Among the painted representations in the India Museum, of objects from the Summer Palace at Pekin, is a circular screen, ‘like the moon,’ borne by the guard of an imperial concubine. See illustration, p. 46. A favourite device for the decoration of these larger screens is that of the fabled Phœnix, the Ho bird of the Japanese. This is seen in the painting of the Chinese school of Japan, British Museum, 822, in which one of the two attendants on a Chinese Emperor carries a long oval screen bordered with peacocks’ feathers, and ornamented with two Phœnixes.[36] We therefore perceive that the ceremonies and customs relating to the fan, no less than the various forms which this instrument assumed, were practically identical with the ancient peoples of the East and West;—the same order of development, having its origin in the natural suggestion afforded by the wings of birds and of the broader leaved plants; the fans of the Han dynasty reliefs, their exact counterpart being found in Egypt and Assyria; the rigid hand-screens corresponding to those tabellæ which the Romans derived from the Greeks, who in turn received them from the peoples of Asia Minor, and which, doubtless, had their origin in the more remote East; the employment of the fan in both religious and civil ceremonial and in war.[37] Among the Bat Bu’u (eight precious things) carried at the end of staves by the inhabitants of Annam in their ceremonial processions, is a fan (Quat) symbolising the graceful perfection of the form of woman, and the light breeze that tempers the heat of the summer sun.[38] These Bat Bu’u are made in three ways— 1. Of carved wood lacquered and gilt. 2. Of tin or pewter. 3. In the form of transparencies to be lighted from within. A huge wooden fan is carried as part of the insignia of a mandarin’s procession.[39]