In Dard Hunter's incomparable publications from the 1930s and 1940s we find samples of papers collected during his explorations of papermaking in China. The Bird and Bull Press publication of Floyd Alonzo McClure's text on Chinese handmade papers provides forty paper samples collected by this botanist who taught in southern China in the 1920s and 1930s. Hans and Tanya Schmoller's book by the same press preserves samples of specialty decorative Chinese papers collected early in the twentieth century by British steel-window magnate Francis Henry Crittall and seldom seen today. Elaine Koretsky continues to document on film and videotape and to write from an experienced papermaker's perspective about her encounters with papermakers on many trips to China over the past twenty years. Lucien Polastron's recent monograph Le papier, 2000 ans d'histoire et de savoir-faire (1999) includes a chapter filled with distinctive photographs of Chinese papermaking and an appended bibliography. University of Chicago Professor Emeritus Tsien Tsuen-hsuin's volume Paper and Printing in the series Science and Civilisation in China is an indispensable resource. A wide variety of hand- and machine-made papers from Asia are available in the market outside Asia. We can easily find papers from Thailand, Nepal, India, the Philippines, Korea, and, of course, Japan. For nearly three decades direct trade between China and the United States ceased. Though diplomatic and trade ties were re-established in 1979, only a few paper merchants in North America today strive to import Chinese papers. Quite naturally we tend to compare Chinese papers with the Asian papers with which we have long had a chance to work and which we have used in a variety of ways, particularly kozo papers from Japan. However, if we expect handmade papers from China to have the same qualities as Japanese papers, we will be sorely disappointed. This is particularly true for wet strength, versatility in conservation work on paper and books produced in the West, toughness for use in letterpress or other mechanized printing, and sensibilities in decorative paper. I once watched a young printer attempt to use a Vandercook press and oil-based inks to print a polymer-plate image on one of the finest xuan papers produced in China today. After wrinkling or destroying sheet after sheet, he declared Chinese xuan paper to be "junk, pure junk." In fact, this printer expected the handmade Chinese paper to have qualities it was not designed to have and to respond in ways it was not designed to respond. Handmade papers have traditionally been used in China to cover windows; to make very durable lanterns, kites, and folding umbrellas; to fabricate clothing (from spun paper strips); to insulate; to seal jars; and to wrap meats for special culinary preparations. These everyday, household uses of paper suggest that Chinese paper has strengths and qualities that may be unfamiliar to us. Furthermore, paper has been used for cultural and artistic purposes at least since the second century CE. It first proved itself useful as a durable medium for manuscript records and books, brush paintings and calligraphy, and later, perhaps as early as the seventh century, for woodblock-printed images and texts.1 The Chinese handmade papers that interest me most are those used for calligraphy, painting, and especially for the printing of books and prints, that is, the papers put to literary and artistic uses. In the 1980s, in the process of doing research for my dissertation in classical Chinese literature, I handled and read many old and rare Chinese books bound in traditional styles. Only occasionally did I pay close attention to the details of these printed books or their paper. I eventually completed my dissertation, began to take bookbinding classes, and pursued several teaching opportunities, one of which took me to Shanghai in the mid-1990s. While there, I met a rare-book librarian who introduced me to his book conservators and invited me to study Chinese bookbinding with them. In learning to repair and rebind these books, I encountered binding styles new to me and papers that were very different from those common in the West. It quickly became obvious that, as a student of Chinese culture who was developing a hands-on interest in Chinese books, I needed to learn as much as I could about the paper used to make and repair these books. Thus began my pursuit to understand Chinese paper. Locating Papermaking Sites in China Stores that sell handmade papers and other traditional art supplies have proven to be goldmines of information about the location of paper manufacturers, brand names, names of paper types, fiber content, intended uses, and standard dimensions. In 1996, I bought my first small selection of Chinese papers at an old-line art-supply store. The clerks in the paper section welcomed my going behind the counter to touch the papers, patiently unfolded bolts of paper, and answered as many questions as I knew to ask about where the papers were produced and from what fibers they were made. Good facility in Mandarin makes this possible, though often enough I struggle with peculiarities of dialects and the special vocabulary of concepts related to paper and papermaking. At a store on Fuzhou Road, the heart of Shanghai's book-sellers' district, I met Yu Juncan in his art supply store when I spotted some papers printed with red lines in the style of Chinese book pages. Mr. Yu offered to go to his factory warehouse to get the stock that I wanted and invited me to visit his operation in Fuyang in Zhejiang province. Later, a similar meeting at the paper counter in the Antiquities Book Store (Guji shudian), also on Fuzhou Road, resulted in a visit to a combination paper mill, print shop, and book bindery in Fuyang owned by Yu Yougang, a close relative of the first Mr. Yu. I have spent countless amusing and informative hours talking with clerks at paper counters, simply to hear how they talk about paper and for leads to the sources of their papers. Many stores sell papers from all over China while others have an exclusive relationship with one particular paper manufacturer or with papermakers in a specific region. A paper store on the street that runs in front of the Confucian Temple in Shanghai mostly sells papers from the owner's home town in Sichuan province, in the far western part of China. I asked the owner, Mr. Shi Li, if someday he would welcome a visit to paper mills there. Over the next three to four years, I wrote him letters and visited his shop each time I went to Shanghai. Once our friendship was well established, Wang Xuequn, Mr. Shi's wife (and very savvy business partner) took me back to her home for a most satisfying and generous look at a huge, interconnected group of independent family papermakers dotting the mountains and valleys south of Jiajiang. Conservators and bookbinders whom I have met at major institutions in China, such as the Shanghai Library, have been generous in their help with introductions to papermakers from whom their institutions purchase handmade paper. A friend in Beijing mentioned my interest in papermaking to her art school classmate, now a professional artist in Anhui province. This artist arranged my first of several visits to Mr. Su Chunmin, a papermaker who creates fine-quality traditional papers and extremely unusual experimental papers for artists. On another occasion, a friend of many years who is the customer-relations manager in a major book store on Liulichang, the book and antiquities district of Beijing, placed a telephone call to the owner of a paper mill to arrange for me a day trip to that mill in Qian'an in Hebei province. Frequently it has been said that hand papermaking in China is a dying art, but that is far too simplistic an evaluation. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China trade brought plenty of "India paper" and "India ink"—both in fact made in China, hence more properly called "Chinese paper" and "Chinese ink"—to the markets in Europe and North America. For more than a century, artists and printmakers in the West used these papers as a matter of course. Because the fineness of the paper yielded very sharp images, bank note companies preferred to pull proofs of their engraved dies on xuan paper backed with card stock. In the mid-twentieth century, these intaglio printers were forced to substitute thin Western papers when their stocks of this Chinese paper dwindled.2 Early in the 1950s with the establishment of the Communist government in China, access in the United States to handmade paper from China was for the most part cut off, which accounts somewhat for our present lack of experience and familiarity with those papers. There were plenty of ups and downs in the handmade paper industry in China in the decades of political, cultural, and economic experimentation that followed. However, since the 1980s, with the Chinese government's encouragement of private industry, a multitude of small paper operations have emerged and grown, some proving far more profitable than operations that were completely government-owned. These changes show papermakers combining innovation with tradition in paper production and mark a healthy revival for Chinese hand papermaking. The papers I have seen produced and the papers available on the market in China show that Chinese papers vary richly. Each region of China generally produces papers using the fibers that are locally prevalent, though modern transportation and market demands are changing that practice. We in the West still suffer from not knowing what to call Chinese papers, many of which on first look seem to be largely the same—opaque white with chain lines, rather thin and very flexible—and usually continue to fall back on the generally misguided and misleading term "rice paper."3 Names of traditional Chinese handmade papers are a complicated issue. These papers may be named after the place or the mill in which they were produced, the dimensions of the sheet, the intended use of the paper, the fiber content, a particular artist for whom the paper was first produced, the special pattern of chain lines, the design of a watermark, the sizing applied to or the surface treatment given to waterleaf sheets, the color, the weight or the number of layers of the sheets, the decorative inclusions, the paper it is designed to imitate, or the paper's qualities. For now I suggest using the general term "Chinese paper" as the reference for papers from China. When we understand more about the various kind of Chinese paper, we can begin to use more specific names. Fuyang, Zhejiang Over the past six years I have visited many papermakers (several of them repeatedly) in different regions of China where papers for painting, calligraphy, and book printing are produced. The first was Fuyang in Zhejiang province, which lies about two hundred kilometers southwest of Shanghai on the Fuchun river. In the mountainous countryside south of this manufacturing center, there are numerous small hand papermaking operations, some producing rough, calligraphy-practice paper (yuanshuzhi) of locally grown bamboo. Others produce a pseudo-xuan paper, made of fibers from pulp sheets mixed with wood pulp imported from Canada and the United States and reprocessed sheets damaged in production.4 With the exception of men dragging bundles of cut bamboo ("moso bamboo;" Ch.: maozhu; L.: Phyllostachys pubescens) down from the mountains and concrete pits of bamboo soaking in strong alkaline solutions, I saw no processing of raw plant material for papermaking in Fuyang.5 One papermaker told me that strict environmental-control regulations made it impossible for makers of handmade papers for calligraphy and painting to use anything but sheets of fibers (largely Chinese alpine rush or "dragon-whisker grass"; Ch.: longxucao; L.: Eulaliopsts binata) commercially prepared elsewhere in China where these grasses grow in abundance. I am skeptical of this explanation and suspect that economic factors drive these papermakers to resort to the use of prepared fibers, rather than to invest in the equipment and labor necessary for fiber preparation. At the time of my first visit to his papermaking operation in Zhuangjiawu in November 1998, Yu Juncan was a broker for many independent papermakers who worked in their homes. The most coveted locations for paper operations are the highest points on the streams running through steep valleys down to the Fuchun river. Positions downstream must deal with impurities in the runoff from operations above. Sheet formation in Fuyang is a one-man operation using a frame suspended overhead with a counterbalance. On this, a mould is laid and clamped into place with a hinged deckle stick on both the left and right ends of the frame. Moulds are made from finely shaved, round bamboo sticks, aligned horizontally and woven together with fine white silk thread running vertically. Moulds come in a variety of sizes, generally about twice as wide as they are tall—for example, a "four-foot" mould is 70 x 138 cm—although there are a multitude of standard mould sizes for production of papers for specific end uses. Vats in Fuyang are made of cement-covered brick with a front section of pulp ready for use and a back section holding thicker pulp that is added to the front section as needed. Sheets are formed by dipping the long edge of the mould closest to the papermaker rather deeply into the vat while pulling it toward the papermaker, raising the mould on its frame up to horizontal, and holding it still until the water has drained. The deckle sticks are flipped open, the mould raised from the edge closest to the papermaker with the right hand and laid pulp side down onto a board with the papermaker's right hand stretching out and his left hand setting the mould against two bamboo guides.6 The papermaker repositions his right hand to the edge of the mould nearest himself and with a snap of the wrist lifts the mould up, gently rolling it off the layer of pulp, which is left lying on the post. The mould is again set onto the frame for forming the next sheet. Nothing is placed between the consecutive sheets of pulp laid onto the post. Water is slowly pressed from the finished post of five hundred sheets or more using stone weights and logs on top of a board. A final pressing is sometimes done with a standing screw press. Slightly damp posts are ferried down the hill to drying sheds on a kind of wheelbarrow commonly used in China for centuries. In Fuyang, sheets of paper are dried against hollow metal walls that have been given some sort of surface treatment. A post of papers is roughed up with a vigorous overall rubbing of the face and a feathering of its four edges. Sheets of damp paper are carefully peeled away one at a time7 and brushed onto the vertical drying wall using a remarkably soft but firm wide brush made of pine needles bound over a wooden frame. With the walls heated to about ninety degrees Celsius, sheets of paper dry within sixty to ninety seconds and are then peeled off the walls. Yu Juncan gave me a glimpse of a workshop that produced pulp-dyed papers containing some portion of paper mulberry fibers (Ch.: chushu or goushu; J.: kozo; L.: Broussonetia papyrifera). These papers went exclusively to a major client in South Korea.8 And he showed me the tiny print shop where he sent his papers to be printed offset with the outline of Chinese book page frames, the item that I had seen first in his storefront in Shanghai. In Fuyang in 1998, I found only one storefront run by a local papermaker. By the following year, this store had moved to the metropolitan market of Shanghai. Jingxian, Anhui In June of 1999, I went to the region that has long been known as the center of the production of true xuan paper, paper whose fibers are a combination of the inner bark of a member of the elm family known as the blue sandalwood tree (Wingceltis; Pteroceltis tatarinowii) and rice straw (Oryza sativa). Jingxian, in Anhui province, west of Fuyang about two hundred kilometers, stands on the banks of the Qingyi river. In that year, among the shops and government buildings surrounding a large lotus pond at the center of town were the storefront operations of at least ten papermakers. Stores for other papermakers lined the main north-south street leading to the square. On my most recent visit, in February 2003, the number of retail paper outlets had dropped by a third. This may suggest that the economic situation for papermaking is not bright or that paper manufacturers are simply seeking out other marketing methods, such as opening storefronts in cultural centers away from the place of production. The production of true xuan paper requires that a mill have the equipment and the space to process the plant fibers—pits in which to ret the fibers, vats in which to steam the plant material, space and water for stripping the outer bark, vats in which to cook the fiber, tanks in which to thoroughly rinse out the lye or the cooking soda, and stone grinders or large Hollander-type beaters to reduce the fibers to pulp. Perhaps a dozen of the largest papermakers in Jingxian are able to make this investment. Many others resort, as in Fuyang, to re-hydrating pulp sheets made of dragon-whisker grass. Many less-than-scrupulous papermakers trade on the Jingxian name and call their product xuan paper regardless of the fiber content. Others call this paper made from dragon-whisker grass "paper for calligraphy and painting" (shuhuazhi) to distinguish it from the true xuan papers that they also produce or market. The wholesale price of true xuan paper is two to three times that of the knock-off version. Each has its utility; cost and end use determine which paper customers choose. In Jingxian formation of sheets of xuan paper is usually a two-person operation.9 At the Xiaoling Xuan Paper Mill (Red Flag Brand), which I visited in 1999 and 2000, pairs of men formed the sheets. At the Wenchangge Xuan Paper Company, which I first visited in 2001, each the papermaking pairs was a husband-and-wife team. There is no overhead suspension system to support the frame and mould. Cement-covered brick vats are constructed to fit the size of the mould. A worker stands at either end of a vat, clamping to the frame a loose deckle stick that holds the short sides of the mould in place. Sheets are formed by first dipping one long side of the mould into the vat of pulp and tossing off the same long side of the mould. A second dip begins on the same long side of the mould with the toss-off on the opposite long side. The frame and mould are rested diagonally on the edges of the vat, the mould lifted off the frame, and the layer of pulp inverted onto the post, much as in Fuyang. Excess water is pressed out of the finished post very slowly with weights set onto a large board laid on the top of the post. As in Fuyang, the sheets of paper are applied to a heated metal wall using a wide pine-needle brush. Here, though, the best papers are dried at a much lower temperature, between forty and fifty degrees Celsius. A single worker can brush up a whole wall of six to eight sheets of "four-foot" paper just in time for the first one to be removed, after about ten minutes of drying. The lower drying temperature reduces the amount of shrinkage of the finished sheet. Paper is inspected and then trimmed by hand, fifty sheets at a time in a stack of several hundred sheets. The straight sides and right angles of a cutting table on which the paper rests serve as a template and cutting guide. The offcuts are tossed up onto the stack of papers to add weight and stability. In Jingxian, the task of wielding heavy, blunt-nosed trimming shears is done almost exclusively by petite young women who deftly perform this trimming operation. Trimmed sheets are folded, smooth surface to the inside, into 100-sheet bolts. A sheet of wrapping paper made of waste pulp is folded around the outside of each bolt. The brand logo, name of the mill, kind and size of paper, and place of production are hand stamped in red along the exposed cut edge of the bolt and sometimes also along the top or bottom edges. At Wenchangge, each bolt is given a paper tag noting its weight and the date of production, before being set aside in a warehouse to age.10 Papermakers in China are aware of the variables affecting the production of high-quality, pH-neutral papers, but expediency and market expectations lead many of them to resort to shortcuts, such as whitening fibers with chemical bleach. Others, such as the famous, government-owned Red Star Brand Mill, situated in the broad valleys south of Jingxian, lay plant fibers out on grass-covered hills, to be bleached and rinsed naturally for six to nine months. The mosaic of fibers in creams and browns on the hillsides around the mill is strikingly beautiful. Papermakers have pointed out how differences between the mineral content of the water in the area of the Red Star plant and that in the steep valleys of the Xiaoling area on the west bank of the Qingyi river, where Red Flag and Wenchangge papers are located, subtly affect the quality of papers each area produces. Xuan papers produced in Xiaoling are slightly more compact and dense than the xuan paper of equal weight produced by mills in the area to the south of Jingxian. Jiajiang, Sichuan Jiajiang in Sichuan province (southwest China, just east of Tibet) is situated south of the provincial capital Chengdu, in a mountainous region at the confluence of several major rivers. To reach a papermaking community in August of 2001 took me a full thirty-six hours by train from Shanghai to Chengdu, followed by two hours by bus on a superhighway to Jiajiang, and forty-five minutes of jostling over mountain roads in a motorized tricycle lorry that bumped to a halt at a stone bridge. Quite literally, I had been transported to a realm apart. The four-day hospitality extended by the family of Wang Xuequn, the wife of the owner of the paper store near the Confucian temple in Shanghai, was uncommonly warm and easy going. Papermakers in Sichuan produce many different grades of papers from various combinations of fibers. Dragon whisker grass grows in abundance and is processed locally. Bamboo covers the mountainsides and is a component of almost every kind of paper produced in Jiajiang. Paper mulberry is sometimes added. The one unappealing but not at all concealed fiber component of many ordinary papers comes from the addition of recycled paper (waste blueprint paper was the type of choice during my visit). Asked why so much recycled paper was added, the papermakers said that they could sell paper to a wholesaler for only so much money and there was no way to stay in business without including recycled paper. Huge wooden steamers for slow cooking of fibers stand abandoned in most papermaking neighborhoods. Bamboo cut into short lengths and retted in sodium hydroxide is instead stuffed into tower-like pressure cookers for a two- or three-hour cook rather than the two or three days it took with the old equipment. In Jiajiang, extra large sheets are formed with an unsuspended mould held by a person on either short end of the frame. The deckle is a loose stick at both short ends held in place with hand pressure. Average size sheets are produced by one person using a mould that rests on a frame suspended from overhead beams. The maker uses only a single deckle stick on the right end of the mould, which means that as the sheet is formed, the left side of the mould floats loose. Sheet formation in Jiajiang shows distinctive regional characteristics that are evident in the way the finished papers behave. In the two-man operation, the long edge of the frame and mould closest to the front of the vat is dipped very deeply into the pulp, but the back long edge never goes below the surface of the pulp mixture. The front edge is somewhat slowly brought up level with the back edge and then lifted slightly. The toss-off of excess pulp is executed by lifting the right end of the frame and mould so that the pulp flows horizontally across the width of the mould, perpendicular to the first line of flow. Things get more complicated with the one-man operation. The papermaker dips the long edge of the mould closest to himself deeply into the vat of pulp, quickly pulls the mould toward himself and up to level. He then raises the right end of the mould sending the pulp racing toward the left and finishes the sheet formation with a toss-off that flushes the excess pulp diagonally back across the mould from lower left to upper right. Pressed posts of paper produced in Jiajiang are left much damper than those in Fuyang and in Jingxian. In preparation for drying, a post is laid flat on a table, and the sheets are teased partially apart with tweezers and laid open in a staggered fashion at one corner. Groups of these sheets are lifted and then draped over a tall plastic-covered saddle-like stool for carrying to the drying wall. Drying walls in Sichuan are wonderfully varied. The spaces between the vertical pillars of the exterior walls of homes are set to a gauge that accommodates the dimensions of papers produced. These walls are covered with a highly polished stucco made of very fine clay, giving the residences built-in drying surfaces. Larger operations expand the available drying surface by constructing parallel ranks of specially prepared drying walls under a high roof. Many homes have large lofts or eaves that are wide and deep so that papers spread out on lacquered drying boards can be propped or hung away from rain and direct sunlight. In Jiajiang, paper drying is a very slow process because of high humidity and because as many as ten sheets of damp paper are brushed up onto the wall overlapping each other. Only the worst of rainy weather or urgency of production pushes a papermaker who has the luxury of owning a heated drying wall to use it. The drying temperature of that wall is very low, and the sheets are brushed up onto the wall, one at a time, with six sheets stepped one on top of the other. Tools of the papermaker's trade in Jiajiang show distinctive regional design. Hand-forged, curved tweezers are used to separate sheets of paper in a damp post. Papermakers use a wide, thick drying brush made of palm-tree bark fiber. Stacks of dried sheets are pulled off the wall as a group and then separated with a long, narrow bamboo spatula-like tool. Large stacks of paper are anchored to a wooden cutting table with a built-in clamp and hand trimmed with a huge circular scythe-like knife wielded with a sawing motion. Jiajiang has a large wholesale paper district that also handles retail sales. Disparaging its poor quality, Wang Xuequn buys little of the paper sold in this market. Much of what she sells in her Shanghai store is produced at her own family's mill, now run by her mother's younger brother and his son. These papers are supplemented with orders placed with papermakers, the quality of whose paper she trusts. Jiajiang papermakers identify their papers as Sichuan xuan paper, painting and calligraphy paper, and Daqian paper, the last named for the famous painter and native of Sichuan Zhang Daqian (1899-1983) for whom papermakers in Jiajiang late in the 1930s used limited wartime resources to produce a paper suitable for his art. Characteristics of Chinese Papers Over two millennia, the characteristics of Chinese paper have evolved from the interaction of available plant materials and production technologies in response to several factors: the development of writing and printing techniques, instruments, and inks; aesthetic sensibilities; and the demands for the use of paper. The Chinese papers we encounter today are largely so thin that they test to exhaustion the patience of the printer, book binder, or artist in the West. Most Chinese papers will clog the nib of a stylus pen with fine fibers or rip with the pressure of lead pencils, but the soft hair of a Chinese writing brush flows smoothly over the surface. The tackiness of oil-based inks tends to tear, buckle, and glob on Chinese papers, particularly when used for letterpress printing that restrains the paper's ability to stretch with the printing and whose type requires a paper thick enough to cushion the impression. In contrast Chinese papers absorb and disperse water-based inks in a wide variety of ways depending on the fibers of the paper and the sizing treatment or lack thereof. Chinese paper works well for water-based wood-block printing, but it requires techniques and tools different even from those used in Japanese wood-block printing, particularly with respect to the kind of baren (in Chinese, malian or pazi) used. Chinese papers respond quite well to oil-based inks when used for intaglio printing. The same is true for their use in lithographic printing and for Chine collé. That inks tend to bleed through Chinese papers is clearly a deterrent to printing or writing on both sides of the paper as we usually expect paper to allow us to do. However, the thinness of the paper—which contributes to just the right absorbency for the inks used—also makes it possible for a Chinese book with its silk or paper covers to contain several hundred pages and still be light, highly flexible, and very portable. The recto and the verso of a Chinese book page traditionally were printed from the same side of a woodblock or a single rectangular mould filled with moveable type. These pages were folded individually (not nested), hiding from view any messiness on the back side of the pages, and then stacked in order for binding. Chinese paintings and calligraphy, also done on only one side of xuan paper, or on other bast, grass, or bamboo paper, must be reinforced and mounted to protect the image. This requires using watery starch paste to laminate one or more sheets of thin paper with comparable qualities to the back of the painting, regardless of whether the art work will be mounted as a scroll or in a rigid format. Knowing how sheets of paper will behave when placed in contact with water is crucial to the painting mounter. This involves a knowledge of the quality of fibers in the paper and the sheet formation techniques in the region where the paper was made. For example, in the double-dip sheet formation technique used in Jingxian and the single-dip method used in Fuyang, the flow of the pulp is parallel to the chain lines, which run in the same direction as the vertical, short dimension of the mould. Even the thinnest of papers from Jingxian and Fuyang have this distinctive short grain, and when wet, these papers stretch horizontally, in the direction perpendicular to the grain of the sheet of paper. In contrast, sheet formation of papers in Jiajiang sends the pulp running with the chain lines and then perpendicular to the chain lines and, in some papers, casts it off diagonally. Predictably, when a sheet of this paper is humidified, it stretches first horizontally, next vertically, and then does a kind of overall relaxation stretch. Prior to lamination, Chinese papers are remarkably forgiving. Storing these papers in folded bolts protects, rather than damages, the fragile sheets. Serious wrinkles, fold marks, and even hard creases disappear when a sheet of paper is dampened and stretch-dried or dried under pressure. Laminated properly, the papers retain flexibility and durability, as evidenced by the longevity of paintings mounted as scrolls, now many hundreds of years old.            Chinese papers dried on a metal wall run the risk of having iron bits that show up as foxing or rust. Papers dried very quickly at especially high temperatures are likely to stretch and shrink markedly. Papers whose fibers have been dew-retted and sun-bleached will have better longevity than those whose fibers have been subjected to harsh chemical bleach. Papers made with a high percentage of locally processed grass, bamboo, or bast fibers, are likely to have qualities noticeably different from those made with pulp sheets and imported sulfite. Where to Find Chinese Papers There are numerous rewards and pitfalls in using Chinese papers. The best way to gain familiarity with them is to put them to use and to read more about them. I bind books in traditional Chinese formats and also experiment with decorative paper techniques and printing the Chinese woodblocks that I have collected. In addition to a few dealers in the United States that specialize in Chinese papers,11 many other art-supply and paper dealers carry a limited number of papers from China. Digging around in book and art-supply stores in the Chinatown neighborhoods of large cities sometimes turns up interesting finds. As more Chinese papers are imported by more dealers, the quality of these papers should improve. There is a surprising amount of information on the web about Chinese hand papermaking. Some of the sites contain misinformation or suffer in translation, and some sites would be more accessible with translation. You will find many individual mills in China have their own websites that describe and show samples of papers and even give the dimensions of different standard sheet sizes. Try entering phrases like "xuan paper," "Chinese paper," "Chinese handmade paper," or the name of a region in China, such as "Fuyang," "Jingxian Anhui," or "Jiajiang Sichuan" into a good search engine. From what I have seen thus far of hand papermaking in China, and clearly this is just a beginning, it is easy to learn quite a lot about how xuan paper and other papers for painting, calligraphy, and printing are made. However, all of the details of the big picture of hand papermaking in China today and its relationship with the history of that craft may well be quite impossible to get. Understandable and natural reticence on the part of papermakers to reveal every aspect of their art contributes to this difficulty. I look forward to returning to China to continue observing this remarkable process and would encourage anyone interested in handmade papers to learn more about what has kept hand papermakers in China producing paper for such a long time.   Endnotes 1. The earliest surviving printed book texts written in Chinese characters date from the eighth century and, ironically, were discovered in Korea and in Japan. See Tsien Tsuen-hsuin, Paper and Printing, vol. 5, part 1 of Science and Civilisation in China, ed. Joseph Needham (1985; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 35ff and p. 146ff. 2. Conversation with Mark D. Tomasko in reference to materials in his collection of bank-note engraving proofs and historical records. 3. For an accurate but light-hearted article that from historical, botanical, and culinary perspectives sets the record straight on what can truly be called "rice paper" and what things are erroneously given that same name, see Ken Grabowski, "Rice Paper Caper," Hand Papermaking" 9.1 (Summer 1994), pp. 18-22. 4. True xuan paper is made from the inner bark of the blue sandalwood tree mixed with rice straw. The papers produced in Fuyang, while called xuan paper, only resemble somewhat true xuan paper. These papers absorb and disperse ink quite differently from true xuan papers. 5. One recently published Chinese reference work introduces fibers commonly used for papermaking. The explanatory text in Chinese is accompanied by microscopically enlarged images of plant fibers. The table of contents and several charts are in Chinese and in English, and in addition, the text provide the Latin names of fibers, making this work of some utility to anyone interested in the fibers used in papers in China. See Wang Juhua, ed., Zhongguo zao zhi yuanliao qianwei texing yi xianwei tupu (Papermaking Raw Materials of China, An Atlas of Micrographs and the Characteristics of Fibers) [Beijing: Zhongguo qinggongye chubanshe (Chinese Light Industry Publishing House), 1999], ISBN 7-5019-2345-0/TS 1435. 6. The side of the layer of pulp not touching the mould becomes the "smooth side" or the side of the finished sheet on which printing, writing, or painting is done. This smooth side is face down on the post and is the side of the sheet that is laid against the drying wall. The "rough side," the side in contact with the mould in formation, shows sweeping marks left by the brush used to apply the damp sheet up on the drying wall. 7. Two or three sheets are dried together to produce double-layer or triple-layer xuan paper (erceng jiaxuan or sanceng jiaxuan). No added adhesive holds the layers of this kind of xuan paper together.  8. As is the case with many hand papermakers elsewhere in China, some large portion of Mr. Yu's production is for clients in Asia outside of China. With the help of capital from Japanese and Korean investors, in January 2003 he set up a new paper production facility, all under one roof, very close to Shanghai. When I visit this paper mill on my next trip to China, I will contemplate what this step in economic progress for this very determined entrepreneur has meant for the small production facilities in his village. 9. In Jingxian, papers made of other kinds of fibers such a paper mulberry are made by one person using a suspended mould and a sheet formation technique that very gradually splashes the pulp up onto the mould. 10. Many Chinese artists and calligraphers prefer to use papers that have been aged (chenzhi) believing that this gives the paper time to develop desirable qualities. 11. This short list can be found on the Hand Papermaking website: www.handpapermaking.org/Chinese paper retailers in US.