Their capacity for flight is magical, almost animate, reflected in the names by which they are known around the world. In Greek, they are χαρταετοί, paper eagles, and the Germans call them Drachen, dragons. French children float flying stags (cerf-volant) above the earth — although “cerf”, here, is likely a corruption of the Occitan serp, snake — and in Russian, too, they are serpents of the air, воздушные змеи. Other languages reach beyond the animal world. Spanish speakers describe them as comets, cometas; Mandarin remembers when the flying forms were affixed with bamboo flutes, like airborne Aeolian harps — fēngzhēng, “wind zithers”, known elsewhere as “wind psalteries” — while the Japanese kanji 凧 combines a radical connected to wind with an element meaning towel or cloth. In English, they are simply kites, named for the bird of prey, from the old English cyta — thought to be onomatopoetic imitation of its sharp-edged call.

Kites are often said to have been invented in China, perhaps before written history. Legend has it that the ancient philosopher Mozi (ca. 470–391 BCE) spent three years perfecting a wooden kite that crashed shortly after its first launch, while his contemporary, the master carpenter Lu Ban (Kungshu Phan), assembled a wooden bird that could stay in the air for three days without rest. Similarly, the earliest Western account of kite flying is sometimes claimed to be Aulus Gellius’ description of an artificial flying dove, invented by Archytas of Taranto around 400 BCE — although this may have been closer to a steam-powered automaton. Yet others believe that the historical evidence of kite use in New Zealand, Hawai’i, and elsewhere in Polynesia suggests that ancient Southeast Asian kiteflyers, who brought these traditions to Oceania, predate the earliest Chinese records. On these islands (as in Thailand, Korea, and many other places), kites once had a spiritual function. In 1931, the philologist Nora K. Chadwick summarized her comparative mythological findings: “The kite is a religious symbol and represents the soul. It is a demon-queller. It is not of recent introduction.”

Kite festivals are relatively new, but carry forth certain religious traditions. As a source of amusement, kites only started being flown for fun in China around 1000 CE, according to the historian of flight Berthold Laufer. The Double Ninth Festival — celebrated on the ninth day of the ninth month in the Chinese calendar — is said to have arisen when a man named Huan Ching was told by a fortune teller that his family would suffer a seismic tragedy on this day. They fled to the hills and returned to find all of their animals dead. In memory of Huan Ching — and as a method of avoiding an entire year of bad luck — believers still flee to the hills today, bringing ornate kites as a way to pass the time. Another origin story for this festival concerns a farmer, Mêng Chia, who lost his hat to the wind but remained ignorant of his loss. To honor him, hats were subsequently floated on strings, which evolved over time into our modern pastime. Indian recreational kite flying is said to have flourished under the Mughals. In 2015, during the state of Gujarat’s Uttarayan festival, which marks the Sun’s passage into Capricornus, so many kites were flown over the two-day period that 2,394 birds were reported injured.

Early written records of kites come from military history, where they were used for surveillance, signaling, and — sometimes affixed with lanterns — became intimating, unknown phenomena. During the reign of Emperor Wu of Liang (502–549 CE), kites were supposedly used to communicate messages between army leaders at a distance. When the military general Hou Jing rebelled and besieged Nanking, his archers were ordered to shoot down the emperor’s kites, but “they changed into birds which flew away and disappeared”, records Joseph Needham in his Science and Civilisation in China. During a thirteenth-century war between Chin Tartars and the Mongols, kites were overlaid with messages to prisoners of war, inciting them to revolt and escape, and purposefully crashed behind enemy lines — what we might now call airborne leaflet propaganda. A Korean story relates how the winds were used to return a shooting star to the sky: when a meteorite fell to Earth — a bad omen during wartime — General Gim Yu-Sin (595–673 CE) attached a fireball to a kite, flew it toward the heavens, and raised his troop’s morale through subterfuge.

Some of the earliest illustrations of European kites are found in the various manuscript copies of the German military engineer Conrad Kyeser’s fifteenth-century Bellifortis, where the draco, as it was known, takes the form of a demonic windsock, with a head of parchment, a body of linen, and a tail of silk. It is thought that Romans flew kites like these as early as 105 CE for two purposes: these were daunting military banners that inspired awe in enemies but also allowed archers to gauge the wind. In Athanasius Kircher’s Ars magna (1645), the Jesuit scholar illustrates a similar psyop in India: “[A missionary] made a kite out of very fine paper, in the middle of which he attached a mixture of sulphur, pitch, and wax, so that on being ignited the device would be illuminated and display the words IRA DEI [WRATH OF GOD]”, Kircher writes. “The barbarians, seeing the extraordinary movement of the apparition, were thunderstruck and, remembering the words of the fathers, were afraid that they were about to suffer the predicted punishment.”

Before windsurfing, kiteboarding, and paragliding — not to mention gliders and airplanes — there was the fantasy (and then the actuality) that kites could assist in human flight. In 1282, Marco Polo described the practice of using man-lifting kites to predict success or disaster at sea. The first step was to find “some fool or drunkard”, since no sane or sober person would expose themselves to the risk that follows, and bind him to an aerodynamic frame. Wait for a strong wind, tie a cord to the test subject, and then launch him off the ship’s stern.

If the hurdle going straight up makes for the sky, they say that the ship for which the test has been made will have a quick and prosperous voyage. . . . But if the hurdle has not been able to go up, no merchant will be willing to enter the ship for which the test has been made, because they say she could not finish her voyage and would be oppressed by many ills.

Elsewhere, kites were means of escape and ingress. In Takizawa Bakin’s sixty-eight-chapter serial novel, Chinsetsu Yumiharizuki (Strange Tales of the Crescent Moon, 1807–1811) — richly illustrated by Hokusai — the exiled samurai Minamoto no Tametomo sends his son Tomowaka back to the mainland on a giant kite, in order to become the adopted heir to a samurai leader. Other Japanese annals tell of archers mounted to kites who fire down upon their enemies, and of the bandit Ishikawa Goemon riding a kite to infiltrate Nayoga Castle.

Man-lifting kites took on new promise at the end of the nineteenth century. On November 12, 1894, the Australian Lawrence Hargrave jerry-rigged four box kites and flew sixteen feet off the ground. In the United States, the recent MIT graduate Samuel F. Perkins made a name for himself by flying high with nothing but his rig and a decent breeze. In 1912, a lieutenant on the USS Nebraska took interest in his technology and ordered twenty-five units, hoping they could be used to observe enemies at sea. (700 years after Marco Polo’s description of naval augury, the fantasy of seeing farther with kites, whether into space or into the future, seemingly persisted.) Man-lifters were quickly outmoded by airplanes and also proved unsteady — as Perkins himself discovered when he fell 150 feet to the ground, relatively unscathed, during a sales demonstration — but played an important role in the prehistory of aviation, as we witness in Alexander Graham Bell’s tetrahedral experiments. The Wright brothers, for instance, studied Hargrave’s work before their powered flight in 1903.

Kites also prefigure the automobile. In 1826, the English school teacher–inventor George Pocock patented the Charvolant buggy, a kite-drawn carriage. In his treatise The Aeropleustic Art or Navigation in the Air by the Use of Kites, or Buoyant Sails, Pocock claims that the Charvolant is the most pleasant and efficient mode of transportation, comparable only to the steam engine. One can travel twenty miles per hour, attached to kites with cords more than 1,500 feet long. “Privileged with harnessing the invincible winds, our celestial tandem playfully transpierces the clouds, and our mystic-moving car swiftly glides along the surface of the scarce-indented earth.” The only downside — there is little mention of faltering winds — concerns the vehicle’s tendency to suppress the appetite. “People must not, therefore, think themselves dying, if, on arriving at London, after a morning’s ride of 120 miles, they do not even feel themselves quite ready for dinner.”

Below you will find sixty-nine images of kites created across five centuries from a dozen or so countries, from medieval manuscripts, through Japanese Ukiyo-e prints, to early twentieth-century scientific photography.