It was only during the current century that papermaking began to decline in China. However, after 1949 the country sought to reevaluate the role of traditional skills in a socialist society. Interest in papermaking was renewed, and a number of books on the subject were published. There was a sense of urgency to record the ancient techniques before they completely disappeared. Unfortunately, much of the information I have amassed is not new. Either it has been discussed by Westerners elsewhere or was identical to what is already known about Japanese papermaking, itself an offshoot of Chinese papermaking. There were, however, passages which were new to me, offering exciting possibilities for exploration and experimentation. What follows is a brief summary of some of these techniques. To begin with, the Chinese use a surprisingly wide variety of plants to make paper. Reading a good Chinese botanical work that notes which plants are or have been used as a source of fiber can be overwhelming. Basically, however, Chinese papermakers talk about five major categories of plants: zhu (bamboo), ma (hemp), pi (bark), cao (grass), and teng (climbing plant). Each category contains many different species. In the case of pi and cao, there are many different plant families as well. Generally, pi refers to bast fibers such as kozo, gampi, mitsumata, elm, and hibiscus. Cao includes all the fibers obtained from the stalks of grain-bearing plants such as wheat and rice. The last category, teng, presents a problem, since this plant disappeared many centuries ago due to overharvesting. Attempts to identify the plant have remained unsuccessful, although some have erroneously concluded that teng refers to the common rattan.[sp^2es] Outside of these five general categories, one or two ancient texts also mention the use of seaweed, lichen, and ramie. In turning plant material into paper the Chinese papermaker follows basic procedures. The unusable portions of the plant are discarded. What remains is treated with a caustic solution or allowed to rot. This coarse fiber is then washed and sun-bleached. Finally the whitened fiber is pounded into paper pulp. Procedures vary according to the plant used and according to how fine the paper is to be. One procedure which the Chinese papermakers use a great deal of is fermentation. Fermentation is used not only in the initial stages of fiber processing but in the later stages as well, even after the fiber has been cooked. For paper made from kozo, fermentation lasts only one or two days, depending on the season. But for bamboo, fermentation is longer and often has to be repeated. Yan Ruyu (1821) observed that the bamboo was allowed to soak in a pit for ten days. After the bamboo had been steamed it was put in another pit and left to soak for two or three days.[sp^3es] Song Yingxing (1637) recorded that the bamboo was first soaked in a pit for 100 days. Later, after much processing, the bamboo was left in the steamer for ten or more days so that it "soured naturally."[sp^4es] Pan Jixing (1979) wrote that the initial fermentation for bamboo lasted about twenty days or until the green color turned yellow. Later, after the paper had been steamed, the fermentation process was repeated. This time the bamboo was left for twenty days in summer, thirty in winter.[sp^5es] Steaming has been and remains the preferred way of cooking fiber for papermaking in China. Boiling is rarely mentioned in the literature. Usually the fiber is steamed twice, once to remove the outer bark and once to soften the fibers just before beating. In both cases a caustic solution is used, either lime or lye. Some texts make a point of mentioning specific types of lye, such as that made from burned t'ung tree seeds.[sp^6es] Steaming is a fairly tricky process. There are right and wrong ways of packing the steamer. In addition, the steamer itself has to be watched, sometimes for days at a time. Hemp and kozo can be steamed in a couple of hours, but bamboo can take up to ten days. One text by Yan Ruyu mentions that flour paste was put into the steamer to insure added whiteness. He writes: When the lye water has been completely washed away (from the bamboo), a paste of five pints of soy bean flour and five pints of white rice flour is added to each steamer. The bamboo is added, mixed thoroughly, and steamed seven to eight days.[sp^7es] At this point the bamboo was ready for the stamping mill. By the seventeenth century water-driven stampers performed much of the work. Earlier texts merely mention the labor involved: Up and down continuously, for whoever wants to make paper stock must pound the fiber with a pestle until it turns to a pulp.[sp^8es] In the last thirty years Pan Jixing has observed two kinds of stampers in use: one for bamboo and the other for kozo. The bamboo stamper was a trip hammer that beat the fiber confined inside a mortar. The kozo stamper was similar except that there was no mortar, just a stone slab. This second stamper produced tapa-like sheets of beaten kozo, called 'banners.'[sp^9es] As the next step, Wang Zongmu writes, the workers "cut the pulp with knives as though there were preparing it for broiling."[sp^10es] In this way, the naturally long kozo fibers were shortened, perhaps to facilitate sheet formation. Pan Jixing describes this procedure in detail: Each banner is neatly folded over itself until there are thirty layers of pulp. The pile is then placed upright on a thick wooden bench. A noose is slipped over the banner and the end of the rope is held tight with the foot. Then a double-handled knife is gripped with both hands and pieces measuring 11 x 1.5 cm. are sliced off.[sp^11es] These strips are then added to the vat. Preparing the vat to make paper differs from region to region. Sometimes starch pastes are added, sometimes a viscous formation aid. These formation aids are known by a variety of appropriate terms: zhiyao (paper medicine), huashui (slippery water), and youshui (oily water). The Chinese use many different plants for these additives. Some of the most common ones mentioned are Hibiscus manihot, Hibiscus syriacus, Actinidia chinensis, Althaea officinalis, and Ilex pubescens. Plants mentioned less commonly are wild grape, elm, and Chinese olive tree.[sp^12es] After the vat is properly prepared, the molds are brought out to be used. Unfortunately, there is very little about molds in early texts. In the tenth century, Su Yijian mentions a fifty-foot long mold which was manipulated by dozens of workers trained to move in unison at the beat of a drum,[sp^13es] but this was an unusual mold. It is not until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that we catch a glimpse of the typical Chinese mold. Such a mold consists of three parts: a rigid frame, a screen, and deckle sticks. The frame supports the screen, which is made of bamboo or copper. Bamboo is the preferred material, in particular bamboo from kuzhu (Arundinaria densiflora Rendle) which has been scraped into thin splints and coated with unboiled varnish. The deckle sticks make the Chinese mold unique. Unlike Japanese and Western molds, the Chinese deckle is not a rigid frame, but four separate sticks. One stick is sewn to the top of the screen, another to the bottom. The other two are held at the sides of the screen as the sheets of paper are formed. The two side deckles are removed to facilitate couching. This is a description of the simplest mold. More complicated ones have various handles so that when large sheets of paper are formed more than one vatman can manipulate the mold. Other types of molds have hooks so that they can be attached to overhanging beams. This makes it easier to handle a mold weighted down by water and pulp. After the molds are brought out and the screens are checked over for wear and tear, the paper is made. The Chinese describe sheet formation as chao (seizing), lao (dredging), jie (lifting), yao (bailing), or dang (rocking). This last one approaches the more modern term bailang (oscillating the waves) or pailang (beating the waves). According to Liu Huiguo and Lin Yijun, pailang ensures that each sheet will have the same thickness, no matter how much pulp is in the water. They write: Before the vatman raises the screen [out of the water] to form a sheet of paper, he rocks the screen back and forth to keep the pulp, which is floating in formation aid, churning. Grasping the screen, he brings it up to meet the waves head on, 'lifting the screen out of the moving waves'[sp^14es] in one quick deft movement. This raising the screen to meet the waves is known in papermaking as 'beating the waves.' It serves to stir the pulp and send it onto the surface of the screen.[sp^15es] There are many other methods described in the literature but one more deserves mention here, for its understatement. This is from a 1941 survey of Chinese technology. The method is called yao (dipping). First the left side of the mold is dipped into the pulp just once. Then the right side is dipped once. The evenness and thickness of the paper is completely a matter of how the mold is handled.[sp^16es] After the sheets are formed they are pressed and dried. The principle drying method is to brush the damp sheets on to a wall with a coir brush. The wall is heated from within. This wall is sometimes constructed from a lattice work of bamboo and plastered over. This "baking cage" (beilong) is sometimes polished with t'ung oil to keep it smooth and, I believe, to prevent the sheets from adhering tenaciously to the plaster. Sometimes the paper is dried in spurs of four to five sheets. This is economical and tends to give a different surface quality to the inner sheets in each spur. After the sheets are dried, they are cut and stacked. Most of the sheets are sold as is, but some are treated with dye, wax, starch or alum, given coats of colored paste, dusted with mica, or even marbled. The recent books on Chinese papermaking I have discovered, together with older texts, offer knowledge long hidden from the West. What remains now is to experiment with some of these techniques and observe what happens when fermentation is repeated, when pulp is steamed instead of boiled, and when sheets are formed in the Chinese manner.   NOTES 1. Liu Renqing, Zhongguo Gudai Zaozhi Shihua, Qinggongye Chubanshe, Beijing, 1978. 2. See Chen You, On the Quality of Paper, Manoa Press, Honolulu, 1988. Pan Jixing (Zhongguo Zaozhi Jishu Shigao, Wenwu Chubanshe, Beijing, 1979) mentions that this plant may be Cocculus trilobus. 3. Yan Ruyu, Sansheng Bianfang Beilan (Shan Huo), Guangxu 8 nian, quan 10, pp. 5b-7b. 4. Song Yingxing, Tian Gong Kai Wu, Zhonghua Congshu Weiyuan Hui, Taibei, 1955, p. 314. For an English translation, which, unfortunately, contains many inaccuracies, see Sung Ying-Hsing, T'ien-kung K'ai-Wu: Chinese Technology in the Seventeenth Century (E-Tu Zen Sun and Shiou-shuan Sun, translators), the Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park and London, 1966. 5. Pan Jixing, op. cit., pp. 232 and 234. 6. See the essay by Huang Xingsan (late nineteenth century), as quoted in Liu Renqing, op. cit., pp. 67-68. Huang also mentions lye made from huangjingmu (Vitex negundo), a plant used in papermaking and textile weaving. 7. Yan Ruyu, op. cit., p. 6b. (translation mine) 8. Fei Zhu, Shu Jian Pu, (Meishu Congshu, vol. 13), Shenzhou Guoguang She, Shangahi, 1947, p. 242. [translation mine] 9. Pan Jixing, op. cit., p. 242. [translation mine] 10. Quoted in Pan Jixing, op. cit., pp. 111, 114-115. For an English translation, see Wang Zongmu, An Essay on Paper, Manoa Press, Honolulu, (in press). 11. Pan Jixing, op. cit., p. 242. 12. For a detailed discussion of formation aid, see Pan Jixing, op. cit., pp. 203-209. 13. Su Yijian, Wenfang Si Pu (Baibu Congshu Jicheng, vol. 8, no. 3, pt. 2), Taibei, 1968, Yiwen Yinshuguan. 14. Here the authors are quoting Wang Zongmu. 15. Liu Huiguo and Lin Yijun (contributors), Zaozhi Shihua, Kexue Jishu Chubanshe, Shanghai, 1983, p. 47. [translation mine] 16. Anon., Zhonghuamin Jian Gongyi Tushuo, Jicheng Tushu Gongsi, Hong Kong, 1941, p. 249. (translation mine)

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