The Secret Language of Fans: The Secret History of the Folding Fan - Episode 3

00:00:01: Imagine you're standing in a crowded ballroom.

00:00:04: The year is eighteen fifty, the room holds about five hundred people... ...the candles are blazing and music is loud!

00:00:12: The air is thick with heat & perfume And your mother's sitting exactly three feet away from you watching every single move Across the room, there is however someone you very much want to speak to.

00:00:25: You cannot walk over uninvited!

00:00:27: You can not catch their eye for too long without SOMEONE

00:00:30: noticing!!

00:00:31: You CANNOT write a note – NOT HERE, NOT

00:00:33: NOW!!!

00:00:34: In the world of eighteen fifty… The rules of social contact are a CAGE.

00:00:39: So...you do THE ONLY THING AVAILABLE TO YOU!

00:00:42: You reach for the object dangling from your wrist, you snap it open and draw slowly and deliberately across your left cheek.

00:00:50: And across the room, if they know what their looking at…they just received a message.

00:00:57: Today we're talking about The Folding Fan An object most of us think as either a dusty antique or portable breeze maker.

00:01:05: But for centuries in cultures around three continents...the fan was something far more interesting than those things.

00:01:14: It was a battlefield signal, a political newspaper.

00:01:17: A marketing masterpiece and depending on who you believe one of the most elegant communication systems ever invented.

00:01:25: And there's twist in this story.

00:01:27: The most famous thing about the fan?

00:01:29: The secret language may not be quite what it seems.

00:01:34: I'm Alexandra.

00:01:35: Welcome to the hidden life of things Everyday history for anyone whose ever looked at something ordinary and wondered how did they actually get here.

00:01:47: Let me start with something that surprised when I began researching this episode.

00:01:52: The fan, as a concept and an object used to move air is one of the oldest tools in human history – not folding fans specifically but the principle Directing air toward yourself using a surface you move by hand.

00:02:08: We have depictions of fans in ancient Egyptian tomb paintings, we have them and reliefs from Ancient Assyria!

00:02:15: We know they were used in ancient China In India, in ancient Greece And Rome typically large rigid objects made From feathers, palm leaves or stretched fabric carried By servants to cool royalty & the wealthy.

00:02:28: In many Asian cultures, the fan wasn't just a cooling device.

00:02:31: It was symbol of status something only important and powerful had because it required someone else to operate it.

00:02:39: To be fanned is significant.

00:02:43: By the time we reach the medieval period across Asia Fan making have become sophisticated craft.

00:02:49: in China rigid fans of exquisite lacquer and silk were exchanged as diplomatic gifts between courts In Korea and Japan, fan-making traditions develop their own distinct aesthetics in ceremonial roles.

00:03:03: The rigid fan is an old story!

00:03:06: The folding fan, the hinged collapsible kind that snaps open and shut appears in Japanese records from around the seventh or eighth century CE.

00:03:23: The Japanese call it the sensu-oogi depending on style And It became so central to japanese culture That it developed an entirely distinct set of meanings & uses that persist this day.

00:03:37: There is a legend, and I want to be clear that this IS A LEGEND not a confirmed historical account.

00:03:42: That a craftsman named Toyomaru was inspired by watching the wings of a bat?

00:03:48: How a Bat could fold an enormous wing span into compact structure then unfold it instantly in flight!

00:03:55: He replicated the mechanism.

00:03:59: It's a beautiful story.

00:04:00: Whether or not it is true, it captures something real about the elegance of the folding fans design.

00:04:06: The way that collapses to almost nothing then opens into full arc in single motion.

00:04:11: What we do know historically Is That Folding Fans Became Significant Objects In Japanese Court Culture Very Early On.

00:04:19: They were used by the aristocracy as accessories, writing surfaces for poetry.

00:04:25: There is a long tradition in Japan of fans inscribed with verse as gifts.

00:04:29: Enna ceremonial objects in theatre religious ritual and dance forms that developed over centuries.

00:04:36: Crucially they also use on the battlefield.

00:04:39: Japanese military commanders carried Gun-sen, war fans often made of iron or reinforced materials which were used to signal troop movements.

00:04:48: To direct soldiers and communicate across distances where voices couldn't carry.

00:04:54: The fan as a communication device is not a Victorian invention.

00:04:57: it goes back in Japan over a thousand years By the time folding fans reached Europe via Portuguese traders.

00:05:04: in the sixteenth century, they already arrived carrying centuries of cultural weight from Japan China and Korea.

00:05:11: In European courts there were immediately received as luxury objects from a distant and fascinating world.

00:05:18: To own a Folding Fan in sixteenth-century Europe was to own an import something rare expensive and redolent of exotic.

00:05:26: Which is partly why what happened next was so interesting.

00:05:30: Because European crafts people, particularly in France Spain and Italy didn't just copy the Asian fan they transformed it!

00:05:37: They began making fans from their own materials ivory tortoise shell carved bone painted vellum embroidered silk And applied their own craft traditions to the object.

00:05:48: Within a century, the European Folding Fan had become its own thing entirely.

00:05:53: Still recognisably descended from Japanese Senzu but now a European luxury object in it's own right.

00:06:00: Manufactured at workshops in Paris, in Seville and Venice And It was an eighteenth-century Europe that the fan took on.

00:06:07: new role I find genuinely wonderful By the early seventeen hundreds The folding fan has became essentially universal among women of any social standing across Europe.

00:06:18: Not just the very wealthy, reasonably well-made fans were affordable enough that middle class women owned them too.

00:06:24: They were everywhere at bowls and churches ,at the theatre or court.

00:06:29: And someone noticed something interesting The leaf of a fan...the paper or silk surface opened out into half circle was essentially a blank canvas A portable surface Always with its owner always visible, always in use.

00:06:43: So fan makers began printing on it.

00:06:47: This is the moment that stops me every time because it's both completely logical and somehow surprising.

00:06:54: In an era when newspapers existed but women had limited access to formal public life, The Fan became a vehicle for information!

00:07:02: Funmakers printed current events maps dance instructions song lyrics popular games satirical cartoons and political commentary all on fanleaps.

00:07:13: There is a famous surviving example in the London Fan Museum and as side note, you should add that to this list of places because it's genuinely amazing.

00:07:23: So This Famous Surviving Example Is A Fan From Seventeen Eighty Eight Printed With Details Of The Trial Of Warren Hastings, The Former Governor General of British India Who Was Accused Of Corruption And Whose Trial Became One Of Great Public Spectacles.

00:07:40: The file includes the sealing chart of the courtroom, names and summaries.

00:07:45: A woman attending that trial could hold a beautifully decorated object in her hand entirely socially acceptable even expected while simultaneously having a kind-of reference document for proceedings.

00:07:58: It gave women permission disguised as fashion to be interested and informed about public affairs.

00:08:04: The fan has a notebook, the fan has scorecard... ...the fan is newspaper.

00:08:09: you could wave in front of your face while looking absolutely composed!

00:08:12: This wasn't only happening in Britain.

00:08:14: In France revolutionary era fans were printed with texts on new laws & declarations.

00:08:20: In China fans had for centuries carried paintings calligraphy & poetry.

00:08:27: The European innovation of the printed fan was in some ways catching up to an Asian practice that had existed for generations.

00:08:53: Which is, when you think about it a form of quiet subversion.

00:08:57: Now the part everyone wants to know about – The secret language.

00:09:04: For a long time, these lists were presented in popular culture as genuine historical fact.

00:09:28: Victorian women it was claimed were operating a kind of silent communication about their feelings and tensions and invitations across crowded ballrooms through a codified system of gestures –as precise as naval signal

00:09:43: flags.".

00:09:44: I have to be honest with you about what i found.

00:09:50: There is no question that fans were used to communicate.

00:09:53: In the broad sense, any gesture in any social context can communicate.

00:09:59: Drawing a fan slowly across their face or snapping it shut decisively Or using it partially conceal a smile.

00:10:05: These are readable social gestures of any era.

00:10:09: People have always read body language But the very specific codified system, this gesture means exactly this and any literate fan user would know.

00:10:18: it was in large part a commercial fabrication.

00:10:22: In the late nineteenth century there were prominent Parisian fans named Jean-Pierre Duveleroi whose shop on London's return street is one of the most fashionable in Europe.

00:10:32: Juve Leroy understood that he was not merely selling a cooling device, He were selling mystique romance and the idea of feminine sophistication.

00:10:41: So he published his small pamphlet distributed through his shop which claimed to document an ancient secret language used for centuries by Spanish women.

00:10:51: The pamphlets provided the code.

00:10:53: It is precisely this kind elegant origin story that the Victorian public adored.

00:10:57: The Code in all likelihood Was largely its own invention.

00:11:01: This was not to be fair pure cynicism.

00:11:04: Duvaleroy was operating in a tradition of nineteenth-century Europe that was fascinated by secret languages and hidden meanings, the language of flowers was a genuine craze as well.

00:11:14: reading significance into positioning postage stamps on envelopes.

00:11:19: His pamphlet perhaps less a deliberate lie than an enthusiastic contribution to cultural appetite for hidden communication – he gave people code they wanted.

00:11:30: And here's the remarkable thing, because he published this code people began to use it.

00:11:36: The fabrication became partly real!

00:11:38: Young women bought the pamphlet along with their fan.

00:11:41: they learned gestures and used them at balls.

00:11:43: They invented language bootstrapped itself into a least partial existence.

00:11:48: There is broader history of Fan.

00:11:49: Gesture that is genuine.

00:11:51: in comes from Spain Not an elaborate code but a real cultural practice.

00:11:56: In Andalucía and across Spanish-speaking cultures, the fan had long been an expressive object wielded with genuine skill as part of dance performance in social interaction.

00:12:06: The Spanish abanico is a real tradition, still alive and the expressive use of fans in flamenco Is not a Victorian fantasy but are living art form with centuries of history.

00:12:15: What the Victorians did was take a real cultural practice from another part of the world, strip it off its actual context And reframe as secret code which perhaps is a very Victorian thing to do.

00:12:27: The Juvelleroy pamphlet gave the English-speaking world a version of Spanish fan culture that was tidier, more clandestine and more amenable to their romantic imagination than the real thing.

00:12:38: But here's what I think is genuinely interesting... Underneath the historical tangle, THE NEED THAT DROVED THE FINAL LANGUAGE REAL OR INVENTED WAS COMPLETELY REAL!

00:12:48: In a society where unmarried women and men had almost no sanctioned private communication, where courtship was surveilled.

00:13:15: We don't carry folding fans much anymore, at least not in the same way.

00:13:19: You'll find them at summer festivals or traditional performances In the hands of dancers and Spain Japan Korea & China.

00:13:26: you will find them museum collections exquisite survivors that long history.

00:13:32: You will find affordable ones sold to tourist stalls in warm cities.

00:13:36: The craft hasn't disappeared.

00:13:38: Japanese fan makers still practice a tradition That has been alive for over a thousand years.

00:13:43: But the social function of The Fan, the part where it carried hidden messages served as a newspaper threaded through rules that official communication could not.

00:13:52: That function hasn't disappeared either!

00:13:55: It's just migrated.

00:13:57: Think about the emoji —a tiny yellow face-that allows you to add an entire layer of subtext into otherwise blunt message—a single punctuation choice or its deliberate absence that changes emotional register for sentence entirely.

00:14:13: The red receipt that signals you have been seen and the choice not to respond, that signals something else.

00:14:37: And perhaps what moves me most about the fan, looking back at its full arc from The Butt-winged Legend of Japan to the political newspapers in Georgia and London.

00:14:46: To their romantic pamphlets on Victorian Paris... ...to the flamenco stages of CIVI is that it was always an object in service off connection Of reaching across a room or a rule Or silence toward another person.

00:15:02: The air you move with the fan touches someone else's face.

00:15:06: That was always the point.

00:15:08: So, next time you see a fan in museum case and film In The Hands Of A Dancer Don't Just See A Pretty Object.

00:15:16: See A Battlefield Signal From Japanese General.

00:15:19: See A Georgian Woman Following Corruption Trial From Her Seat And Gallery.

00:15:23: See A Marketing Genius Who Invented A Secret Language And Sold It As Ancient History.

00:15:29: See The Quiet Rebellion of People Who Found A Way To Say Things The World Told Them They Couldn't Say.

00:15:35: Every ordinary object carries the fingerprints of people who needed it.

00:15:40: History isn't only in museums, sometimes... Sometimes!

00:15:44: It's in movement air between two peoples.

00:15:48: Stay curious.

00:15:49: I'm Alexandra and i'll talk to you next week.