The Han Dynasty

Words: 1985
Pages: 8

Our goal as a human race, as a society, is to improve upon what we have. To push the boundaries of what the past has given us and to strive for something better. Soon this present time, where we have improved upon something, becomes the past and again we seek for improvement, for our ideas to be further polished. The Han Dynasty, is a time in our past from 206 BCE to 220 CE. An age so influential that people native to China refer to themselves as ‘the children of Han’, the golden age of China’s past. A dynasty, which has led to the making of a better world, with many inventions that are still used today, by people from different walks of life. The Han Dynasty has left us with a legacy of which our technological advancements can never and will …show more content…
Cai Lin was eunuch of the imperial court and during his time he had gathered bamboo fibres and the inner bark of a mulberry tree, added water and pounded it with a wooden device. This process was to make a sort of paste which was then poured over a flat woven cloth allowing for the water to be absorbed. When it was dry Cai Lun realised he had created a material which was both lightweight and had a good writing surface. He then began to experiment with other materials such as hemp and a year later in 105 AD he presented his invention to the emperor, He Di. This invention was then spread to many nations via the silk road. Prior to this, writing surfaces were often bones or wooden boards and without Cai Lun’s invention we possibly may be writing on them. However, paper has become such a large commodity that it has gone into mass production, becoming a large ecological issue. The pulp and paper industry is said to be the third largest industrial polluter of the earth, producing over three-hundred million tonnes of paper per year. Australia, since the settlement of Europeans, has cleared almost half of its forest areas. However, we are not stopping here, as we continue to deforest land as large as the ACT annually, destroying habitats and endangering many species such as the black cockatoo. From the years 2007 to 2008 ‘Clean Up Australia’ reported that as a country we are using over four million tonnes of paper and approximately two million of it goes straight to landfill. In office environments ten-thousand sheets of A4 paper are used on average and about half of it ends up as garbage. Today, in our modern society, it takes approximately twenty-four trees to produce a single tonne of paper, meaning that we cut over nine-hundred million trees per year. However, deforestation is not the only issue presented, with the pulp and paper industry using ninety-thousand litres of