Prior to the invention of paper, the Chinese bureaucracy had already invented paperwork, covering thousands and thousands of bamboo slips with accounts, reports, audits and diaries, by the time that paper first appeared in the early Han dynasty. Paper quickly became the ideal medium for
bureaucratic paperwork but at a glance at the bamboo slips found along the Great Wall near Dunhuang, shows how vast and detailed the Han government record-keeping system was, even when inscribed on intractable bamboo. The most common writing mediums found in archaeological digs from ancient sites predating the Han period are shells and bones as well as bronzewares. In the beginning of the Han period, the chief writing mediums were bamboo and clay tablets, silk cloth, and rolled scrolls made of strips of bamboo sewn together with hempen string passed through drilled holes and secured with clay stamps. The written characters on these narrow flat strips of bamboo were arranged into vertical columns. Military records of minutiae, the daily non-events of the garrisons in the Far West in the Han (206 BC-220 AD), were written on thin strips of bamboo or wood which were then bound together with string and rolled up for storage (rather like a tiny bamboo blind). Some of the wood-slips were cut quite thick and could be re-used; the unwanted text was simply planed off. The events that the garrison soldiers on the Great Wall record are often extremely mundane, their lives filled with repetitive tasks like counting the piles of firewood (stored to light the beacons), counting the livestock and noting that one dog is missing. Occasionally they sallied forth and rounded up local miscreants and the next day they would release them.