Hewes explained that he did not include the reclining position in his research because he did not find sufficient photographic evidence. That is a shame because reclining has always been a comfortable position for the body at rest. The ancient Egyptians used beds, and may have reclined on couches, although these do not appear in wall paintings—banquet scenes show people on chairs, or sitting on the ground. The earliest pictorial evidence of dining in a reclined position is a seventh-century B.C. bas-relief in the British Museum. The alabaster carving sometimes called The Garden Party shows an Assyrian king and his wife being served food and drink outdoors—they are celebrating a victorious battle. The king is reclining on a couch that resembles a chaise longue, while the queen is seated nearby in an armchair; they share a table laden with food. What is unusual about the furniture is that it is very tall: the couch is about five feet off the ground, and the queen’s armchair, which reminds me of a lifeguard’s chair, is waist-high and requires a footstool. The reason for this height is to elevate the sitters above the servants, who wield fly whisks with handles as long as broomsticks to fan the royal couple. A ghoulish detail: the head of the king’s vanquished enemy hangs from a nearby tree.
Homer describes diners seated at tables, but by the sixth century B.C. the dining couch had arrived in Greece, probably from Mesopotamia. By all accounts Greek homes were sparsely furnished, and dining couches were used as chaises longues during the day and beds at night—all uses are depicted on Greek pottery. Couches were generally elevated, with iron, bronze, or wood frames, the mattress resting on leather or cord lacings. Although the Greeks used stools and chairs, they must have spent much time socializing in a reclined position.
Like so many Greek customs, the reclining posture migrated to Rome. The Met has an example of a Roman couch (reconstructed from fragments recovered at an imperial villa) dating from the first or second century A.D. Raised at each end, the couch resembles a recamier, except that the Roman idea of status required that it be elevated; it is the height of a modern kitchen counter and is mounted with the aid of a footstool. Couches were used for informal conversation, for resting, and also for dining. The arrangement in a dining room, or triclinium (literally, three couches), consisted of three wide couches, each holding three occupants, placed on three sides of a large square table (the fourth side left open to allow the servants access). The diners—only men used the triclinium—leaned on their left elbows in a semi-recumbent position, serving themselves with their right hands.
The Austrian architect Bernard Rudofsky is best remembered for a series of provocative books, including Architecture Without Architects, based on a 1964 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, where he was a curator. Something of a design gadfly, he applauded the custom of prone dining. He observed that Roman diners, with but one hand free, had no use for cutlery, thus doing away with what he called table clutter. A cheerful iconoclast, Rudofsky despised the functional modern bathroom, for example, and disliked most domestic labor-saving devices. He particularly ridiculed chairs. “The more sensitive among us are aware of the ludicrous aspects of sitting on chairs—impaled on four toothpicks, as it were, or, draped limp like an oyster, over what resembles an outsized halfshell.”
Roman couch
Rudofsky’s rather strained description was a calculated challenge to those who considered chair-sitting to be culturally superior to floor-sitting. He was certainly correct that the lack of chairs is not a sign of either primitiveness or ignorance. The refined Japanese and Koreans were long aware of sitting furniture, but chose to sit on floor mats instead. In India, upright sitting was introduced more than two centuries ago by the British, yet most people still perform a variety of tasks—cooking, eating, working—while seated cross-legged on the floor.
Selecting one sitting posture over another has far-reaching consequences. If you sit on floor mats, you are likely to develop an etiquette that requires removing footwear before entering the home. You are also more likely to wear sandals or slippers rather than laced-up shoes, and loose clothing that enables you to squat or sit cross-legged. Floor-sitters tend not to use tall wardrobes—it is more convenient to store things in chests and low cabinets closer to floor level. People who sit on mats are more likely to sleep on mats, too, just as chair-sitters are more likely to sleep in beds.1 Chair-sitting societies develop a variety of furniture such as dining tables, dressing tables, coffee tables, desks, and sideboards. Sitting on the floor also affects architecture: walking around the house in bare feet or socks demands smooth floors—no splinters—preferably warm wood rather than stone; places to sit are likely to be covered with soft mats or woven carpets; tall windowsills and very tall ceilings hold less appeal. Lastly, posture has direct physical effects. A lifetime of sitting unsupported on the floor develops muscles not required for chair-sitting, which is why chair-sitters, unaccustomed to sitting cross-legged, soon become uncomfortable in that position. And vice versa. People in India regularly sit up on train seats and waiting-room benches in the cross-legged position, which they find more comfortable than sitting with feet hanging down.
The ancient Egyptians were unusual in combining floor-sitting and chair-sitting, but in general the two customs make awkward partners. A chair in a room of floor-sitters is a rude intruder. Conversely, sitting on the floor among chairs is socially acceptable only when there is no other place to sit—and then only under certain circumstances such as in a crowded auditorium or airport waiting room. Sitting on the floor among chair-sitters disrupts the order of things, which is probably why teenagers like to do it. For precisely the same reason, sitting on the floor was fashionable among the European avant-garde in the 1920s, among the Beats in the 1950s, and among student protestors in the 1960s—it upset convention.
The Barbarian Bed
For thousands of years, the ancient Chinese sat and slept on the floor. But at the beginning of the second century A.D. this changed; they adopted the folding stool, and eventually the full range of sitting furniture. Why and how this happened tells us a lot about the social and cultural functions of chairs. The stage for this momentous change was set in northern China and Manchuria. Because this region has severe winters, sitting and sleeping on cold floors is uncomfortable and unhealthy, and as a result the northern Chinese invented an unusual device. The kang was a brick platform warmed by heated air passing through underfloor flues. Raised about two feet off the floor and covered in felt pads, woven mats, or rugs, the kang typically extended across the full width of the room and served as a sleeping platform. During the day, sleeping quilts were folded and placed on the side, and the raised area served—and still serves in some rural households—as the main living space of the home.
During the summer the Chinese slept on beds. Beds appeared very early in China: a bed has been found in a burial site that dates from the third or fourth century B.C. A second-century B.C. tomb painting shows men seated cross-legged on a bed, suggesting that beds were also used as divans. Eventually, beds were fitted with low railings on three sides, and a folded sleeping quilt provided a padded backrest, creating a sort of couch. Thus, from very early times, the Chinese were distinguished from other East Asian cultures by combining sitting on the floor with sitting up, not on chairs but on raised furniture.
This pragmatism may explain the apparent ease with which, in the second century A.D., the Chinese adopted the stool. Here is an ancient description: “The [stool] has movable joints so that its legs can be crossed. It is threaded with cords to make it comfortable to sit upon. It can be folded in a moment. It only weighs a few catties [a few pounds].” This obviously describes an X-frame folding stool, identical to the type used by the Egyptians and later by the Minoans and the Greeks. The Chinese called the stool hu chuang. Hu (barbarian) was how they referred to anything foreign, and because there was no word for chair or stool they used chuang (bed), which was the only piece of sitting furniture they knew. The barbarian bed was evidently a cultural import, but from where? None of China’s imme
diate neighbors used stools, so the source must have been farther away. Caravan routes linked northern China across the Gobi Desert and Persia to the Mediterranean port cities of Alexandria and Antioch. Hence, the most likely source for the hu chuang was the eastern reaches of the Roman Empire, precisely the area where the folding stool originated.
Chinese folding stool
Chinese folding stools were sometimes used as portable garden seats, and as camp furniture by military officers; where stools were never used was in the home. Just as modern-day Americans might spread a blanket on the ground for a picnic, but would not think of doing so in their living rooms, the ancient Chinese could not imagine bringing the hu chuang indoors. In the home, one sat on floor mats.
For several hundred years, the two different sitting postures—cross-legged on floor mats, and legs-down on stools—coexisted. It was not until the tenth century that the chair appeared. The stage was set sometime in the second or third century A.D. when, having acquired the habit of sitting on the raised kang—and on bed-couches—the Chinese created a portable kang in the form of a wooden platform. The wooden kang—the name was the same—was supported by a carved open frame and came in a variety of sizes, large enough to accommodate several sitters or small enough for a single person.2 The light platform could be easily moved from room to room or into the garden. People sat on it cross-legged, as they did on a stone kang. These movable daises accommodated a wide variety of activities—eating, studying, playing board games, relaxing.
Platform living spread throughout China during the Tang dynasty, a period when the country was reunified and people and ideas moved freely from north to south. A Tang mural shows a group of scholars at a banquet, sitting on wooden platforms arranged on three sides of a low table laden with dishes. The platforms and the table are both about knee-height. Most of the diners sit cross-legged, but two or three of them have one foot dangling over the edge. Sooner or later, the second foot will come down, and the dais will become—a seat.
A traditional stone kang allowed sitters to lean comfortably against the wall (just as an outdoor sitter leans back against a tree), but a freestanding wooden platform offered no such convenience. At some point, someone had the idea of adding a back to the platform. Once sitters were able to lean against a back, and also sit on the edge with the feet down, it did not take a great leap of the imagination to turn the wooden kang into a chair.
The decisive shift from floor-sitting to chair-sitting occurred during the Song dynasty. Frame chairs, with and without arms, are illustrated in scroll paintings of the tenth century. The oldest surviving Chinese chair, excavated by archaeologists in 1920, is a side chair dating from the eleventh century. It is called a yokeback chair because the curved top rail extends at each end and resembles the yoke of an oxcart. The sophisticated design uses mortise-and-tenon joints, stretchers to reinforce the legs, and a woven cane seat. Most important, it also includes an S-shaped splat to support the lumbar region of the back—the oldest known use of this device in the history of the chair. The yokeback—with and without arms—remained unchanged for centuries, and became the standard Chinese chair, used in reception rooms, banqueting halls, studies, and bedrooms. Being light, it was easily moved and could be carried outside. Upholstery was unknown although loose cushions were used, and for special occasions a colorful embroidered silk runner was draped over the yoke and the seat. The Chinese named their homegrown chair yi, which is derived from the verb “to lean”—one sat on a stool, but one leaned back on a chair.
Song dynasty yokeback chair
Tenth-century China is the unique case of a premodern floor-sitting culture that adopted the chair voluntarily, rather than as the result of conquest or colonization. The societal change was dramatic and swift. A copy of a tenth-century scroll painting, The Night Revels of Han Xizai, shows a banquet in the home of Han Xizai, a scholar and court dignitary. A woman playing a Chinese lute is entertaining the group; she is seated on a stool. Three male visitors occupy yokeback chairs. Han and a friend are seated on a wooden kang with a backrest on three sides. Several guests are standing but no one is sitting on the floor; indeed, there are no floor mats. Food and drinks are laid out on small tables. What is remarkable is the variety of sitting postures. Two of the chair-sitters are upright, the third leans forward, listening intently to the music, his hands on his knees—a very modern position. On the other hand, both Han and his friend sit on the platform in traditional floor-sitting postures: Han is cross-legged, while his friend, more casual, leans against the backrest with one knee raised. This scene exemplifies the Chinese culture’s ability to mix innovation and tradition.
This mixture lasted a long time. A French diplomat recounted a visit to Peking in 1795. “The mandarins had assumed that we would sit cross-legged on the floor,” he recorded. “But seeing that we found this posture very uncomfortable, they took us into a great pavilion … furnished with tables and chairs.” The Frenchman described the furniture as arranged on a platform, which had “a thick carpet and they lit a fire underneath.” In other words, the furniture was placed on top of a heated kang.
A domestic revolution accompanied the adoption of the chair in China. Women started wearing trousers; people no longer removed their shoes before entering the home, and the outdoor veranda, which previously had served as a place to leave one’s footwear, lost this function. Waist-high dining tables, desks, gaming tables, and worktables appeared. So did tall lamps and washstands, as well as cheval mirrors. The dimensions of rooms changed to accommodate these objects; ceilings became taller. These innovations arrived in grand homes first, but soon spread to modest dwellings, for chairs were used by all strata of Chinese society; Song dynasty paintings show chairs and stools being used by common folk in roadside inns. When the Emperor Huizong commissioned his official portrait, he chose to sit not on an elaborate throne but on a yokeback side chair. The chair, which is finished in red lacquer and has an embroidered silk throw, is tall enough to require a footstool.
What were the conditions in China that facilitated the adoption of such a radically new form of furniture? According to the French historian Fernand Braudel, changes in the furnishings have always been constrained by two conditions. First, poverty. “Interiors change hardly at all in the world of the poor,” he wrote. Floor-sitting required only mats and cushions, whereas chairs—and the furniture that accompanied chair-sitting—were expensive. Such a shift required prosperity. “Rule number two: traditional civilizations remain faithful to their accustomed decor.” That is why the age-old sitting postures that Gordon Hewes documented—among aborigines, pastoral people, and remote tribes—have hardly changed in centuries.
Tenth-century China was a period of not only prosperity but also intense social upheaval. Improved rice production led to dramatic population growth; maritime trade developed with India, Africa, and the Muslim world; the economy was further stimulated by the introduction of paper money (for the first time anywhere in the world). Public affairs were administered by a newly formed civil bureaucracy. Moreover, this period was remarkably inventive, producing movable-type printing, astronomical clocks, and gunpowder. Living in the midst of such momentous change, it is little wonder that people were open to seeing the world from a different vantage point: up on a chair.
“Chair-sitting and furniture, possibly the chief distinguishing postural attribute of Western civilization, go hand in hand,” Hewes observed, “though it is difficult to tell which is cause and which effect, whether the habit of sitting on a support led to the invention of stools, benches and chairs or vice versa.” In China, at least, the habit of sitting up seems to have arrived first. The imported folding stool did not cause people to abandon sitting on mats and wooden platforms. Rather, it was the habit of leaning back, and of sitting with the feet lowered, that prepared the way for the adoption of the chair.
Chinese Household Furniture, published in 1948, was only the second book in English on the subject, and the first to enjoy wide circulat
ion. Its author, George Norbert Kates, was an American scholar who lived in Peking for seven years immediately prior to World War II and experienced what he called the “Old China.” His summary of the evolution of sitting habits, while based on the fragmentary and partial evidence available to him at the time, still rings true:
It appears possible that as civilization progressed in China, men sat ever farther away from the ground; first directly upon it, no doubt, then later upon mats, as we can see in familiar arrangements in paintings where the sages of old are represented. Those of rank were placed upon low, broad wooden platforms, also provided with matting, and these seem gradually to have developed until they finally become true couches. Many later pictures show examples of them being used by personages of honor, while next to them sit secondary figures in armchairs, themselves attended by still others a little lower on stools.
There were many Chinese stools: folding stools, four-legged wooden stools, round stools, and drumlike porcelain stools. Chinese stools could be utilitarian but they could also be luxurious, beautifully carved hardwood with inset seats of woven cane or palm fiber. Such stools were considered particularly appropriate for ladies. Stools were used in ways different from the West: they sometimes served as low tables, and they were commonly taken out of doors.
Kates observed that although chairs were sometimes provided for special guests, or for the elderly, diners normally sat on stools. This practice dated back to the tenth century. In a painting attributed to Emperor Huizong and showing a small outdoor banquet, the guests are seated on wooden drum stools around a large square table resembling a platform. Sitting at a table coincided with a change in how and what people ate. When China had been a mat-sitting culture, food was served on low individual tables—resembling modern bed trays—that were brought from the kitchen already laden. Now people sat around a large table, leaning forward to serve themselves from platters, sharing in a communal experience. It is surely no coincidence that the custom of eating together, serving oneself from common dishes, seated around a table on stools, emerged during the Song dynasty concurrently with what many consider the world’s first great national cuisine.
Now I Sit Me Down Page 4
