The Olympic flame burns above the National Stadium during the opening ceremony for the Beijing 2008 Olympics on August 8. (AP)

Of the many remarkable shows on view at last week’s opening ceremony of the 2008 summer Olympics in Beijing, what intrigued me most was the use of paper. Expectedly, much of the ceremony was in-your-face hi-tech, with massive LED scrolls, simulated space explorations and gravity-defying acrobatics. But it was the story of paper and printing, told with the help of 897 performers, which showed how old-fashioned technology could be as awe-inspiring as the new.

Now, few things could be as old-fashioned as the technology of paper. The Chinese claim to have invented it in 105 AD, when an official attached to the Han imperial court created a sheet of paper from mulberry and other miscellaneous fibres. It was thus the first in the sequence of the ‘Four Great Inventions of China’, the other three being the compass, gunpowder and the printing press. The invention of paper was followed by that of printing, which occurred around the third century AD; both compass and gunpowder appeared during the Song dynasty, in the first century after the millennium.

Early Chinese paper was used for a variety of purposes, not all of them to do with writing. The Chinese used paper for wrapping, padding, storing things in, making money from, and for use in the toilet. The admirable Wikipedia informs us during the early 14th century, the modern-day Zhejiang province produced 10 million packets of toilet paper with 1,000 to 10,000 sheets in each packet. The Song dynasty, faced with a shortage of copper, introduced the jiaozi, the world’s earliest paper money.

But what about printing? No one knows exactly when the Chinese began printing, but what we do know is that the oldest extant printed artefact in the world is a 16-feet scroll called the Diamond Sutra, which the explorer Marc Aurel Stein brought to the British Library from the Mogao caves in northwest China in 1903. The printing was done with wooden blocks, a process known as xylography and still current in many parts of the subcontinent. Given the several thousand logographs in the Chinese language, it was faster to carve woodblocks rather than compose from movable type. But nevertheless, such attempts were made. In 1040 AD, a certain Bi Sheng, a ‘man of unofficial position’, made types out of clay and thereby invented movable type a good four centuries before Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz invented printing with metal type. But clay was fragile, and did not take up ink very well. The Chinese also experimented with wooden movable type in the 13th century, but this too did not succeed.

At the opening ceremony, the 897 performers each turned into a movable type and formed three versions of the character which stands for ‘harmony’. One hopes it will be a sentiment which is not just restricted to paper.

The author is a professor of English at Jadavpur University