Litter (vehicle)

• 1. Introduction

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  A litter is a vehicle with no wheels, carried entirely by human muscle. Before the bicycle, before the railway, before the paved road, rulers and the wealthy across most of the known world solved the problem of dignified transport with a simple idea: a chair or bed slung between poles, hoisted onto human shoulders. What began as a battlefield stretcher for the wounded grew into one of the most status-laden objects in history, attracting its own elaborate rituals, legal restrictions, and social codes on every inhabited continent.

  The questions this raises are more surprising than the basic design. Why did Chinese empresses, Indian merchants, Korean government officials, Philippine princesses, and Scottish patients in a hospital all converge on essentially the same solution? Why did the East India Company feel compelled to prohibit its junior clerks from owning one? And what drove the citizens of Bath, Somerset, to keep the metal link extinguishers on their exterior walls long after the sedan chair itself had vanished from the streets? The story of the litter is really the story of how human societies organize themselves around who gets to be carried, and who does the carrying.

• 2. The Many Forms

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  The simplest version of a litter is a sling stretched along a length of poles or inside a frame, carried by porters at each end. Such basic constructions appear on battlefields and in emergency situations where wheeled vehicles cannot pass.

  At the other end of the scale, Chinese emperors traveled in litters that resembled small rooms, borne on the shoulders of a dozen or more people. The most efficient method for the porters was to place the carrying poles directly onto their shoulders or use a yoke to transfer the load.

  In the Indian subcontinent, the palanquin took a distinct form. Larger versions were rectangular wooden boxes eight feet long, four feet wide, and four feet high, with openings screened by curtains or shutters and interiors furnished with bedding and pillows. The most ornate examples had lacquer paintwork and cast bronze finials at the ends of the poles, with designs drawn from foliage, animals, and geometric patterns.

  In traditional Vietnam, two separate varieties existed side by side. The cang was a basic bamboo pole with the rider reclining in a hammock, sometimes fitted with an adjustable woven shade. The kieu resembled a sedan chair more closely, enclosed with a fixed elaborately carved roof and doors. The cang eventually fell out of use; the kieu survived in temple devotional processions.

  In the Kingdom of Kongo, from at least the 15th century through the 19th century, a type known as the tipoye served the elite. Seat-style versions with a single pole along the back were topped with an umbrella and carried by two men. Lounge-style versions shaped like a bed moved one to two occupants with a porter at each corner. Horses could not survive in the tropical climate even after the Portuguese introduced them, so human portage became highly refined. Missionary accounts claimed the litter transporters moved at speeds comparable to galloping post horses.

• 3. Status Encoded in Wood and Silk

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  In Korea, six distinct types of gama were assigned to different ranks of government officials, making the vehicle itself a portable statement of bureaucratic standing. The mountainous terrain of the Korean peninsula and the absence of paved roads made the gama practically useful as well as symbolically powerful.

  In China, the distinction ran along a sharp social line. A commoner rode a wooden or bamboo civil sedan chair called a minjiao, while the mandarin class used an official sedan chair called a guanjiao, enclosed in silk curtains. The bridal palanquin, xijiao, occupied a category of its own: lacquered in auspicious red, richly ornamented and gilded, with red silk curtains to screen the bride from onlookers.

  In Java, the gilded throne-like jempana was originally reserved solely for royalty. The Dutch colonial administration later adopted it as a status marker of their own, the logic being that the more elaborate the palanquin, the higher the rank of the occupant. A weapon or heirloom of sufficient importance, such as a keris or tombak, could be granted its own separate palanquin.

  In the Philippines, a class of royal women called Binukot or Binocot were forbidden to walk on the ground at all or to be seen by the general population. When they needed to travel, they were veiled and carried in a hammock or a basket-like litter. Longer journeys required covered palanquins with silk covers, some built in the form of a miniature hut.

  In Hong Kong, before the Peak Tram began operating in 1888, wealthy residents of Victoria Peak were carried by porters in sedan chairs up the steep paths to their homes, including former Governor Richard MacDonnell's summer residence. Private chairs were a significant marker of a civil officer's status; the number of bearers attached to his chair indicated his official rank.

• 4. Regulation and Commerce

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  London had chairs available for hire by 1634. Each was assigned a number, and the chairmen were licensed because the operation was a monopoly granted to a courtier of King Charles I. Sedan chairs could pass through streets too narrow for a carriage, offering some relief from the crush of coaches, making them an early response to urban traffic congestion.

  In 1738, Scotland established a formal fare system for its sedans. The regulations covering chairmen in Bath were described as resembling those of a modern taxi commission. A trip within a city cost six pence; a full day's rental cost four shillings. A sedan was even pressed into use as an ambulance at Scotland's Royal Infirmary.

  Bath chairmen moved quickly and expected clear passage. Pedestrians hearing the call "By your leave" behind them knew to flatten themselves against walls or railings as the chairmen pushed through. Despite this, accidents were common: upset chairs and broken glass-paned windows were frequent results.

  The decline of the sedan chair in Glasgow is precisely documented. Licensing records show twenty-seven sedan chairs in the city in 1800, falling to eighteen in 1817, and ten in 1828. Over that same period, the number of registered hackney carriages in Glasgow rose to one hundred and fifty, suggesting comfort and company mattered more than maneuverability once streets improved.

  In India, the East India Company took a different kind of regulatory action. Owning a palanquin and keeping a staff of bearers was a luxury that even low-paid company clerks could afford. Concerned that this indulgence was leading junior clerks to neglect their work in favor of what the company called "rambling", the Court of Directors prohibited junior clerks from purchasing and maintaining palanquins in 1758.

• 5. Religious and Ceremonial Life

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  In ancient Rome, a litter called the lectica or sella carried members of the imperial family along with dignitaries and members of the wealthy elite, when they were not traveling on horseback.

  The Third Council of Braga in 675 AD issued a specific ruling on the matter: bishops carrying the relics of martyrs in procession were required to walk to the church on foot. They were forbidden to be carried in a chair or litter by deacons clothed in white. The church saw a distinction between the dignity of the relic and the ease of the cleric.

  Popes were later transported in the sedia gestatoria, a form of carried throne, which was eventually replaced by the popemobile. In traditional Catholic processions, holy statues and relics are still carried through streets using litters.

  In Japan, the portable shrines used to carry the goshintai, or god-body, the central totemic core of a Shinto shrine, closely resemble the kago litters used for human transport. During some religious festivals, this object is taken on a tour to and from the shrine in a form that mirrors the ceremonial processions used for secular authority.

  In Bali today, the Hindu tradition of using palanquins for auspicious statues, weapons, or heirlooms continues, particularly for funerals. In more elaborate rituals, the body itself is borne in a palanquin, which is then cremated along with the deceased. In the Greater Accra region of Ghana, the chiefs of the Ga people use figurative palanquins built after a chief's family symbol or totem. These are related to the figurative coffins that became widely known after being exhibited in 1989 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, later traveling to art museums around the world.

• 6. The Latin American Silla

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  In the mountains of 18th- and 19th-century Latin America, a simpler form of litter emerged that solved the problem of steep terrain and narrow roads. Called a silla, the Spanish word for seat or chair, it consisted of a plain wooden chair fitted with an attached tumpline. The occupant sat in the chair as a single porter strapped it to his back, the tumpline crossing his forehead to share the load. The passenger rode facing backward.

  The porters who carried the silla were called silleros, cargueros, or silleteros, sometimes translated as "saddle-men". Travelers typically employed several porters who would rotate carrying the occupant in turns.

  A nearly identical arrangement still operates in the Huangshan Mountains of Anhui province in eastern China, where older tourists and visitors are ferried up and down the mountain paths on a chair borne on a porter's back. The parallel development of the same solution on two distant continents speaks to the practical constraints imposed by similar geography rather than any shared cultural inheritance.

  The simple litter made of poles lashed to a chair, sometimes fitted with an umbrella and stout bamboo poles, also survives at Chinese mountain resorts including the Huangshan Mountains, where it carries tourists to viewing positions otherwise unreachable by any other means of transport.

• 7. Survival and Revival

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  In 1787, Benjamin Franklin, then 81 years old, gouty and in generally poor health, traveled to meetings of the United States Constitutional Convention in a sedan chair carried by four prisoners. The image of one of the republic's founding figures arriving at the convention in a vehicle last associated with European monarchs captures how slowly transport habits actually change.

  The neoclassical sedan chair made for Queen Charlotte, who served as Queen Consort from 1761 to 1818, remains at Buckingham Palace. Several houses in Bath, Somerset, still display link extinguishers on their exterior walls, shaped like outsized candle snuffers, the remnants of an era when sedan chairs moved through the streets at night accompanied by link-boys carrying torches to light the way.

  In the 1970s, a Bath entrepreneur named John Cuningham briefly revived the sedan chair service as a commercial venture. The attempt did not last, but it signals the persistent fascination with a form of transport long after its practical moment has passed.

  Since 1975, an annual sedan chair race has been held in Hong Kong to benefit the Matilda International Hospital, commemorating the practice that ended when the Peak Tram made it unnecessary. The last known doli, the simplest form of palanquin used in India, was made around the year 2000 by Sharma craftsmen of the Vishwakarma community in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, for use in wedding processions. The thread between ancient practice and the present is thinner than it looks, but it has not broken.