I get asked often why I chose to design a folding fan — a sensu, as it's called in Japanese. After all, my generation rarely uses one anymore.
For me, it started with memory. My grandmother carried a humble sandalwood fan through the sweltering summers of Hong Kong, where I was born. Even as a small child, I was captivated — by the timeless elegance of the form, the clever mechanics of its opening and closing, the delicate thinness of each rib handsewn at perfect intervals, the satisfying swoosh of it in motion. Then I moved to California at seven, and the sensu faded from my world entirely. Decades later, on a trip to Kyoto with friends, I stumbled across folding fans again in a gift shop. They were beautiful — but something was missing. That was the moment I decided I wanted to bring the sensu back to relevance.
Tracing the History of the Sensu
The bamboo fan has a longer history than most civilizations. The flat uchiwa originated in China during the Zhou Dynasty (1046–256 BC) and was introduced to Japan's imperial court as early as the Kofun period (300–710 AD).1
The folding fan, however, is a Japanese invention — born in Kyoto during the Heian period.2 One legend traces it to a monk or court official inspired by the slats of cypress wood strung together; another credits a man named Toyomaru from Tamba province, who is said to have observed the folded wings of a bat and understood something essential about structure.3,4 Whatever its true origin, the folding fan — the ōgi, or hiōgi when made of hinoki cypress — began as a functional object and quickly became cultural. Men used it in the imperial court in place of paper. Poetry and painted art were added. Women adopted it as an accessory and symbol.2 From the imperial court to temples to samurai generals on the battlefield, the fan accumulated meaning everywhere it traveled.
In Japan, the sensu spread from Kyoto outward — to Nagoya and Tokyo. Each place developed its own structure, materials, and conventions. In Kyoto, the kyō-sensu remains an important presence at weddings, graduation ceremonies, tea gatherings, and performing arts like noh, rakugo, kyōgen, and buyō dance.2
Around the 10th century, paper folding fans were developed, and by 988 AD a Japanese monk named Chōnen presented fans to the Chinese Song Dynasty court as diplomatic gifts.1,2 Through trade, the form reached Korea during the Goryeo Dynasty around the same time.2,4 Both countries developed their own distinct techniques, aesthetics, and rituals around the fan — originally for nobility and the literati, eventually for everyone.3,5
Portuguese merchants were the first Europeans to establish direct maritime trade with Ming Dynasty China and Sengoku-period Japan, and brought folding fans back to Lisbon.5,6,8 From Lisbon, the form spread across the Mediterranean. Venice, a center of maritime trade, became an early hub for distributing these "oriental" curiosities into Europe.3,5 In Spain, the fan became the abanico — inseparable from flamenco, from royal court, from the language of gesture that became an art form in itself.6 In 1533, Catherine de' Medici brought the fan to the French court when she married the future King Henry II — and within a generation, the éventail had become indispensable to aristocratic fashion.3,4,5
What strikes me about this history is how the fan adapted everywhere it landed without ever surrendering the integrity of its structure. It became simultaneously aristocratic and universal — a form that absorbed new cultures without dissolving into them.
The Sensu in Kyoto Today
Having moved to Kyoto, my first instinct was to collaborate with the city's renowned sensu makers. I was fortunate enough to share my designs with two prominent houses — one with a 500-year history, another with 90 years — which, given that I'm a foreigner with limited Japanese, felt like something of a small miracle. My goal was to help them create something modern that might attract a younger, more global audience, while raising awareness for a craft that is rapidly declining as its master makers age without successors.
What I discovered surprised me. Both companies were genuinely intrigued by my designs — the design wasn't the obstacle. The obstacle was structure.
In Kyoto, fan production is governed by the Kyoto Folding Fan and Round Fan Association of Commerce and Industry (京都扇子団扇商工協同組合),9 established in the Meiji era to uphold exacting quality standards. The Association has 69 members — both makers and vendors — and sets strict parameters for the kyō-sensu: a fixed count of 25 to 35+ delicate bamboo ribs, prescribed lengths for men's and women's fans, and a constrained palette of colors.9
What makes this constraint structurally binding is the kyō-sensu's production model: unlike the Edo-sensu made in Tokyo (where one workshop handles the full process), the Kyoto fan is produced through a division of labor across five specialized makers, each responsible for a distinct stage.9 There is no single workshop that makes a fan from start to finish. Each maker produces standardized components, which are sold through the Association's vendor network. Any change to one step disrupts the entire supply chain.
The result: innovation is structurally impossible from within. Both companies pointed me toward China — where some Kyoto vendors already source their fans and bamboo materials.
The Sensu in China Today
So I went to China, which has its own thousand-year history of folding fans — and its own crisis of succession.
China's craft traditions faced an extraordinary sequence of disruptions over the past century: the fall of the Qing Dynasty, two World Wars, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution. Even as China built a global manufacturing economy, the cultural value of handcraft was significantly eroded. There's a painful contradiction at work: producing handmade objects by definition requires time and decades of mastery — yet craftspeople receive neither adequate compensation nor cultural respect. The result, across nearly all craft categories, is a generation of masters with no one to follow them.
In China, my ambition wasn't simply to find a manufacturer. I wanted to demonstrate — both to the public and to the makers themselves — that Chinese handcraft has genuine value. And I hoped, perhaps ambitiously, to inspire a younger generation to consider the path of the craftsperson.
With some luck and a great deal of persistence, I found a 160-year-old, sixth-generation, award-winning fan maker in Anhui — the bamboo capital of China. The workshop is run by the Wang family. Mr. Wang initially wasn't taking on new clients; his senior staff were retiring, and production capacity had fallen to roughly a tenth of its former peak. But something about this particular inquiry gave him pause: a Chinese-American woman with broken Mandarin who arrived with an NDA — something he had, apparently, never been asked to sign before.
What convinced him, in the end, wasn't the design itself. It was the shared conviction that there might still be new ways to give the fan a future.
It took us two years to develop the collection together, and honestly, both of us wanted to quit more than once. From Mr. Wang's perspective, my order was relatively small, I was a first-time customer, my designs were more complex than usual, and my quality standards were unusually high. From mine, I was accustomed to Western working conventions — precision briefs, detailed specifications, formal contracts — none of which map easily onto craft workshop relationships. Though I had studied Mandarin in college and spent time in Beijing two decades earlier, I hired a trusted Chinese friend to help translate and mediate throughout.
What kept us going wasn't a transactional calculation. It was a mutual wish: to find new ways to revive the fan, and to restore dignity to the craft.
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The Workshop and Its History
The Wang family's roots in fan-making trace back to the Tongzhi period of the Qing Dynasty (1862–1875), when the patriarch learned the craft in Zhejiang before relocating to Anhui to establish his own family workshop. Over subsequent generations, the Wangs developed a distinctive regional style. During the Mao era, the business was absorbed into a collective enterprise — but after China's reopening in the early 1980s, the family reestablished themselves as a private workshop, this time targeting scale and international markets, particularly Japan and Korea, which today account for the majority of their clients.
I hadn't been to China in nearly twenty years when I visited. The village was quieter and more modern than I expected — luxury cars parked alongside traditional Anhui architecture, bamboo forests, and tea plantations. We were lucky enough to meet three generations of Wang fan-makers, as well as staff members who had spent twenty or more years in the workshop. The youngest was in their forties.
What struck me most was the texture of daily life in the village. Bamboo craft wasn't contained within the workshop walls — it was everywhere. Thermoses wrapped in woven bamboo in every restaurant. Bamboo furniture in people's homes. A village where lives are still materially tied to the things made by hand, in the landscape where those materials grow, among people who know each other's families. There is something deeply romantic about that — something worth paying attention to before it's gone.
Mr. Wang gave up high school to apprentice with his father. He knows every step of the process: how to identify the right bamboo trees, when to cut them, and all sixty-plus steps of the fan-making process. The Wangs work across a range of fan typologies — some paper, some fabric, some entirely bamboo — each with its own production requirements. Some of the most prized materials take advantage of rare natural patterns in the bamboo itself, including markings caused by disease, which makes them both unusual and expensive.
Their quality range spans from promotional fans produced for events like the Tokyo Olympics all the way to collectible, museum-grade pieces.
Mr. Wang told us that he estimates perhaps ten more years remain for folding fan production in Anhui. Every craftsperson we visited in the region said the same thing about their own trade. They are, as they understand it, among the last.
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The Next Fold
The fan, it turns out, is a remarkably coherent model for how a product can exist well in the world — made from rapidly renewable local materials (bamboo, cotton, paper), produced by community members who develop mastery over decades, symbiotic with the landscape that supplies its raw materials, and flexible enough to absorb the aesthetics and rituals of different cultures without losing itself. It has outlasted empires, trade routes, and revolutions. It has lasted over a thousand years — more than most products, more than most civilizations. And that's because as a product, it is not only designed for function, which could have been superseded by the electric fan, but also for beauty and rituals — it is deeply meaningful in culture. That dual nature — functional and ceremonial, useful and beautiful — is what most products never achieve, and what we should be designing toward.
As someone who spent many years in Silicon Valley, working in an industry that increasingly treats labor as an inefficiency to be automated, I find the craft model quietly radical. It offers an alternative picture of what production could look like: community-rooted, materially honest, culturally generative. Not as nostalgia — but as a genuinely viable option for what comes after.
References:
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Nippon.com, Sensu: Japan's Elegant Folding Fans. https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-glances/jg00138/
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Fan Circle International, Japanese Fans. https://fancircleinternational.org/japanese-fans/
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Swiss National Museum, A Little History of the Fan (2022). https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/en/2022/10/a-little-history-of-the-fan/
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Mukashine Sewing, A Brief History of Folding Fans, With a Side of Mythbusting (2023). https://mukashinosewing.com/2023/06/27/a-brief-history-of-folding-fans-with-a-side-of-mythbusting/
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Ohnishi Tsune, About the History of the Fan. https://www.ohnishitune.com/en/fans/about-the-history-of-the-fan/
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The Grace Museum, Illustrated Happy Hour: History of the Hand Fan (2020). https://thegracemuseum.org/learn/2020-6-17-illustrated-happy-hour-history-of-hand-fan/
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Domus Web, Fan History and Design (2025). https://www.domusweb.it/en/design/2025/07/17/fan-history-design.html
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Museu de Angra do Heroísmo, Abano-Lequio: Folding Fan. https://museu-angra.cultura.azores.gov.pt/en/others/historical-pieces/abano-lequio-folding-fan/
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Kyoto Folding Fan and Round Fan Association of Commerce and Industry (京都扇子団扇商工協同組合). https://sensu-uchiwa.or.jp/w/whatis/
