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Show upward of cighteen hundred years it has been made continually in man f the provinces, but even with this unique background and with countles generations of training in the handicrafis, the modern papers of China ar not all that could be desired It will not be within my |)ruvmm: t0 prophesy regarding the fture o the handmade paper industry of China, but it is likely that there ar man local consumption for hundreds of years to come. In the more accessibl regions, however, there is a tendency to turn to machine-made papers fo many purposes, including even a substitute for the absorbent, unsize mulberry bark papers used for brush writing. Within the past several year young Chinese engineers have established a machine mill in Foochow Fukien Province, where the soft brush writing papers are being successfull manufactured. The workmen at this mill have not been lacking in cunnin and mgcmuty,and have imitated the qualitis and desirable characteristic of the nativ handmade writing papers, even to placing a bamboo "laid mat from a hand mould around the "dandy-roll" of the machine, thu causing every sheet to be impressed with the "laid and chain lines" of typical Chinese hand-mould. There are no European papers that len themselves to brush writing, and therefore the Chinese scribes have foun only Oriental handmade paper satisfactory for this purpose In the section of this book dealing with moulds I have given a description and illustration of a particular Chinese "wove" mould, photograph 8 such as I surmise was the original type used by T'ai Lun at the inventio unique in Oriental papermaking, and, from my own observations, it i found only in a fe ts in China at the present time, the mos accessible localities being in Kwangtung Province As previously explained, the carliest paper that has been discovere Al rights reserved |
