IN-PERSON: Prague – Section B

Abstract

Over 2,000 years ago, a curious court official named Cai Lun from China’s Southwest Province, cooked and beat locally available plant-based materials like hemp fishing nets, mulberry bark, and linen rags into flat sheets of felted fibers—the world’s first paper. His discovery was spectacular because—unlike stone and clay tablets—paper allows human knowledge and art to be recorded quickly and portably. This innovation, though initially closely guarded, spread widely, first to neighboring regions, to neighboring regions like Vietnam and Korea, and then eventually around the world. Furthermore, since each region has their own locally available plants, different cultures processed different plants by different methods to make unique, handmade papers. Now with automation displacing manual traditions, hand papermaking traditions are globally threatened. While papermaking in both China and Japan have been added to UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage lists, papermaking traditions elsewhere lack this recognition. Such is the case for Vietnam, a country where industrialization, years of colonialism, and war have rendered its seventeen-century-old papermaking traditions nearly extinct. In Vietnam, ethnic minority groups still practice traditional papermaking. Within this region, traditional papermaking is still unequivocally tied to the livelihood and sustainability of individual communities. Recording the traditional ecological knowledge associated with papermaking is a key step towards conserving their traditions. This paper will provide an overview of the significant legacy that hand papermaking traditions in Vietnam carry—an essential cultural activity tied to identity and place.