The history of real paper started in China. Similar to the Egyptians, the Chinese had, virtually fifty centuries in the past, created a pictographic type of writing. They too had been making use of various things to scribe on, most usually strips of bamboo and woven silk and it is possible that the barkcloth they used for other uses from the Paper. Mulberry was used as well.
Historical documentation points to the fact that in 105 years after the birth of Christ an official by the name of Tsai Lung, brought out papyrus, although it appears from archaeological finds that actually it was being used in South East Asia for more than likely two hundred years before Tsai Lung.
In olden times setting down words or pictograms was generally done on some derivative of bamboo or sometimes on lengths of silk, which were called Ji in those days. But the cost of silk and bamboo being heavy, these two materials were inconvenient. At this time Tsai Lun thought of using the bark from trees, rags, hemp, and fish nets. In 105AD he made a report to the emperor on the production of paper and was endowed with high accolade for his inventions. From that period paper has been used all over the world and is called the "paper of Marquis Tsai".
If this accolade is Tsai's entitlement or not, will likely never be known! However, the important thing has to be that it was found that they could grind some substances derived from plants into a mache, abolish spume, float the mache in liquid, sieve it out onto cloth sheets giving it enough time to dry out. After the drying process was complete, it caked into a hard, resilient sheet that turned out to be exceedingly light, and provided that it did not get wet, turned out to be extraordinarily tenacious.
This the most simple of paper making technologies is still in use in precisely the same way around Nepal and Tibet, the very first places to learn the technolgies from what is now the People's Republic of China. A simple frame makes use of a cotton cloth stretched over a single side, thin mash is put in to the other side and spread around until it is even. After which it is left suspended in order for it to let the water to drain out of it and the mush to dry into a parchment sheet which can be removed by peeling.
At some point in time a very talented individual realized that constructing a frame with an arrangement of ribbing and putting in place a delicate bamboo mat that is replaceable over it, would enable the process to be speeded up enormously. Rather than utilizing a single mould for every sheet of paper, severely limiting the number of sheets that could be manufactured at the same time, a stack of sieved pulp could be built up layer upon layer, with merely a strip of cotton thread between them in order to facilitate later separation. The stack would then be squeezed very lightly, and each sheet of grume moved to a dry board.