Cai Lun

Cai Lun, styled Jingzhong, was a native of Guiyang during the Eastern Han dynasty and served as Director of the Imperial Workshops, overseeing the production of imperial artefacts. Drawing upon papermaking techniques developed since the Western Han, he refined the process by using bark, hemp scraps, rags, and discarded fishing nets as raw materials to produce lightweight, affordable paper—later celebrated as 'Marquis Cai Paper'. In the first year of the Yuanxing era, he presented his invention to the imperial court; Emperor An enfeoffed him as Marquis of Longting, and the paper became universally known as 'Marquis Cai Paper'. This breakthrough catalysed the widespread adoption of papermaking, establishing it alongside printing, the compass, and gunpowder as one of the Four Great Inventions—a quartet that fundamentally reshaped the course of human civilisation. Subsequent generations of papermakers revered Cai Lun as the Patriarch and Sage of Paper, and his tomb and shrine in Yangxian County, Shaanxi Province, have remained active sites of veneration for centuries; in traditional paper-producing regions, artisans invariably perform ritual offerings to the Paper God before commencing new production.