Cheng: I'll teach you seven ways to identify the authenticity of handmade rice paper.

At present, almost all rice paper manufacturers borrow the name of "rice paper", but in fact, the real rice paper no longer exists. The uniqueness of traditional handmade rice paper lies in the unique raw materials, using sandalwood bark and shatian straw. This raw material ratio has been followed for thousands of years. The excellent quality of Xuan paper comes from strict material selection and fine technology. Tan bark and straw materials are soaked, covered with ash, cooked, bleached, beaten, fished, glued and pasted with flood water, and so on. After two years of careful carving, its arduousness and complexity are beyond ordinary people's imagination, and finally it can be made into pure handmade rice paper. With the change of mechanism and the improvement of chemical bleaching agent in the early 1960s, the industrialization process was accelerated, and the whole process only took two or three days. As a consumable, pure hand-made rice paper before the 1950s is increasingly scarce. One piece is used less than the other, which is very precious. Now, the handmade rice paper before the 1950s has already exceeded 10,000. And those painters who pursue the ultimate are striving for it, in order to preserve their works for future generations. Jingxian county, the origin of rice paper production, has few resources since ancient times, and the rice paper with three parts per mu is very limited, and it is rare to hand it to the present. For laymen, the identification of rice paper is even more foggy. Here are seven ways to identify rice paper, so that you can quickly identify the authenticity of rice paper without instruments.

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First, look at the net pattern and touch the net pattern: the hand-made net pattern is the trace caused by the small bamboo curtain of papermaking, which is very clear. Hand-made propaganda is rough on both sides, not very smooth. See if there are any pine needle patterns, which are traces of dry paper brushes. Then look at the first and last sheets of a knife to see if the uniformity of these two sheets is the same. If so, it is not pure artificial propaganda, but mechanical propaganda. Because only 60 pieces of handmade rice paper can be fished in the pond, its uniformity will not be the same.

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2. Pick up the paper and look at it in the light: See if there is cloud-like paper on the rice paper, which is sandalwood fiber, and you can also find scribbled ribs (each paper can always be 8 to 10 2-3 mm long), but this method can only identify whether it is pure sandalwood paper or grass paper, and it cannot be used as the key to identify whether it is handmade paper.

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Third, look at the four sides of the whole knife paper: if it is neat, it is not pure hand-made rice paper. Most hand-made rice paper is irregular because it is cut by hand, but hand-made rice paper can also be cut by machine.

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Fourth, test the change of ink with a pen: trace several shallow and thick ink marks in the same place on the paper, and observe the ink absorption change of rice paper. If it is handmade rice paper, it will clearly show the levels between ink marks. However, the mechanism of Xuan paper and painting paper at the alternation of pen marks is vague, and the ink absorption effect is not rich, so it is impossible to distinguish the ink color change.

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Verb (abbreviation of verb) tearing method: When manual rice paper is torn longitudinally, it will show a very obvious double layer with a width of 2-3 cm, while machine-made paper is often single layer. This acidic structure caused by chemical bleaching agent corrosion has weak tensile strength.

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6. Combustion method: This is the simplest identification method. Because the traditional manual propaganda is weakly alkaline and acid-free, if the paper is grayish white after burning, it is pure manual propaganda. If the paper ash is gray, it is acid paper, which is undoubtedly machine-made rice paper. This is because the carbonization of carbon and sulfuric acid in acid paper promotes the formation of carbide, which leads to the darkening of ash.

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7. vinegar bubble: soak a small piece of paper in vinegar. If there are tiny bubbles, it is mostly hand-made rice paper. This is because acid-free paper contains alkaline fillers (such as calcium carbonate). Acetic acid in vinegar will react with calcium carbonate and release carbon dioxide. The bubbles we see are carbon dioxide.