Where does Folding fan come from?
The folding fan comes from Japan, from the court culture of Nara and Kyoto. It was invented there sometime between the 6th and 9th centuries, and China, which had used rigid fans for centuries, first met it as a Japanese gift.
Cypress blades and paper pleats
When the folding fan appeared, the only fans known in Japan were rigid ones, like the round uchiwa. Two kinds developed. The hiōgi was a stack of thin cypress-wood blades bound with thread; the kawahori-ogi had fewer ribs covered with paper folded in zigzags. The oldest folding fan that survives, a hiōgi dated 877, was found at the Tō-ji temple in Kyoto. Folding fans turn up often in Heian literature, such as The Tale of Genji, and by the Chōho era (999–1003) they were so popular that laws limited how richly they could be decorated.
A gift for the Song emperor
According to the official History of Song, in 988 the Japanese monk Chōnen sent the Chinese emperor a gift of twenty wooden-bladed fans and two paper fans. The Chinese called them 'Japanese fans', and in the 11th century Korean envoys brought fans of Japanese origin too. The folding fan became fashionable in China under the Southern Song and very popular under the Ming dynasty, and Chinese makers added a design of their own, the brisé fan.
Why people say China or Spain
Both made the fan their own. Portuguese traders, who reached China and Japan in the 16th century, were probably the first to bring Chinese and Japanese folding fans to Europe. In Spain, Madrid became an important centre of fan making, and by the 18th century Valencia was the country's fan-making capital. Spain is also linked with a 'language of the fan', a secret code of gestures for flirting, but historians now see that code mostly as a 19th-century sales idea of fan makers.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org ↗ · ja.wikipedia.org ↗ · gov-online.go.jp ↗ · thestar.com.my ↗
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