Post content
I've spent weeks watching videos from the Instagram account Rabias_world1. Videos of Chinese artisans, almost without words, cameras following their hands as they work. The processes take months. The videos last three minutes. And in that compression there is something that keeps me thinking long after I close the screen.
The question I can't stop asking myself seems simple and isn't: how did anyone know they had to do that?
Not a specific gesture, but the complete sequence.
Strip the inner bark of the mulberry tree, soak it for weeks, boil it with alkaline ash, wash it, cut it, pound it until it becomes a paste, add a plant root that slows drainage, submerge the screen, move it rising out of the water with a precise gesture, stack the damp sheets without intermediate felts, press, dry. The complete process for mulberry paper can take between four and eight weeks. How do you arrive at that?
The answer is that nobody designed the whole thing.
The oldest paper fragments we have are not from the year 105 AD, when official history places Cai Lun and his invention. They are from between 179 and 141 BC: hemp found in a tomb in Gansu with a map drawn in black ink, three centuries before the official inventor. Cai Lun did not invent paper. He systematized something that already existed and scaled it. The process we call invention was in reality seven centuries of distributed experimentation, generation after generation, without central coordination and without scientific language.
Chinese lacquer illustrates this even better because it is a counterintuitive case. The tree resin does not dry by evaporation like any modern varnish. It cures through oxidative polymerization and requires relative humidity of between seventy and eighty-five percent. Lacquer hardens in a humid environment. How did anyone discover that eight thousand years ago? Probably by observing the tree: the sap that seeps from wounds in the trunk polymerizes naturally in the subtropical climate of the Yangtze. The first artisans did not design a chemical process. They replicated conditions the tree itself already produced.
The pattern is the same in every case. Observable accident first. Reproduction of it. Systematization of conditions later. And documentation at the end: the first real step toward scaling.
That knowledge traveled from hands to hands, from father to son, from master to apprentice living in the house for years, learning by imitation rather than explanation. Without needing to write it down. Zhuangzi, in the fourth century BC, had already theorized this with precision.
In the third chapter appears the butcher Paoding, who dismembers an ox with gestures so fluid they seem like dance. Asked about it, he answers that when he started he saw the whole ox. After three years he no longer saw it as a mass but as a structure of hollows and joints. Now he approaches it with his spirit, not his eyes. He follows the natural contours, enters through the large hollows, slides the knife where the animal was already disposed to come apart. A bad butcher changes his knife every month. Paoding has had the same knife for nineteen years and the blade is immaculate.
Further on there is another parable: an old carpenter who has spent his whole life carving wheels finds a nobleman reading books of the sages. The carpenter tells him there is something in his craft that no book can contain. That when he strikes the axle, if he does it too softly it doesn't fit, if too hard it gets stuck. That the exact point he gets with his hand and feels in his heart, but his mouth cannot say it. That he has spent seventy years carving and has not been able to pass on that knowledge even to his own son. And that therefore what the nobleman is reading in his books is, at bottom, the dregs of men who have already died: what remained when living knowledge could not pass on.
What fascinates me about these processes is not that they are complicated. It is that they are forms of knowledge of the world that did not need scientific language to be precise and transmissible for millennia. The potters of Jingdezhen learned the temperature of the kiln from the color of the flame, something that today is measured with precision thermometers and that they passed on by telling an apprentice to observe for years until he could see it. The imperial kiln museum holds millions of fragments deliberately destroyed because they did not meet the standard. Each broken piece was a piece of data in a feedback system whose language was sensory, not numerical.
Chinese artisans improved their processes for centuries without objective measurements. They had the capacity to hold in mind an image of what should be. They had judgment.
Is there a shorter path to judgment that does not pass through years of hands in the clay? In a moment when knowledge is liquid, what remains beyond instant reach is the hand that knows before the mind reasons.
–
Follow me on LinkedIn to stay updated on new posts.
–
Bangkok, 2024
References: