Why Paper Is Eternal - Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press ...

Cai Lun introduced his innovation to the court in 105 A.D and the
Chinese became the first great papermaking culture. But the new technology
did not immediately race across the world and triumph over existing media. It
spread slowly, first to Korea and Japan, then west across Central Asia. In the
year 751 A.D., the Chinese lost a battle in Turkestan. Some of the Chinese
soldiers who were taken prisoner knew how to make paper and turned over the
secret to their Turkish captors, and soon papermaking was underway in
Samarkand. 40 From there, the technology moved around the Middle East and
finally, at some point around 1,000 A.D., it reached Western Europe. The
oldest known example of Western paper is The Missal of Silos, a church
manuscript from the eleventh century preserved in a Benedictine abbey in
central Spain. 41
When paper arrived in a given society, rather than wiping out the
existing communications media – which were, principally, papyrus and
parchment – it moved in beside them. It was accepted and embraced to varying
degrees, and over different stretches of time, depending on social, cultural and
political circumstances. In Egypt, for instance, it appears that paper was quickly
recognized as an improvement over the relatively inflexible and less durable
papyrus (a paper-like writing material made from the stalk of the papyrus plant,
from which paper takes its name). An Egyptian thank-you letter written around
890 A.D closes with the phrase, “Pardon the papyrus.” Since the note appears
on higher quality papyrus, historians have assumed that the writer was
apologizing for not using paper. 42 By the eleventh century, Egyptian demand
for paper was so great that “mummies were being disinterred for supplies of
cloth for paper-making.” In Baghdad in the year 1226, there were more than
one hundred papermakers and booksellers operating on a single street. 43
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