Now I Sit Me Down (7 page)

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 circulation. 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.

Prosperity and cultural change are prerequisites for the adoption of new social customs, but they are not sufficient causes. Cultures pick and choose. The Japanese meticulously copied many Chinese artifacts and practices, including architecture, calligraphy, art, and dress, as well as sitting on mats. But they ignored the folding stool and the wooden platform, and although they periodically flirted with chair-sitting, the fashion never caught on and Japanese life remained at floor level.
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Conversely, while the Greeks copied much of their furniture from the Egyptians, they did not sit on the floor; indeed, they considered people who squatted to be uncivilized, perhaps because their old enemies, the Persians, sat on cushions and divans. During the Renaissance, Italians copied Roman architecture and admired Roman art, but they never adopted the Roman habit of reclined dining. On the other hand, in Spain, where Islamic fashions persisted long after the Moorish occupation ended, according to Braudel, as late as the seventeenth century it was still the custom for elegant ladies at court to sit on floor cushions. The willingness to alter or abandon—or not abandon—a long-standing custom is never predetermined. Ultimately, cultures choose to sit up or down because they want to.

The Sitting Position

Any culture that decides to sit on chairs must come to terms with a challenging reality: human posture. The first person to recognize the connection between sitting and posture was the eighteenth-century French physician Nicolas Andry de Boisregard. Andry was a pioneer in the field of orthopedics—he coined the term—and in his 1741 treatise he described the connection between healthy sitting posture and chairs. “When one sits with the body bended backwards, the back must necessarily be crooked inwards,” he wrote, “and when one sits upon a hollow seat, the effort which one naturally makes, and without any design, to bring the body to an equilibrium, must of necessity make the back still more crooked.” The hollow seat referred to the concave woven rush seats of ordinary chairs, which tended to sag over time. To improve posture, Andry proposed adding an adjustable screw that would push up on the seat from beneath, keeping it flat.

Two hundred years after Andry, Ellen Davis Kelly, a physical education professor at the University of Oklahoma, neatly summarized the physiological challenge of human posture in a teaching handbook:

Posture is a distinct problem to humans because the skeleton is fundamentally unstable in the upright position. A four or even a three-legged chair or stool can be quite stable. But who ever heard of a two-legged piece of furniture? The two-legged human body presents a continuous problem in maintaining balance, a problem augmented because the feet are a very small base of support for a towering superstructure. And as though this were not problem enough, the trunk, head, and arms are supported from the hips upward by a one-legged arrangement of the spine.

The purpose of the chair is to provide respite from this precarious balancing act. But the instability that Kelly describes is, if anything, compounded when one sits down. The weight of the body is concentrated on the ischial tuberosities, or sitting bones, at the base of the pelvis. These bones, which resemble the rockers of a rocking chair, provide support only laterally and allow the body to rock back and forth in the other direction. A chairback provides the support that allows the muscles to relax, but a too-vertical backrest causes the sitter to slump, while simply angling the seatback creates an unnatural backward leaning posture. If the seat is too hard, it will cause discomfort to the sitting bones, and if it is too soft it will distort the buttock muscles and will press on the ischia, likewise causing discomfort. If a chair is too low, the body's weight will all be concentrated on the sitting bones instead of being carried by the thighs; if a chair is too high, the sitter will tend to slump forward to place the feet in a more stable position on the floor, but this will constrict breathing and create muscle tension in the neck.

In 1884, a German orthopedic surgeon, Franz Staffel, judging that most chairs were “constructed more for the eye than for the back,” proposed a low backrest that supported the lumbar region. Staffel, who has been called “the father of the modern school chair,” recommended that when sitting, the back should approximate as closely as possible the double-S curve of the spine when standing upright. During the nineteenth century, when primary education became obligatory and children spent more and more time sitting in the classroom, researchers proposed a variety of chair-desk combinations intended to improve posture. Some of the designs included seat belts, forehead restraints, and face rests, although it is hard to imagine that such draconian devices were ever actually used.

In 1913, a Swiss anatomist, Hans Strasser, published the design of a chair whose upper backrest was slightly angled, and whose seat was sloped to better support the underside of the thighs. Strasser's findings were confirmed thirty-five years later by Bengt Åkerblom, a Swedish researcher, who used X-rays and electromyograms to study the body mechanics of sitting. Åkerblom designed several chairs whose bent backrest became known as the “Åkerblom curve.”

The movement of standing up and sitting down is also a challenge. We have all experienced the rude jolt when we miscalculate the height of a chair, because dropping into a chair briefly exerts twice our body weight on the spine. The design solution to this problem is the armrest, which provides something to hold on to as we lower ourselves into the seat and is also a handy place to push up from as we rise. This is especially important if a chair is low, like a lounge chair.
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Getting up from a low chair without arms can be difficult, especially for the elderly. Armrests serve another purpose: relieving some of the stress from the shoulders by providing something on which to lean while we are sitting.

Chair with lumbar support (after Hans Strasser)

The British psychologist Paul Branton described the seated body as “not merely an inert bag of bones, dumped for a time in a seat, but a live organism in a dynamic state of continuous activity.” We don't sit still—we fidget, we shift our weight, even if ever so slightly, crossing our legs and arms, moving our cramped muscles. We interact with our chairs: we sit on them, lean back and lean forward, and often perch on the edge of our seats. We wrap our leg around our chair's leg; we sling one arm across its back, or a leg across its arm.

We are good at walking and running, and we are happy lying down when we sleep. It is the in-between position that is the problem. This is true even if we sit on the ground—as attested by the variety of pads, bolsters, armrests, and cushions used by floor-sitting cultures. It is even truer when we choose to sit on a chair. Every chair represents a struggle to resolve the conflict between gravity and the human anatomy. Sitting up is always a challenge.

 

FOUR

A Chair on the Side

A side chair is a straight-backed chair without arms. Like a side issue or a side dish it is of lower rank. An armchair bestows a certain stature, you sit
in
it; a side chair is more prosaic—you sit
on
it, whether you are attending a social function, eating a sandwich, or simply tying your shoelaces. My oldest side chair, one of a pair bought years ago in a roadside flea market, is a straightforward affair. The seat is a slab of solid wood with carved depressions shaped to fit the buttocks and a slight slope so that you slide back against the wooden spindles and the curved top rail. The chair feels stable; the four slightly splayed legs are countersunk into the seat and braced with dowel-like stretchers. Homely and unsophisticated though it may be, this kitchen chair gives me pleasure every time I sit on it. It's like using a claw hammer or a crosscut saw, or indeed any tool that has been refined over centuries—it feels right.