In remote areas of South and East China's country side, villagers in Zhejiang and Guangdong provinces are still practising papermaking techniques nearly 2,000 years old.

They owe their skill to Eastern Han Dynasty eunuch Cai Lun, who made history in AD 105, when he announced that he had perfected Chinese papermaking.

Artists had tried for more than 200 years, but it was Cai that perfected it by using bark and hemp. For 500 years, China would hold the monopoly on papermaking.

Cai's name would forever be associated with one of China's four great inventions - paper, the compass, gunpowder and the letter press.

While the ancient art is now replaced by modern paper presses, villagers in Zeya County of Wenzhou in western Zhejiang Province, and the Dengcun Village of Sihui County in Guangdong Province continue to use Cai's techniques, a great example of how history is preserved.

Pingzhi paper

Hidden in the rolling Yandang Mountains and lush forests of bamboo, dozens of villages in Zeya County in Wenzhou still make pingzhi, a type of ancient Chinese paper.

Old style papermaking workshops still process paper the way their predecessors did about 2,000 years ago.

In late Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), ancestors of the Zeya people migrated from Nanping in bordering Fujian Province, where papermaking was a major industry.

Zeya papermakers still call their products pingzhi, or paper made in Nanping.

The abundant bamboo and water supply keep traditional papermaking alive.

Bamboo leaves are cut, then the bamboo is chopped into one-metre-long pieces. They are then cut into even smaller pieces about the length of a finger.

The bamboo threads are tied into bundles that are put into the lime pits and soaked for three to five months. Each pit usually holds 1,500 kilogrammes of bamboo.

After soaking, the pieces are dredged from the pits and dried, then soaked in clean water for another month before being dried again.

The hardest and most dangerous process of grinding bamboo comes next.

Huge stone pestles powered by water are used to grind the bamboo, which lies in a mortar. Workers must carefully and patiently turn over the bamboo paste in the mortar.

The ground bamboo is then put into a pool of clean water and stirred with a stick into raw pulp material.

Papermakers will hand a sheet of pulp on bamboo curtains until it is dried into damp paper, where skilled artists carefully determine the paper's thickness. The remaining water is then squeezed out and the paper, now a golden colour, is separated into pieces and dried in the sun. Once dry, the paper is collected, packed and sold in markets both near and far.

Declining art

Papermaking used to be a generational business for the villagers in Zeya.

After development in the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties (1271-1911), the population of papermakers in Zeya reached 100,000 in the 1930s, nearly 80 per cent of the population.

In the 1940s, pingzhi paper extended to Shanghai, Shandong, Fujian and Taiwan and some Southeast Asian countries.

Back then, the golden paper covered the hills of Zeya, becoming part of the local landscape.

But by the 1980s, modern papermaking would oust pingzhi from its reign.

Today, it is only used for firecrackers and fake paper money for traditional funerals. Profits of pingzhi drop sharply each year, said Huang Kerong, director of the local tourism administration. One year of making paper only earns him at most 2,000 yuan (US$241).

As a result, most of young people in Zeya have stopped learning the traditional craft.

Few born after 1970 possess any papermaking know-how, Huang said.

But the fate of this declining craft has recently attracted the attention of Chinese culture researchers.

In 1999, Yun Tiehu, a research fellow with the China Printing Museum, came to Wenzhou and collected a whole set of papermaking equipment in Zeya. He also photographed the artists, which are now on display in the printing museum in Beijing.

"I have travelled to many places in the country to search for the remains of ancient Chinese papermaking," he said. "Zeya is unique and should be well preserved."

Huang also said he is considering teaching young tour guides how to make traditional paper. "So the old craft can be handed down to the younger generations," the director said.

Huizhi paper

Using similiar techniques for pingzhi, craftspeople in the Dengcun Village of Sihui County, in Guangdong Province, continue to prosper.

They call their paper, huizhi, or paper made in Sihui.

This traditional bamboo paper is considered "pure paper" and is commonly used in funeral and other religious rituals, especially in Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macao and Southeast Asia, researchers said.

As the largest production base for this paper, the Dengcun Village is known as "the most famous village of Chinese huizhi."

Almost every family has their own workshop. In recent years, the village has become a scenic spot after primary and middle school teachers started bringing students to the village to watch the traditional craft.

But local artisans do not follow the traditional techniques as strictly as papermakers in Zeya do.

Since the 1980s, they have used electric-powered machines to grind the bamboo.

Many workshops have begun to use plastic curtains to hang sheets of the pulp on, as well as machines that squeeze water from the damp paper.

Villagers also process the paper into various kinds of paper objects for funerals and other traditional rituals, much like they did thousand of years ago.

(China Daily February 21, 2002)