Tom has always appreciated and enjoyed buying hand-made paper, so he was especially excited as we wound down a dusty lane, following Gul to the home of an elderly farmer. He is the fourth generation of his family to make paper, one sheet at a time, out of pounded, boiled mulberry bark.

He faces a number of problems. On the supply side, the provincial government has ordered mulberry trees to be cut down and replaced with walnut trees. Walnuts are a high-value cash crop that can be stored indefinitely and released for sale when prices are high. So his bark supply has been drastically cut.

On the demand side, the only real market for his paper is foreigners, and they are thin on the ground in Khotan. And you may have noticed that here’s no tab on Amazon.com for “artisanal paper.” His sons, whom we met, are full-time farmers, and have never learned the craft. As we watched him make a single sheet of paper - Gul had called him the day before, so he had prepared just enough of his precious mulberry bark to give us a demonstration – we realized he would not be making many more in his lifetime.

Settling the bark slurry onto a screen to dry took him less than a minute, and then he pulled out a stack of the thick, gray, highly-textured paper to show us the finished product.

When we bid the paper-maker goodbye and closed the wooden gate behind us, we felt like we were stepping from one century headlong into another.

Next up: a musical encounter!