Long, long before the invention of the cigarette butt and the chopstick wrapper, Chinese ground was clean and inviting, good enough to sit on. Well, not directly on. Even the venerable ancients found cause for mirth in grass and mud stains on the seat of another’s robe. Thus the xi, or mat, became de rigueur, a must-have intermediary between buttock and good earth.

But it is not to be imagined that every hard-scrabble rice farmer and duck herder in the Yangtze basin had a mat to call his own. Devices of such comfort and face saving were for the elite, men of means who spent most of their days sitting. The unfortunate masses slowly mastered the enviable trick of squatting on the heels for respite, which would one day lead to the squat toilet impasse, the cultural conundrum that will only be solved when the ankles and hams of the Chinese become as stiff and inflexible as our own.

In any event, up until the Tang Dynasty, even the most stately gatherings were conducted entirely on mats. Personages favored by heaven in having fathers who had killed thousands of people got their own mats to sit on, while those of more peaceful descent huddled together on tattered, public xi. The august soul who not only had genocidal parents, but had also contributed significantly to the body count, got a special mat in the center of the gathering. Thus was the term zhu xi, or ‘main mat’, coined to refer to the leader in any organization, even one as progressive and anti-feudal as the Chinese Communist Party. So while Time Magazine in the 1940s was singing the praises of Chairman Mao, agrarian reformer, his admirers on this side of the Pacific knew him as Mao Zhu Xi. To this day, qu xi, or “go to the mat”, is an idiom expressed not with the intent to fight, but to attend an important meeting.

It may come as a surprise to know that the literal elevation of the Chinese people came thanks to the Mongols, long before all that wholesale slaughter business they are so well known for. A certain variety of razor sharp grass that proliferates on the steppe made it risky business to simply flop down hind-end first on a moonless evening, and in those pastoral days, fresh piles of yak dung were as numerous as spit-gobs at a Beijing bus stop, making the mat an unsuitable alternative. In perhaps their only feat of non-weapons related engineering, the Mongols invented a tiny folding stool. Because it could be tied to a horse for easy transport, it became known in China as the ma jia, or ‘horse tie-on’.

Ever ones for punnery and subtle humor, the Chinese soon began referring to the ma jia as a hu chuang, or Mongolian bed. The Chinese knew the Mongolian as the Hu, and attributed many things that didn’t originate in the Middle Kingdom to their design. Such foreign origins didn’t stop them from adoption and adaptation, however. By the Tang Dynasty, the Chinese had made the Mongolian bed inarguably Chinese: impractical, clean-lined, soft-looking but hard as nails, and ingeniously crafted, with nary a screw, nail, or jot of glue.

The Chinese never forgot Hu gave them the chair. Perhaps it was the Yuan Dynasty, and the subsequent lack of tolerance for jokes at the expense of the Mongols, that prompted yet another change in chair nomenclature, from hu chuang to jiao yi, or ‘cross chair’. The emphasis on etymology here is not in the vain hope that people care, but to show that chairs have an inextricable link to authority that mats do not. By the Ming Dynasty, a Chinese head honcho was often referred to as di yi ba jiao yi, ‘the first cross chair’. The term is still in use today, but by fewer and fewer people.

Perhaps this can explain the gaffe committed a few years ago by a Chinese company seeking a new CEO. The directors had instructed HR to place notices in leading newspapers to the effect that they were seeking a top ‘cross chair’. Out of either miscomprehension or mischief, HR translated the term into top ‘rose chair’. Any Chinese with a whiff of classical education knows that only courtesans sit in the rose chair, albeit refined ones. Then again, in these days of lying down for the WTO, who’s to say that the company couldn’t have done as well with an experienced prostitute as with an experienced cross chair?