History

In China, traditional funerals often include the burning of folded paper, most often representations of gold nuggets (yuanbao). The practice of burning paper representations instead of full-scale wood or clay replicas dates from the Sung Dynasty (905–1125 CE), though it's not clear how much folding was involved. Traditional Chinese funeral practices were banned during the Cultural Revolution, so most of what we know about Chinese paperfolding comes from the modern-day continuation of these practices in Taiwan.

In Europe, there was a well-developed genre of napkin-folding

When Japan opened its borders in the 1860s, as part of a modernization strategy, they imported Froebel's Kindergarten system—and with it, German ideas about paperfolding

In the early 1900s, Akira Yoshizawa, Kosho Uchiyama, and others began creating and recording original origami works.