Chinese rice-paper is a thing which we frequently hear of, but do not often see. It is very curious and pretty, but far too frail for most of the uses to which we put our English paper; and, for this reason, it has no commercial value in European countries, and is only brought away by travellers and traders as a curiosity.

The rice-paper which I have seen was cut into small squares about three by two inches, each of which had a beautiful coloured picture of a Chinese man or woman. The paper was very white and thin, slightly rough, like blotting-paper, stiff and brittle. It was impossible to fold it, as the least effort to bend the sheet broke it in two. The pictures upon these little sheets had evidently been painted by hand, and were very beautiful and interesting. The surface of the paint was bright and clear, and the paper was transparent enough to permit the picture to be seen from the back, with all its colours and details only a little dimmed, as if seen through a thin sheet of ground glass.

Notwithstanding its name, rice-paper has really nothing to do with rice. It is not made from rice, nor even from the rice plant, but from the pith of a kind of ivy, the Aralia papyrifera, which grows abundantly in the island of Formosa. This Aralia is not much like our English ivy. It is, in fact, a small tree, which may attain a height of twenty or thirty feet, and is crowned with a number of large leaves, shaped like those of the sycamore. It bears clusters of small, pale yellow flowers, which contrast beautifully with the dark green foliage. The stem is ringed with the marks of the fallen leaves, very like the stems of the castor-oil plants which are often seen in pots in England.

The stem of the rice-paper plant is hollow, and filled with a pith which, though it is rather broken in the centre, is firm and compact outside. After the tree has reached a certain age, the pith becomes less serviceable, and so the tree is usually cut down when it is about twelve feet high, before it has attained its full growth. The stem is cut into lengths of nine or twelve inches each, and the pith is pushed out by inserting a stick at one end, and hammering it through the core of the tree. The little rolls of pith obtained in this way are placed in hollow bamboos, which permit them to swell a little, but prevent them from curling up as they dry. When properly dried, they are ready for the cutting, which is the really skilful part of the making of rice-paper. The man who cuts up the pith has a long, sharp knife, which he places against the side of the roll of pith in such a way that it will take off a thin paring as he turns the roll round and round. It is like paring off the bark of a log by rolling it round against a sharp knife, with these differences, however, that the paring is as thin as paper, and that it is part of the log itself, and goes on until the broken centre is reached. The parings, or sheets, when stripped off, are about four feet long, and they are placed one upon the other and pressed, after which they are cut into squares like those described above. The squares are made up into packets of one hundred each, which the Chinese sell for five or six farthings a packet. Many of these little squares are dyed or stained different colours, and are used for making little artificial flowers; others, as we have already seen, are covered with little pictures, representing sometimes the people and the costumes of China, and sometimes the birds, butterflies, and animals of that country.

There are a few other trees or plants which yield a pith from which rice-paper can be made; but the Aralia is the most important. Though the tree grows best in the northern part of Formosa, the paper is made less by the Formosans than by the Chinese, who barter their goods for the rice-paper trees or logs.