The contemporary scholar Joseph Roach, writing about seventeenth-century methods for signifying cultural others on the British stage and in British atlases (particularly those published by John Ogilby, 1600–1676), notes that parasols held by attendants over important figures signified “otherness.” He observes that, in these settings, the “global parasol” became a European visual trope for human cultural difference. It may be instructive to expand Roach's analysis even further, and look at this trope from the other side of the world in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The Dutchman Joris van Spilbergen (1568–1620), arriving in Indonesia in the 1590s, noted that distinguished local figures were attended with parasols; the Dutchman Jan Huyghen van Linschoten (1563–1611) noted the same of Indian dignitaries in the Indian coastal city of Goa. But Linschoten added that the Portuguese in India took up the practice of having umbrellas held over the well-to-do. Furthermore, Japanese artists of 1600 and beyond clearly showed Portuguese and Dutch maritime traders accompanied by attendants holding parasols (see Fig. 8.1 for one such image). In sum, though the practical employment of sun-shielding umbrellas may have started in India or Indonesia, the custom of being accompanied by attendants in this way was adopted by a variety of Europeans in Asia by the 1600s and 1700s.