Until then, the paper was either sold in the Chinese style in sheets or in a roll, from which the paper had to be torn off with the help of teeth on the holder. Nevertheless, the new invention was sold at the end of the 19th century with great discretion – only in pharmacies and wrapped in brown wrapping paper.
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The oldest records mentioning toilet paper were found in sixth-century Chinese annals. The British sinologist Joseph Needham (1900-1995) quoted the Chinese scholar Jen Zhichue, who wrote in 589: “I do not dare to use paper with quotations or comments from the Five Classics or the names of the sagas for toilet purposes.”
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The Five Classics is a set of five basic Confucian texts organized by Confucius. In 851, a traveler wrote: “The Chinese are not too worried about cleanliness. When they finish the need, they don’t wash them with water, they just wipe them with paper. “
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In 1393, the Nanjing Imperial Court used about 720,000 sheets of toilet paper, measuring 60 by 90 centimeters. Emperor Chung Wu and his family consumed 15,000 sheets of “particularly fine, perfumed toilet paper.”
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Luxury commodity
Western civilization initially rejected toilet paper because it had long been a luxury commodity, and continued to use its established methods and tools — wool, old cloth, dry grass, or water. People sometimes resorted to moss, leaves, hay and even straw, Sabine Schachtner wrote in her book “Paper: From Crafts to Mass Production”.
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Excavations of medieval latrines in the old Hanseatic city of Tartu in present-day Estonia have uncovered pieces of fabric used as toilet paper. Their different quality indicates the social status of the household. Softer, softer woolen fabrics torn into strips of everyday clothing – on which silk embroidery still remained in places – were used by wealthy families. The poor had only coarse, plain fabrics.
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The expansion of newspapers and industrial paper production was the latest breakthrough in the use of this raw material as a hygienic product. Flush toilets became popular in the second half of the 19th century and first spread in England. Their creation subsequently required the production of special paper, which did not clog the waste pipes.
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No chips
Today, toilet paper is a matter of course, but in the past, for example, it was sometimes not available. The most serious problem with the “toilet” occurred in totalitarian Czechoslovakia in 1988 after the fire of Harmanecké papíren in Slovakia. People most often replaced the missing paper with cut strips of newspaper.
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In the 130 years of its existence, toilet paper has undergone few changes. Today, it can be purchased with the scent of chamomile, stacked in several layers and executed in blue or pink, but the most important improvement came in 1935. The American company Northern Tissue began selling and advertising toilet paper “without chips”.
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