Chinese Fishing Nets Quotes

The house is full of the mouldering relics of a more complex, more opulent life – the huge silk umbrellas like marquees that rot in the outsized yellow dragon Chinese vases in the vestibule, the complicated deckchairs with canopies and footrests whose green canvas is worn so pale and thin that they can barely take the weight of a field mouse. In cupboards and trunks and outhouses there lurk decaying galoshes, sou’westers and rubberized macs, ancient shotguns and fishing-rods and nets. On disintegrating dressing-tables the bristles of enamel-backed brushes have caught the hair of people who are all now dead.

From approximately 10000 BCE onward, central and eastern Asian peoples began to rely on hemp to make rope, fish netting, canvas, and fabrics—and it became a staple source of food for the Han Chinese and their animals.

In the rest of the world, they used papyrus, clay tablets, or parchment for writing, but they all had similar drawbacks. But during the Han Dynasty, according to myth, a court official looking at wasps building their nest became inspired to create paper from the bark of trees, rags of cloth, fishing nets, and remnants of hemp. And according to this story, this invention happened around 105 CE. But archeological findings go as far as the 2nd century BCE, but the first use for writing on paper is evidenced in 8 BCE.

Chinese officials needed something better suited for all that paperwork. They needed paper. According to official records, they got it in 105 AD, when a eunuch named Cai Lun, the emperor’s “officer in charge of tools and weapons,” ground up mulberry bark, rags, and fish nets; dipped a screen into the mash; then let the mash dry on the screen. People loved paper, and Cai became rich and famous. (For a while, anyway. Eventually, Cai was accused of falsifying some financial paperwork, so he took a bath, put on his fanciest clothes, drank poison, and died.)

Chinese officials needed something better suited for all that paperwork. They needed paper. According to official records, they got it in 105 AD, when a eunuch named Cai Lun, the emperor’s “officer in charge of tools and weapons,” ground up mulberry bark, rags, and fish nets; dipped a screen into the mash; then let the mash dry on the screen. People loved paper,