Paper made from bamboo

Leiyang's paper rests on what the ground offers. The city sits on the southern edge of the Hengyang basin, where large reserves of kaolin make good paper stock, and its hills carry nan bamboo, the south's tall bamboo, alongside fir and pine and oil-tea, all of them listed among the county's forest products. The invention the town claims is papermaking itself: Leiyang is the hometown of Cai Lun, the Han-dynasty court official credited with inventing the technology, one of the Four Great Inventions, and the city is an ancient county of more than two thousand years on the Lei River, which still runs through it. From those beginnings the town built a paper industry that has lasted to the present, and Leiyang is still described as a centre of paper production. The sheet, in the long run, is a local thing: the clay for the sizing, the bamboo for the fibre, and the name of the man who is said to have first turned plant fibre into a surface that could carry writing. The county town still sits on the Lei River from which the place takes its name, on the northern side of the water.

Papermaking is counted among China's Four Great Inventions, the technology that gave the written word a cheap and portable surface, and Leiyang's claim to it is a claim to a place in that history. Cai Lun, whose hometown this is, is remembered as the inventor of the technology, and the town has built its identity on that single achievement, styling itself the paper capital. The paper the town produced fed the long demand for a material to write on, and the industry has kept Leiyang's name attached to it for centuries, so that the county-level city remains known for the craft. The raw materials, the kaolin and the bamboo, remain local, and the town's paper production continues, part of the broad manufacturing that Hengyang lists among its industries, alongside chemicals, textiles and processed foods. The use of the paper, in short, is the use of writing itself, and Leiyang made its living by supplying it. The paper's fame even draws in the poet Du Fu, who died on his journey near the Lei River and was first buried there, so the county keeps his grave alongside the papermaker's memorial.

Leiyang keeps the papermaker's name in its public spaces. The Cai Lun Memorial Park, once the site of a stage, is a place where the town gathers in the evening, and the Cai Lun Bamboo Sea, a stretch of bamboo forest, carries the inventor's name into the landscape of the city's natural sights. Paper production itself continues as an industry, fed by the local kaolin, and the town remains a centre of it in the province. Around that working industry the memory of Cai Lun is tended: the city styles itself the paper capital and the thousand-year old county, and the man is claimed as the town's own. The town's own recent names even cross the ocean, for the novelist R. F. Kuang traces her family to Leiyang. The craft, then, is not only the making of a sheet but the keeping of a name, the way a small Hunan town holds on to the inventor it says first gave the world paper. The Inventor's Square, named for the papermaker, is one of the town's largest plazas, used by the young for skating and by older residents for conversation.