How is traditional papermaking inherited?

During the Eastern Han Dynasty, Cai Lun comprehensively revolutionized and improved the technology and quality of papermaking. Traditional papermaking was once passed down in Beizhang Village, south of Xi'an, and was used as paper for zhengzhi and imperial examinations during the Qing Dynasty.

The inheritor of the kozo paper copying technique is Zhang Fengxue, who produces the pulp, which is called "white hemp paper" after several processes such as preparation, cutting, and making the paper. Contributed to the development and inheritance of traditional papermaking.

More than 20 kilometers south from Xi'an, the water-rich Feng River flows into the Wei River from south to north in the west, and the artificial river locally known as the Fenghui Canal is in the east. Chang'an Beizhang Village is located between the two streams.

Legend has it that during the Eastern Han Dynasty, Cai Lun was caught in a political struggle and brought to Kyoto to stand trial. Unwilling to endure the humiliation, he took poison and killed himself in Longting County, the place where he invented and fiefdomed paper-making.

Cai Lun's family was also implicated in all around the escape to hide, some of them fled to Ankang, through the Meridian Road over the Qinling Mountains, to the north out of the Qinling Mountains when the pass, the most advanced plant fiber papermaking technology to the village of Beizhang area. As a result, what the people of Beizhang Village are still using today is the paper-making method invented by Cai Lun, which uses plant fibers as raw materials.

The Qinling Mountains to the south of Beizhang Village are overgrown with bushes, and kozo and mulberry trees can be found everywhere, making them an inexhaustible source of high-quality raw materials for papermaking, while the water of the Fenghuang River facilitates the soaking, fermentation, rinsing and pulping of kozo bark.

For more than 1,000 years, the papermakers of Beizhang Village in Chang'an have been making all-natural kozo paper using primitive, simple tools and following a complex, complete process invented by Cai Lun in the Eastern Han Dynasty. This process has been called a "living fossil for the study of the evolution of handmade paper craftsmanship" by experts.

Beizhang Village has been a small village with a large population since ancient times, and handmade paper has been the main source of livelihood for local villagers for a long period of history. A folk song circulating around Beizhang tells the story of Cai Lun, who experimented with papermaking and overcame a technical difficulty.

The ballad says:

Cai Lun's paper-making failed to make Zhang, and the old mother of Goddess of Mercy said that she had a prescription for the medicine.

Zhang Lang then burned the lime, Li Lang copied the paper into Zhang.

Almost every papermaking workshop in the village on the wall, are enshrined in the papermaking ancestor Cai Lun's statue, there is also a Cai Lun Temple outside the village, enshrined in the "paper saint" Cai Lun ancestor to accept the paper workers and villagers of the worship.

"Cangjie word, Leigong tile, Feng out of the paper, the water floating curtain." The folk song of Beizhang Village, which has been passed down, not only describes the birth of the earliest paper, but also becomes a strong evidence of the long history of paper making along the Feng River.