Paper-Making and Printing: Chronology, Geography, Technology and Political Context

Based on Dard Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technology of an Ancient Craft (London: Crescent Press, 1957) with corrections from more recent scholarship by Jonathan Bloom (2001), Edmund Burke III (2009), Abdul Ahad Hannawi (2012), and Valery Hansen (2015).  [Note that paper's origins begin in eras when "history" was not often recorded unless events were too catastrophic to forget (Vesuvius erupts in 79 CE, killing Pliny the Elder and thousands in Pompei and Herculaneum, causing Pliny's son to write two letters to the historian, Tacitus; a Japanese Empress receives an impressive gift recorded by court scribes).  Later eras' earliest "historians" mixed together confirmable events with myths that explained the existence of important cultural features with dates, names, and places assigned by tradition to stand in for unrecoverable actions by many people in many places.  This "traditional" history is subject to interogation, research, and the emergence of new evidence found by modern scholars.  Being debatable, unlike myths, it is also subject to change as a result of more recent work.  Even moveable-type printing's invention occurred on the brink of widespread historical recording.  Fortunately (?), Johannes Gutenberg was sued by his financial backer, Johann Fust, and lost his press and type fount.  Those legal records fix a point in time before which printing must have been invented.  Gutenberg lost the business, but the European world gained a powerful technology primed to take advantage of the newly available supplies of paper, which encouraged more paper production and the spread of literacy as a "software" technology.  Traditional/mythic people and events below are in black; confirmable/historically verifiable people and events below are in red.]

• C3 BCE  Meng T'ien in China is traditionally credited with inventing the hair-bristle painting brush, making painted calligraphy possible.  Documents were painted upon woven silk.  Many survive from the lucrative "Silk Road" commerce in sites buried by desert sands and preserved by extremely dry climate in western China.  (Also see Valery Hansen, below.)
  
• 105 CE  Ts'ai Lun [also Cai Lun], eunuch and Chinese imperial servant, traditionally credited with first reporting paper's invention (by others?) and traditionally is credited with paper's invention.  His apprentice, Tso Tzu-yi, said to have improved the process. (Hunter 48-53).  Modern scholars believe this to be a popular myth representing a much longer, more complex origin process (see Bloom and Burke, below).
  
• 610 CE  the monk Kokyo introduces the concept of paper to the Japanese Empress Shokoku. (Hunter 53)
  
• 708-806 CE / 806-1155 CE, the Nara and Heian Eras of Japan, an annual imperial paper levy on papermaking guild supplied the government with 20,000 sheeets of the finest paper and 46,000 sheeets of colored papers for non-writing uses. (Hunter 54-59).  Court and commercial records corroborate this.
  
• 632-651 CE,  Sassanian Empire (Persia) gradually falls to the successors of Muhammad after the Prophet's death in 632 CE.  Arab armies march east to fill the power vacuum and refugees flee before them to the land of the Sogdians, called by Europeans since Alexander's time, Transoxiana; 659 CE  Tang Empire Chinese appear in Samarqand and Bukhara, cities of Transoxiana or Sogdia (modern Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan) as the Tang Emperor extended his rule in the west.  749-750 CE  Abbasids (descended from the Prophet's uncle, Abbas) revolt and establish Abbasid Caliphate in Iraq, Umayyad Caliphate refugees flee to Cordoba (al-Andalus, modern Spain), perhaps taking paper-making technology with them.  (Bloom 42 ff.)
  
• 751 CE  Battle of Talas (Taraz or Tharaz) River, Turkmenistan, Islamic armies of the Abbasid Caliphate and their Tibetan Empire allies, defeat Imperial Tang Dynasty Chinese armies, capturing many Chinese prisoners.  Traditional narratives claim they included a group of paper craftsmen who are induced to reveal the secret of papermaking.  Whatever the truth of the "Battle of Talas"paper technology story, the craft of paper-making and the use of paper for documents, replacing papyrus and parchment, spreads west to Samarkand, Baghdad, Damascus, Egypt, Morocco and al-Andalus (Spain), within regions controlled by Islamic culture. (Hunter 60)  Most early sacred Islamic texts are manuscripts on paper, which is good circumstantial evidence for the transfer of paper technology from China to Arab culture around this time.  However, the Battle of Talas River story appears to be a popular myth first reported by the Arab historian, Thaalibi, 300 years after the battle (Bloom 42).  Material evidence points to an earlier date of technology transfer.  Paper analysis demonstrates that C8 Chinese paper was made directly from vegetable "bast," raw fibers sometimes mixed with beaten rags, whereas the paper of the earliest Islamic texts were made mainly from beaten rags, sometimes mixed with bast, so the method of production had changed significantly during the time of transfer, not an "instantaneous" event (Bloom 44-45).  Letters written on paper in Arabic, Chinese, and Sogdian were discovered together in the ruins of a fortress occupied by a Sogdian ruler fleeing the Muslim conquest in 722-723 CE, decades before the battle (Bloom and Hansen).  Still, the core of the "Battle of Talas" story offers a correct, if massively condensed outline of papermaking's movement from China in the East to the Abbasid caliphate in the West via the Silk Roads amid military conflicts contesting the rule of Central Asia.  Consider papermaking technology as but one element in the collision between the Chinese Tang empire's westward expansion and the spread of the Abbasid Muslim rule to the east, a conflict whose consequences are still working themselves out in the C21.
  
• 770 CE Japanese Empress Shitoku commissions the "Million Printed Prayers," a printed block book of charms against disease, distributed to shrines all over Japan.  Many of the shrines and books still survive.  By tradition, dated 24 May 770 but no dated copies survive. (Hunter 61)
• 868 CE, May 11 (13th day of the fourth moon of the ninth year of Xiantong), Wang Chieh (also "Jie") prints The Diamond Sutra, the first dated book printed in the world.  He distributed it for free on 17-foot scrolls in the memory of his parents. (Hunter 61)
  
• ca. 850-1300 CE, papermaking spreads to Europe from Morocco to Moorish Spain to Italy, France, Germany and the Netherlands, for use in manuscripts but not for important books intended for long life, which were still made from parchment (animal skins). Hunter (60 and 114) dates papermaking's movement into al-Andalus  around 1150 CE.  Hannawi (20-24) makes a persuasive circumstantial case for Spanish papermaking as early as the mid-800s based on the rapid increase in book production in Umayyad al-Andalus and throughout the Islamic lands.  Perhaps Hannawi's most important point is that, "contrary to what the Chinese did, the Arabs did not make papermaking a state secret, nor did they restrict its manufacturing or regulate its production.  It seems that paper remained a commodity on the free market, and its manufacture open to whoever wanted to set up a mill" (Hannawi 24; see also Burke 177-8).
  
• Moorish papermakers used moulds made of vegetable fibers, which were replaced by wire in Europe after wire-drawing technology made cheap wire production possible in bulk. (Hunter 90-91)
• German papermaking began in 1450-1455 CE Around 1454-5, Johannes Gutenberg printed 160 to 180 copies of a Bible set with 42 lines per column ("the 42-line Bible"); perhaps the first quarter of the copies were printed on parchment but most were printed on paper.  Gutenberg's invention of moveable-type printing creatively combined a series of smaller earlier inventions.  He used family expertise in metal working, making pilgrim badges and mirrors from special alloys, to create durable and affordable metal type.  He adapted the power of a mechanical press to force the inked type into the tough and liquid resistant European paper, probably adapting the screw-press then in use to force water out of freshly laid stacks of paper and to impress decorative metal designs like those of the pilgrim badges.  He may have adapted oil- based paints used by panel painters for his invention of an oil-based ink that would stick to metal type, unlike water-based manuscript ink previously in use.  Most importantly, perhaps, for the economic viability of the whole project, for the majority of his print run, he took advantage of the recently developed supply of cheap paper, at first imported from the Piedmont region of Italy but later produced locally.  Paper mills, like print shops, were highly competitive enterprises like our modern digital inventions in their potential to make, and to destroy, great fortunes.
  
• 1495 CE, John Tate of Hereford operates the first English papermill.  First used in known surviving printed book by Wynkyn de Worde, formerly William Caxton's pressman, the Bartolomeus, 1495.  (Hunter 115)  Tate's mill goes out of business in 1507 because of cheaper European paper imports.  (Hunter n. 116)  Almost all English books are printed on European paper until the late C16.  Compare this with the current international market in microchips, leading to occasional market hegemonies because of breakthroughs in technology, attracting competition, which returns the market to a distributed production base.
  

Some Dard Hunter principles of papermaking and text production (supported by historical evidence):

• The first Asian papers available for printing were "only paper that had primarily been made for writing . . . and therefore the method of printing was adapted to the paper at hand--not the paper to the printing" (Hunter 61).  I.e., early papers (e.g., Japanese rice paper) were translucent and made for scrolls, painted only on one side because 2-sided writing would show through and make both sides illegible.  Early printed Japanese books were woodblock prints on single sides of scrolls (Hunter 61-2).
  

• European paper was coated with gelatin sizing made from animal bones, which created "a hard, opaque and impervious surface well adapted to the European mode of writing with a quill pen," but not for printing.  "It was this unielding linen and cotton paper, made impervious to fluid writing ink by the application of animal gelatin, that made necesssary the invention of the printing press" (Hunter 62).  I.e., the immense pressure of the adapted goldsmith's press forced the ink-coated type down into the paper, whereas ink brushed onto Asian papers stands on the paper's surface, ideal for ink painting (sumi).   European printing paper sheets were sprinkled with water before they were run through the press, in order to soften them enough to better accept the impressions of inked type.  The need for linen rags and sheep and cow bones to make printing paper led to their collection by "rag and bone" merchants in English cities.  Sometimes, linen rag shortages led governments to forbid their export to support the now-essential industries of papermaking and printing.  Eventually, in the 1800s, a water or steam powered paper-making machine replaced hand-laid paper, and a method for turning chemically treated wood pulp into flexible paper replaced fabric rag based papers.  Again, current attempts to control the export of microchip technology come to mind, together with the motivation for rapid innovations in chip manufacturing.  The marketplace, and international political competition, drive the emergence of new "Gutenbergs."

Additional Sources:
Jonathan Bloom, Writing Before Print: The History and Import of Paper in the Islamic World, (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001).  Especially see Chapter 1, "The Invention of Paper," pp. 42-45.  Available as an ebook from the Goucher Library.
Edmund Burke III, "Islam at the Center: Technological Complexes and the Roots of Modernity," Journal of World History (June 2009) Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 165-186.  JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40542756.
Abdul Ahad Hannawi, "The Role of the Arabs in the Introduction of Paper to Europe," MELA Notes, No. 85 (2012), pp. 14-29. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23392489
Valery Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015
"The Morgan Gutenberg Bible Online," The Morgan Library & Museum.  Available at https://www.themorgan.org/collection/Gutenberg-Bible