1 The Silk Road, the information highway of its time, shrank the vast distances between Europe, Central Asia, and China. Ideas were exchanged by traders, pilgrims, soldiers, and nomads moving in both directions with their cargoes of silk, spices, wool, jade, gold, glass, and gunpowder. Earlier, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and various Christian sects also travelled the route. The battle of Talas opened the way for the advance of Islam into Central Asia, displacing many of these older religions. In addition, the Silk Road facilitated the spread of paper technology. In previous centuries, with the dissemination of Buddhism throughout Asia, paper arrived on its heels, the perfect material for the inscription of the Buddha's teachings. From the eighth century, paper made it possible to preserve and publish Mohammed's words. In Samarkand, I headed for the Koni Ghil MEROS Paper Centre2 in a village about eight kilometers from Samarkand. In 1995, UNESCO convened a conference to consider ways to conserve Uzbekistan's historic monuments and handicrafts. Zarif Mukhtorov, the son of a well-known potter, began to research traditional papermaking. About five years later, he established the small papermill in Khoni Ghil beside the Siab River in an area where paper used to be Papermaking on the Silk Road: Samarkand and Beyond dorothy field Waterwheel at Koni Ghil papermill turned by water from the Siab River outside of Samarkand. Note the asssortment of vessels that fill with water. All photos by and courtesy of the author. 6 - hand papermaking made. Seeing a building with mulberry bark hung to dry, I knew I had arrived. Mukhtorov and his assistant described and demonstrated their process.3 They harvest one-year-old mulberry shoots in February and store them as dried sticks.4 Through the rest of the year, they soak the sticks and then boil them in water for five to six hours. They strip the cambium layer, scrape off the outer black bark, and boil the inner bark with wood ash for four to five hours. After rinsing the bark, they put it in the stamper for eight to ten hours, moving the fiber in the pits with a stout stick. Stamping mills, powered by water wheels and using cams to lift trip-hammers, have been used in Samarkand since the late tenth century.5 The mill has both Japanese- and Western-style moulds, and they were using a Western-style wove mould while I was there. After one dip, they couch onto a post, separating newly formed sheets with Tyvek. They press the post under boards and slowly add rocks on top to increase the weight. After 24 hours, they brush the damp sheets onto smooth boards and dry them outdoors. Finally, they burnish both sides of the sheets with a smooth stone or shell. Burnishing distinguishes Samarkand paper, making it ideal for calligraphy and painting. The finished paper is pale ochre with a strong rattle and a smooth, wove surface. From Central Asia, paper technology moved east with the Mughal conquerors into northern India. In Uzbekistan, handmade paper is called kaghad; in northern India, it is kagaz, both derived from kaghaz, Persian for "paper." All these words derive from the Chinese word guzhi, meaning "paper made from paper mulberry \[bark\]."6 Traditional Samarkand paper was made on a flexible grass screen, similar to the Indian chapri or chhapri, still in use in traditional mills in India.7 Since the paper I saw being made at Koni Ghil was formed on a Western-style mould covered with copper mesh, it does not have the grass-screen watermark of traditional Samarkand paper. As I began to dig deeper into the origins of Samarkand paper, I realized how complex and layered the story of paper in Central Asia actually is. The first paper to be seen and handled in Central Asia was most likely Chinese paper made from bast fibers, particularly paper mulberry, occasionally combined with hemp and waste fibers of flax or ramie rags.8 This paper must have been a great spur for artisans in Central Asia to experiment with locally available raw materials to make paper themselves. But did it require the capture of Chinese papermakers in 751 CE for them to grasp the process, as the old story tells us? In 1907, Sir Marc Aurel Stein discovered a cache of paper documents east of Talas between Dunhuang and Loulan. They were written, circa 313 CE, in Sogdian, an eastern Iranian language that was the lingua franca of the Silk Road in Central Asia. "One of the letters, enclosed in a coarse cloth envelope addressed to Samarquand, about two thousand miles west of the site, shows that Silk Road merchants throughout the oasis cities of Central Asia used paper well before the coming of Islam, several centuries later."9 There is no way to know where these papers were made, but most likely they were locally made "…as elsewhere, Buddhist monks, who had been active in the region, had brought papermaking to Transoxiana well before the Muslim conquest."10 Early Samarkand papermakers had access to mulberry. While paper mulberry (Broussonetia papyrifera), the mulberry variety most used for paper, is neither native, nor grown in Uzbekistan,11 silk mulberry trees (Morus) were introduced into Uzbekistan in the fourth century.12 Their leaves were fed in huge quantities to silkworms. During my travels I saw many silk mulberry trees in Uzbekistan along highways, edging fields, and in mosque gardens. In Bukhara and other places, I saw dead mulberry trees still standing or the trunks of ancient mulberries lying on their side, sometimes with a sign noting the tree's great age. "Mulberry trees are revered throughout Uzbekistan. Ancient trees are considered sacred and people leave bits of cloth or paper in their rough bark as petitions. On special occasions, crowds of women, children, and even men in business suits can be seen circumambulating a particularly venerated ancient tree…."13 Although they became an established and beloved species, it is unlikely that the supply of silk mulberry trees was great enough to make mulberry the primary papermaking fiber. Besides mulberry, papermakers in Samarkand made paper from other linen and cotton rags, silk waste, hemp, and other bast fibers. A wide range of papers were made in Samarkand, including "Samarkand sulton kogozi," noted for thinness and soft texture; "Mir- Ibrahimi" which had watermarks in a design of white circles; and "Nimkanop" made from silk waste mixed with bast fibers to form a brown sheet of paper.14 Traditional Samarkand paper was often described as "white" in color, leading one to believe that the prevailing papermaking fibers were probably hemp or rags. To complicate matters even further, there is another paper called "Samarkand shoyi kogozi" meaning "silk paper." It was described as pale ochre, the color of the paper made today at Koni Ghil, and having a silky surface. This "silk paper" was most likely made from silk mulberry, not silk. As people in the West mistakenly refer to Japanese paper as "rice paper," Uzbeks now refer to all their handmade paper as "silk paper" though silk was used only in "Nimkanop" paper. In its heyday, there were a great many paper mills in Samarkand. Prior to the mid-nineteenth century when Russia took power over "the Stans," what is now Uzbekistan was three independent regions called khanates. In those years, conflicts between the khans escalated, destabilizing the region and causing the center of papermaking to move east to Kokand in the Fergana Valley before it petered out in the early twentieth century. The Russians brought in quantities of Russian machine-made paper, just as the British brought commercial British paper into India. Indigenous handmade papers could not compete. In Uzbekistan today, tourist shops sell old paper with new kitschy watercolors of Silk Road imagery—camels, donkeys, and herdsmen—painted in the margins beside the old Arabic text. I bought two sheets of old paper, one with traces of the old calligraphy and another with Arabic text in black and red. Uzbek conservators and artists purchase much of the paper that is being produced at Koni Ghil MEROS Paper Centre. The old legend puts forth the notion that the knowledge of papermaking was wrested from the Chinese in one event after the Battle of Talas. There is wide agreement among scholars that there was not one great transmission but rather a gradual infiltration of knowledge over several centuries.15 Similarly, we used to say Cai Lun invented paper in 105 CE. Recent evidence shows that paper was made centuries earlier and that Cai Lun was a promoter of paper rather than its inventor. These old stories simplify our understanding, assigning short and clear time frames to what were in actuality the results of a gradual process of experimentation and dissemination over centuries. We have long credited China with the great discoveries that changed our world: paper, printing, and gunpowder. However, given the vast territories that separated East and West, we must acknowledge that during their journey from Asia to Europe, most Disengaged trip hammers of the stamping mill inside the Koni Ghil mill. The wheel that turns the disengaged camshaft outside the Koni Ghil papermill. 8 - hand papermaking innovative ideas and technologies "had undergone refinement in the Arabic crucible."16 It is time to give credit where credit is due— to the Arabic cultures whose inventiveness was so integral to the development of paper. ___________ notes 1. Dard Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft (New York: Dover Publications, 1978), 60. 2. MEROS, meaning "heritage" in Uzbek, is an NGO that supports artisans' access to the global market. Koni Ghil MEROS works with UNESCO and JICA (Japanese International Cooperation Agency) to preserve, develop, and revive Uzbekistan's artistic traditions. 3. The day I was there, a few women were scraping black bark, but the mill was not in production. The stampers sat idle, and the young papermaker formed sheets only as a demonstration for tour groups that came through. While Mr. Mukhtorov and his staff were kind and welcoming, several follow-up emails to him and a translator have gone unanswered to date, leaving me with numerous questions such as how much paper they produce, or where the mulberry is grown. 4. My guess is that the shoots are harvested from silk mulberry trees that are grown to feed the leaves to silkworm grubs. http://www.virtualtourist.com/travel/ Asia/Uzbekistan/Samarkand-1462812/Local_Customs-Samarkand-TG-C-1.html (accessed January 13, 2014). 5. Jonathan M. Bloom, Paper Before Print (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 53–54. 6. Ibid., 47. 7. Ibid., and Neeta Premchand, Off the Deckle Edge (Bombay: The Ankur Project, 1995), 27. 8. Bloom, Paper Before Print, 45. And on Encyclopaedia Iranica website: "By 650 CE, the Persians started to import Chinese paper made from the bark of the mulberry tree, though it was so rare a commodity that it was only used for important state documents." http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/paper-andpapermaking (accessed January 13, 2014). 9. Bloom, Paper Before Print, 8. 10. Ibid., 43. Transoxiana is an ancient regional name that includes modern-day Uzbekistan. For more on the Sogdian Ancient Letters, including translations, go to http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/sogdlet.html (accessed January 13, 2014). 11. Bloom, Paper Before Print, 47. 12. "Agriculture in Uzbekistan," Wikipedia, last modified September 24, 2013, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_uzbekistan. 13. Mary M. Dusenbury, "Binding Clouds in the Twenty-First Century," in Sumru Belger Krody, Colors of the Oasis: Central Asian Ikats (Washington, DC: The Textile Museum, 2010), 220. For more on mulberry's spiritual and healing associations, see Dorothy Field, "Bark Cloth and Blue and Gold Sutras: Ritual and Hierarchy" in Hand Papermaking, vol. 26, no. 2 (Winter 2011): 3–9. 14. "The History of Samarkand Paper," Business Connections (Winter 2010): 17. Published by AMCHAM Uzbekistan (American Chamber of Commerce, Uzbekistan), http://amcham.uz/www/downloads/bc/winter_2010.pdf (accessed December 20, 2013). 15. The work of paper historian Nozim Habibullaev, head of the Temurids Museum of Uzbek Academy of Sciences, is discussed in "Mysteries of Samarkand Paper," by Anatolly Yershov, on Uzbekistan Today website, http://old.ut.uz/eng/ kaleidoscope/mysteries_of_samarkand_paper.mgr (accessed December 20, 2013). 16. J.M. Roberts, A History of Europe, 1996, quoted in Bloom, Paper Before Print, 11.

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