It was in this period that, in 1995, Skinner founded the Drachen Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Seattle that sought to reframe kites as historical art objects through residency programs for young makers and educational workshops.
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But in the ’90s and early aughts, kite flying experienced a boom in the American West and parts of Europe, due in part to the popularization of kite surfing, and groups of kiters - who gathered at word-of-mouth meet-ups in windswept places like Maui, Seattle and the French Atlantic coast - began to take interest in its lore. INDEED, VERY FEW major cultural institutions have deemed kites worthy of inquiry or preservation. Once they invented the airplane, that’s what became important.” “They were obsessive kite fliers,” says the Seattle-based kite historian and maker Scott Skinner, 68. Starting in 1899, the Wright brothers’ exhaustive trials with gliders and man-lifting kites helped pave the way for the realization of the first powered airplane in 1903. In 1752, Benjamin Franklin famously attempted to harness electricity by sending a kite hooked to a thin metal wire - an ill-fashioned lightning rod - into a thunderstorm. From there, the kite traveled to North America, where it informed two of the defining advancements of the modern age. During the following century, flying kites - often ones made in arched or pear shapes and crafted from silk with ornamental tails - became a popular pastime for children in Europe. Less clear is how they arrived in the West - some sources suggest Marco Polo, who traveled through Asia along the Silk Road in the late 13th century, observed Chinese sailors using wind-carried devices to gauge incoming weather patterns and brought an assortment back to Europe with him - but tailless kites, modeled on medieval pennon-shaped military banners, appear in English and Dutch drawings from the early 1600s.
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It seems likely, though, that kites originated in China or Southeast Asia and were brought by merchants, missionaries and soldiers into Korea and Japan and, later, Myanmar and India, where they can be seen in Mughal miniature paintings from the turn of the 17th century. Even their origin story has seemed uncertain since the 1997 discovery of a prehistoric Indonesian cave painting of what appears to be a floating rhomboid. And in parts of Bali, villagers construct cotton kites up to 13 feet tall - shaped like leaves, birds or fish - that are flown in competitions during the dry season to show gratitude for a successful harvest.ĭespite their ubiquity, though, kites have rarely been the subject of serious study. On Good Friday in Bermuda, people gather on the country’s beaches to watch enormous, multicolored pinwheel-like kites billow through the clouds in homage to Christ’s ascension.
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In Japan, washi-paper versions, often depicting scenes from legends and fairy tales, have been flown for good luck since the Edo period. In Singapore and Borneo, Malay fishermen have long trailed lures from kites attached to the sterns of their boats. And yet they have captivated adults and children alike for centuries, serving a range of practical and spiritual functions in cultures around the world.
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Today, of course, these delicate aircraft - built from light wood or wire frames shaped to create lift, covered in a thin material such as paper or silk and piloted via long strings - are considered toys, not tools of military warfare. In 1232, according to the Sinologist Joseph Needham, Chinese military kites dropped pages of propaganda into the compound of a Mongolian prisoner-of-war camp, inciting first a riot and then a mass escape. Similar devices were later used by other Chinese armies, who launched them after dark in whipping winds, hoping the noise would scare off their foes, or delivered threats via missives tied to their tails. It is one of the most famous early stories of kite flying. ONE NIGHT AROUND two millenniums ago, a Han dynasty general sent a square-shaped assemblage of bamboo and cloth into the air above Chu enemy territory at Weiyang Palace in central China he was trying to measure how much ground his men would need to tunnel through in order to breach their adversaries’ defense line.