Papermaking is a unique term for ancient Chinese paper-making skills. It is also an outstanding contribution made by the Chinese nation to human society. Paper is not a natural substance, but an artificial substance. The birth of paper has had a tremendous impact on world culture and civilization.

　　Paper made by the paper-making technology invented by our country is manually processed, so it is called hand-made paper. When this kind of paper has become popular and spread in China, Europeans only know how to use "pen" (or goose feather tube) to draw words on mud, papyrus and sheepskin. Therefore, people call Chinese handmade paper Chinese paper, and we used to call it "earth paper".

　　Since the Ten Years of Tianbao in Tang Dynasty (A.D. 751), Chinese papermaking spread westward through Arabs, and then to Spain in A.D. 1150, there has been handmade paper from European countries. It wasn't until 1799 that the paper machine ("endless mesh belt") was created, which opened a new chapter in the history of paper making. European paper refers to machine paper made from paper machines. Later, it was called "foreign paper" (as the Japanese call it). Therefore, from the end of the 18th century, papermaking has been divided into two stages, one is Chinese papermaking and the other is European papermaking.

　　In terms of paper-making technology, the basic principles of hand-made paper and machine-made paper are the same, but there are differences in production process and operation methods. After the introduction of Chinese hand-made paper to Europe, Europeans from the imitation process felt that the physical consumption is high, coupled with the European population is small, the labor force is insufficient and the growing demand for paper and other reasons. So they tried every means to replace manpower with machines and power. Afterwards, under the influence of objective conditions, through continuous efforts, papermaking machines and pulping equipment were invented. From then on, papermaking was divided into two different systems: pulping and papermaking.

　　From this we can see that manual papermaking is often called papermaking, while machine papermaking is called papermaking technology. Definition, fabrication and product performance are not exactly the same.