Let us come now to China, to find there Parasols and Umbrellas in great honour, since the beginning of the dynasty Tchéou (eleventh century before Christ).
“The Umbrellas of that time,” says M. Natalis Rondot, “resembled ours; the mounting was composed of twenty-eight curved branches, and covered with silken stuff. The Parasols were of feathers.
“After the Thong-ya, it is only under the first Wei (A.D. 220-264) that gentlemen began the use of Parasols; these Parasols were most frequently made of little rods of bamboo and oiled paper; pedestrians never made use of them before the second Wei (386-554). Parasols figure ordinarily in processions and funerals since the seventh century. Thus, in 648, at the time of the inauguration of the Convent of the Grand Beneficence, at Si-ngan-Fou, one counted—says the historian of the Life of Hiouen thsang—only in the procession three hundred Parasols of precious stuffs. The Parasol in China, as in India, has always been a sign of elevated rank, although it has not been exclusively used by emperors and mandarins. Formerly, it seems, four-and-twenty Parasols were carried before the Emperor when his Majesty went to the chase.
“A Chinese of a rank at all elevated, such as a mandarin, a bonze, or a priest, never goes out without a Parasol,” according to M. Marie Cazal, a Sunshade manufacturer, who, about the year 1844, wrote a small Essay on the Umbrella, the Walking-stick, and their Manufacture.—‘Every Chinese of a superior order is followed by his slave, who carries his Parasol extended over him.’
“The Umbrella in China is destined to the same use as the Parasol, says M. Cazal: it belongs to all. Never, when the weather is the least degree doubtful, does a Chinese go out of doors without his Umbrella. Even horses are sheltered, as well as elephants, by Parasols or Umbrellas fastened to branches of bamboo. Their drivers take very good care not to illtreat them; imbued as they are, like every good Chinaman, with the doctrines of metempsychosis, they fear to torture the soul of their father or their grandfather, reduced, in order to expiate his faults, to animate the body of these quadrupeds.”
The Umbrellas and Parasols which are most common in China resemble very much those which are imported into Europe; they are made entirely of stalks of bamboo, disposed with enormous art, and covered with oiled, tarred, or lacquered paper. Some are coloured, and have printed on them religious allegories or sentences of Confucius.
All the voyages in China and around the world are filled with details of the Chinese Parasol. “The Chinese women, whose feet have been compressed from infancy,” remarks M. Charles Lavollée, “can scarcely walk, and are obliged to support themselves on the handle of their Parasol, which serves them for a walking-stick.”
The Parasol and the Fan in China play a rôle so considerable, that it would be necessary to write a special monograph on each of these two objects in order to consider properly their importance in the history of the country and its current manners. In a general and summary sketch like the present, must we not skim through, rather than sew together documents collected with difficulty, or found within reach, and leave aside the more bulky bundles, under pain of foundering in the folio form of heavy dictionaries?
