The Chinese folding fan, zhe shan (折扇), is a hand fan of thin ribs joined at the base, with a pleated leaf of paper or silk that closes into a slim stick. It came to China later than the round fan, and by the Ming dynasty it had become the scholar's fan, a small surface for painting and poetry.
The round fan came first
China's older fan is the rigid round fan, tuan shan (团扇), often made of silk. Round fans from China had reached Korea and Japan by the sixth century. By the Tang dynasty (618 to 907), the typical fan carried a painting on one side and a poem in calligraphy on the other. Round silk fans stayed in fashion through the Song and Yuan dynasties.
From Japan, by way of Korea
Museum scholars credit Japan with the folding fan. Harvard Art Museums dates its invention to about the eighth century. The National Palace Museum in Taipei says it first reached China from Japan through Goryeo Korea in the tenth and eleventh centuries. For a long time it stayed rare, owned by envoys and a few scholar-officials.
That changed under the Ming. Japanese envoys brought folding fans as tribute to the Hongwu emperor. The Yongle emperor liked them for their convenience and had craftsmen copy them. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries trade with Japan brought them in large numbers, and Chinese workshops made their own. Sources differ on one point: the Arts and Crafts Museum in Hangzhou notes that some Chinese scholars place an earlier folding fan in China, as far back as the fifth or sixth century.
The scholar's fan
The Xuande emperor, Zhu Zhanji, kept up the court custom of giving folding fans and painted and wrote on them himself. Painters and calligraphers gradually took up the arched shape. Wu School masters such as Shen Zhou, Wen Zhengming and Tang Yin painted and inscribed folding fans as gifts for friends. Ribs were most often bamboo.
Fan leaves as art
Most Ming folding fans that survive are kept as leaves alone, and many were mounted as album leaves. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds Tang Yin's "Song of One Year," a fan leaf dated 1522, and Wang Hui's landscape "Mountains after Rain," dated 1695, from the Qing dynasty. In nineteenth-century China, painters such as Hu Yuan listed their prices in fan shops and stationery stores.
The fan on stage
Peking opera has a role called the shanzi sheng, the "fan scholar." He is a young scholar, often the romantic hero of a love story. His skill lies in handling the fan, and its movements, together with his singing, show his refined and sometimes vain nature.
Folding fans at Buddha.store
Our hand fans carry cranes, peacock-feather prints and flowers. In Chinese art the crane is the bird of long life, as our guide to crane meaning explains.
