The story of real paper happened in what is now the People's Republic of China. Like the indigenous people of Egypt, the Chinese had, virtually fifty centuries in the past, brought out a style of writing that used pictures. They also had been utilizing various kinds of things to write on, most commonly strips of bamboo and silk woven into a fine fabric and possibly the barkcloth they were making for other purposes derived out of the Paper. Mulberry was ased too.
Legend leads us to believe that in 105AD an official named Tsai Lung, developed papyrus, though it appears from archaeological digs that actually it was around in South East Asia for at least two hundred years prior to him.
During times gone by scribing was mainly on some form of bamboo or sometimes on pieces of silk, which were called Ji in those days. Nevertheless the great price of silk and bamboo being too weighty, these two materials were not convenient. Due to these factors Tsai Lun came up with the idea of making use of tree bark, hemp, fish nets, and rags. In 105 years after the birth of Christ he made a report to the emperor on the process of paper making and was endowed with high accolade for his ideas. Since then paper has been used everywhere and is known as the "paper of Marquis Tsai".
If the above title is deserved or not, will very likely never be known! But the major consideration is that the discovery was made that if they pounded particular compounds derived from plant material into a pulp, separate impurities, float the pulp in liquid, filter it out onto textile sheets and give it time to dry out. After the drying process was complete, it conglomerated into a hard, tenacious sheet that was really light, and provided that it did not get wet, proved decidedly robust.
It's a fact that this very straightforward of paper making technologies is still being used in exactly a similar way within Tibet and Nepal, the first regions to take the techniques from China. A simple frame has a cotton cloth stretched over one side, watery paste is poured in to the other side and moved around until it is level. It is then left hanging somewhere to let the water to leave it and the grume to dry into a parchment sheet which can be removed by peeling.
As time passed a developer with great skills figured that constructing a frame with an arrangement of ribbing and putting in place a delicate replaceable bamboo mat across it, would allow the paper-making procedure to be speeded up incredibly. Rather than utilizing a single mould for each paper sheet, therefore severely restricting the number of sheets that may be made at the same time, a stack of sieved mash was able to be built up layer upon layer, with just a length of cotton thread between them which would enable later separation. The stack would then be squeezed gently, and every sheet of mush shifted to a place to dry.