People often use eight words to describe the charm of Xuan paper-"Mo Yun is ever-changing, paper lives for thousands of years". Xuan paper is not moth-eaten and rot-free, and it is known as "Millennium Life Paper". White and dull, long-term storage does not change color, flexible texture, folding and wear resistance, no wrinkle and no damage, and good ink absorption.
Wu Niu Tu is a colorful jute paper painting created by Han Yun in Tang Dynasty 1200 years ago, and it has been well preserved. Wu Niu Tu is one of the top ten famous paintings handed down in China, one of the few original paper silk paintings handed down in the Tang Dynasty, and the oldest paper Chinese painting in existence.
Xuan paper originated in the Tang Dynasty.
Jingxian County in Anhui Province was under the jurisdiction of Xuanzhou in Tang Dynasty. Xuanzhi was named after Xuanzhou Prefecture as a tribute to the imperial court. The word "Xuan paper" first appeared in the famous paintings written by Zhang Yanyuan, a scholar in the Tang Dynasty: "A good man should buy hundreds of Xuan paper and wax it to imitate it ..."
Song Xia Gui's paper "Flowing Qin Tu" is collected in the Palace Museum in Beijing.
The earliest document recording the production of Xuan paper is Hu Shi's Pearl Boat: "During Yonghui years, Xuanzhou monks wanted to write Huayan Sutra. They first planted bamboo trees with agarwood and made paper. This is the beginning of rice paper. "
Xuan paper looks "as light as a cicada's wing, as white as snow, and shakes like a thread, but its life span is the longest among all papers."
Song Liangkai's paper ink is 48.7 cm high and 27.7 cm wide.
It is said that there has been a crisis of "book self-destruction" in the Library of Congress, but many precious materials and original paintings and calligraphy in China are safe and sound because they are made of rice paper. For example, Sikuquanshu in Qing Dynasty has been well preserved so far, and Zhang Jizhi Classic of Southern Song Dynasty collected by Anhui Provincial Museum has a history of about 800 years, and the paper is still as smooth and white as ever.
Song Dynasty's anonymous sketch "Summer Scenery in Huaiyin" was collected by the Palace Museum in Beijing.
Jingxian County, Anhui Province is the hometown of rice paper. The materials used in Xuan paper are different from ordinary paper. The main raw material is celadon bark, and the important ingredient is Shatian straw, which is hand-made by using the unique mountain spring water in Jingxian County. The process is very complicated. The Xuan paper produced in Jingxian county is as thin as cicada's wings and as moist as Qingyun, and is known as the king of paper.
There is a record in the Record of the Second Floor of Emperor Kangxi of Qing Dynasty: "There are many trees in the ground. Peel the skin, mash it into juice, check the agent of fire and water, scoop it up, iron all the vegetation, dry it in the sun and fall. The cleanest and heaviest one is like a jade board. "
"The selection of materials must be precise, the examination of questions must be good, and hard work must be done at all costs", so that the papers made can be "rigid inside and soft outside, delicate in arts and sciences, and white in color".
The words "skin, grass, water and technology" summarize the production of jingxian rice paper.
"Skin" is the bark of Pteroceltis tatarinowii in Jingxian county, with tough and slender fibers, uniform thickness and good ink particle adsorption performance; "Grass" is a kind of straw in Shatian, Jingxian County, which has less knots, less ash impurities, low lignin content and high cellulose content, and can enhance the softness of rice paper. "Water" refers to the mountain spring water in Jingxian County; "Technology" refers to the technology of making rice paper that has been passed down from mouth to mouth for thousands of years.
The production process of Xuan paper is as follows:
1. Selection of materials such as rice paper, sandalwood bark and shatian straw.
To make excellent rice paper, the first thing is to choose materials. In Xuan Paper Theory, Hu Puan emphasized that "making paper is first of all a material, and the material used is bamboo skin or sandalwood skin, which must be born between rugged rocks."
Jingxian county qingtan forest
The bark of the ebony tree in the picture is the main raw material for making rice paper.
The bark of Pteroceltis tatarinowii is a Pteroceltis tatarinowii tree growing in karst hills around Jingxian County, which is made by cutting branches, soaking and peeling. Compared with other leather materials, sandalwood fiber is slender and ink wettability is better.
Growing environment of Pteroceltis tatarinowii
Cuttings are usually carried out from the first frost to the following year 1, February-when Pteroceltis tatarinowii enters dormancy, and are cut once every three years.
There is also a knack for cutting green sandalwood. When cutting green sandalwood, you should cut the mouth of the ingot, so that in the next year, the seedlings will be stronger.
Rosewood with its branches cut off in the photo.
Boil the chopped branches of Pteroceltis tatarinowii in a pot, which is easy to peel after being cooked thoroughly.
Boiled sandalwood branches
After the cut branches are tied, they should be sealed and steamed at high temperature for 20 hours, so that the bark can be peeled easily.
Boiled bundles of celadon bark are soaked in a stream for a day, and it is easier to peel after boiling in cold water.
Then peel the bark off the branches of Pteroceltis tatarinowii.
The peeled bark of Pteroceltis tatarinowii was exposed to the sun and rain in the open air, naturally bleached and sunburned on the beach.
Shatian straw is also one of the raw materials for making rice paper (green sandalwood bark is the backbone of rice paper, and Shatian straw is flesh and blood). Shatian straw is the straw that grows on the sandy soil in the valley plain.
In the process of geological changes, Jingxian County has formed river alluvial and glacier alluvial valley plains, which are mainly composed of gravel, gravel, fine sand, medium fine sand, gravel, clay, sandy clay and muddy silt. The thickness is generally100-150m, which is the raw material soil base of Shatian straw in rice paper.
Shatian rice straw ash has less impurities, low lignin content and high cellulose content, so it has strong toughness, and the made rice paper is white and not easy to rot.
Remove the dead leaves from the straw stalks in Shatian with an iron rake, cut off the heads of the rice ears, and then tie them into straw stalks.
According to the proportion of sandalwood bark and straw, rice paper can be divided into three categories: ultra-clean, clean skin and fabric.
2. To make green tangerine peel, take raw materials such as dark plum and shatian straw, mash them, and add them to plant ash for pickling.
Soak the dried sandalwood bark in lime water.
Adding lime and soda ash, and cooking to remove impurities.
After soaking, put it in a steamer and cook it with caustic soda until the black skin turns white.
Alkali is used to cook sandalwood bark and rice straw at high temperature. Its function is to dissolve pectin and lignin like lime.
The straw tied in Shatian is soaked in the river water and pressed with stones to prevent the straw from outcrop and discoloration and rot. Soak for about ten days in summer and one month in winter.
After soaking, it is pickled with lime water, and the time, temperature and water quality of pickling straw are very particular.
Grass is soaked in lime, which combines with water to produce calcium hydroxide, and at the same time releases a lot of heat, which increases the temperature of aqueous solution and plays the role of dissolving pectin and lignin.
3. Put the raw materials such as pickled green sandalwood bark and shatian straw on the hillside of Chaoyang, and naturally whiten in the sun and rain.
The main purpose of sun drying is to naturally bleach paper materials. Compared with chemical bleaching, it has the characteristics of no discoloration and more durability, which can not be replaced by short-time bleaching by machines.
In addition, the sun platform on the mountainside is paved with stones along the inclined mountain, and there are gaps between the stones. Drainage can be done quickly in rainy season to prevent soaking and burning grass; At night, the landscape will wet the grass through the gap.
It takes one year to complete natural bleaching, and the production of sandalwood bark is roughly the same as burning grass.
The paper-making process of "soaking" is labor-intensive and takes a long time, but it does little damage to fibers. The natural bleaching method needs calibration for about one year.
This has become a unique landscape in the hometown of Xuan paper-huge white and yellow patches appear strangely on the green hillside, and then you can look at them from a distance. Craftsmen, like excited ants, hunched over and carried loads, climbed up the steep path and carried the grass on their backs to the sloping sun beach to bask in the sun.
The mystery of the longevity of rice paper lies in the seemingly primitive processes such as soaking, natural bleaching and stamping. In 1960s and 1970s, in order to improve production efficiency and reduce costs, chemical bleaching and mechanical pulping were also introduced into Xuan paper manufacturing, and the production cycle of some processes was shortened to several days. Especially after changing to chemical bleach, it only takes 100 hour to "whiten the skin".
However, people soon found that chemical bleaching made paper acidic and prone to premature aging, while mechanical pulping did more damage to fibers. Some researchers believe that chemical bleaching and mechanical pulping may make "Millennium paper" only "healthy" for decades, and its ink wettability is worse.
The bark of Pteroceltis tatarinowii and the straw in Shatian turned white after sun and rain.
Natural bleached celadon bark
Natural bleached Shatian straw
4. Ingredients: pulverizing, soaking, fermenting, pulping, adding tree paste, and blending into paper pulp. The ingredients of rice paper are selected, peeled, peeled, stamped and bagged in turn.
Material selection
Choose fur and grass, take the essence and discard the dross. Only the successfully selected fur materials can be sent to the grass.
stupid
The function of threshing and weeding is to make the dispersed cellulose join into film-like substances through hydrogen bonds through the physical action of plant fibers. The hydroxyl group is wrapped in a shell, so this shell must be broken by beating, ramming or other methods to refine the fiber and expose the hydroxyl group, so that hydrogen bonds can be formed and pulping can be carried out.
Cut the skin
The bark of Pteroceltis tatarinowii was repeatedly beaten by the machine and turned into pancakes. Press several pancakes into thin slices, stack the hammered skins together, and then cut them into small pieces in an oblique triangle.
This cutting method is also very delicate, which makes sandalwood fibers have different lengths, thus meeting the requirements of papermaking.
Tread material
The step-on process is to step the rinsed pulp with plant gum (such as carambola juice) into the tank with your feet (wearing long shoes) to make it into thick slurry similar to porridge.
The added vegetable gum can increase the viscosity of the pulp, make the pulp more uniform, facilitate the stacking of the fished wet paper and improve the paper yield. Carambola, also known as kiwifruit, is also an indispensable raw material for rice paper production.
Crush leather with your feet to further homogenize the fibers.
Bag material
After leather and forage are mixed in proportion, the raw materials are put into cloth bags and sent to a special pool for rinsing.
The gauze bag is stirred back and forth in the pool, and the essence of raw materials-pulp will flow out of the gauze bag. At this time, the pulp of burnt grass and burnt skin will meet, which is the so-called "pulping" process.
Make pulp
Pulp mixed with straw, sandalwood and other raw materials
5. Handmade fishing paper, fishing paper water, from Jingxian Mountain Spring.
The quality of rice paper depends on the quality of water besides raw materials and technology.
Water in Jingxian county
Zheng Xiangru also emphasized the importance of water in making Xuan paper in Jing County Records: "The water color is obtained according to the groove, the water color is good, the bleached skin is white, the paper is the brightest, and the thick one is like a jade plate, just like the water in Jinjiang is named after brocade!"
The thickness and texture of rice paper depend entirely on the feeling of fishing with both hands. Once the paper is picked up, it will take shape again. Light wave is fine, heavy wave is thick.
There is a local plant called carambola, and the juice (separating agent) squeezed from it can make the pulp uniform and prevent the picked rice paper from sticking to each other.
"Immerse jathyapple in the cold current, knock on the ice, lift the curtain and cut the fat evenly" means that because of the good water in winter, paper workers wash materials in the cold current and even break the ice to make paper.
Paper people suffer in winter, the water in the pulp pool is cold, and they have to soak paper thousands of times every day, so many paper people have arthritis.
Fishing for paper can complete a piece of rice paper in ten seconds, but there are complicated doorways. When the pulp concentration is different, the fished paper should still have the same thickness and weight, and the error should be controlled within 65438±0g. The skill of fishing paper, the depth and strength of launching water depend on the accumulation of experience and the good cooperation of two people.
Papermaking is one of the most exquisite links in manual papermaking. The thickness of paper is even, and it is all in the hands of paper makers, which can't be mastered in a short time. When making big paper, it needs the tacit cooperation of many people.
Paper fishing is purely manual. In front of the fish tank full of pulp, the master at both ends carried the rectangular thin and neat bamboo curtain bed, dipped it sideways into the pulp tank, dipped it again in the opposite direction, lifted the curtain, and let the water seep from the seam of the bamboo curtain, and the papermaking fibers were laid flat on the bamboo curtain to form a thin, cotton-wool wet rice paper.
Paper fishermen's hands are soaked in paper pulp all the year round. The uniform suspension of pulp and the separation between papers depend on kiwi vine juice mixed with pulp. If the temperature is high, kiwi vine juice will volatilize, which will directly affect the suspension of pulp and the separation of paper, so the masters can only work with their hands in the water temperature of MINUS several degrees even in winter.
After improvement, Japan has made a paper fishing mode that can be operated by one person, but the quality of this single paper fishing is not as good as that of double paper fishing.
The thickness of rice paper depends entirely on this special dipping technology. The angle, speed and height of the curtain should be properly handled, with more being too thick and less being too thin. This job is highly technical, and it is said that it will take a worker several years to practice it.
Curtain masters and curtain-lifting masters at both ends of the slurry pool in the substation carried bamboo curtains and swung them left and right in the slurry pool, so that the slurry was deposited on the curtains and formed a thin layer, and the rice paper changed from invisible to tangible.
Master Zhou said, "It's too difficult to fish for paper." Working for thirteen or fourteen hours every day, my hands are already soaked in water, especially in winter. "The water in winter is really cold!"
The wet paper picked up should be laid flat on the "cardboard" one by one, and then squeezed by gravity to remove excess water.
Because the pulp juice of kiwi branches or carambola is added to the pulp, these papers will not stick together, but can be uncovered one by one.
Squeeze the water out of the paper.
Six, point paper, stick the copied paper on the fire wall to dry.
Drying paper requires a fire wall, also called baking paper, which is a "fire wall" made of soil and bricks. A flue is built in the wall, and firewood or coal is ignited through the smoke port, so that hot air enters the flue and the fire wall heats up.