I used to think paper came from trees, period.
Then I walked into the Samarkand Paper Mill on a dusty Tuesday morning—honestly, I wasn’t expecting much—and watched a craftsman pull a screen through a vat of what looked like milky water, and suddenly I’m holding a sheet of paper made from mulberry bark that feels nothing like the stuff I’ve been writing on my entire life. It’s thicker, almost textile-like, with these irregular edges that catch the light weird. Turns out the Chinese invented this process around 105 CE, give or take, and it traveled the Silk Road to Samarkand sometime in the 8th century when, according to legend, Chinese papermakers were captured during the Battle of Talas and basically had to teach their captors the whole thing. Whether that’s entirely accurate or somewhat mythologized, I can’t say for certain, but here’s the thing: Samarkand became a paper-making hub for roughly six centuries after that, supplying manuscripts across Central Asia and the Islamic world.
The workshop itself sits near the Siab River, which isn’t a coincidence. You need clean water for this. The process starts with mulberry branches—specifically the inner bark—which gets stripped, boiled, and beaten into pulp.
Wait—maybe I should back up. The mulberry tree (Morus alba, mostly) grows wild around Uzbekistan, and its bark contains long cellulose fibers that, when processed correctly, create paper that’s absurdly durable. I’ve seen manuscripts from the 10th century that look better than my college notebooks. The craftsmen at the mill soak the bark for days, then boil it with ash or lime to break down the lignin, which is the stuff that makes wood rigid. After that comes the beating: traditionally done with wooden mallets for hours until the fibers separate into this soup-like consistency. It’s exhausting work, and watching someone do it for even twenty minutes makes you appreciate industrial pulp mills, even if the end product isn’t nearly as interesting.
The Vat Formation Process That Hasn’t Changed in Twelve Centuries
Here’s where it gets weirdly meditative.
The papermaker stands over a rectangular vat filled with water and suspended mulberry pulp. They hold a wooden frame with a mesh screen—traditionally made from bamboo or reed, though some workshops now use synthetic materials—and dip it into the vat at a precise angle, then lift it horizontally while gently shaking it side to side. This distributes the fibers evenly across the screen. I tried this once and produced something that looked like a diseased pancake. The motion requires muscle memory you only get from doing it thousands of times: too fast and the sheet’s too thin, too slow and it clumps. The craftsman I watched could feel the weight of the water through the frame and knew exactly when to lift. Each sheet takes maybe forty seconds to form, but learning to do it right takes years.
Pressing and Drying Under Samarkand’s Unforgiving Sun
Once formed, the wet sheets get stacked between layers of felt.
Then comes pressing—either with a manual screw press or, in some traditional setups, just heavy stones. This squeezes out excess water and helps the fibers bond. The pressure has to be gradual; too much too fast and you’ll tear the sheet. After pressing, each piece gets peeled off (carefully, because it’s still fragile) and laid out to dry. At the Samarkand mill, they dry sheets on wooden boards in direct sunlight, which in summer means temperatures pushing 40°C. The sun-drying gives the paper a slightly warm tone and, according to some papermakers, affects its texture in ways artificial drying doesn’t quite replicate. I’m not sure if that’s objectively measurable or just craft romanticism, but the finished product definately has a different feel than industrially dried paper.
Why Silk Road Merchants Preferred This Paper Over Alternatives
Animal parchment was the competitor back then. Heavier, greasier, way more expensive.
Mulberry paper from Samarkand weighed less, absorbed ink beautifully (especially important for Arabic calligraphy with its fluid lines), and didn’t require slaughtering livestock. Islamic scholars and Persian poets used it for everything from Qurans to scientific treatises. The Ulugh Beg Observatory’s astronomical tables, compiled in the 15th century, were recoreded on Samarkand paper. It could survive desert heat, mountain cold, and the general abuse of caravan transport better than parchment or Egyptian papyrus, which would crack in dry climates. By the 12th century, Samarkand paper was being exported as far as Baghdad and Damascus, where it competed with—and often replaced—local production.
The Modern Workshop Experience Between Tourism and Preservation
Anyway, the mill today operates partly as a tourist attraction.
You can book a workshop session where they walk you through the whole process: stripping bark, pulping (though they’ll have most of this pre-done), forming a sheet, pressing it. You leave with your own handmade paper, which will probably be lumpy and uneven but feels like an accomplishment regardless. The guides explain the history in English, Russian, or Uzbek, depending on the group, and there’s a small shop selling finished paper, notebooks, and prints. Some critics argue this commercialization dilutes the craft, turns it into performance rather than preservation. Maybe. But the alternative is letting the knowledge disappear entirely, which nearly happened in the Soviet era when industrial paper made traditional methods economically pointless. The mill employs local craftspeople who might otherwise have no reason to learn these techniques, and the tourist revenue funds ongoing production. It’s messy, sure, but crafts survive by adapting or they don’t survive at all.
What You’ll Actually Take Away Beyond the Souvenir Paper
I guess what surprised me most was how physical it all is. We think of paper as this disposable thing, but watching someone coax fibers into alignment with just water and a screen makes you realize how much knowledge is embedded in gestures—the angle of the dip, the rhythm of the shake. The craftsman I watched couldn’t fully explain what he was doing; his hands just knew. That kind of embodied expertise doesn’t transfer through YouTube tutorials or instruction manuals. It requires presence, repetition, failure. The paper you make in the workshop won’t be perfect, might not even be particularly good, but you’ll understand viscerally why a 10th-century manuscript merchant would pay premium prices for Samarkand sheets. And maybe, like me, you’ll stop crumpling up notebook pages quite so carelessly.
