Chen Xu got off the horse and covered his nose and walked to a clay jar, picked up some twine rags with a wooden stick and looked at them, and found that these things had been fermented and the price comparison was very strong, and they had begun to spread out with a light pick.

"Almost, get some out and crush it, the more broken the better!" Chen Xu felt that he was almost soaked.

Papermaking is a complex technology that not only requires a lot of water, but also pollutes the environment, and in future generations, as long as there is a paper mill, the water source will be polluted for several kilometers in the vicinity.

Although the paper he is trying to make is still the most primitive hemp papyrus, without adding any deodorant, whitening and sterilizing chemicals, the pollution of the water source is still unavoidable, so this paper mill is built in the lower reaches of the Xiaoqing River, two hundred meters away from the nearest primary school, and has no impact on the town's living water.

He wants to make paper naturally for the convenience of writing, and he also wants to give it to his future wife, a gentle beauty, so that she will not write on the inconvenient bamboo slips every day.

However, Chen Xu also had a black eye on papermaking, and only knew that the papermaking technique that could be practical after Cai Lun's improvement in the Eastern Han Dynasty was obtained by mixing rags, twine, rotten fishing nets, tree bark and messy grass to soak and mash and spread out to dry.

And this time he used a few clay jars to place the proportions of different ingredients, to see if he could try to make paper that could be written, once successful, it would advance China's papermaking technology by hundreds of years, if it was smooth and soft enough, it was good to wipe the butt after fumigation and sterilization, it was much better than using a bamboo chip and a wooden stick, and it had been almost two months since he crossed over, and he felt that his chrysanthemum had been destroyed and almost no pleasure.

Under the command of Niu Dashi, the two and a half children picked out a large ball of rotten hemp rope and linen in the pottery jar, cleaned it slightly, and then put it into a stone mortar, and then stepped on the wooden pestle to scoop it up.

"The clay pot on the stove with water starts boiling!"

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

These rotten pulp should be put into clean water and boiled vigorously to kill the eggs, and at the same time, it can also remove some sour smell, otherwise even if the paper is made, turn over a disgusting sour smell, he is embarrassed to take it to the water and use it gently, it is too embarrassing, and it is a shame to lose the people of Taiyi Tianzun.

Watching the pulp being scooped into the clay pot on the earthen stove by a swarthy young man with bare arms, Chen Xu repeatedly stirred it with a bamboo stick, feeling that the concentration was high enough, so he instructed Niu Dashi to take out the paper sieve and tile board and prepare it.

The paper sieve was made under the guidance of a bamboo craftsman in the town who had a decent amount of bamboo work.

In the past, the carpenter did not have the kind of scraping and washing the scorn knife in later generations, and the bamboo utensils made on weekdays were also very simple and rough, that is, bamboo cups, bamboo tubes, bamboo bowls, chopsticks, and then some rough baskets were woven into the grain, because the tools were not good, and the green and yellow could not be separated very well, so although the bamboo was used very early in China, it has been used very roughly.

However, Chen Xu created a bimoon-shaped knife commonly used by later generations of craftsmen, which can wash and scrape the bamboo strips into extremely fine silk, and the thickness and thickness are exactly the same, the thinnest can reach a few tenths of a millimeter, which is about the same thickness as fine twine, but it is obviously much stronger, because the structure and characteristics of bamboo determine that its texture is very straight and the toughness is extremely high.

The washed silk is woven into a very fine mesh sieve like a woven cloth, so that the water can pass through, so that only the pulp is left on the bamboo sieve.

In later generations, the bamboo ware woven by a good craftsman can even directly hold water without leakage after being brushed with tung oil and dried, of course, Chen Xu does not need to be so perverted, and it is not leaky

Chen Xu learned this trick in the handmade rice paper broadcast on TV, and Cai Lun definitely did not use such a high-density bamboo sieve during the Eastern Han Dynasty, so Chen Xu believes that as long as the pulp is fine, then the paper should be much finer and smoother than the so-called Cai Hou paper.

The bamboo sieve is not big, the length and width are only one foot, mainly because the clay pot for boiling pulp is too small, and this is also an experimental nature, only need to verify the process of papermaking, use this bamboo sieve to dry the paper, it is only the size of the paper of the sixteen open in later generations, but if it is successful, there is no problem at all with writing.

After the pulp is completely boiled, waiting for the water temperature to cool slightly, Chen Xu picked up a bamboo sieve and sank it into the tile pot with a little anxiety and excitement, let the pulp enter the bamboo sieve and shake it gently repeatedly, and then slowly put the bamboo sieve flat, as the water fell down, a layer of hemp gray pulp was evenly attached to the bamboo sieve, which was also mixed with a lot of twine stems that were not completely broken, but the appearance of those broken rags and hemp ropes could not be seen at all.

Waiting for most of the water in the paper sieve to drain up, Chen Xu carefully put the sieve on a wooden frame next to it to dry, as long as this layer of pulp is half dry, you can try to peel off the paper and spread it on a specially customized tile board to dry thoroughly, and finally imitate the practice of rice paper, stack many papers together, press them with stone slabs, and you can get a flat paper in a few days.

But these are Chen Xu's best wishes.

Soon, Chen Xu personally scooped out some pulp with several bamboo sieves and put it on a wooden frame to dry.

"See the process clearly!" Chen Xu washed his hands and asked Niu Dashi and the two teenagers.

"Clear, clear!" Niu Dashi nodded again and again, and the two teenagers also nodded quickly.

"That's good, you treat the remaining cylinders like this, the pulp can also be finer, and the pulp in each cylinder must be marked separately after it cools out, so as not to get mixed up when it happens, and try to peel it off after most of the pulp of the bamboo sieve is dry, if you can pick it up, take it out carefully and put it on the tile board, put it in the room and dry it slowly......"

After some instructions, Chen Xu rode away from the paper workshop again.

Anyway, everything he thinks is beautiful, as for the result, it depends on luck, but Chen Xu believes that if it doesn't work once, it will be two or three times, and he will always make the paper in the Qin Dynasty, because the difficulty of this kind of paper is indeed not too high.

And as long as the papermaking is successful, you can also find some sulfur fumigation bleaching in the future, and even burn some lime and put it in the pulp for sterilization, and even add some colored plant juice or insect-proof plant juice to change the color or increase the aromatic smell in the pulp, so that the paper has a better use prospect.

In fact, in addition to this mixed hemp pulp, the best papermaking materials are bamboo and lightweight trees without oil, and the toilet paper of later generations is made of bamboo pulp and wood pulp, which is not more complex than hemp pulp paper in principle, but requires more complex and sophisticated equipment, such as crushers, which cannot be solved now.

But Chen Xu believes that as long as steel can be made, and then borrowed water power, it can also be done, but this is all a later story, everything has to be done step by step.