WHAT THIS CATEGORY IS ABOUT

We are happy to be able to offer a very large range of all types of hand-made Chinese paper for Asian calligraphy and Chinese brush painting to you. This large portfolio of Chinese rice paper is the result of a long research during which we located a wide range of local suppliers and smaller manufactories which still produce paper in the century-old tradition of crafting hand made paper which has not changed until now and which does not compare to industrially manufactured paper at all.

Most people are aware of the most famous Chinese paper mills famous for their Shuen paper and mainly located in Anhui province such as the Red Star paper mill which is producing the probably best known Xuan paper - the so-called Red Star Xuan. We also carry Chinese paper from this mill, but we found that we also get papers in similar or comparable quality from other mills located in the same are which are better priced or have characteristics, Red Star paper does not have.

To make it easier for you to find the exact paper you are looking for you - being the best match for a specific painting or calligraphy technique such as Gongbi or Fineline or having very specific characteristics in bleed and absorbency - we classified our Chinese rice paper into several sections.

In the section of Practicing Paper, you find paper types which normally come in larger bundles, are of smaller size and moderately prices since you use them to perfect your strokes and calligraphy skills.
In the category of Classic Artwork Paper, you can find all Chinese paper which is considered artwork paper - i.e. not paper used only for practicing purposes, but high quality hand-made paper with superb characteristics also allowing the artwork to be mounted or framed at a later point.
Decorative Paper contains all papers which have special effects in terms of paper color, special effects such as marbling, gold or silver speckles, patterned paper with dragons or Chinese symbols or products which contain paper such as Shuen Paper Hand fans - all of them allowing you to create special artworks beyond the normal black and white painting or calligraphy. Therefore, you can also find Shikishi boards or Shuen Paper albums for small-format sketches and paintings in this section.
Finally, there is the section we refer to as Specialist Paper. In here we added high-quality Chinese paper - mainly Xuan paper which has been crafted to serve a very specific purpose or painting style - such as Shuen paper specially made for fineline painting, paper that has idea characteristics for landscape painting, for calligraphy writing or Flower and Bird painting techniques.

Please be advised that we only use the term of Chinese rice paper since this is the term in which most people in Western countries refer to all kinds of Chinese paper as a kind of common denominator. However, the term Rice Paper is a term often wrongly used as you can read in our knowledge base and in the excellent knowledge base about Asian brush painting from Art Virtue. No quality Chinese paper is really made of rice, just some cheap paper types may contain ingredients of rice straw or sometimes rice husk.