Since the invention of writing, people had been trying to come up with something easier to

write on than papyrus or parchment, and also something easier and cheaper to make. But it
took 3000 years to come up with paper! Paper was invented around 100 BC in China. In 105 AD,
under the Han Dynasty emperor Ho-Ti, a government official in China named Ts’ai Lun was the
first to start a paper-making industry.

Ts’ai Lun seems to have made his paper by mixing finely chopped mulberry bark and hemp
rags with water, mashing it flat, and then pressing out the water and letting it dry in the sun.
He may have based his idea on bark cloth, which was very common in China and also made
from mulberry bark. Ts’ai Lun’s paper was a big success, and began to be used all over China.
With paper available, Buddhist monks in China began to work on ways of mass-producing
prayers. By 650 AD they were block-printing prayers.

Even after people in China began to use paper, it took another thousand years before people
were using paper all over Eurasia. By the 400s AD, people in India were also making paper, and
by the 600s paper had reached Korea and Japan too. With the expansion of the Islamic Empire
into Pakistan about 700 AD, people in the Abbasid Caliphate also began to use paper. For the
traders of the Silk Road, paper had a big advantage: it absorbed ink, so you couldn’t erase it.
That made forgery harder.

By this time, people in the country of the Aztecs (modern Mexico) had also, independently,
invented paper. Their paper was made out of agarve plant fibers, and people used it to make
books.

Meanwhile, in China people were using paper in more and more different ways. They were
using paper for kites (650 AD), playing cards (800 AD), folding fans (1100s AD), and even, by
the 1300s, for toilet paper!

Europeans were still using parchment, or buying paper at high prices from Egypt. But that soon
changed. By 1250 AD, Egyptian paper-making technology reached Italy, and the Italians made
good paper and sold it all over Europe. Then the Black Death wrecked the paper industry in
Egypt. In 1338, French monks began to make their own paper. Europeans used water wheels
(destroying salmon runs) to power paper mills, so they could make paper more cheaply. By the
1350s, Europeans were selling paper (along with other things like sugar and sewing thimbles)
to people in North Africa and Mamluk Egypt and West Asia.

By 1411 – nearly a millennium and a half after it was invented – people in Germany began to
produce their own rag paper. Once they had learned to make paper, they became more
interested in also learning about Chinese printing, and a man called Gutenberg produced the
first printed Bible in 1453.