The use of hemp dates way back to the Stone Age, with 10,000 year old hemp fibre found in Chinese and Taiwanese pottery. These ancient Asians also used the same hemp fibres to make clothes, shoes, ropes, and an early form of paper.
The fibre is one of the most valuable parts of the hemp plant. It is commonly called "bast", which refers to the outside fibres that grow on the woody interior of the plants stalk, and under the most outer part (the bark). Bast fibres give the plants more strength, which is especially true with the hemp plant. Hemp fibres can be 3 to 15 feet long, running the length of the plant. Depending on the processing used to remove the fibre from the stem, the hemp naturally may be creamy white, brown, grey, black or green.
The use of hemp for fibre production has fallen sharply over the last few hundred years, but before the industrial revolution, hemp was a popular fibre because it is very strong and grows quickly; it produces 250% more fibre than cotton and 600% more fibre than flax when grown on the same type of land. Hemp has been used to make paper as evidenced by Jefferson's draft version of the The Declaration of Independence, which was on hemp paper. The world hemp paper pulp production was believed to be around 120,000 tons per year in 1991 which was about 0.05 % of the world's annual pulp production volume.
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