While I was an undergrad, I was fortunate enough to have been able to visit China as part of a study-abroad program. Myself, my professor and one other student spent five weeks traveling around the southern part of China doing research for a paper we intended to publish at the end of that summer. Although our focus was fact-gathering, we had several “free exploration” days written into our itinerary so that we could better experience the country. During one of these days near Xi’an (the capital city of Shaanxi province in the south), we decided to take a tour of a tiny handmade papermaking facility located in a rural village we were passing through.

I had never seen the papermaking process before, but thanks to this visit I was able to actually participate in it — fittingly so it seemed, as the very origin of paper itself comes from China. The facility was tiny and spartan; a low stone building enclosing a courtyard that contained much of the raw material they used to make the paper. They had electricity through a generator, but most of the procedures were carried out manually. We were there during the high summer heat, and that’s part of what I remember most: the sweltering temperature and the buzzing of insects in the grass fields outside the papermaking building.

After we were introduced to some of the workers, we were invited to step through the process of how a sheet of handmade paper is constructed. First we were taken to the courtyard where a large vat of water and wood pulp fibers was being worked on. The workers had us take large screens and sift the pulp and water mixture through them in order to get a thin “sheet” of fibrous material on the bottom of the screen. This was then set aside to firm up. When the fiber had congealed but hadn’t completely dried, we lifted the sheet from the screen and placed it on a stack of others of its kind to dry further. This stack was then transferred to a large wooden press, where the sheets would be kept as flat as possible during that phase of the drying process. After these had stiffened up, the workers had us pull individual sheets out and hang them with clips to a drying line where it would dry to its final state. The sight of hundreds of large sheets of paper gently fluttering in the breeze that day is an image that has stayed with me ever since.

The end result was a roughly three by four foot sheet of handmade paper, thick and fibrous. The workers let us keep a sheet each, although I regret to say that my sheet didn’t survive the rigors of travel in the country. It was really something else to see the facility that day: the speed and ease with which the workers did their duties and the papermaking process from beginning to end. The thing that stands out the most, however, is a feeling of peace that I got there and several other times during my stay in China. Looking out over the drying sheets of paper, the sun beating down on my head with nothing to hear but the drone of the insects, I was struck by the simplicity of the existence there, and the sense of connectedness to a culture and a people. In this way the papermaking process had become a metaphor for the weaving together of a community — the threading of random individual fibers through pressure, each becoming dependent upon the next as they formed into something beautiful, like paper gently floating in the breeze.

Recommended Link:
LCI’s Handmade Paper Offerings

Will Collins
willc@lcipaper.com