What was Chinese paper made from?

How much paper do you use every day? Probably you can’t answer that question quickly. In 1990 tile world’s use of paper was about one kilogram for each person in a year. Now some countries use as much as 50 kilograms of paper for each person in a year. Some people say that the amount of paper a country uses shows how advanced the country is. Countries like the United States, England and Sweden certainly use more paper than other countries.
     Paper, like many other things that we use today, was first made in China. In Egypt and the west, paper was not very commonly used before the year 1400. The Chinese first made paper about 2000 years ago.  China still has pieces of paper which were made as long as that. But Chinese paper was not made from wood of trees. It was made from the hair-like parts of certain plants.
     Paper was not made in southern Europe until about the year 1100. Scandinavia-which now makes a great deal of the world’s paper-did not begin to make it until 1500. It was a German named Schaeffer who found out that one could make the best paper from trees. After that, the forest countries of Canada, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and the United States became the most important in paper making. Today in Finland, which makes the best paper in the world, the paper industry is the biggest in the land. New paper making machines are very big, and they can make paper very. fast. The biggest machines can make a piece of paper 300 meters long and six meters wide in one minute.