Papermaking

technology

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.

A technology is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.