that began to change with the fall of the Han dynasty in 220 AD. The advantages of paper were plainly seen by everyone, and with its accessibility, writing letters became a common activity. This also allowed calligraphers to hone their craft much more easily due to the ability to create several drafts. Calligraphers, such as Wang Xizhi, were known for their ability to weave words with moods, which weren’t dictated by what they wrote, but how they wrote it (style of characters). 

With paper on the rise, Buddhism made its round around China, appealing to the non-elites with its simple living and immortality preachings. Translators brought the religion into the Mandarin script and then spread it using the easily accessible paper. In China, it competed with Daoism, with each claiming to be the original faith although both preached many of the same ideas. It was on paper where this battle between the two occurred, with scribes being encouraged to write scripts from one faith or another to win merit in the afterlife. Ultimately, Buddhist scripture far outnumbered any other religious text and mass paper was created for the sole purpose of furthering its influence. These masses of paper were often made into scrolls that ranged from five to forty feet and were given to temples, which grew to enormous size and wealth. Due to the difficulty of reading scrolls, books - bound pages - grew in popularity, which historians knew after a man named Aurel Stein introduced it to the world after another man found a cave that for some unknown reason was filled with scrolls and books. This cave also helped fill in several hundred years of Chinese history. 

       After the fall of the Han dynasty, paper continued to travel to other parts of East Asia, where cultures used the invention for a greater variety of uses. One such place, Korea, which was under control by China at that time, received paper through the vehicle of Buddhism. This Buddhism aided in the unification of Korea in 668. Over the centuries, writing and reading were encouraged by Korean rulers and the reach of paper continued to expand. This was helped even more by Sejung, the ruler at the time, who created a Korean alphabet in the 15th century, one much simpler to understand and write, leading to higher literacy rates and more books and scrolls being produced. Paper also reached Japan,and its people revered the substance, ensuring that only high-quality paper was constructed. Along with paper came Buddhism, Confucianism, and overall Chinese culture, all of which increased the literacy rates of the Japanese. All of this progress and reverence for the aesthetics that came with the Buddhist and Confucius scriptures that was tied to the influx of paper into Japanese society occurred in the last couple of centuries of the first millennium. These obsessions led to a wider range of uses for paper such as origami. The script that the Japanese used involved Chinese characters, but the characters symbolized Japanese syllables. 

In the 13th century, when Genghis Khan captured China, he adopted many of their customs and used Uighur scribes to create an alphabet for the Mongols. The nomads ruled via the easily accessible paper, using it to transmit messages across their vast empire. Back in 581, China reached a golden age after reunifying. Not only were festivals occurring all around the majestic city of Chang’an, which amassed immense wealth, but scholarly progress also occurred on a wide scale. Paper, which was also used for windows and lanterns, allowed anyone to write down their life story (a pretty incredible capability). As all things do, however, this Golden age came to an end in the mid-8th century after famine, war, and political corruption caused the population to plummet from 50 million to just 17 million. 

       In the late 8th century, a man named Bai Juyi embodied the pathway to enter high society. This pathway involved taking tests on the classics and political decisions and vehemently studying Chinese, particularly Buddhist and Confucius, texts. Since Buddhist texts concerned themselves more with content than style, print slowly became of use via wooden molds covered with ink. Bai used paper and poetry to criticize the government of the Tang Dynasty, write to his exiled friend, and record the details of his life. Paper allowed him to criticize and change the government anonymously, and even though he was exiled for some time, he refused to sit silently and used poetry as his outlet until he died in 846. 

       (Now for paper reaching other parts of the world) In the 8th century, the Silk Road ran from Rome to Chang’an with the middlemen being the Turks. Paper naturally crossed along the Silk Road, but its influence took a while longer to cross as ideas were much more difficult to transfer as merchants rarely made the full trek (they merely conveyor belted it across). The Muslim Abbasid Caliphate controlled the whole of the Arabian peninsula and many lands surrounding it while the Tang Dynasty controlled much of east Asia. Both wanted control of Turkestan, and as the Chinese controlled several important cities, an Abbasid general made a plan to attack them at the city of Talan. While the battle was deadly, both sides were weakened and faced rebellions, so the Chinese continued to hold onto those cities and the Abbasids continued to hold much of Central Asia. The Abbasid did return home with Chinese slaves, however, and from them learned the art of papermaking (now that’s quite the tale for paper). 

The Uighurs, who resided in Turkestan, grew to revere paper and especially the Koran. This began with a prophet named Mani, whose followers could not work or eat meat, so they spent their days writing to preserve their purity and ascend to heaven. Mani, the religion being called Manichaeism, wrote his scripture himself, and scribes became the elites of the faith, ensuring that whatever they wrote contained as much style as possible. While the details of the growth of Manichaeism were difficult to discern, it was believed that Mani and his followers stayed in Central Asia to continue preaching, eventually reaching the Uighurs, where their obsession with written artistry mixed with the capabilities of paper. This allowed for further reach of the religion as sometimes the beauty of the books sufficed to win followers. Despite its allure, it failed to compete against Islam and Christianity in its reach and didn’t impact China much due to their xenophobic views of the Uighurs. Nonetheless, the paper that was used, along with the Chinese captives, had influenced the Abbasid caliphate enough so that the Islam culture made of Arabs and Persians adopted the Chinese invention. 

       With Arabic as the sole language, illuminators (decorators) and calligraphers teamed up to standardize what calligraphy script would be used for the Koran before putting their style into it. Thus, Islam spread in the region through books. While many of the books produced at this time no longer exist, buildings, such as the Friday Mosque in Herat, detail the impact that they had.

       In 570 Arabia, the prophet Muhammad was born, and during his time in Mecca, where the black stone lay that was used by several religions to get closer to God, Muhammad received his revelations, which he used to build his following. While Muhammad was illiterate and Arabs as a whole distrusted writing, it was the Koran, which was a collection of recitations by Muhammad, that ended up spreading the religion across the continent. After he died in 632, his son-in-law created a team to canonize the Koran, and that team created four canon Koreans on parchment, as paper Korans weren’t created until centuries later due to the fear that Muhammad’s words wouldn’t last on paper. Even though the Koran itself wasn’t paper, this western part of Asia was becoming increasingly paperful due to the book. This was caused by the many technological advances that were made during the Abbasid caliphate such as telling time and geography in order to follow Islam’s rules. 

       As Baghdad quickly grew to become the center of the caliphate and one of the intellectual centers of the world, the need for paper grew alongside it. A grand vizier member of a powerful family named Jafar (like from Aladdin) filled that need, and soon enough, Baghdad was filled with paper mills creating paper of different sizes, qualities, and colors. An obsession with books followed, leading to the discovery of the earth’s circumference, cosine, tangent, the number system that we use today, decimals, and many others like these. Over the centuries, the caliphate waned, and when it was taken over by the Mongols in the 13th century, the Mongols sacked their libraries and ceased any progress.

       (Now to Europe) In the Middle Ages, European elites grew fond of codexes - predecessors of books created with parchment or vellum, a product made from animal hide. Unfortunately, parchment and vellum were expensive and difficult to produce. In Muslim-controlled Spain, paper was used ever since the 11th century due to their ties with the caliphate, but it didn’t spread to the rest of Europe. By the late 13th century, the rest of Europe finally began making their own paper after importing it from the Middle East. Paper makers, especially those in Italy, soon created high-quality and cheaper paper by using different materials. While their paper was almost always written in Latin in the beginning, it slowly grew to be widespread for all practical matters in a multitude of languages as the chief writing surface. The spreading of paper helped kindle the Renaissance, which saw a rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman texts as well as other classical European texts. When a need for creating copies of these classics arose, Gutenberg revolutionized the printing press, a large device handled by two people that pressed a long series of letters onto a page, saving countless hours. 

       In the 16th century, Martin Luther published his 95 Theses, openly criticizing the church. He wasn’t the first to do so, but through the reach of printing, he became the most popular. With his preaching that the Bible was the sole source of the holy lord, Luther headed the Reformation that soon grew into full force, warring against the church with pamphlets as their weapon of choice. Even though only a minority of the receivers of these pamphlets were literate, they were easy to recite and easier to read than most things due to standardized print (reading text is easier than handwriting). After Luther was exiled, he translated the New Testament into German and included some commentary as well, creating a plethora of new and enticed readers (Luther played quite the role in paper’s history across Europe). Not long after, a man named William Tyndale translated the Bible into clear and easy-to-understand English, allowing the commoners in England to be able to read it. These translations changed politics dramatically as priests were no longer the only ones capable of preaching the word of God, thus slowly lost their unearned elite status. With Luther’s work, the Church’s armor of divinity was slowly worn down as the people whom Luther inspired no longer needed the Church to reach God. 

       As the Protestant Reformation started to wane from public discourse, scientific achievement took its place. With paper, scholars could write letters detailing their latest discoveries to each other with ease. The late Renaissance scientific discoveries led to further printing and a greater culture focused on paper. One such use of paper was architectural planning, which an architect by the name of Palladio used to create his designs that inspired buildings such as the White House and Monticello (Thomas Jefferson’s home). Another use was the ability to print music which increased competition between composers, allowing for a greater reach even after the composer’s death as with Bach. A third was novels, which gave many women avenues to reach an audience, resulting in a growing female literacy rate. 

       By the 17th century, the increase in common writing brought about an increased appeal to politics (much the same way social media created an increased appeal in politics). This led to the creation of letters from centers of government and newspapers. By the late 18th century, France tightened its regulations on what could be published, which led to a plethora of Enlightenment thinkers’ books being smuggled in, adding fire to the resentment of the monarchs. The result of the revolution was a recognition of the need for both freedom of the press and copyright laws. Freedom of the press’s importance translated to America codifying into the Bill of Rights in 1791. This freedom of the press and freedom of speech intertwined themselves with paper’s legacy because endless possibilities could result from the blank sheet (partly why the internet could be concerning if corporations or governments can assume too much control over it). In modern times, alternative modes of knowledge, such as photography, movies, television, and online books continue to copy the types of stories that books provide, and while each method has its advantages, none can give the same sense of ownership and physical embodiment that a book can give (I can relate to that, even though I prefer reading on my phone out of convenience). And for all that paper has done, that is its most profound legacy: the stories. (And that is the story of the paper. Hope you enjoyed it and keep on being amazing! Whenever you write on something, remember the long history that surrounds that simple piece of paper you take for granted.)