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?

Everywhere on the exquisite decorative combinations of Japan, we see a large Parasol opened amidst delicate peach-blossoms, gracious flights of strange birds, indented leaves, and rosy ibises. Sometimes, on the inimitable paintings of the enamelled vases, the Japanese Sunshade shelters a king’s daughter, escorted by her followers, who makes her chaste preparations for entering the bath; sometimes, on a thin gauze, the Parasol half hides women, promenading on the margin of some vast blue lake, full of ideal dreams. Sometimes, in fine, in a fantastic sketch of an album, which one reads as a riot of the imagination, is perceived some human being excited to a singular degree, with hair tossed by the wind, and haggard eye, floating at the will of the tumultuous waves on a Parasol turned upside down, to the handle of which he clings with the energy of despair. The plates of the Voyage de Ricord, and especially the old Japanese albums, are useful to consult in order to understand better the varieties of forms of the Sunshade in Japan. We gain a bizarre notion of the effects and services which a Japanese can obtain from a common Parasol of his country by looking at the games of the acrobats who come to us occasionally from Tokio, Yedo, or Yokohama. Théophile Gautier, who was highly astonished, and not without reason, at the quickness, grace, and daring of these marvellous equilibrists, has left us on this matter the fairest pages, perhaps, of his Feuilletons de Lundiste. The worthy Théo, that Gallic Rajah borrowed from these clowns, astonishing in their lightness, an enthusiasm which put on his palette as a colourist the most vibrating tones and the finest shades. The Sunshade and the Fan are in fact presented by these magicians of the East with particular graces in the jugglery of the most varied exercises. Here it is a ball of ivory which rolls with the bickering of a babbling stream over the lamels or ribs of the Sunshade; there it is a Parasol held in equilibrium on the blade of a dagger, and a thousand other astonishing inventions. All these fascinating feats of skill cannot be described save in the manner of Gautier, in other words, by veritable pen-pictures. Admirable interpretation of things glimpsed at!