Paper
Hemp paper fragments at Fangmatan in Gansu predate Cai Lun's 'invention' in 105 CE by centuries. Cai's contribution was a formal recipe — bark, hemp waste, old rags, fishnets, water, screen — and the institutional weight of the imperial court. For a thousand years afterwards the dominant fiber in Chinese paper was hemp.
Vat and mould
Pulped hemp fiber is suspended in a vat of water. The papermaker dips a mould — a wooden frame with a wire screen — into the slurry, lifts it level, and the fibers mat into a wet sheet. The sheet is couched onto wet felt, pressed, and dried. The deckle (the removable frame around the mould) leaves the rough characteristic edge.
Pulp · screen · couching
Four acres of forest
Lyster Dewey and Jason Merrill's 1916 USDA bulletin reported that hemp hurd paper 'would be classed as a No. 1 machine-finish printing paper.' The 'one acre of hemp = 4.1 acres of forest' line is from Popular Mechanics 1938, not the bulletin — but the substrate is real. Hemp paper takes acid-free bleaching and lasts centuries.
USDA Bulletin 404 · 1916
On the page
Hemp paper is still hand-made by specialists — Twinrocker in Indiana, St Cuthberts Mill in Somerset, Hemp Papers Inc. for artists. It takes fountain-pen ink without bleeding, holds watercolour, and outlasts wood-pulp papers by an order of magnitude.
Hemp Papers Inc. · Twinrocker · St Cuthberts
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