Four Great Inventions of Ancient China – Paper

China was the first nation to invent paper. Before its invention, words were written on various natural materials by ancient peoples-on grass stalks by the Egyptians, on earthen plates by the Mesopotamians, on tree leaves by the Indians, on sheepskin by the Europeans and strangest of all, even inscribed on bamboo or wooden strips, tortoise shells or shoulder blades of an ox by the early Chinese. Later, inspired by the process of silk reeling, the people in ancient China succeeded in first making a kind of paper called "bo" out of silk. But its production was very expensive due to the scarcity of materials. In the early days of the 2nd century, a court official named Cai Lun produced a new kind of paper from bark, rags, wheat stalks and other materials. It was relatively cheap, light, thin, durable and more suitable for brush writing. At the beginning of the 3rd century, the paper making process first spread to Korea and then to Japan. It reached the Arab world in the Tang Dynasty, and Europe in the 12th century. In the16th century, it went to America by way of Europe and then gradually spread all over the world.
Before paper was invented, Qin Shihuang, the first emperor in Chinese history, had to go over 120 kilos of official documents written on bamboo or wooden strips. A paper map in Western Han Dynasty, unearthed in Tianshui, Gansu Province, in 1986