The Almanac of Collapsing Records

The First Sheet — Luoyang, c. 105

A court workshop yard in Luoyang, capital of the Eastern Han, beside the soaking vats

around 105 CE — the Han court at Luoyang, where the imperial workshops are cooking rags, bark, hemp ends and worn-out fishnet into pulp, and the officer of the palace workshops is preparing to present a new writing surface to the throne

Writing's future peels off a wooden mold in a wet yard, and nobody in the yard says a word about it. This breach reads the APPRENTICE AT THE VAT in the Han imperial workshops at Luoyang: rags, tree bark, hemp waste and rotted fishnet cooked down to slurry, a screen dipped and lifted, a thin mat of fiber settling and drying into a clean sheet light enough to carry in one hand. The breach holds in the background what that sheet will do — the bamboo slips it replaces, the libraries it will make possible — and never lets the apprentice know it. The fragment is the subject's own: the first thing they ever made with their hands that came out right — and the memory beneath it of being taught a craft by someone patient, and the day the work finally obeyed them.

From the record

Chinese records credit Cai Lun, an officer of the imperial workshops under the Eastern Han, with reporting a new writing material to the throne in 105 CE
the recorded materials were tree bark, hemp waste, old rags and worn-out fishnet, beaten and soaked into a pulp
before this, documents were written on strips of bamboo bound into rolls, which were heavy, and on silk, which was costly
the pulp was suspended in water and lifted out on a screened mold, leaving a thin mat of fiber that was pressed and dried into a sheet
the imperial capital of the Eastern Han at this period was Luoyang, where the palace workshops operated

The era door

a plank door in a mud-brick workshop wall, the wood swollen and pale from years of splashed water, an iron ring for a handle cold in the morning

LUOYANG — c. 105

Walk this day yourself — free

A guided walk with Wallace — you are placed inside the record as a witness, and you carry a memory of your own back out. Free, ~20 minutes.

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MEMORY IS RESISTANCE · IN SERVICE OF VELOCITY · YEAR 3037