East Asian societies share many cultural traits, but only China adopted the chair before modern times. Until about one thousand ears ago, most Chinese sat on mats or used a kind of folding chair without a back, known as a hu-chuang,which probably originated in Central Asia.Around the fourth and fifth centuries AD, when the hu-chuang became popular, the word hu was used to refer to imports from the west via trade routes. Paintings, literary references, and other types of documentation offer evidence that the chair as we know it—with a back and sometimes arms, and known as a yi in Chinese—appeared in China during the Tang dynasty (618-906 AD), although it did not become widespread immediately.

There are many reasons to believe that the adoption of the yi by Chinese society was a gradual one. Because Tang-dynasty urial graves were often furnished with clay figures of the deceased as well as with representations of objects believed to be necessary in the afterlife, such as horses, camels, furniture,and sometimes even houses, they are a good indication about what was considered essential to daily living. But no clay models of chairs have been found in the extensive modern collections of these grave objects. Since Japan was strongly influenced by aspects of the Chinese Tang culture, it is also significant that the Japanese never adopted the chair during the Tang dynasty. The diary of Ennin, a famous ninth-century Japanese traveler, distinctly mentions that he sat on a chair while in China, which suggests that he found the experience unusual and noteworthy. For many years, the yi was is ed exclusively by people such as the emperor, ladies of the court, and Iqh-ranking officials,and it was adopted into common use only during the Song dynasty(960-1279 AD).A twelfth-century painting, possibly of the Qingming Festival in Kaifeng, shows chairs and tables in the city's restaurants, tea houses, and wine shops.

If the chair came from outside China, a likely source is the Byzantine Empire, which occupied the eastern Mediterranean region at the time of the Tang dynasty. Chairs were known in parts of the Mediterranean world from the third millennium Bc and were common use in the Roman and Byzantine Empires. The Chinese and Byzantine Empires traded with each other, and one Chinese description of court life in the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, describes the Byzantine emperor sitting on what was probably a throne.It has also been suggested that the chair was introduced by the Nestorians, foreign residents of China who belonged to a Christian sect that flourished there in the seventh to tenth centuries The Nestorians' origins were in the Byzantine Empire,and it is likely that, when in China, they retained the Mediterranean custom of sitting on chairs. Still,the extensive Chinese written and pictorial sources provide no clear evidence of this or any other foreign origin of the chair in China.

Whatever its origins, the chair had a profound influence on the design of Chinese homes. Where low tables once accompanied mats on the floor,tables now had to be higher,and new types of furniture appeared, such as tall, narrow tables placed against walls to serve as stands for vases or other art objects. In fact, Chinese chairs usually stood higher than Mediterranean chairs in order to keep a person's feet above cold floors.Sitters rested their feet on a front rung of the chair,or sometimes on a footstool, which was often a mark of status; paintings often showed a single footstool in front of the senior person at a gathering. One twelfth-century painting in the Beijing Palace Museum,a copy of one painted two centuries earlier,shows people sitting on chairs in an aristocratic household. The tables are still relatively low,as if people had not yet adjusted to the new style of furniture.But the folding screens (partitions used to divide a room into separate sections) shown in the painting are larger than those of earlier times,evidently in response to the higher line of vision of people sitting in chairs.In later centuries,as the height and quantity of furniture increased, space in Chinese buildings came to be divided by walls instead of screens.