The Paper Trail An Unexpected History of a Revolutionary Invention

The Paper Trail is the two-millennia-long history of how a simple Chinese invention changed the course of human events. Tracing the emergence of paper from the imperial court of Han China to its subsequent journeys to Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, through the empire of the Abbasid Caliphate and eventually, by way of the Silk Road, to Europe in the late thirteenth century, Alexander Monro shows how the medium allowed religions and revolutions, philosophies and propaganda to spread like never before. A sweeping, richly detailed, and vividly written tale populated by holy men and scholars, warriors and poets, rulers and ordinary men and women, here is the story not only of paper, but of human culture itself.

Alexander Monro has worked as a Parliamentary researcher, on The Times (London) foreign desk and wrote general news and features for Reuters Shanghai. He was previously a China analyst at Trusted Sources, where he wrote on political risk in China. Monro has edited a classical poetry collection, Laments of Four Cities of China, and has coedited an anthology of poetry about ‘the East’ called Desert Air. In 2002 he was sponsored by the Captain Scott Society to trace the route of Genghis Khan through Mongolia on horseback. His articles have been published by The Times (London), The Sunday Telegraph, The Guardian Arts blog, The Washington Post, The Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, New Scientist, Agence France-Presse and Reuters. He speaks French and Mandarin Chinese, having studied the latter at the universities of Cambridge and Peking, and continues to write on contemporary China.