Spare a thought this millennium for one of the people whose invention you use every day, every hour, perhaps even this very second as you read this article, but whose name you probably have never heard before. His name was Ts'ai Lun and he was a eunuch who worked at the Han imperial court (206 BC - AD 220 ). His job was to keep a record of the palace inventory and the distribution and collection of implements and instruments. Writing in those days was done on silk, which was very expensive, or on heavy books made of bamboo, weighty tomes (literally) which had to be moved around on carts.
Around 105 AD, Ts'ai Lun worked out a process of washing and steeping bamboo pieces in a water pit, digesting the pulp in a kiln along with bark, sackcloth, rags and fishnets, then rolling out and pressing the resulting mess and hanging it up to dry on a bamboo frame. The final result was paper. One can dismiss Ts'ai Lun as an accidental hero, as Malcolm Rutherford did in The Guardian some years ago, arguing that being the first to make paper was "a bit like plumbing; the spin-offs were enormous but someone was bound to invent it in the end". But no one else thought of the idea for a thousand years after he did. Nor can one underestimate the impact on the world of Ts'ai Lun, whose name rarely appears in western encyclopedias. I was glad to see he is included in a book called The 100 (Simon & Schuster, 1978) by Michael Hart, who ranks him as the 7th most important person in history after Muhammad, Isaac Newton, Jesus Christ, Buddha, Confucius and St Paul.
The strategic and cultural role of paper in the advance of civilisation is comparable to that of information technology in the late 20th century; if you didn't have it, you couldn't advance as fast as those who did. The first people to record their words on moveable scripts of any kind were the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans. They generally used papyrus rolls. While Ts'ai Lun was still struggling with his bamboo books, western scholars had advanced to using parchment or vellum made from sheepskin or calfskin.
Paper was a giant leap forward. It was far more advanced than parchment. It was cheaper and more efficient. It brought about a revolution in the use of words. Paper allowed for the rapid spread of ideas and theories, the explanation to a wide audience of mathematics and astronomy, the mass circulation to people hungry for stories of poetry and prose, and the publication of laws and proclamations. It opened up a world of books, textbooks, wall posters, pamphlets and newssheets. Eventually it would be used as money and as the universal means of wrapping and packaging.
The Chinese manufacturing process remained a secret for centuries, even to neighbours of the Han Dynasty empire, though the Arabs in AD 751 kidnapped some Chinese paper-makers and started producing paper in Samarkand and Baghdad soon afterwards.
IT WAS to be 1,000 years before the use of paper spread to Europe and during this time China became the most advanced civilisation in the world. Prior to the 2nd century, as Hart points out, Chinese civilisation was less advanced than the west, but during the next millennium its accomplishments exceeded those of the rest of the world. The crucial factor in China's failure to advance before the 2nd century was the lack of convenient writing material. But with a suitable means of writing available - paper was widely used in the Middle Kingdom after Ts'ai had his invention approved by the Emperor - China developed culturally and politically with great rapidity and caught up with the west.
By the 12th century China had become more prosperous than Europe and along the way had invented gunpowder, the compass and block printing. European culture began to advance quickly again after Johannes Gutenberg invented modern printing in the 15th century, and with the mass production of books soon sped ahead of China. This could not have been done without paper. Imagine trying to cut vellum into A4 size and putting it through a printing press. Only now with the growth of the Internet has a medium been invented which does not need paper, though e-mails and chat rooms have driven us back to a greater use of written words (countless emails where we rarely wrote letters) as a universal means of communication. The true pioneers were Ts'ai Lun and Gutenberg.
Ts'ai Lun never got copyright for his invention, one of the earliest to be pirated round the world and essentially still the same process as he thought of, but it made him rich and famous. He was made a nobleman by a grateful emperor. Then he allowed himself to get caught up in palace intrigues and fell from favour. Unable to face his disgrace, he took a bath, dressed up in silken robes and drank a goblet of poison. We know this because it is recorded in Chinese historical records, on paper, a millennium before the western world even knew what paper was.
Conor O'Clery is Asia Correspondent of The Irish Times