JAPAN
folding screen of later times, but a silk curtain depending from a horizontal bar, which was supported by a slender pillar fixed in a heavy socket. A metal mirror mounted on an elaborate tripod-stand, a clothes-horse, usually of gold lacquer, and a species of low two-shelved table on which stood a censer and a box of incense-implements, completed the furniture of the apartment in warm weather, but in winter there was added a box for burning charcoal—metal braziers not having yet come into fashion. For lighting purposes the commonest device was a rush-wick laid in a shallow vessel of oil from which the end of the wick projected. This vessel was either supported on a bamboo tripod, or fixed to an upright rod moving in a vertical socket, so that the height of the light could be regulated at will. The annals speak of "combustible earth" and "combustible water," in other words, coal and oil, as having been presented to the Court in the middle of the seventh century by the inhabitants of a part of Japan corresponding to the present province of Echigo,[1] but it does not appear that coal was ever employed in ancient times. Tallow candles seem to have been in use from the ninth century. They were set on a pricket stand. In short, the Japanese of the Heian epoch were as well supplied with lighting apparatus as any of their successors until modern times.
- ↑ See Appendix, note 54.
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