All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French

The Paper Trail: An Unexpected History of the World’s Greatest Invention

Posted: May 30th, 2014 | No Comments »

Alex Monro’s (an old Shanghailander himself of recent vintage) The Paper Trail is now out….

The story of how a Chinese invention has wrapped itself around our world,

with history’s most momentous ideas etched upon its surface

9781846141898L

 

 

It can be eaten as rice paper or it can carry regurgitated food as an airplane sick bag. Paper can cover a spot and it can cut a finger. Children have made handheld aeroplanes out of it and assassins have moistened it to block a sleeping victim’s nostrils before strangulation. It can last for hundreds of years but it can also disappear with moisture in minutes or be eaten by bookworms in a few days. It can be as mundane and practical as a bus ticket or it can be as prized and expensive as the interface of the world’s greatest paintings.

 

The Paper Trail tells the story of how a simple Chinese product has for two millennia allowed knowledge, ideas and religions to spread at an unprecedented rate around the world.

 

Alex Monro traces this groundbreaking invention’s voyage, beginning with the Buddhist translators responsible for its spread across China and Japan, and follows it westward along the Silk Road, where it eventually became the surface of the Quran.

 

Once paper reached Europe, it became indispensable to the scholars who manufactured the Renaissance and Reformation from their desks. As Monro uncovers, paper created a world in which free thinking could flourish, and brought disciplines from science to music into a new age.

 

 

Alex Monro studied Chinese at the University of Cambridge and in Beijing before working for The Times in London and for Reuters in Shanghai. He has contributed chapters to The Dragon Throne (a history of China’s dynasties) and The Seventy Great Journeys in History, and edited two travel poetry anthologies, including China: City and Exile.

 

In 2011, he won the Royal Society of Literature’s Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction for The Paper Trail. He lives with his wife in the Cotswolds, and writes on contemporary China.

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