The traditional date given for Cai Lun's papermaking, AD 105.
The journey of paper
“Who invented paper?”
Chinese tradition says that in AD 105 a court official named Cai Lun presented the emperor with a new writing material, made by pulping tree bark, hemp, old rags and worn-out fishing nets, then drying the mash in thin sheets on a screen. Archaeologists have since found fragments of paper older than that, so Cai Lun probably improved and standardised paper rather than inventing it from scratch.
For centuries papermaking stayed mostly in East Asia. A well-known story says it spread west after a battle in AD 751, when Chinese papermakers were taken prisoner and brought to Samarkand, in today’s Uzbekistan. Historians now think paper was already known in Central Asia before then, but Samarkand did become a great papermaking city.
From there the craft moved into the Islamic world. Baghdad had paper mills by the 790s, and paper soon replaced papyrus across Egypt, Arabia and North Africa. Libraries and scholarship flourished on it.
Paper reached Europe through Islamic Spain. The town of Xàtiva is usually named as home to one of Europe’s first paper mills, by the 12th century. Italy, France and Germany followed. England’s first known mill came at the end of the 1400s.
Look closer: Paper took around a thousand years to travel from China to Europe. Gutenberg’s press would make it matter more than ever.