ABSTRACT
Back of the invention of printing lies the use ofpaper, which is the most certain and the most complete of China’s inventions. While other nations may dispute with China the honor of those discoveries where China found only the germ, to be developed and made useful to mankind in the West, the manufacture of paper was sent forth from the Chinese dominions as a fully developed art. Paper of rags, paper of hemp, paper of various plant fibers, paper of cellulose, paper sized and loaded to improve its quality for writing, paper of various colors, writing paper, wrapping paper, even paper napkins and toilet paper-all were in general use in China during the early centuries of our era. The paper, the secret of whose manufacture was taught by Chinese prisoners to their Arab captors at Samarkand in the eighth century, and which in turn was passed on by Moorish subjects to their Spanish conquerors in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, is in all essential particulars the paper that we use today. And even in our own times China has continued to furnish new developments in paper manufacture, both the so-called “India paper” and papier-mâché having been introduced from China into the West during the nineteenth century.
