The Paper Trail
An Unexpected History of a Revolutionary Invention
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
This is the story of how paper, a simple Chinese invention, has wrapped itself around our world, with history's most momentous ideas etched upon its surface.
The emergence of paper in the imperial court of Han China brought about a revolution in the transmission of knowledge and of ideas. For over two millennia, it has allowed ideas, religions, philosophies and propaganda to spread around the world with ever greater ease. Paper was the first writing surface sufficiently cheap, portable and printable for books, pamphlets, prints and journals to be mass-produced and to travel widely. It enabled an ongoing dialogue between communities of scholars who could now engage with each others' ideas across continents and years.
The Paper Trail traces the westward voyage of this ground-breaking invention; beginning with the Buddhist translators responsible for the spread of paper across China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam. It describes the theologians, scientists and artists who used paper to create the intellectual world of the Abbasid Caliphate, and journeys with the missionaries and merchants who carried it along the Silk Road. Paper finally reached Europe in 1276 and was indispensable to the scholars and translators who manufactured the Renaissance and Reformation from their desks.
Paper created a world in which free thinking could flourish, and brought disciplines from science to music into a new age: the paper age. Paper still surrounds us in our everyday lives - on our desks, wrapping our food, in our wallets. It has become universal, and also supremely disposable. But is the age of paper coming to an end?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this well-researched history, Monro (China: City and Exile), a British reporter who has written extensively on China, digs into the long and complicated evolution of paper and its effects on civilization. "This is the story of how that soft and supple substance became the vehicle of history and the conduit for landmark innovations and mass movements across the world," he writes. Monro begins with paper's emergence in ancient China, and as he chronicles how paper supplanted other forms of writing material, he follows the trail of art, literature, religion, and politics across the course of centuries and continents. His primary focus is on how paper affected Chinese culture, but as the technology spreads to other countries, he studies those trails as well, leading to tangents on the printing press, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and more. Religion plays a large role, with the Bible, the Qur'an, and Buddhist texts finding widespread audiences thanks to the portable, convenient medium. Monro finishes by acknowledging the power of the book itself and how "paper's greatest role has been as courier of books to individual owner-readers." The result is an engaging, lively, informative examination of a ubiquitous resource and its multimillennia influence on the world.