Yet there has never been any sign of a ‘Javanese paper’ Dutch literary theorists and linguists discovered a number of Javanese manuscripts in Oriental library collections, written on material called dluwang, but were unable to identify it.

In theory this is possible because from earliest times a thriving trade existed between the islands of Indonesia and both India (where paper had been made autonomously since the year 1000) and China (where paper was invented well before the birth of Christ). This immediately gives rise to the question of whether paper was ever actually produced in Indonesia in the distant past. In old Javanese and Chinese texts there are various references made to ‘Javanese paper’. There also seems to have been no inhibition about habitually binding European paper together with dluwang into one single book. It is not uncommon for these manuscripts to be compilations of texts in more than one language and in different scripts.

Handwritten manuscripts on dluwang in public collections are mainly Javanese, with one or two Malay or Madurese examples. Dluwang is most renowned as a writing material. It was botanical identification and physicochemical analysis that provided the initial answers to these questions.

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