Around 589 C.E., a Chinese scholar-official named Yan Zhitui wrote something quietly remarkable. In a personal essay, he noted that he would not use paper bearing sacred texts for bodily hygiene — implying, without ceremony, that using paper for exactly that purpose was already normal. It was the first recorded reference to toilet paper in human history, and it arrived not as an announcement or invention, but as an aside.
What the evidence shows
- Toilet paper use: The earliest written record dates to c. 589 C.E., when scholar Yan Zhitui (531–591) referenced wiping with paper as an established practice in China.
- Yan Zhitui’s account: His comment was incidental — a note about respect for sacred texts — which suggests paper hygiene was already common enough to require no explanation.
- Paper’s prior history: China had used paper as a wrapping and padding material since at least the 2nd century B.C.E., making its eventual application to personal hygiene a natural, if unheralded, extension of an existing technology.
A small note in a long tradition
Yan Zhitui was a Confucian scholar living through one of China’s most turbulent centuries — the collapse of the Northern Wei, the chaos of the Northern and Southern dynasties, and the eventual consolidation under the Sui. He wrote prolifically on family ethics, education, and personal conduct. His hygiene reference was not meant to be historic. It was a point about reverence for classical learning.
That offhandedness is itself significant. It tells us that toilet paper use was not new in 589 C.E. — it was already ordinary enough to need no introduction.
Paper had been a Chinese invention for centuries by this point, traditionally credited to court official Cai Lun around 105 C.E., though archaeological evidence suggests papermaking began even earlier. The technology spread through Chinese society slowly, first as a material for writing and wrapping. Its use for personal hygiene appears to have developed gradually, long before it was formally recorded.
What travelers saw
The practice did not go unnoticed by outside observers. In 851 C.E., an Arab traveler visiting China during the Tang dynasty remarked with some surprise that the Chinese “do not wash themselves with water when they have done their necessities; but they only wipe themselves with paper.” He was not describing something new — he was describing something already embedded in Chinese daily life.
For readers in the Arab world, where water cleansing was the norm, the observation carried a tone of mild cultural puzzlement. For historians, it confirms that by the mid-9th century, toilet paper use was widespread enough to define Chinese hygiene practice in foreign eyes.
From personal practice to mass production
What began as an individual habit eventually became an industry. By the early 14th century — during the Song and Yuan dynasty periods — the province of Zhejiang alone was manufacturing tens of millions of packages of toilet paper annually, with sheets numbering between 1,000 and 10,000 per package.
By 1393 C.E., during the Ming dynasty, imperial records show that 720,000 large sheets of toilet paper were produced annually for the imperial court in Nanjing. The Hongwu Emperor’s family alone received 15,000 sheets of specially scented, soft-fabric paper each year.
This was not a curiosity. This was industrial-scale production organized around personal hygiene — centuries before the concept existed anywhere else in the world.
Elsewhere, across medieval Europe and the Arab world, people used wool, rags, moss, leaves, corn cobs, or water, depending on geography and social class. The Roman practice of a shared sponge on a stick had faded with the empire. Paper hygiene remained, for most of human history outside China, an unknown option.
Lasting impact
The Chinese development of paper hygiene is one of the longer arcs in the history of public health. Modern commercial toilet paper — patented in roll form in the U.S. by Seth Wheeler in 1883 C.E. and popularized by the Scott Paper Company from 1890 C.E. onward — descends from a tradition that began in Chinese households more than a thousand years earlier.
The broader importance is not just sanitation. It reflects what happens when a material technology — paper — gets embedded in a culture deeply enough to find its way into every corner of daily life. China’s long paper tradition, built on centuries of manufacturing expertise and cultural emphasis on written learning, created the conditions for this particular application to emerge and normalize.
Today, more than seven billion rolls of toilet paper are sold in the U.S. alone each year. The global toilet paper industry is worth tens of billions of dollars annually. The hygienic norm that Yan Zhitui casually referenced in 589 C.E. is now nearly universal across the developed world — and growing in reach.
That trajectory started with a single offhand line from a Confucian scholar who simply wanted to protect the dignity of sacred texts.
Blindspots and limits
The historical record reflects who wrote things down and whose writing survived. Yan Zhitui was an elite scholar; the hygiene habits of ordinary Chinese people across the same period are far less documented. It’s also worth acknowledging that toilet paper, for all its cultural spread, remains unavailable or impractical in many parts of the world today — and that water-based cleansing, standard across much of South Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere, is widely considered by its practitioners to be more hygienic, not less.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Wikipedia — Toilet paper
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Global suicide rate has fallen by 40% since 1995
- Renewables now make up at least 49% of global power capacity
- The Good News for Humankind archive on the medieval era
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