Chen Xu got off the horse and covered his nose and walked to the front of a pottery jar. He used a wooden stick to pick up some twine and rags and looked at it. He found that these things had fermented and had a good price comparison. He started to spread out with a slight pick.

"It's almost done, make some to pound and crush them, the better the more you break them!" Chen Xu felt that the soaking was almost done.

Papermaking is a very complex technology. It not only requires a lot of water but also pollutes the environment. In later generations, as long as there is a paper mill, water sources several kilometers away will be polluted.

Although the paper he is trying to make is still the most primitive hemp paper, without any chemicals for deodorization, whitening and sterilization, pollution to the water source is still unavoidable. Therefore, this paper mill is built downstream of Xiaoqing River, which is already two hundred meters away from the nearest primary school, and has no impact on the water intake in the town.

He wanted to make paper for the sake of convenience of writing, and he also wanted to give it to his future wife, the beautiful woman, so that she would not be able to express inconvenient bamboo abbreviations every day.

However, Chen Xu also had a dark look on his eyes. He only knew that the practical papermaking technique that Cai Lun could improve after the improvement of the Eastern Han Dynasty was to use rags, twine, rotten fishing nets, bark and messy grass to soak and mash, spread and dry.

This time, he used several pottery jars to place different proportions of different ingredients to see if he could make the paper that could be written. Once successful, he would advance the Chinese papermaking technology hundreds of years. If it was smooth and soft enough, it would be good to fumigate and kill and sterilize it and wipe his butt. It was much better than using a bamboo piece and a wooden stick. It has been almost two months since he traveled through it. He felt that his chrysanthemums had been destroyed and he felt that they were almost exhausted.

Under Niu Dashi's command, two and a half-year-old boys picked out a large ball of rotten hemp ropes and linens from the pottery jar and cleaned it for a while, then put it into a stone mortar, and then stepped on the wooden pestle and pounded it hard.

"The pottery basin on the stove and start cooking with clean water!"

More than ten minutes passed, and seeing that the pounding was almost done, Chen Xu ordered the next step to start.

These pounded pulp should be placed in clean water and cooked hard to kill the insect eggs, and at the same time it can also remove some sour smell. Otherwise, even if the paper is made and turned on, he will feel embarrassed to use it gently for the water. It is too embarrassing to throw it away from Taiyi Tianzun.

Seeing the pulp being scooped into the pottery basin on the earthen stove by a black boy with red arms, Chen Xu repeatedly stirred it with bamboo sticks, feeling that the concentration was already high enough, so he ordered Niu Dashi to take out the paper sieve and tiles to prepare.

The paper sieve was made by a bamboo craftsman in the town under his guidance.

The bamboo craftsmen in the past did not have the bamboo swords that scraped and washed the bamboos in later generations. The bamboo utensils they made on weekdays were also very simple and rough, just bamboo cups, bamboo tubes, bamboo bowls, chopsticks, and then weaved some rough bamboo utensils. Because the tools were not good, bamboo utensils could not be separated very well. Therefore, although bamboo utensils were used very early in China, they have always been used very briefly.

However, Chen Xu created a bimoon-shaped bamboo knife commonly used by bamboo craftsmen in later generations, which can wash and scrape the bamboo strips into extremely thin strips, and the thickness is exactly the same. The thinness can reach a few millimeters at most, which is about the same thickness as thin linen, but it is obviously much stronger because the structure and characteristics of the bamboo determine that its texture is very straight and its toughness is extremely high.

The scraped bamboo strips are finely woven into a very fine mesh screen like a weaving cloth, so that water can pass through it, so that only pulp remains on the bamboo screen.

In later generations, bamboo utensils woven by good bamboo craftsmen were even able to directly hold water without leaking after being dried. Of course, Chen Xu didn't need to be so perverted, and it wouldn't work without leaking water.

Chen Xu learned this trick from handmade rice paper played on TV, and Cai Lun definitely did not use such high-density bamboo sieve in the Eastern Han Dynasty. Therefore, Chen Xu believed that as long as the pulp is fine, the paper made should be much more refined and flatter than the so-called Cai Hou paper.

The bamboo sieve is not big, and it is only one foot long and wide. It is mainly because the pottery pot for cooking pulp is too small, and this is also an experimental nature. You only need to verify the papermaking process. Using this bamboo sieve to dry the paper out will be the size of the paper that was sixteen in later generations. However, if it is successful, there will be no problem in writing.

After the pulp was completely cooked and waited for the water temperature to cool down, Chen Xu picked up a bamboo sieve with a little nervous and excited to sink it into the tiles. He let the pulp enter the bamboo sieve and shake it gently repeatedly. Then he slowly lifted the bamboo sieve flat. As the water fell down, a layer of hemp-gray pulp evenly attached to the bamboo sieve. There were also many stems of hemp-shaped threads that had not been completely crushed, but there was no sign of the torn rags and hemp ropes.

After most of the water in the paper sieve was drained, Chen Xu carefully placed the sieve on a wooden rack next to it and dried it. As long as the layer of pulp is half dry, he can try to peel off the paper and spread it on a specially customized tiles until it is dried. Finally, he imitated the rice paper method and stacked many papers together and pressed them with stone slabs. In a few days, he will get a flat paper.

But these are Chen Xu's best wishes.

Soon Chen Xu used a few bamboo sieves to scoop out some pulp and put them on a wooden rack to dry.

"You can see the process clearly!" Chen Xu asked Niu Dashi and the two boys after washing his hands.

"It's clear!" Niu Dashi nodded repeatedly, and the two teenagers also nodded quickly.

"That's good. You can treat the remaining few tanks as follows. The pulp can be pounded finer. After the pulp in each tank is cooled, you must mark it separately to avoid mixing it up. After most of the pulp in the bamboo sieve is dried, try to peel it off. If it can be lifted up, take it out carefully and put it on the tiles, put it in the room and dry it slowly..."

After giving some instructions, Chen Xu rode his horse away from the papermaking workshop again.

Anyway, everything he thought was beautiful, and the result was determined by luck. But Chen Xu believed that if he didn't work once, he would always make paper in the Qin Dynasty, because the difficulty of this kind of paper was indeed not too high.

Moreover, as long as the paper is successful, you can also find some sulfur fumigation and bleaching in the future, and even burn some lime and put it in the pulp for sterilization. You can even add some colored plant juice or insect-proof plant juice to change the color or increase the aroma of the pulp, so that the paper will have a better prospect of using it.

In fact, apart from this mixed hemp pulp, the best papermaking materials are bamboo and light trees without oil. Later toilet paper was made of bamboo pulp and wood pulp. In principle, it is not more complicated than hemp pulp paper, but it requires more complex and precise equipment, such as a crusher, which cannot be solved now.
Chapter completed!