Cai Lun (Tsai Lun)

SUBJECT AREA: Paper and printing

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b. c.57 AD China

d. c.121 AD China

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Chinese Director of Imperial Workshops who is usually credited with the invention of paper.

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He was a confidential secretary to the Emperor. He became Director of the Imperial Workshops and he is said to have invented, or sponsored the invention of, paper around the year 105 AD. Recent studies, however, suggest that paper was already known in China two centuries earlier. The method of making it has hardly varied in principle since that time. The raw materials, then usually old fishing nets and clothing rags, were boiled with water, to which alkali in the form of wood ash was sometimes added. The resulting pulp was then beaten in a stone mortar with a stone or a wooden mallet. The pulp was then mixed and stirred with a large amount of water, and a sieve or mould (formed on a wooden frame carrying a mat of thin reeds sewn together) was dipped into it and was shaken to help the fibres in the layer of pulp to interlock and thus form a sheet of paper. The rest of the process consisted, then as now, of getting rid of the water: the sheets of paper were dried and bleached by leaving them to lie in the sun.

Some of China's many inventions were achieved independently in Western Europe, but it seems that Europe's knowledge of papermaking stems from the Chinese. It was not until the eighth century that it passed into the Islamic world and so, first by contact with the Moors in Spain in the twelfth century, into Western Europe.

Cai Lun was later made a marquis. Further promotion followed when he was regarded as the god of papermaking.

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Further Reading

J.Needham, 1985, Science and Civilisation in China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Vol. V (1): Clerks and Craftsmen in China and the West, 1970.

LRD