The origins of genuine paper happened in South East Asia. Similar to the Egyptians, the Chinese had, virtually 50 centuries in the past, invented a kind of writing that used pictures. They too had been using many different objects to scribe on, most notably strips of bamboo and silk woven into a fine fabric and possibly the barkcloth they were making for other uses derived out of the Paper. Mulberry was made use of too.
Legend leads us to believe that in 105 years after the birth of Christ a government worker by the name of Tsai Lung, brought out paper, though it appears from archaeological discoveries that actually it was being worked with in what is now the People's Republic of China for probably two hundred years before him.
Way back in times gone by setting down words was mainly on bamboo or occasionally on lengths of silk, which were known as Ji then. Nonetheless silk being expensive and the weight of bamboo, these two materials were not of great use. Around then Tsai Lun came up with the idea of making use of tree bark, rags, hemp, and fish nets. In 105AD he submitted a report to the emperor with regard to the process of paper making and got high accolade for his thoughts. From this time paper has been availed of all over and is known as the "paper of Marquis Tsai".
If this title is correct, will likely not ever be known! However, the important factor has to be that they found that they could grind particular compounds derived from plants into a mash, expel unwanted materials, place the mash in water, filter it out onto cloth sheets giving it time to dry. When fully dried, it conglomerated into a hard, tenacious sheet that turned out to be particularly light, and as long as it did not get wet, turned out to be extraordinarily firm.
This most straightforward of paper making technologies is still practised in precisely a similar way in Tibet and Nepal, the initial regions to take the technolgies from China. A basic frame utilises a type of cotton cloth pulled and held over one side, diluted pulp is situated in to the other end and spread around until it is smooth. Then it is left hanging somewhere to enable the liquid to drain out of it and the mush to dry in to a sheet of paper which can be stripped off.
As time passed an extremely talented individual figured that making a frame with ribs and putting in place a delicate bamboo mat that is replaceable over this, would let the paper-making process to be speeded up enormously. Rather than using a single mold for each parchment sheet, severely restricting the amount of sheets that can be produced at the same time, a stack of sieved mache could be built up a layer at a time, with merely a piece of cotton thread between them to enable separation at a later time. The stack would then be pressed very slightly, and every layer of paste shifted to a board to dry.