Tucked into the list of illustrations of Annie Carey's 1873 popular-science book, The History of a Book, is an entry that quietly contradicts what almost every English speaker assumed — and many still assume — about a familiar material:

"Chinese Rice-Paper Plant, and Method of Preparing the Paper . . . 17"

Carey was a Victorian populariser of science, author of companion titles like The Autobiography of a Lump of Coal and The Fads of Knowledge, who specialised in turning industrial processes into approachable narratives for general readers. Her stated goal in this volume was to call attention to "the thought and skill, the care and labour, which are more or less required and expended whenever a Book is 'Printed and Published.'" In doing so she preserved a detail that has slipped out of common knowledge: "rice paper" is not, and never was, made from rice.

The "Chinese Rice-Paper Plant" Carey illustrates is Tetrapanax papyrifer — a small tree in the ginseng family native to Taiwan. The papery sheets the Victorians prized for delicate watercolours, artificial flowers, and pressed botanical specimens were produced by:

• Cutting cylindrical sections of the plant's pith (the soft white core of the stem)
• Rotating the cylinder against a flat blade to peel off a continuous spiral sheet — essentially the same principle as a wood lathe producing veneer
• Pressing and drying the resulting translucent strip flat

It is, in other words, not a paper at all in the modern sense — no pulping, no felting of fibres, no mould. It is a single shaved sheet of living plant tissue. That technical distinction was widely understood in 1873, when Chinese pith paintings were a fashionable Victorian souvenir trade; by the mid-20th century the export industry had collapsed, the source plant had been forgotten in the West, and the name "rice paper" had migrated to a completely unrelated product: the thin sheets of rice-flour and tapioca starch used for Vietnamese spring-roll wrappers.

Modern botanists confirm Carey's account in every detail. Tetrapanax papyrifer is now better known to Western horticulturists as an aggressive ornamental garden plant ("rice paper plant") than as the source of an art medium. Surviving Victorian pith paintings — the ones our great-great-grandparents may have brought home from Canton — are now museum-conservation specialties precisely because curators have had to relearn what the substrate is.

So the next time you see "rice paper" on a packet of spring-roll wrappers, remember Carey's illustration on page 17: the original rice paper was a shaved spiral of pith from a small Taiwanese tree, and the rice was always a mistranslation.