Crazily long trek to the paper mill

Just before Toph left we went to the Guan Shin Paper Mill (廣興紙寮) in Nantou (南投). At the time I had wanted to buy a pig mask, and due to various cock ups, didn't end up getting it. Luckily Steve became interested in a trip out there after seeing my handmade paper - so we headed out today (in the middle of a typhoon which is devastating the more mountainous regions in Nantou).

The paper industry in Puli, Nantou, has been in existence since the late Chin dynasty. Apparently the water quality of Puli (埔里) city makes the area suitable for paper making, as water with a high concentration of iron turns out bad quality paper. Once paper mills dominated the region. Now there is only 10 (which still sounds numerous to me), and Guan Shin is the only one which specializes in handmade papers. The mill offers a guided tour by one of their guides - the majority of them seem to be female, and they all look a little harassed and slightly jaded about the whole arrangement. I guess that's what happens when you do 20 guided tours a day to people who flood in from all over.

After the tour I made my second bit of paper. It was easy this time around. I embossed it with a goat. The last time I did one of flowers. Handmade paper from the mill is exceptionally strong and flexible, because it has super long fibres which are arranged in irregular patterns during the hand-making process. This makes them very suitable for embossing.

This is how the paper making process goes:

1. Raw material (bark of various trees, bamboo, and also husks of water bamboo (筊白筍), which is actually the stem of Manchurian wild rice, after being infected with the smut fungus Ustilago esculenta) is cooked and steamed and bleached and pulped. This process is not open to the public.
2. The pulp, mixed with water, is scooped from a pool into a wooden tray with a bamboo sheet (like the type you roll sushi with, but finer grained) stretched across, like a flat sieve.
3. The water drains and the fibres form a wet piece of paper, which is then peeled off, and laid on top of one another with a piece of string to separate one sheet from another, forming a curious block which looks a bit like soggy tofu. The artisans at the factory do this on a large scale, with giant frames that produce big pieces of paper. We paying customers do them on a tenth of the scale.
4. The paper is pressed to dry. An industrial size block of paper-tofu needs to drip dry over night before pressing for 6-8 hours on a hefty looking big press. We got ours pressed in a matter of 5 minutes on small presses (which nevertheless required some muscle power to turn).
   
5. The paper is laid out onto baking tables heated by steam, and brushed with pine needle brushes to get rid of air bubbles - the side which comes in contact with the table is smooth, and the other side rough. Laying out small sheets of paper is easy as pie - but the ladies who do the "baking," as it were, at the factory, have a knack of picking up individual sheets of wet paper with a wooden stick, waving them in the air like a flag, and laying them flat out on the baking tables. Neat trick!Then we were given an opportunity to do embossed printing on our own bits of handmade paper. There were numerous clay tablets (well worn with ink) on tables. Each tablet has a different design, some are modern (cartoon characters), and others are traditional Chinese symbols.

To emboss:

1. The paper is laid directly onto the carved clay tablet, and wetted through with a spray bottle.
2. A second piece of thin, machine made paper is laid over top.
3. Both sheets get the hell beaten out of them by a big brush.
4. Replace the top sheet of machine paper with another one, and repeat, until moisture has been absorbed out of the handmade sheet of paper.
5. Ink is then applied with rag blobs.

This is my embossed flowers from my first visit. This time round I embossed a picture of a goat, and also got my pig mask, which was my main objective for going down there in the first place (the girls in the gift shop thought I was crazy to truck all the way down to buy a mask). Of course I also caved when I saw these paper woven pork-pie hats which were just absolutely perfect for me - waterproof too, and only NT$420 (less than a tenner!).

For more photos, check out my newly acquired Flickr account.