Eastern Han Eunuch, the Key Figure Who Improved and Systematized Papermaking
Cai Lun (c. 63–121) was an Eastern Han eunuch who, while serving as director of the imperial workshops (in charge of the manufacture of court articles), directed the improvement of a process for making paper from cheap raw materials such as tree bark, hemp ends, rags, and old fishing nets, greatly lowering the cost of production. Before this, early paper objects already existed in China, but Cai Lun’s contribution was to turn papermaking into a systematized process that was stably repeatable and easy in materials, and this was the true reason "paper" could replace bamboo slips and silk to become the mainstream writing material for the two thousand years after. In 105 he presented the improved paper to Emperor He of Han, and this paper was thereafter called "Marquis Cai paper." Papermaking passed through the Silk Road and the Arab world, taking about a thousand years to reach Europe, which had long relied on costly parchment for writing before; the spread of paper was the material precondition for the later mass scale of printing.
Before Cai Lun, the papermaking process was unstable and costly, and bamboo slips were heavy and silk expensive, both limiting the scale of written record and transmission. Cai Lun systematically worked out a papermaking process using tree bark, rags, and waste fishing nets as raw materials, of very low cost and wide sourcing, and this at last gave paper the real conditions to replace bamboo slips and silk and become a popular writing material.
After papermaking spread in China, it slowly traveled west through the Central Asian trade routes, and after the mid-eighth-century Battle of Talas some captured Tang papermakers brought the technology into Samarkand in the Arab world, whence it took several more centuries to reach Europe by roundabout ways. Before this, European book copying relied heavily on costly parchment, and the introduction of paper directly cleared the obstacle of material cost for the later mass application of Gutenberg’s printing.
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