Papermaking

Assembled from 17 blocks · 1 evidence · 13 related

1. Story
2. The technique of macerating plant fibre into pulp and forming it into sheets on a screen. Chinese tradition credits the Han court official Cai Lun with its invention in 105 CE, though archaeological paper fragments predate him by more than two centuries. Its westward transmission is often attributed to Chinese papermakers captured at Talas in 751, a story that appears only in later sources such as al-Tha'alibi in the eleventh century; paper was demonstrably already circulating in Central Asia well before 751, so the battle is better read as a marker than a cause. Samarkand became a production centre in the eighth century, a mill is recorded at Baghdad by the 790s, and paper reached Iberia and Italy by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. A technique, not a place.
3. Knowledge
4. Samarkand
5. Papermaking
6. Connections
7. Paper
8. Samarkand
9. Battle of Talas
10. Pamir Mountains
11. Bukhara
12. Sogdian merchant networks
13. Papermaking
14. Arab conquest of Transoxiana
15. Battle of Talas
16. Evidence
17. Five substantially surviving letters of Sogdian merchants, undelivered, showing how the eastern routes actually operated: resident family colonies in a chain of cities from Sogdiana to the Hexi Corridor, goods moved between them in relays, business conducted by correspondence and credit rather than by single long journeys. Letter 2 reports the sack of Luoyang, which anchors the conventional dating to around 313 CE. The letters are written on paper, establishing that the material had reached the far western Chinese frontier by that date.