In the Musée Guimet in Paris is a large fan of red lacquer framework (reversed heart shape) enclosing a series of metal ribs through which the wind plays; in the centre are painted dragons.
Among the painted representations in the India Museum, of objects from the Summer Palace at Pekin, is a circular screen, ‘like the moon,’ borne by the guard of an imperial concubine. See illustration, p. 46.
A favourite device for the decoration of these larger screens is that of the fabled Phœnix, the Ho bird of the Japanese. This is seen in the painting of the Chinese school of Japan, British Museum, 822, in which one of the two attendants on a Chinese Emperor carries a long oval screen bordered with peacocks’ feathers, and ornamented with two Phœnixes.[36]
We therefore perceive that the ceremonies and customs relating to the fan, no less than the various forms which this instrument assumed, were practically identical with the ancient peoples of the East and West;—the same order of development, having its origin in the natural suggestion afforded by the wings of birds and of the broader leaved plants; the fans of the Han dynasty reliefs, their exact counterpart being found in Egypt and Assyria; the rigid hand-screens corresponding to those tabellæ which the Romans derived from the Greeks, who in turn received them
from the peoples of Asia Minor, and which, doubtless, had their origin in the more remote East; the employment of the fan in both religious and civil ceremonial and in war.[37]
Among the Bat Bu’u (eight precious things) carried at the end of staves by the inhabitants of Annam in their ceremonial processions, is a fan (Quat) symbolising the graceful perfection of the form of woman, and the light breeze that tempers the heat of the summer sun.[38] These Bat Bu’u are made in three ways—
1. Of carved wood lacquered and gilt.
2. Of tin or pewter.
3. In the form of transparencies to be lighted from within.
A huge wooden fan is carried as part of the insignia of a mandarin’s procession.[39]
The invention of the folding-fan is generally credited to the ingenious little inhabitants of the land of the rising sun; its date, however, as well as its precise character, is impossible to determine with anything approaching to accuracy. Tradition says that it was designed by an artist who lived in the reign of the Emperor Jen-ji, about 670 A.D., and was formed upon the principle of the construction of a bat’s wing, this being in conformity with the general usage of Japanese designers, who derived their artistic motifs from natural constructive forms. The date of its introduction into China is also a matter of considerable uncertainty: we have a reference to it in a Chinese work of the date 960, to the effect that the tsin-theou-chen, or folding-fan, was introduced by Tchang-ping-hai, and was supposed to be offered as a tribute by the barbarians of the south-east, who came, holding in their hands the pleated fan, which occasioned much laughter and ridicule. All Chinese authors agree, however, that it was the invention of foreigners, i.e. the Japanese, who, together with the Tartars, possessed folding-fans before they were known in China.[40]