During the trip in 1990 I conducted two interviews that have had a lasting impact on my ventures in hand papermaking. What follows are brief excerpts of conversations that I had in Beijing with Dai Jia Zhang, chairman of a special committee for the history of Chinese handmade paper, and in Hangzhou with Lu Fang, a woodcut artist and printmaker. We discussed xuanzhi 2 which at the time was considered an off-limits, secret topic for foreign visitors. During these interviews, I had an epiphany about how I should process papermaking fiber as they did in ancient China, with less haste, using gentler chemicals (if needed at all), and letting nature do most of the work. These principles have guided me throughout my career. Dai Jia Zhang (djz): The xuan paper has a reputation of "lasting a thousand years." Helmut Becker (hb): My question is how many people would know every step of how to make the xuan paper so that it will not be lost? In various places in China, where the xuan paper is handmade, the craftsmen have kept it up. The families who have inherited the craft keep it up in their own special way, learn it through experience, and pass it on. So far so good, and we will keep our fingers crossed that it will continue like that. 3 Do you know the name of the shrub or tree that the xuan paper is made from? \[The bark of a tree called\] tan 4 is sun bleached from six months to a year. \[Tan\] is a rare tree that tends to grow just in that area. It is something like paper mulberry. That is no "secret." In the hand papermaking villages in Southern Anhui province, particularly at Jingxian, the highest quality handmade paper, the famous xuan paper, is manufactured.5 The xuan paper is prized by artists and bookbinders, painters and calligraphers. These hand papermaking villages are politically inaccessible to the outside world and also, within China itself, to most Chinese. What is the nature of the sun bleaching? The \[inner\] bark of the tan tree \[is pulped\] then treated with lye and beaten into a wet, mushy pulp. It is put onto a rocky slope or by the river, and you turn it over. It will become wet; the pulp must not be too thin. See that it is loose, not solid, so that air can oxidize the fibers, so that it can breathe with the air. Lu Fang: The xuan paper best for printing woodcuts is of double thickness; it has a double layer. Skillful hand papermakers, who exercise great patience every step of the way, make the xuan paper. The paper should not contain acid, should be neutral. The raw material is from a very particular, certain kind of bush, the bark of the tan tree. And also a very special kind of rice straw, not the usual kind of rice straw is used. The tan plant is a special kind of bush, very slow to grow, takes three years to grow to a harvestable thickness. Then you cut it down and tear off the bark, peel the bark. Then you put it into a tank mixed with lime and leave it for over a month. Then wash the fibers with very clean water from mountain streams, very clean water. Even this water is still not clean enough for making the paper. You have to use water directly from a mountain, without any pollution, very clean water! The workers pick an outer layer of a small hill, and then use film cover to pave a layer for bark. You leave it for over a year with nature, to bleach with the sun. The not too loose but not too compact fiber is left lying outside on the mountainside to weather through mist, rain, snow, and sun. Xuanzhi will never change color. ___________ notes 1. The delegation was organized by Judith Sugarman, whose article, "Hand Papermaking in China," appeared in the Summer 1990 issue of Hand Papermaking (vol. 5, no. 1). 2. Xuanzhi was first handmade in Xuanzhou (now Jing County of East China's Anhui Province), thus given the name xuan paper (xuanzhi, 宣纸). 3. In 2009, the traditional handicraft of making xuan paper was added to UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. http:// www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?RL=00201 (accessed August 31, 2010). 4. Tan is blue sandalwood, Pteroceltis tartarinowii, known in Chinese as chhing than. Tsuen-hsuin Tsien, Paper and Printing, volume 5, part 1 of Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 61. 5. Dai Jia Zhang indicated that there are three kinds of tan paper in production: 1) 100 percent tan; 2) tan mixed with 30 to 50 percent rice straw; and 3) tan mixed with 80 percent rice straw or 80 percent wheat straw and wood pulp. 6. For more on xuan paper, see Nancy Norton Tomasko, "Chinese Handmade Paper, A Richly Varied Thing," Hand Papermaking vol. 19, no. 1 (Summer 2004): 20–32. Also, Lucien X. Polastron, Le Papier, 2000 ans d'histoire et de savoirfaire (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale Editions, 1999), 43–44 and 48–55. Inspired by what I witnessed in China in 1990, I lime-boiled Natsaja and Belinka flax fiber and retted and bleached it on the snow, under sun and waxing moon, in Southern Ontario during the winter of 2010. This gentle processing produces a strong, snowywhite flax paper that relates to the spirit of traditional Chinese hand papermaking. The name of the paper sample and the epigraph are taken from a seventeenth-century Japanese poem about bleaching cloth ("sarashi") in the Uji River near Kyoto. Paper Sample: Sarashi helmut becker …send down moon light send down moon light…"
