Translations:Adventist Youth Honors Answer Book/Arts and Crafts/Origami/6/en

How was it used and developed?

In Japan, the earliest unambiguous reference to a paper model is in a short poem by Ihara Saikaku in 1680 which mentions a traditional butterfly design used during Shinto weddings. In China, traditional funerals often include the burning of folded paper, most often representations of gold nuggets (yuanbao). The practice of burning paper representations instead of full-scale wood or clay replicas dates from the Sung Dynasty, though it's not clear how much folding was involved. Traditional Chinese funeral practices were banned during the Cultural Revolution, so most of what we know about Chinese paperfolding comes from the modern-day continuation of these practices in Taiwan. In Europe, there was a well-developed genre of napkin-folding, which flourished during the 17th and 18th centuries. After this period, this genre declined and was mostly forgotten; historian Joan Sallas attributes this to the introduction of porcelain, which replaced complex napkin folds as a dinner-table status symbol among nobility. However, some of the techniques and bases associated with this tradition continued to be a part of European culture; folding was a significant part of Friedrich Froebel's "Kindergarten" method, and the designs published in connection with his curriculum are stylistically similar to the napkin fold repertoire.