Bamboo and wooden slips
Bamboo and wooden slips (traditional Chinese: 簡牘; simplified Chinese: 简牍; pinyin: jiǎndú) are long, narrow strips of wood or bamboo, each typically holding a single column of several dozen brush-written characters. They were the main media for writing documents in China before the widespread introduction of paper during the first two centuries AD. (Silk was occasionally used, for example in the Chu Silk Manuscript, but was prohibitively expensive for most documents.) Strips of wood or bamboo vary primarily in length.