Paper Analysis and Paper History from Ancient Chinese Paper to Japanese Washi

This paper describes about analysis for papers and old documents. The samples consist of various kinds of papers, from early 4th century documents to 20th century papers, e.g. Chinese old documents, 19th century Japanese papers and modern handmade papers from Japan, China, Taiwan and South Korea. First, we investigated about elements in the papers by X-ray Fluorescence Analysis. Most of the ancient papers from China have metal elements, Fe, Ti and Al. But most of the modern papers do not include them. Next, we also measured paper colour, and classified the papers by the paper colour data. The result shows that old paper´s colour is darker and yellower than modern paper´s one. Finally, we investigated dunhunag manuscripts from 5th century to 10th century, and tried to classify them by paper fibre analysis.