The origins of true paper began in what is now the People's Republic of China. Similar to the indigenous people of Egypt, the Chinese had, virtually 5,000 years ago, created a type of writing that used pictures. The Egyptians also had been utilizing many different types of things to scribe upon, most notably lengths of bamboo and processed silk and possibly the barkcloth they made for other purposes from the Paper. Mulberry was used as well.
Historical documentation leads us to believe that in 105 years after the birth of Christ a government worker by the name of Tsai Lung, brought out papyrus, although it appears from archaeological digs that it was in fact being worked with in China for at least two centuries prior to Tsai Lung.
Way back during times gone by setting down words or pictograms was generally done on some form of bamboo or occasionally on strips of silk, which were called Ji in those days. Nevertheless the prohibitive cost of silk and bamboo being very heavy, these two materials were not convenient. Then Tsai Lun came up with the idea of making use of the bark from trees, fish nets, hemp, and rags. In 105AD he put an idea to the emperor about the process of paper manufacture and got much praise for his idea. Since those days paper has been in use globally and is called the "paper of Marquis Tsai".
Whether this title is accurate, will likely never be known! However, the important thing must be that the discovery was made that if they pounded some compounds derived from plants in to a pulp, take out impure substances, place the pulp in water, screen it onto cloth sheets allowing it to dry. When fully dried, it dried into a hard, tough sheet that turned out to be extraordinarily light, and as long as it did not come into contact with water, turned out to be surprisingly resilient.
This the most simple of paper making technologies is even now practised in exactly a similar way around Tibet and Nepal, the very first places to pick up the techniques from South East Asia. A simple frame utilizes a cotton cloth made to stretch over a side, watery mache is emptied into the far end and moved around until it is even. It is then suspended somewhere to allow the liquid to drain and the mash to dry in to a sheet of paper which may be removed.
There came a time when an extremely talented developer worked out that making a frame with an arrangement of ribbing and putting in place a delicate bamboo mat that is replaceable across it, would let the paper-making process to be speeded up fantastically. Rather than tying up a single mould for each paper sheet, severely limiting the number of sheets that may be produced at one time, a stack of sieved mush was able to be built up layer upon layer, with merely a length of cotton thread between them to facilitate later separation. The stack would then be pressed slightly, and every layer of paste moved to a place to dry.