paper

Dear Teacher,

I am a little bit confused about the meaning of the bracketed sentence. Could you do me a favor?

A few centuries later in China, writing would be committed to bamboo (about 500 BC), then on to silk, and finally on to paper following its invention, reportedly by a eunch named Ts'ai Lun, in about AD 105 toward the end of the Han dynasty. (Significantly, paper would not begin its slow journey to the world beyond China for another 500 years, when Buddhist priests initially took it to Korea and Japan.)

Thanks a bunch.

[Tdol]

Paper took several hundred years before it was made and used in other countries.