What materials were used in ancient papermaking?

When improving papermaking, Cai Lun was responsible for supervising all kinds of utensils used in the palace. He picked out bark, rags, old fishing nets, etc. And let the craftsmen chop them up and soak them in a big pool. After a period of time, the sundries in it rot, but the fibers are not easy to rot, so they stay.

He asked the craftsmen to pick up the soaked raw materials, put them in a stone mortar, and kept stirring them until they became slurry, then picked up the sticky things with bamboo sticks, dried them and turned them into paper. Cai Lun and his craftsmen tried again and again, and produced light, flexible, easily available, widely available and low-priced paper.

Extended data:

The birth of written language has brought mankind into civilized society, and written language has become an important carrier of human communication and cultural communication. Oracle Bone Inscriptions, wood chips and bamboo slips became the earliest carriers of recorded characters. Of course, carriers like this also have some shortcomings, so they came into being with the application of papermaking technology.

With the evolution of the times and continuous innovation, paper media was not widely used until Cai Lun presented paper to Emperor Wu of Han Dynasty in A.D. 105. This year, Cai Lun summarized the previous management and skills of papermaking and began to improve papermaking technology.

Another important factor in papermaking is beating and beating of fibers. By using a stirring knife and high-power machinery, plant fibers are bifurcated and broken, and then paper is made with great binding force, unlike smooth silky fibers that easily slip off. In addition, the crumbs and paste produced after pulping have the functions of filling pores and bonding paper in the paper making process. In ancient or modern manual papermaking, framed bamboo was used to screen floating fibers in pulp.

Because the front and back edges of the screening action are short and the left and right edges are long, the fibers of the hand-made sheet can be arranged freely in all directions very evenly, and there is no silk flow problem mentioned in this paper. Then there is the modern waterless dry papermaking method, which uses air to spread and bond the paper, and its fibers are also arranged freely, without the direction of silk flow.

Baidu Encyclopedia-Cai Lun