A Fashionable Century: Textile Artistry and Commerce in the Late Qing 2019041152, 2019041153, 9780295747187, 9780295747194, 0295747188

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Preface: In the Museum
Terms, Abbreviations, and Chronology
Introduction
Part One: Creating Fashion Through the Dynasty
1. Visualizing Fashion: Ethnicity, Place, and Transmission
2. “Outlandish Costume and Strange Hats”: Moral Discourses of Fashion
3. Workshop, Boudoir, Village: Producing Embroidered Dress
Part Two: Plays and Poems
4. Performance, Print, and Pattern: Popular Culture in Fashion
5. “The Luxury of Words”: Fashion Authorities and Aspirations
Conclution
Acknowledgments
Appendix 1: A Dowry List for a Zhejiang Gentlewoman in the Late Qing
Appendix 2: Clothing, Textile, and Accessory Shop Names in Mid-Qing Suzhou
Appendix 3: Commercial Embroidery Price List from the End of the Qing Dynasty
Appendix 4: Qing Dynasty Commercial Clothing, Accessory, and Embroidery Guilds
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

A FASHIONABLE CENTURY

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A FASHIONABLE CENTURY TEXTILE ARTISTRY AND COMMERCE IN THE LATE QING

R AC HEL SILBER ST EIN

A William Sangki and Nanhee Min Hahn Book

university of washington press seattle

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A Fashionable Century was made possible by a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Association. A Fashionable Century was also supported by a generous grant from the William Sangki and Nanhee Min Hahn Fund for Books on East Asia. Additional support was provided by the Association for Asian Studies First Book Subvention Program, the Pasold Research Fund, and the Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute of Historical Research. Copyright © 2020 by the University of Washington Press Design by Laura Shaw Design Composed in Warnock Pro, typeface designed by Robert Slimbach, and Ideal Sans, typeface designed by Hoefler & Co. Maps by Bill Nelson 24 23 22 21 20  5 4 3 2 1 Printed and bound in Korea All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. University of Washington Press uwapress.uw.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Silberstein, Rachel, 1977– author. Title: A fashionable century : textile artistry and commerce in the late Qing / Rachel Silberstein. Description: Seattle : University of Washington Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019041152 (print) | LCCN 2019041153 (ebook) | ISBN 9780295747187 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780295747194 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Textile design—China—History—19th century. | Textile industry—China— History—19th century. | Fashion—Social aspects—China—History—19th century. | Women textile workers—China—History—19th century. | Women artisans—China—History— 19th century. Classification: LCC NK8883.A1 S55 2020 (print) | LCC NK8883.A1 (ebook) | DDC 746.0951—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019041152 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019041153 The paper used in this publication is acid free and meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48–1984.∞

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For my husband Lev and our sons—Jascha, Emil, and Natan

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If all the clothing handed down for generations had never been sold to dealers in secondhand goods, their annual sunning in June would have been a brilliant and lively affair. You would move down the path between bamboo poles, flanked by walls of silk and satin—an excavated corridor within an ancient underground palace buried deep under the ground. You would press your forehead against brocades shot through with gold thread. When the sun was still here, this thread was warmed by the light, but now it is cold. Zhang Ailing, “A Chronicle of Changing Clothes” (Geng yi ji), 1943

The chief problem presented by the sheer phenomenon of aesthetic force, in whatever form and in result of whatever skill it may come, is how to place it within the other modes of social activity, how to incorporate it into the texture of a particular pattern of life. Clifford Geertz, “Art as a Cultural System,” 1976

The luxuries of the people are also the livelihoods of the people. Gu Gongxie, “Excerpts from Leisurely Writings to Pass the Summer” (Xiaoxia xianji zhaichao), 1785

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CONTENTS

Preface: In the Museum xi Terms, Abbreviations, and Chronology xvii Introduction: Fashion and Chinese History 3 PART ONE

CREATING FASHION THROUGH THE DYNASTY imagery, discourse, production 1. Visualizing Fashion: Ethnicity, Place, and Transmission  15 2. “Outlandish Costume and Strange Hats”: Moral Discourses of Fashion  45 3. Workshop, Boudoir, Village: Producing Embroidered Dress  77 PART TWO

PLAYS AND POEMS fashioning nineteenth- century decoration 4. Performance, Print, and Pattern: Popular Culture in Fashion  119 5. “The Luxury of Words”: Fashion Authorities and Aspirations  153 Conclusion 181 Acknowledgments 189

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Appendix 1 A Dowry List for a Zhejiang Gentlewoman in the Late Qing 193 Appendix 2 Clothing, Textile, and Accessory Shop Names in Mid-Qing Suzhou 197 Appendix 3 Commercial Embroidery Price List from the End of the Qing Dynasty 202 Appendix 4 Qing Dynasty Commercial Clothing, Accessory, and Embroidery Guilds 208 Glossary 211 Notes 217 Bibliography 243 Index 265

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PREFACE In the Museum

In the 1930s, railway diggers in China unearthed the tomb of Prince Guo (Yunli; 1697–1738), seventeenth son of the Kangxi emperor (1662–1723) and half-brother of the Yongzheng emperor (1678–1735), in the Western Imperial Tombs eighty miles from the capital, in Yi County, Hebei.1 The tomb contents—silk robes, porcelain, Buddhist texts—quickly passed from local officials and small-time dealers to the Beijing art shops supplying museums and private collectors in Europe and North America. By 1934, when Beijing-based American curator Laurence Sickman (1907–1988) saw the textiles, many had been deconstructed and repurposed as mats and runners, one even serving as “a throw for some Westerner’s Steinway.”2 For Sickman, the numerous dragon robes, however altered, were a treasure, and he “rescued” the robes, purchasing the group on behalf of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas.3 Among the textiles was a satin woman’s robe, once worn by one of the prince’s two wives, that survived in three pieces (see figs. P.1 and 4.2). Likely produced in Suzhou, then the center of embroidery production, its roundel scenes of palace ladies in leisurely activities were finely embroidered in an array of stitches and a somber palette of browns, greens, and golds. In contrast to the tones of power and majesty conferred upon the dragon robes, this robe was given a different emphasis; named by curators the “Ladies in the Garden” or “Water Garden” robe, it was lauded as “delicacy and refinement . . . a melody of grace and charm.”4 Following the arrival of the robes in America, the Metropolitan Museum of Art included them in the 1945 exhibition Costumes from the Forbidden City, an “exotic display of imperial robes from the old Manchu court of China.” With more than two Figure P.1. Fragment of a woman’s robe, named the “Ladies in the Garden” or “Water Garden” robe, early eighteenth century, tomb of Prince Guo (1697–1738). Later mounted on silk, 152.4 × 114.3 cm. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust, 35-279/104. Photograph courtesy Nelson-Atkins Media Services / Tiffany Matson.

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hundred objects, it was the mid-twentieth-century equivalent of a blockbuster, with an opening party that attracted countless celebrities.5 Due to the show’s “unqualified and continually mounting success,” the museum decided to extend the exhibition period, a decision the show’s curator, Alan Priest, an eccentric showman figure, attributed to the wonders of Chinese dress: “In design, in color, in texture, in execution and conception, they are beyond anything else that human beings have ever devised to clothe themselves in.”6 Costumes from the Forbidden City was just one show in a decade crowded with exhibitions of Chinese dress, both in Europe and America.7 These exhibitions—including the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s 1943 Imperial Robes and Textiles of the Chinese Court and the Royal Ontario Museum’s 1946 Chinese Court Costumes—presented a strikingly consistent account: dominated by imperially associated dragon robes and hierarchized rank badges, they told a tale of male imperial power and official status that was constructed like most articles of Asian dress—essentialized, unchanging, and far from the fashion impulse that distinguished early modern European history. As one collector put it: “Neither the implements nor the decorative motives have varied appreciably since remote times.”8 Objects that did not fit within the defining limits of dragon adornment and state robes were classified as “others,” “strange,” and “curious.”9 What the Western viewer desired was dragon-festooned robes, ideally with their emperor identified, that evoked the “China of the Dragon Throne, whose emperors had ruled the world and carried her ancient civilization peacefully down the centuries.”10 Compared to the stream of male swagger embodied in robes and badges in this narrative of imperial might, women’s dress was rather sidelined in Western exhibitions—afterthoughts in an account of imperial power and male status.11 Where it was considered, women’s dress was framed as artistic, genteel, and static, as objects of “delicacy and refinement,” much like the Water Garden robe mentioned earlier. Both women and their wardrobes were placed deep in their inner chambers, apparently untouched by the processes of fashion or commodification that had, in recent decades, transformed the dress consumption of women in Western Europe or Northern America. Ideas that might have made these objects less “beyond” and rather more assimilable to contemporary understanding—commercial production, fashionable demand, popular design influences—were entirely absent from the Western construct of Chinese women’s dress. Attributes of fashion and design were reserved for the Western fashion designer, who used these museum collections as inspiration. In the months following the 1945 Costumes from the Forbidden City, China, as defined by the exhibition, reverberated through fashion’s commercial institutions. The Textile Color Card Association issued its advance collection of 1945 fall rayon colors “taken from imperial robes of the Ch’ing dynasty of the Manchu rulers, and including: Pagoda violet, Manchu fuchsia, Ch’ing turquoise, Mandarin red, green Dragon, Temple jade, Forbidden gold, and Blue of Heaven.”12 Women’s Wear advised its readers to look out for “Chinese Dynasty Colors, x i i  |  P R E FA C E

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inspired by the exquisite court robe” on exhibition at the Met.13 Marketing campaigns appealed to the more ordinary consumer to participate, by purchasing, for example, Chen Yu “Chinese Red Nail Lacquer and Lipstick”: “Lipstick, nail polish, and base coat are combined in a handsome package designed with a colorful reproduction of one of the precious Chinese robes in the ‘Forbidden City’ collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”14 To be sure, this dichotomy—Western dress as fashion, Asian dress as unchanging—begins far earlier than the exhibition of Chinese dress in the Western museum. The origins of the “myth of the absence of fashion in China” have been traced to the eighteenth century: earlier European travelers described Chinese dress in terms of similarity, but as both industrialization and conflict between European and Chinese notions of political economy started to gather pace, a discourse of difference became commonplace.15 Hence, assertions like the following: “The Chinese have a great dislike to innovation or change in their laws, customs, or costume; all that is ancient or been adopted by their ancestors is, in their estimation, good and perfect, therefore the national dress never varies—their fashions never change.”16 By the nineteenth century, as theories of Western fashion increasingly tied the phenomena to capitalism and modernity, Chinese dress was predominantly described as static and regulated.17 The site of the museum provided an ideal locus for materializing that myth—through processes of collection, exhibition, and scholarship, this contrast was more wholly formed. In reifying Chinese dress as separate and beyond and reducing it to palettes of red and gold and motifs of dragons and phoenixes, curators subtly reaffirmed the impossibility of a non-Western country like China joining modern Europe’s possessive relationship with fashion. The notions of imperial power, official status, and ancient traditions that dominated these earlier accounts of Chinese dress continue to preoccupy collections and collectors. And yet, the China from which the garments originated was a society with a heavily commercialized economy and vibrant urban cultures. The garments’ exhibitory presence in Western museums was enabled by the collapse of that society—the early twentieth-century demise of the Qing empire, and the ensuing civil war, famine, and chaos that caused once wealthy and privileged families to sell their clothes. Contrary to the museum’s framing of Chinese dress and textiles, many collections derived not from imperial power and nobility, but rather the secondhand garments and accessories of Chinese people. The transfer of old garments to antiques shops, department stores, and later, museums in America and Europe, was a product of political upheaval, international conflict, the growth of tourism, and most of all, commercial trade networks involving art dealers and secondhand clothes salesmen.18 This movement of objects had begun with the earliest stage of Sino-Western trade (ca. 1680–1839), when foreigners were confined to Guangzhou (Canton) where they bought Chinese trade silks and embroidered shoes as souvenirs. Their long-standing frustration with this trade system eventually erupted into the Opium Wars (1839–42, P R E FA C E  |  x i i i

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1856–60), which forced China to open to Western trade and diplomacy. These wars, along with the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64), the Boxer Rebellion (1900), other uprisings, and a series of environmental disasters rained blow after blow on the Qing empire’s wealth, territory, and sovereignty. The “unequal treaties” (the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing and the 1860 Treaty of Beijing) opened up the treaty ports, bringing many more foreigners—diplomats, merchants, missionaries, and tourists—to cities like Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai. Dealers began selling the luxuries of impoverished families in the antiques markets of Beijing and Shanghai from the 1880s onward, and when the Qing dynasty fell in 1911, the market was flooded with the possessions of Manchu and Han families in dire need of funds. In this way, foreign residents and visitors gained access to high-quality handicraft objects: ancient and contemporary porcelain, cloisonné, jade, paintings, furniture, silk robes, and embroidered accessories. By this juncture, Western interest in Chinese art had developed considerably: there were new institutions and publications for producing and circulating knowledge about Chinese objects in East Asia, Europe, and North America, a fast-growing volume of connoisseur knowledge and the beginnings of museum formation. The system providing objects to satisfy these new sites and interest connected curio-shop owners, pawnshop owners, auction house representatives, and petty criminals in China with dealers, curators, and department-store owners in Europe and North America. And yet, despite the reliance upon such networks, understanding and positioning Chinese dress as art depended on being able to remove factors such as looting, commercial tourism, or the secondhand clothing trade (gu yi). Instead, discourses relating to the imperial court and noble status were used to narrate and understand the objects: “personal requisites of court life in old China” or figural tropes like “Manchu lady” or “Chinese lady” that, critically, lacked attributes such as place, age, or socioeconomic position that might suggest the real life behind the discarded dress object. These historical processes explain why hundreds of objects of Chinese dress, though first made and used in China, now reside in North American and European museum collections—the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas, the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and so on. Together these museums established a collective conception of what a Chinese dress collection should encompass: imperial dragon robes, official rank badges, religious robes and hats, finely embroidered lady’s gowns, shoes, and purses. Accordingly, the earliest Western studies of Chinese dress were dominated by accounts of imperial and official dress.19 This bias continued to be evident in the numerous collection catalogs museums published between the 1980s and early 2000s.20 Still, many other substantial, lesser-known American collections of Chinese dress remain unpublished: the American Museum of Natural History, the Field Museum, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the Nelson-Atkins x i v   |   P R E FA C E 

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Museum of Art, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. Western writings on Chinese dress were also brought to popular audiences by dealers like Linda Wrigglesworth, Jacqueline Simcox, and Valerie Garrett, who published sumptuously illustrated catalogs, nearly entirely absent of voices and texts from the Qing dynasty or studies by Chinese scholars.21 Historian Schuyler Cammann’s classic volume China’s Dragon Robes (1952) was unusual in integrating close object study with Chinese textual sources. But the dominant interest in regulated clothing for male elites meant far less attention was devoted to women’s garments or more vernacular modes of dress, even though such objects filled many private and museum collections.22 The historical processes outlined here explain not only how collections of Chinese dress entered Western museums, but also the positioning of Chinese women’s dress outside fashion theory and scholarship. The collecting and exhibition of Chinese dress and its construction by curators and collectors as a shorthand for imperial and official dress has obscured our understanding of the impact of commercial production and fashionable consumption on late Qing society. The museum collector’s frameworks of value—art, antique, imperial, auspicious—determined the boundaries of Western scholarship on Chinese dress, and it was with great difficulty that they accommodated the fashionable garments at the center of this book, defined instead by values like contemporary, commercial, and fashionable. Neither official nor regulated, late Qing rather than High Qing, determined by the desires of the market rather than the traditions of political symbolism, these jackets, skirts, and accessories have until now received little attention.

P R E FA C E  

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TERMS, ABBREVIATIONS, AND CHRONOLOGY

Measurements

Fabrics were measured in pi (bolts), zhang (lengths or yards), chi (feet), and cun (inches): 1 pi = 4 zhang (11.11 m) 1 zhang = 10 chi (3.3 m) 1 chi = 10 cun (0.33 m) 1 cun = 3.55 cm Shi (stone) is a unit of measurement equal to 10 dou (100 liters). Currency

Qing China had a bimetallic currency of silver and copper: Silver ingots (liang or tael, approximately 37.68 grams of silver) were used for large and wholesale transactions. 1 tael = 10 qian = 100 fen = 1,000 li Copper coins or cash (qian wen) came in strings of 1,000 coins (chuan, diao) and were used for small retail transactions. 1 silver tael = 1,000 copper wen (official exchange rate; actual market rate fluctuated from 1:800 to 1:2000 throughout the Qing). During the nineteenth century, foreign silver dollars (yang yuan) also circulated. The Chinese yuan was introduced in 1889, when it was equivalent to 0.72 tael.

Museum Abbreviations

AIC CMA DAM Met

Art Institute of Chicago Cleveland Museum of Art Denver Art Museum Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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MFA MIA PEM PMA RISD ROM V&A

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Minneapolis Institute of Art Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts Philadelphia Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design, Providence Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Qing Dynasty Reign Periods

Shunzhi (1643–1661) Kangxi (1661–1722) Yongzheng (1723–1735) Qianlong (1736–1795) Jiaqing (1796–1820) Daoguang (1820–1850) Xianfeng (1850–1861) Tongzhi (1861–1875) Guangxu (1875–1908) Xuantong (1908–1911)

x v i i i   |   T E R M S , A B B R E V I AT I O N S , A N D C H R O N O L O G Y

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A FASHIONABLE CENTURY

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Introduction FASHION AND CHINESE HISTORY

G

iven the countless English-language catalogs of Chinese dress filled with page after page of dragon robes and rank badges, it is unsurprising that the denial of fashion in Chinese history has proved persistent. Witness French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky: “In China, women’s dress underwent no real transformation between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.”1 Or British historian Neil McKendrick: “In China . . . in 1793 a traveller confirmed the lack of change when he wrote ‘. . . the form of clothing is rarely changed by fashion or whim. . . . Even the women have scarcely new fashions.’”2 Even historian Kenneth Pomeranz posited a decline of fashion during the mid-Qing, arguing that women were more likely to engage in social competition and personal expression through poetry than fashionable clothes.3 Studies of Chinese historical fashion remain isolated from studies of European fashion, whose historians rarely acknowledge the existence of fashion in China or Asia, or consider what comparisons between China and Europe might bring to our understanding of fashion.4 This impasse is, to some degree, a more general problem: many scholars view claims of fashion in non-Western cultures as an invalid application of a Western framework.5 Western cultural specificity is not necessarily inherent to basic definitions of fashion: “It is a system of dress found in societies where social mobility is possible; it has its own particular relations of production and consumption, again found in a particular society; it is characterised by logic of regular and systematic change.”6 But for this definition’s author, sociologist Joanne Entwhistle, and others, fashion is geographically and historically specific to early modern Europe; accordingly, other types of fashion occurring in other types of societies and cultures must be excluded. Countries and cultures positioned outside this time and place have been left with two alternative |   3  |

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terms, folk costume and anti-fashion, neither of which can be coherently applied to Qing China. Folk costume is defined as that in which any change is so slow as to be barely perceptible even to the wearers themselves. As the semiotic ethnographer Petr Bogatyrev (1893–1971) put it: “Folk costume is in many ways the antithesis of clothing which is subject to fashion changes.”7 That Qing China does not fit the folk-costume characterization is evident in the widespread and shifting usage of fashion terms to describe dress and adornment: shishang (fashion);8 shishi zhuang (fashions of the times);9 shi zhuang (fashionable dress);10 shi yang (lit., “style of the times”);11 xin shi shi (lit., “new time style”);12 and xin yang (lit., “new style”),13 all of which suggest that fashion was of paramount concern to Chinese society. Meanwhile, anti-fashion—which anthropologist Ted Polhemus defined as when tradition, religious practice, or countercultural policies cause forms of dress to resist change, largely wrought in the marketplace—is equally unsuitable for a society shaped by a huge market economy with enormous reach and impact, particularly on the social mobility that predicates his conceptualization of fashion.14 Though many fashion scholars would like to make a clear demarcation between anti-fashion’s pursuit of “fixed” styles as a symbol of continuity and fashion’s pursuit of dress as a symbol of change or movement through time, the obvious problem is the spectrum of possibilities between the two, a range suggestive for Qing society in which forms of cultural stability coexisted with forces of social mobility and popular culture. Of course, there are pitfalls in overcompensating for fashion history’s Eurocentric bias: dress historian Phyllis Tortora’s definition of fashion as “a taste shared by many for a short period of time” dilutes the matter to a degree that it becomes hard to distinguish a fashion system from any other clothing system.15 But considering fashion systems outside Western Europe not only allows study of shared themes—like the trend for the exotic (xin qi, or “new and curious”) or vintage styles (fu gu, or “return to the past”)16—it also opens up fashion history to factors beyond Western socioeconomic phenomena of capitalist states, class structure, and industrialized modernity.17 Entwhistle states that it is an act of ethnocentricity to attempt to locate the fashion system within all cultures, but the ethnocentric act would surely be to suggest that the Chinese fashion system resembled that of Western Europe.18 As fashion historian Jennifer Craik observed, “There are fashions and fashions”: to define fashion as necessarily cast from capitalist economies is to imply a misleading homogeneity to fashion as a social and cultural force.19 During the 1990s, a new wave of scholarship began to challenge the assumption that China lacked the phenomena of fashion until it was brought by the West in the early twentieth century. Some scholars began with the original deniers, arguing that European travelers’ discovery of “unchanging Chinese dress” told us more about “the self-perceptions of an industrializing Europe” than what Chinese people actually wore.20 Indeed, given their restricted access to domestic quarters and female dress, 4 | IN TRODUCTION

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these observers were hardly an authoritative voice, something acknowledged by more astute commentators of the period: “Fashion holds a sway in China little, if at all, less despotic that it does in the West, . . . though the uninitiated or unobservant foreigner may fail to detect the minutiae of change.”21 More recent studies have revealed key components of the fashion system in force as early as Tang China (618–907). Historian BuYun Chen showed how, as innovations in the textile industry stimulated new forms of consumption, women in and outside the court used luxury silks to “fabricate” self.22 Many historians have highlighted late Ming consumption, the beginning of the so-called second commercial revolution, when New World silver began to transform Chinese markets, in exchange for porcelain, tea, and silk.23 Historian of consumption Wu Jen-shu charted the excited reactions to new dress styles that fill late Ming writings, showing how literati society was rocked by the ability of the lower ranks to imitate elite dress, and their efforts to create new fashions in order to deal with this identity crisis.24 Cultural historian Lin Liyue also identified the late sixteenth-century period as a turning point, when fashion threw a once hierarchically stable clothing system into uncertainty. The ensuing attention to clothing was frequently blamed on women, as conservative literati turned to philosophical concepts to respond to the social anxieties created by dress.25 Working on a similar period, literary scholar Sarah Dauncey contrasted the early seventeenth-century satirical novel The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin ping mei) with didactic prescriptive images and texts to investigate how notions of frugality and luxury complicated fashion as status.26 These studies have amassed considerable evidence to show that Chinese clothing and adornment, from the sixteenth century onward, changed at a speed that dizzied its native observers. They have transformed understanding of consumption in a historical Chinese context and demonstrated how fashionable dress was used to negotiate changing social structures. But the emphasis on the Ming has contributed to a body of scholarship with uneven temporal coverage, something highlighted by Antonia Finnane’s detailed study of Yangzhou fashions, which underscored how little we know of the interactions between fashion and place in China.27 This uneven temporal coverage has limited understanding of how the expansion of the market economy and the commercialization of handicraft industries impacted dress production and consumption, or how the relationship between fashion and ethnic identity evolved through this period. In order to shift the scholarship on Chinese fashion beyond this impasse, this book focuses on two major issues of methodology and temporality. Most scholarship has prioritized writings about fashion, while those using images and dress objects as sources tend to be from a museum background, presenting a context of official hierarchy and imperial consumption. The so-called Great Divide that separates the object-centered methods of the curator/collector and the document-based socioeconomic or cultural history of the university academic constitutes a methodological I ntroduction  |   5

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split that I seek to bridge.28 Of course, textual sources are crucial for contemporary responses to the changing styles in the late Qing: brush notes (biji), local gazetteers (difang zhi), and The Record of Carriage and Dress (Yu fu zhi) of the Official Dynastic Histories, as well as less appreciated vernacular genres such as bamboo ballads (zhuzhici), novels, pawnshop texts, and encyclopedias. And material analysis of garments will always be vulnerable to criticism for charting “every flounce, pleat, button and bow.”29 But integrating object, text, and image enables visual analysis to reveal significances overlooked by textually founded investigations, edging closer to the kinds of meaning these objects might have held for their consumers. Temporally, historical studies of Chinese material culture have focused upon the late sixteenth century as a period when commercialization began to destabilize social hierarchies and, with them, conceptions of fashion and taste. But, aside from a short depression caused by the Qing dynastic accession, this commercial expansion continued through the eighteenth century, leading historians to describe China as comparable in living standards to Europe’s most prosperous regions.30 And it is in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that many dress objects—particularly celebratory styles, once confined to imperial or noble circles—became more accessible. Key to this process was growth in rural and urban handicraft production, fostered by the doubling of China’s population: in 1680, it was around 150 million; by 1776, it was 311 million; and by 1850, it was about 436 million.31 Though only 5 percent of people lived in cities, the remainder living in market towns and villages were increasingly brought into an entwined economy. People began to use goods made by craftsmen and women they did not know. Their own crops and handicrafts were now also sold in increasingly dense market networks. These changes were most visible in wealthy cities like Suzhou, Nanjing, and Hangzhou, sites of imperial and private silk workshops, whose products were distributed through interprovincial markets and overseas trade. Previously luxurious techniques of textile adornment became much more widely consumed. While the popular uprisings, natural disasters, and foreign interventions that punctuated the nineteenth century meant the late Qing was a period of immense social and cultural upheaval, such are the conditions in which fashion—with its potential for social distinction and negotiation—thrives. This period has conventionally been viewed in art historical terms as a “nonentity”: not only did museums not collect, but many studies of Qing art commonly stopped at the eighteenth century, though this has begun to change in recent years.32 Nineteenth-century China is uniquely challenging because it both completes the late imperial and initiates the modern period. Literary and cultural historians have explored how conceptions of fashion evolved through these decades of modernity and Western intervention.33 But objects of late Qing fashion also have much to tell us about how the Qing fashion system functioned in a context largely absent of Western presence or industrial modernizations. Thriving production and marketing systems, developed from internal processes of commercialization and urbanization, complicate established characterizations of the 6 | IN TRODUCTION

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nineteenth-century as economically backward and in cultural decline. Part of the appeal of dragon robes was as dynastic embodiment: “Foreigners came to localize in dragon robes all the potentialities of a civilization they perceived to be as far removed from their own as was possible and to project onto the costumes all their personal aspirations of what a society should be. They took home these robes as tangible evidence of a myth.”34 Curators interpreted nineteenth-century dragon robe forms as reflecting the waning that followed the heights of the Kangxi and Qianlong periods. Late Qing designs were described as of “crowded or pinched composition”; once “secure vitality and energetic movement” now “settled down into a mere crust of dull stodgy forms.”35 How might we view this history differently if we turned not to the products of institutional workshops designed through state-controlled processes, but instead to objects produced in private workshops, designed by pattern draftsmen connected with other urban handicraft producers and influenced by local print and performance? The museum collections from which I have gathered these examples of Qing dynasty fashion offer great potential, but they also possess limiting factors delineating this book’s reach. First, despite its claims of universal representation (“Chinese dress”), it informs only upon the consumption of the minority who could afford embellished and fashionable silk garments. Ordinary people wore mostly cotton and ramie, primarily dyed blue, much of it woven locally, sometimes by the wearers themselves. In winter they wore cotton padding and sheep skins while the wealthy wore furs and wools.36 They probably owned no more than two sets of garments for winter and summer apiece, and of course the truly poor would have struggled to achieve even this. Though even poor women might have had a piece of jewelry or bright garment for weddings and festivals, in general, this group experienced little stylistic change over the course of the dynasty.37 However, for a substantial minority, living conditions improved during the Qing dynasty.38 Commercialization expanded the numbers of those who could access fashionable silk objects, particularly accessories. Thus, what the museum collection actually evidences are the consumer tastes of two main groups: upper class elites and the middle class. Elites, also called gentry or literati (shenshi, jinshen), refers to the minority of the population who were educated and engaged in political or bureaucratic professions. Broadly defined to include wealthy nobility and merchants, as well as scholars and officials of all ranks, this group comprised an estimated 1.9 percent of the Chinese population (approximately seven million) in the late Qing, receiving about 24 percent of the national income (probably at least four hundred taels a year).39 The second of these groups was the mostly urban and often commercial middle class, which was more heterogeneous in income and identity. At upper levels it included teachers, head clerks, merchants, shop-owners, artisans; at lower levels, it included clerks and runners. But all these groups could supplement salary through family investments in land or business.40 More fundamentally, economic advances, expanded education, and limited official positions meant Qing society was characterised by social mobility, I ntroduction  |   7

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substratification, and social anxiety: there were downwardly mobile members of gentry families (lower degree holders, specialists and secretaries) who couldn’t access an official position, as well as upwardly mobile educated gentry-merchants (shenshang), scholar-craftsmen, successful shopkeepers, and artists.41 The mid-late Qing period is filled with officials and scholars bewailing the increasing silk consumption by lower-status groups like actors, courtesans, and servants, a discourse oriented around concepts of fashion, luxury, and fuyao (outrageous dress), positioned in opposition to Confucian virtues of frugality and simplicity. Given that fashion served as a means of negotiating social divisions, simplistically dividing Chinese society into the cotton-wearing commoner and the silk-wearing elite belies the complexity of what lay between. Commercial weavers sought to meet middle-class demand with cheaper versions of expensive weaves and diffuse ranges of silk, cotton, and ramie qualities.42 Those living in proximity to silk-producing districts around Suzhou, Huzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and elsewhere would have been able to buy lower-quality silk garments and silk accessories. Hence, English botanist-traveler Robert Fortune’s (1813–1880) well-known comment about Huzhou: “Every person I met above the common working coolie was dressed in silks or crape, and even the coolies have at least one silk dress for holyday.” Still more pertinently, Fortune was struck by “all kinds of articles in common use amongst the people. Embroidered shoes, hats, caps, umbrellas . . . every conceivable article.”43 These low-cost objects fit historian Cissie Fairchild’s definition of populuxe, the fans, umbrellas, and stockings that became central components in allowing the expanding consumption of lower-middle classes in eighteenth-century Paris.44 Despite the European dress historian’s insistence that fashion means changes in silhouettes (contributing to an inability to detect such changes in Chinese dress), these humble objects were central to nineteenth-century fashion change and key enablers in the spread of fashionable consumption beyond elite groups. Yet, the growth in commercial workshops’ economic clout correlates to the growth in moral outcry seeking to control this consumption: how far did this tension—between the didacticism of gazetteers and family instruction books, and the valorization of fashion of urban rhymes and vernacular novels—shape the Qing fashion system? Rather than the monolithic “Chinese dress” established in the museum, nineteenthcentury fashions existed both within and between social groups, requiring work on “constructions of fashionability across social divides.”45 Doubtless this shift from an “honorific vestimentary system,” centered upon courtly consumption and sumptuary regulations, to a “fashion system,” enabling more personal choice and individual taste, still omitted vast sections of Qing society, but equally it allowed many more the possibilities of “self-enhancement through cloth and clothing.”46 The museum collection does not allow for the definition of regional variations of these consumption practices in material terms. One of the corollaries of Western collecting of Chinese dress was a confounding of regional dress histories: objects were rarely cataloged with any information regarding purchase or production location. Indeed, the processes outlined 8 | IN TRODUCTION

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in the preface mean that information regarding collecting circumstances was often omitted from accession records. Whether purchased in Shanghai, Beijing, or Guangzhou, Chinese dress was simply Chinese dress, and collectors rarely recorded how they acquired their purchases. Accordingly, this book is a study of the Chinese fashion system as a whole rather than the fashion system of Shanghai or Beijing. The focus is the cities of Jiangnan, the area south of the Yangzi River that was China’s wealthiest and most commercialized region, but I also make comparisons and connections to the political center, Beijing, and two other heavily commercialized regions, Guangzhou and Sichuan. This broad approach has its limitations—particularly in providing a material counterpart to the regionality that texts suggest was integral to the fashion system—but it enables investigation of the ways in which fashionable consumption in diverse regions was integrated through interprovincial trade and print culture. Despite the importance of handicraft to understanding the progression of the Qing economy and the integration of Chinese culture, historians of China have tended to disdain objects as valid historical enquiry. The following assertion from historian David Johnson gives a sense of their presumed limitation: “Values can be embodied in nonverbal symbols, and exemplified in behavior, but to be communicated with any precision, or to be explained, they must find expression in words.”47 But by grounding these typically unprovenanced objects within written and visual descriptions and associations, I seek to recover an experience that has been largely written out of the formal textual canon. In bringing together the material archive of dress, textiles, and embroideries, the visual archive of prints, paintings, and pattern books, and the textual archive of local gazetteers, contemporary diaries, advertisements, urban rhymes, and pawnshop texts, I aim to reconstruct something of the vernacular culture of late Qing women. In using an interdisciplinary approach spanning art history, anthropology, dress history, and fashion theory to read back and forth between object, image, and text, I seek to position and understood each source within its generic constraints and audience expectations, while defending the validity of objects and images to inform upon historical experience. There are limits to how far objects can inform: garments cannot be read as a text, and the so-called language of dress (language as structural model for dress semiotics) has arguably obstructed rather than aided our understanding of clothing as system of cultural signification.48 Still, objects are not silent witnesses to the past: the forms, materials, and adornments of late Qing dress have much to tell us about their wearers and makers. But it is by returning them to that past—surrounding them with pattern-books, urban rhymes, shop brands, popular prints, and fictional descriptions—that their perspective is most fully voiced, not only because this allows us to understand how the objects were made and used, and how they moved through society, but more fundamentally, because it was as “represented garment” that they acquired significance.49 To ask what it means to speak of fashion in a late Qing context is also to ask what differentiated these fashions from those of the late Ming—the focus of so much I ntroduction  |   9

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material culture scholarship. That is, when Li Ping’er, the maid-concubine heroine of The Plum in the Golden Vase, is described as wearing a highly fashionable summer outfit of “a lavender [lit., lotus color] silk center-opening jacket, and a white gauze joined-skirt with petit-point borders,” what distinguishes her outfit from that of Shuang Qiong, the courtesan heroine of the late Qing novel Shanghai Dust (Haishang chentian ying)?50 The latter, for her part, is described as wearing “a silver stove-red Ning silk half-new, half-old, tight-bodied, lined ao jacket, fully embroidered with eight large knots in aniline blue, with joined-lotus foreign [style] embroidered satin edging, [together with] West Lake–color five-silk gauze ‘scattered tube’ trousers with aniline blue satin edging and a gold belt . . . [tied with] two long trailing trouser belt strips of green gauze embroidered with ‘plum, orchid, bamboo, and chrysanthemum.’”51 There were certainly continuities between the late Ming and late Qing: Han women continued to wear jacket and skirt ensembles; the pleated skirt continued to be a key garment. And yet the two heroines would have likely looked upon each other’s ensembles with surprise. The differences between each one’s fashionable dress stemmed from three factors. First, the Manchu dynasty’s (re-)introduction of ethnicity as a source of sartorial differentiation that produced new garment types and silhouettes, and new creative tension within the fashion system. As fashion became integral to asserting ethnic separation, new silhouettes and styles emerged that shifted conceptions of fashion away from late Ming values. Second, the commercialization of small-scale textile handicrafts popularized new techniques and materialities. In particular embroidery, long a mode of adornment controlled by imperial workshops, began in the early Qing to displace weaving as dominant patterning technique. Rather than the courtly display and sumptuary laws that had previously confined embroidery’s decorative and pictorial qualities to elite consumption, market forces began to determine its reach. That we know so little of how handicraft commercialization impacted dress production, or the commercial networks through which embroidered dress was produced, reflects in part the conventional priorities of dress history toward art-historical issues of style and iconography. Museums sought to identify two basic production contexts for their objects: imperial workshops for dragon robes or female domestic work for women’s robes and accessories. The overlooking of commercial workshops has obstructed our understanding of the impact of fashion upon women’s lives and the role of women in handicraft industry. The final factor distinguishing Qing fashions is the rise of popular urban culture that gave signifying power to the producers and sellers of garments, accessories, and prints. By exploring how popular prints and urban rhymes disseminated images and values of fashionable dress throughout China, the argument highlights the role of vernacular writers, print designers, and pawnshop employees, rather than the gazetteer editors and imperial chroniclers that have tended to dominate the textual canon. Popular imagery shows how the turn toward the commercial producer and the 10 | IN TRODUCTION

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fashionable consumer impacted nineteenth-century dress objects. While connoisseurship accounts of Chinese dress typically emphasized auspicious motifs as preeminent, part of an age-old decorative system, interactions between handicraft producers and other urban craftsmen and women of the nineteenth century caused the emergence of new decorative themes: dramatic scenery and literati values, each underpinned by the normative auspicious motifs. Comparisons between embroidered dress, pattern books, and theatrical prints reveal print and performance as a major inspiration for commercial dress and accessory producers. It also suggests the highly sophisticated and referential ways through which dramatic narrative was rendered in late Qing material culture, and thus the intertextuality of nineteenth-century dress—the desire to reference and shape popular culture, and the importance of the clothed body as a site for negotiating these cultured identities. Fashion in Qing China, as elsewhere, has often been dismissed as frivolous fripperies offering little import to understanding history. This book seeks to show how the development of Qing fashion correlates to, and illuminates, important shifts in Qing society, economy, and culture. Fashionable garments, pattern-books, and beauty prints may beguile in their decorative qualities—the bright hues and patterned surfaces designed to invite desire—but they speak to issues of central interest to Chinese historians: the question of how Chinese culture managed to be both “extremely diverse and highly integrated”; the role of commerce and publishing in spreading local styles and craft techniques across provincial borders; the contribution of commercial handicraft producers to local economies; and the use of notions like fashion and taste to navigate social hierarchies.52 As a “vehicle for communicating power relationships,” fashion offers a critical lens on cultural integration and social differentiation, both processes created through the same socioeconomic conditions.53 And yet because the prefaced and publisher-noted text remains the primary source, studies on these topics tell us primarily about literate male elites, leaving the question of women’s cultural roles outstanding. In the decades since Prince Guo’s wife’s robe entered the American museum, there have been enormous achievements in Qing women’s history. Scholars have demonstrated that by the nineteenth century, the sought-after writings of “cultivated women of the inner chambers” were both published independently and alongside male authors.54 They have investigated publishers’ movement toward women readers: popular tales of romance and fantasy requiring lower-level literacy skills and “explicitly gendered female” knowledge—recipes, patterns, and pedagogy circulating in the form of household encyclopedias, manuals, and almanacs.55 This publishing shift was paralleled by “new constructions of womanhood” reflecting women’s increasingly varied roles.56 But if we wish to understand these issues from the perspectives of late Qing women, then material culture, particularly fashionable dress, for all its evidentiary shortcomings—no preface, no maker’s mark, no publisher—remains a critical and underused source. Here, by using embroidered dress to investigate late I ntroduction  |   1 1

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Qing women, I follow a definition of cultural literacy as encompassing “myths, stories, and symbols” to better characterize the range of educational levels possessed by women of this period.57 We cannot know whether the women who wore and made these objects were able to read and write literary Chinese (wenyan), but they were not culturally illiterate. Employing this more nuanced approach allows us to recognize the cultural production constituted in the wearing and making of dress, something elided in both the museum’s omission of commercial production and fashionable consumption, and Chinese history’s marginalizing of handicraft objects and vernacular texts. Rather than dragon-robed emperors or rank-badged officials, fashion in Qing China changed primarily because of ordinary people in workshops, shops, and markets—pattern-drafters, tailors, merchants, and most of all, women whose days were filled with the making, wearing, and imagining of these objects.

12 | IN TRODUCTION

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PART ONE

Creating Fashion through the Dynasty IMAGERY, DISCOURSE , PRODUCTION

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1 Visualizing Fashion ETHNICITY, PLACE , AND TRANSMISSION

In the capital, all look to the princes’ estates for guidance [on] clothing and hat styles—they call this “style of the inner household” [nei zao yang]. Other provinces copy these as the latest styles: within a few years it is sure to reach Suzhou and Hangzhou, but by then the Beijing styles have changed again. Hu Shiyu, Existing Openings (Dou cun), 1841

T

he Shanghai writer Hu Shiyu (act. 19th c.) confidently pronounced the imperial family to be the source of late Qing fashions. Yet, thirty-odd years later, the Zhejiang official Jin Anqing (1817–1880) argued differently: “The women all follow the Suzhou styles, and Suzhou follows the lead of the courtesan’s styles, and then [ladies from] those official families imitate these styles, though I cannot understand why this should be.”1 Who was right? Who drove the fashions of nineteenth-century China: princely estates or Suzhou courtesans? The northern capital or the southern cities? Addressing this question takes us into the heart of Qing fashions, to the interaction between Manchu and Han ethnicity, and the urban identity that formed a creative force upon the period’s styles.2 Modes of transmission in Qing fashion—the question of what kind of media functioned like the European fashion-disseminating doll or the printed illustration—remain poorly understood.3 Such information was evidently of concern to female consumers, whose styles were often described with the verb “to imitate or learn from” (xue), as in a Hubei bamboo ballad, which told of how the Jingshan women all say “copy the |   1 5  |

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N

SEA OF JA PA N

Huang He (Yellow River) Beijing ZHILI

Tianjin Grand Canal

Kaifeng Chang Jiang jiang (Yangzi (Yellow River)

JIANGSU

HENAN Yangzhou Nanjing (Jiangning) ANHUI

Huzhou Hangzhou

Chengdu Chongqing SICHUAN

Wuxi Suzhou Shanghai (Songjiang) Puyuan Ningbo

ZHEJIANG

Changsha FUJIAN

HUNAN

Fuzhou

Xiamen

PAC I FI C OCEAN

Chaozhou Guangzhou (Canton) GUANGDONG

B AY O F BENGAL

0

500 mi

0

800 km

Map 1.1. China in the Qing Dynasty.

Suzhou [styles]: short jackets, wide sleeves and long gauze sashes.”4 And yet fashion publications as labeled don’t appear until the 1920s,5 and popular prints with titles such as A Fashionable Beauty (Shi zhuang meiren) date only to the late nineteenth century.6 How can this absence be explained? After all, the ability to describe and communicate fashion is a crucial element of any fashion system. More than just disseminating styles, such media standardized markets, tying “consumers to clothing of one impulse,” channeling them into the same sartorial time.7 Accordingly, many of the seminal studies on early modern European dress and textiles have been concerned with the communication of visual and textual information: Chandra Mukerji’s study of how printing formed patterns of consumption, Daniel Purdy’s thesis that the impact of visual representations of dress made print culture more decisive than the industrial revolution in developing a German fashion culture, or Daniel Roche’s argument for the role of fashion illustrations in propagating fashion in a low-cost, accessible format.8 Yet our knowledge of marketing systems or other mechanisms of stylistic change in Qing China remains rudimentary, without explanation for what novelist Zhang Ailing (1920–1995) called “vast, unaccountable waves of communal fancy.”9 How did consumers, not to mention the embroiderers, tailors, and hatmakers who made their 16  |  CHAPTER 1

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living from producing fashionable dress, gain information about “communal fancy”? What role did print culture play in mediating this construction of fashion? The dominance of neo-Confucian values in surviving sources makes these questions challenging to answer. Since texts were primarily penned by scholars and officials, information on everyday lives of urban, mercantile, or middle-class groups is scarce compared to the “overdocumentation” of elite culture.10 The same is true of visual culture, though here it is not only content, but also style that obstructs the historian. Literati painting principles like the disdain for mimesis, expressed in the eschewing of color and detail of the impressionistic xieyi style, or the use of late Ming or Song styles to render the contemporary, hinder studies of fashion. Instead, exploring the transmission of fashion information calls for attention to less esteemed and less studied media. Rather than literati painting, three typically anonymous genres celebrated the textures and patterns of the most fashionable textiles and dress: vernacular painting, palace painting, and popular prints. In his reappraisal of vernacular painting, art historian James Cahill defined the genre as pictures “produced by studio artists working in the cities . . . as required for diverse, everyday domestic and other uses.”11 Often produced in the detail-oriented gong bi zhong cai (fine line, rich color) style, these images are characterized by their attention to material surroundings. Particularly in the theme of “beauties,” urban workshops evolved a mode of colorful, detailed depiction that enabled expressions of fashion.12 Like urban studio painting, court painting often prioritized anonymized rather than personalized brushwork, mimetic rather than expressive depictions, and decorative values over philosophical meaning. Scholars have shown how court artists of the early and mid-Qing period were often closely networked to the urban studio artists.13 Art history’s tendency to denigrate nineteenth-century art means much less work has been done on the Daoguang and Xianfeng courts, though as shall be seen, their paintings of court women suggest fascinating connections to urban, vernacular art.14 Popular prints (nianhua) had a broad consumer base and were produced in a wide range of subjects and styles: from crudely printed and simply colored to finely carved, hand-painted images produced by the Tianjin-based Yangliuqing and Suzhou-based Taohuawu workshops.15 These commercial workshops competed through print-designers, brand repute, and subject matter; for both schools, women were a vital theme, crossing genres of history, drama, rural and urban imagery, and auspicious imagery. Like professional painters, prints also recorded contemporary material culture. They deserve more attention for their role in disseminating fashion knowledge and constructing ideals of late Qing dress. Suzhou’s reputation for popular prints was bound up not only in its reputation for handicrafts, but also the beautiful women who constituted such a sizable proportion of the subject matter. Similarly, Yangliuqing’s reputation for prints and female beauty was entwined—the most beautiful women of the north were said to come from this region.16 V isuali z ing Fashion  |   1 7

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Finally, given that images and texts often present quite different views of Qing fashion, we might question the default search for fashion imagery as necessary component to the fashion system. Disparity is seen, for example, in the minutely detailed textual descriptions of the nineteenth-century Yangzhou novel Dreams of Wind and Moon and the sketchy drawings that accompany the 1886 Juchengtang edition (fig. 1.1). Here, a fifteen-year-old courtesan, Fragrance (Yue Xiang), plays the lute and sings “Full River Red” to her client Lu Shu, a prison officer’s son, newly arrived in Yangzhou in search of a concubine to produce a son to make up for his unhappy and unfertile marriage. The

Figure 1.1. A sparse illustration from the 1848 novel Dreams of Wind and Moon, showing the courtesan Fragrance and her client Lu Shu. Reprinted from Hanshang Mengren, Xiuxiang feng yue meng (1848; Juchengtang, 1886).

18  |  CHAPTER 1

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novel’s description of Lu Shu revels in the details: “He wore a turquoise blue woolen cap embroidered with gold couching. On the front was fastened a red-gold peony design decorated in kingfisher feather and inset with a crimson gemstone ornament. It also had a crimson silk knob on top and eight-inch raw silk tassels arranged at the back. He wore an egg-white gown of Hangzhou ‘foreign’ crepe silk with a corn poppy design, and over it a military-style formal jacket of foreign-blue wool lined with plain white damask and fastened with cassia-bud buttons.”17 Quite different to the generic male figure shown in the illustration. Contrary to the assumption that Qing channels of fashion were visually dominated, oral culture provided a fascinating mode for fashion transmission: urban vernacular genres like “bamboo ballads” (zhuzhici) and bannerman tales (zidishu) form a rich vein for reconstructing the details of fashionable dress. The bamboo ballad, a folk-style poetic form composed of verses made up of four seven-character lines, gained increasing popularity during the nineteenth century because of its vernacular format and colloquial language. The genre’s preoccupation with city life offers an opportunity to explicitly engage in the question of locality in fashion systems. Like bamboo ballads, the Manchu bannerman tales were materially attuned and hugely popular in the mid-late Qing period. Both provide a critical source in countering the bias toward educated male elites in the historical record, which has so obscured female and vernacular communities.18 Visual and textual analysis of these understudied sources enables investigation of the changes that occurred during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Detailed examination of mid-late Qing fashions not only negates claims such as Lipovetsky’s, who so blithely claimed that Chinese women’s dress hardly changed between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, but also furthers our understanding of how those changes occurred.19 We begin with a painting of a Manchu family’s birthday celebration in late Qing Beijing. Ethnicity and Fashion: Regulating Manchu and Han Women’s Dress

“Family auspicious pictures” (jia qing tu) were a specialty of urban workshops. Figure 1.2 exemplifies the genre’s professional gong bi style—highly finished, densely colored, loving of and faithful to detail (the calligraphy from the famous preface to poems from the Orchid Pavilion Gathering [Lanting Xu] hanging on the wall behind the main male characters, the wheel-along elephant pulled by the center child). While this style earns it little legitimacy in the Chinese art historical canon, dominated by a literati art defined precisely against these qualities of detail, color, and mimesis, it is a fascinating image and richly informative for the historian of nineteenth-century dress.20 It is also a curious work. On the one hand, it is defined by structure and harmony, both within the family and between the natural and social world at large. Its vast size—nearly two meters in height and four in width—the smooth use of V isuali z ing Fashion  |   1 9

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Figure 1.2. An anonymous family portrait of four generations of a Manchu family in late Qing Beijing, ca. 1853. Ink and mineral pigments on paper, 185.5 × 384 cm. Mactaggart Art Collection (2007.23.1), University of Alberta Museums. Gift of Sandy and Cécile Mactaggart.

perspectival receding space, first introduced by Jesuit art interactions with court painting, and the viewer’s lofty vantage-point enables the artist to panoramically capture much of the family’s luxurious residence.21 The dull weather and fur-lined hats and robes suggest a winter’s day; the carefully arranged plants and the many floral reproductions in embroidered and woven silks, carved wood, and painted paper all convey harmony with seasonal nature. Four generations have gathered to celebrate the birthday of the family matriarch, a widow. Her three grandsons bring nine ruyi, a symbol of wish-blessings, to mark the occasion. In so doing, as with the prominent dragon-adorned carpet, this wealthy Manchu officials’ family was following court fashions, highlighting the relationship between imperial and urban consumption.22 The focal matriarch is accompanied by a daughter-in-law by her side; her two sons sit at the table to the left, wearing formal dress (li fu) of rank badge surcoats (bu fu) and winter hats (ji fu guan).23 Three younger men, presumably their sons, stand to their right, wearing the rank badges of middling-level civil officials.24 Three younger women, their wives, stand to their right. Six young children punctuate the piece, each attended by a maid, whose dress and stance mark her as inferior. Rather than size (a conventional visual strategy in Chinese painting to convey social status), here it is facial exposure: whereas the family members, both adults and children, are shown in full-frontal poses, the maids are all shown immersed in caring for their charges, with their faces turned away to varying degrees. Despite the careful structuring, the piece is also concerned with leisure and intimacy. Even while the composition communicates a balanced figural order, it seeks to flout it: the maid peeking out oddly at the side, the children bringing a “hundred sons at play” (bai zi tu) sense of controlled chaos. But the figure who most obviously breaks down that balanced structure is the single Han woman, on the far right, wearing a jacket and skirt, rather than full-length robe. This ethnic sartorial contrast is only manifest to us because, unlike the men, none of the women are wearing official dress, but instead wear an unregulated form of dress (bian fu).25 That is to say, it is the women’s fashionable dress that enables the artist to express ethnic difference. When the Manchus defeated the Han Chinese Ming dynasty and established the Qing dynasty, they initiated what would be nearly three hundred years of interaction between Manchu and Han dress, articulated through imperial regulations but implemented and interpreted in both official and domestic settings. The primary signifier separating Manchu and Han women was that the former wore long robes, while the latter wore divided outfits of upper jackets and lower skirts. The Manchu writer Zhenjun (1857–1920) explained: “In Manchu custom, women’s jackets are joined to the skirt, and do not separate the upper and lower; this is the ancient system.”26 Differential components of this long robe also evolved, such as the matixiu horseshoe cuffs on the pao robe (worn beneath the gua gown), which apparently referenced Manchu nomadic culture. Matixiu featured in three of the four dress categories worn by Manchu court women: ceremonial or formal court dress (li fu), V isuali z ing Fashion  |   2 1

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auspicious court dress (ji fu), and informal court dress (chang fu). Only the last category, leisure clothing (bian fu), did not feature this silhouette, and only it was unregulated by the Qing court, worn as it was for everyday and leisure activities.27 Accordingly, it evolved more quickly and in closer dialogue with Han fashions. But this evolution took place in the face of numerous attempts to define and dictate what both Han and Manchu women should wear. The sartorial revolution ushered in by the 1644 Manchu dynastic ascent took hold slowly for women: Ming styles remained dominant for some time. The styles described by late Ming–early Qing novels such as The Plum in the Golden Vase and Marriage Destinies to Awaken the World (Xingshi yinyuan chuan)—loose, center-fastening jackets (duijin shan, dui chenshan) worn with narrow skirts (qunzi); long sleeveless jackets (bijia), or the beizi (long, buttonless, center-opening jackets with side slits)— can still be found in mid-Qing depictions.28 Although the painting in figure 1.3 dates to the mid-Qing, the artist has chosen to clothe the enticingly languid courtesans in late-Ming styles, reflecting its enduring prestige: the women wear shan and beizi jackets with long flowing lines, paired with slim skirts, two button-fastened collars, and narrow damask or brocade trimming leading down from the collar. The artist has highlighted their textile designs of woven roundels and floral scrolls as the primary fashion focus. These were the styles confronted by the Manchu emperors when they ascended to the throne and faced, like all rulers, the decision as to what kind of clothing system they wanted. In China, clothing has always been a metaphor for the civilized world. Chinese civilization is traced back to the moment when the legendary founding emperors—Yao, Shun, and Yu—“allowed the upper and lower garments to hang down and the world was in order” (chui yishang gai quzhu qian kun er tian xia zhi).29 From this point on, the establishment of dynastic rule was bound up in the clothing systems it regulated, and the distinction between the upper and lower garment became an important symbolic assertion. Like all dynastic rulers, the Manchus sought to use clothing as an implement of power and control, and like all non-Han rulers, they sought to construct a clothing system that would simultaneously assert their right to the throne as Chinese emperors and still preserve their ethnic identity and culture. The lessons of their Liao (907–1125), Jin (1115–1234), and Yuan (1271–1368) predecessors—whom they viewed as having miscalculated the balance between sinicization and cultural preservation—evidently weighed heavily. As the Qianlong emperor cautioned, “one must not speak lightly of changing dress and headwear”—to do so was to forget the ancestors, endanger the sacrifices, and weaken the dynasty.30 From Hong Taiji (1626–1643) through to the Jiaqing emperor (r. 1796–1820), imperial edicts alerted the Manchu people not to “abandon our ancestors’ traditions!”31 But while they aimed to control through sumptuary regulation, these same texts reveal the tension of sustaining Manchu identity, a tension particularly central to women’s dress—a touchstone of political stability and moral wellbeing. 22  |  CHAPTER 1

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Figure 1.3. Six beauties adopt various leisurely poses as they recline, stretch, and play musical instruments in a wellfurnished set of rooms. Women in a Brothel, seventeenth or eighteenth century. Painting on paper. Emil Preetorius Collection, Museum Fünf Kontinente (77-11-23).

Over the course of the Qing dynasty, the Manchu court developed detailed regulatory frameworks of hierarchically organized, sartorial rights for the imperial family, nobility, officials, and commoners, as defined by color, material, motif and pattern. These texts focus on clothing worn on official and court occasions; ostensibly they express little interest in controlling the dress of either Han or Manchu women outside those arenas.32 But studying these sumptuary regulations alongside objects and images reveals their limited reach, and hence the necessary supplementation in the form of imperial edicts and moralistic discourse, which we will examine shortly. The tomb of Kangxi’s third daughter, Princess Rongxian (1673–1728), excavated in 1966, provides some of the earliest surviving women’s garments of the Qing period (contemporaneous with the Prince Guo robe). Rongxian was married to the Mongolian prince Wu Ergun (d. 1721), who gained Kangxi’s gratitude during the 1690 Battle of Wulan Butong, and was sent to Inner Mongolia at the age of nineteen. Her tomb contained hundreds of objects, including multiple garments: ten were worn upon her body, but only three survived, the outermost layer, a pearl-embroidered yellow dragon roundel robe probably worn for summer court dress; the second layer—a butterfly-embroidered informal robe; and the innermost layer, an antique motif– embroidered informal robe (fig. 1.4; see also chap. 5). All three robes show early Qing imperial styles: a round neck, right overlapping lapel, straight narrow sleeves (ping xiu) that covered the wrist, and a slit-less skirt.33 V isuali z ing Fashion  |   2 3

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Figure 1.4. An antique motif–embroidered silk informal robe, tomb of Princess Rongxian. L 147 cm, W 161 cm. Chifeng Museum. Reprinted from Qin Bo, “Chifeng bowuguan cang san jian gongzhu paofu,” with permission from the author.

When Rongxian married in 1691, she was titled a second-rank princess (heshuo gongzhu); in 1709, she was promoted to first-rank princess (gulun gongzhu). The following regulation specifies the auspicious court dress (ji fu) to which she was entitled: Dragon robes. Princesses of the first rank, princesses of the second rank, the wives of the princes of the first rank, the wives of the princes of the second rank, the princesses of a commandery, and the princesses of a county should be incense color, embroidered throughout with nine long dragons. The wives of the beile lords, beizi lords, defender generals, bulwark generals, and the ladies of a commandery, ladies of a county, and ladies of a village should wear blue or slate blue, according to use, and embroidered throughout with nine mang dragons. Wives of commoner dukes, down to the third-ranking titled ladies, wives of the 24  |  CHAPTER 1

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supporter generals should wear [robes] embroidered throughout with nine four-clawed mang dragons.34 Such sumptuary rules effectively laid down status bands—groupings of material entitlement: first-rank princesses wore the same dress designs as the second-rank princesses, and so on. But they also left considerable room for manipulation, something evident in Rongxian’s yellow dragon roundel robe (long pao), which overstepped the regulated colors for her rank. Furthermore, her sleeves and sleeve-cuffs both featured a design of longevity roundels, also against the regulations.35 Rongxian’s excess might be explained by her favored status, but the object-text comparison highlights how individuals manipulated the gaps created, in part, by the regulatory reliance on textual description. Here fashion flouted regulation in a formal dress genre, but the opportunities to deviate were greater in the informal genres, in which women possessed, arguably, more autonomy. The two informal garments in Rongxian’s tomb bear close resemblance to an informal garment called chenyi. Then just coming into currency (the earliest dated example is from the Qianlong period), it would become the most popular informal style for nineteenth-century Manchu women.36 Both garments also feature southern influence: embroidered in the Suzhou style, they feature patterns and motifs found in southern pattern books of this period.37 Other tomb finds corroborate this. When the Qianlong period tomb of Imperial Consort Rong (Rong Fei) was excavated in 1979, it contained several garments and fabric lengths with southern loom-marks: a blue damask dragon robe fabric with the loom-mark “Jiangning [Nanjing] imperial workshop [supervised by] official Cheng Shan”; a dark brown (sauce-colored) “inch mang-dragon-patterned” damask robe fabric with the same Jiangning mark, and also “Weaver Wang Qi”; and a camelcolored dragon roundel and antique motif–patterned satin with the loom-mark “Suzhou imperial workshop [supervised by] official Si De.” Imperial workshop archives record the employment of Cheng Shan and Si De in the Suzhou and Jiangning (Nanjing) workshops during the Qianlong period.38 The tomb also contained several embroidered garments and accessories, all of which came from Suzhou.39 The garments from Princess Rongxian’s and Consort Rong’s tombs demonstrate the way material culture itself disseminated fashion: silk robes traveled through the empire, bringing Suzhou design to Beijing and even on again to Inner Mongolia. They also underline the influence of southern Han style on the Manchu imperial court. This was not something that the Manchu emperors appeared to appreciate. Rather, edict after edict sought to limit the degree of Han influence upon Manchu women. For example, in 1759, after inspecting the elegant ladies (xiu nü) to be selected as imperial consorts, the Qianlong emperor (r. 1735–96) was apparently shocked to discover that: Some banner women have been imitating Han people’s clothing and adornment. This is certainly not the Manchu custom. If in front of the V isuali z ing Fashion  |   2 5

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Emperor you esteem such things, then what kind of willful clothing is being worn at home? This may be a trifling matter, but if I do not admonish it, then it will inevitably become common practice, and this would be of great concern for traditional Manchu culture. Therefore, I am explicitly charging the senior officials of the Eight Banners to clearly communicate to each of the bannermen: from now on they must attach importance to being simple and frugal, and cease in this willful costume!40 The main mechanism for this influence was the triennial selection through which all eligible daughters of officials in the Manchu banners (administrative military divisions) were inspected and selected to become imperial concubines. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the imperial consorts were also chosen from Mongol and Han banners. Expanding the ethnic scope became problematic: many of the elegant ladies might have had Han Chinese mothers or relatives, and were hence raised in the Chinese way; later, the Qing court narrowed the selection by reducing the numbers of eligible Han banners.41 But the problem of controlling cultural interaction remained, despite repeated edicts charging fathers, brothers, and a whole catalog of officials with responsibility and threatened punishments. The problem was that, as an 1806 edict put it, “It is easy to control men and boys, but women and girls are secluded deep in the woman’s quarters, and their clothing is hard to monitor.”42 In these edicts, “bad habits” in women’s dress tends to reference wide-sleeved robes, foot-binding, and extravagance: “Recently the banner women often wear clothing of wide sleeves . . . and their consumption is also several times greater than before . . . competing to esteem extravagance, even imitating the Han people’s foot-binding, these kind of bad habits . . . have great bearing on the minds of our country’s ordinary people.”43 The edicts suggest the “wide-sleeved Han styles” came to synecdochally represent notions of gendered ethnicity, but visual culture presents more complex interactions between fashion and ethnically defined sartorial standards, implying that, rather than imitation of, or differentiation from, Han styles, hybridity defined Manchu fashions. An informal portrayal of a mid-Qing emperor-to-be and his women, Yinzhen Enjoying Pleasures (Yinzhen xingle tu), one of a set of five hanging scrolls, was painted when the Yongzheng emperor (1678–1735; r. 1722–35) was about thirty-one (ca. 1708), a decade or so before he became emperor (fig. 1.5).44 As Prince Yinzhen, he is dressed in scholarly blue robes and accompanied by four women, separated from him by the study walls, and divided into two pairs by the balustrade. They are also divided by dress: the older two in the back wear Manchu-style plain robes, one with decorative collar and border, and their hair is in the ruan chi tou style (soft wings hairstyle), a predecessor of the liang ba tou style, associated with Manchu femininity.45 But the younger front pair draw the viewer’s attention with small cloud collars (yun jian), 26  |  CHAPTER 1

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long sleeveless jackets (bijia), pleated skirts, and tasseled belts, all features associated with southern Han fashions of the time.46 The disjuncture between this vision and the many textual edicts prohibiting Manchu women from wearing Han Chinese styles has generated some controversy and a number of explanations. How to explain the consorts’ dress? Perhaps it was just a play. The Qianlong emperor once commented on a similar painting, in which the women also wear Han-style dress (though in an archaic mode), that the garments were merely an artistic device.47 That is, the choice of Han clothing should not be read as real, but rather as a masquerade, and should therefore be categorized along with other “enjoying pleasures” (xingle tu) images, which depict the Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors as fictional figures or generic characters, such as a Taoist monk or Ottoman prince.48 Yet it is hard to accord this playful stance with the Qianlong emperor’s stern words in the edicts cited earlier. How could he simultaneously rebuke and revel? After all, unlike the other Qianlong and Yongzheng images depicting women dressed in archaic Han styles, the Yinzhen Enjoying Pleasures scroll not only shows contemporary styles (not historical fantasy), but also the emperor himself with these women. Perhaps, then, the images were a realistic record—the consorts were Han women wearing Han dress. The Kangxi emperor famously forbade Han women from entering the Forbidden City, and expressed his concern over “the customs becoming more luxurious and those who would wear clothing in excess of their position.”49 But both Kangxi and Yongzheng were known to desire Han beauties, surreptitiously bringing them to the palace through lower-level consort selections.50 Yet it seems that even Han women were not sanctioned in wearing Han dress. During the Shunzhi reign (1644–61), Empress Xiaozhuang (1613–1688), the second spouse of Hong Taiji, insisted that the Han banner girls her husband had introduced as palace consorts could neither bind their feet nor wear Han dress in the palace.51 Another possible explanation lies in aesthetics. Curator Shan Guoqiang argued that since Manchu dress was perceived as “excessively austere,” it could not satisfy the emphasis upon feminine beauty and aesthetic pleasure required by the shinü beauty genre’s conventions, hence the practice of wearing Han Chinese clothing.52 Yet this situation that he presents as intuitive is worth querying: why did Han beauty standards prevail? After all, these are not the archaic, Song dynasty Han women’s styles—the standard mode of female dress used within shinü or meiren beauty paintings, associated with literati aesthetics—rather the women wear early-mid Qing fashions. The Yinzhen Enjoying Pleasures demonstrates not only that these styles were well known at court, but also that Han fashions were alluring, both to the women who wore these clothes and the emperors and princes who controlled their dress. In this respect, debating whether this was real practice or fantasy misses the point. The visualization of the southern beauty in images commissioned by the Qing emperors underlines the aesthetic dominance of Han women’s dress and beauty during the eighteenth century. To consider how this influence was perpetuated, we turn to the southern courtesan. V isuali z ing Fashion  |   2 7

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“Study the Suzhou Fashions”: The Fashionable Southern Courtesan

Decades of dragon robe–focused research created a model dominated by court taste or palace style (gong yang), in which styles originated in the capital’s courts and princely mansions and then circulated southward to more ordinary folk. In this model of fashion as conspicuous consumption, whereby imperial practice inspired domestic imitation, tastes ran from top to bottom: initiated by the upper classes, imitated by lower classes.53 This was how early Qing writer Ye Mengzhu understood fashion: “It likely begins in the gentry families, [then] their maids and concubines copy, and this gradually seeps through to their families and then catches on in the neighborhood.”54 And it was how many late Ming commentators interpreted fashion—it was something founded upon social mobility and competition.55 But though emulation is an undeniably powerful force in the social behavior governing fashion, the “trickle-down” processes that dominate classic sociological models of fashion like those of Thorstein Veblen or Georg Simmel have been discredited for overly simplistic mono-directional analysis, particularly for assuming that only elites can innovate, rather than multiway patterns of influence.56 Evidence from Chinese fashion counters such theories, showing instead the role of lower-class figures like courtesans and entertainers. In the late Ming satirical novel The Plum in the Golden Vase, it is actually female entertainers rather than gentlewomen who exert the most influence: the protagonist Ximen Qing’s concubines anxiously assess the outfits of the sing-song girls who visit the house and with whom they compete for the favors of their master.57 Indeed, contrary to Ye Mengzhu’s account, most other commentators—from the late Ming through to the late Qing—singled out nonelite groups like courtesans and entertainers as integral to the Chinese fashion system: “In recent years, the clothing and adornment of men and women change roughly every few years. Men’s clothing and headwear styles follow the capital; all follow the trend of extravagance. [But] the women’s clothing and adornment all follow the courtesans’ styles, even women from good families follow this bad example, it is really very strange.”58 Their influence puzzled such commentators, but several factors explain why courtesans became tastemakers: their ties to entertainment and performance, their relative mobility and moral freedom, and their necessary expenditure on adornment and fashion.59 The relative freedom of entertainers, like servants, made them a point of contact, a mechanism by which new material culture could enter the homes of otherwise secluded women. But arguably their position as fashion arbiter was also a function of the gentlewomen’s absence, an absence created primarily by moral discourse. As seen in figure 1.3, the fashionable dress worn by courtesans went hand in hand with “informal and suggestive poses” and objects of erotic symbolism.60 Bound feet, tiny Figure 1.5. One of a set of five hanging scrolls depicting the mid-Qing Manchu emperor-to-be at leisure, accompanied by four women dressed in both Manchu and Han styles. “Yinzhen Enjoying Pleasures” (Yinzhen xingle tuzhou), ca. 1708. Color on silk, H 157 cm, W 71 cm. Palace Museum (0006440). Photograph by Ping Hui.

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shoes, a glimpse of red linings, sleeves pushed up to expose a slender wrist, symbols like peonies, zither or Buddha’s hand citron: these visual codes alluded to their sexuality and accessibility. Such poses and details feature in many such workshop-painted beauties, underlining the importance of the courtesan to this genre, and the apparent absence of a viable visual genre in which the gentlewoman could be depicted. Other than the ancestor portrait—a genre confined by key principles like static, full-frontal poses, conservative material surroundings, and official dress—prior to the late Qing, there were few examples in which genteel woman could be visually presented, let alone shown in informal pose or informal dress, contributing to the sense in which gentility was expressed primarily through an absence of fashion. Needless to say, the very places where courtesan influence was strongest—cities like Suzhou, Yangzhou, Nanjing—were the places where urban workshops filled marketplaces with paintings and prints of these fashionable beauties. As Finnane argues, the southern courtesan’s “highly gendered image” was synecdochic of southern urbanity, “a representation of the exotic.”61 But the power of the southern courtesan also points to the importance of place within the Chinese fashion system, the degree to which renowned commercial centers like Suzhou disseminated their styles throughout China. To speak of Qing fashion was to speak of the clothing of Suzhou—all sought to “imitate the styles of the Wu beauties” (xue Wu jie).62 One way in which this influence was perpetuated was through oral culture. Hence, in historian Fan Jinmin’s survey of how Suzhou style (Suyang, Suyi) reached across China—from Zhenan, Wenzhou, where “the Suzhou styles have just arrived, pale white skirts embroidered with peonies” to Guangxu-period Xiangtan, Hunan, where “the women tie their hair so it hung down behind, slightly raised, lightly tied at the front but with the hair floating forward” in the “Suzhou bai” style—his primary evidentiary genre is the bamboo ballad.63 But visual culture was also a vital medium for spreading Suzhou styles, a process evident in the development of a key fashion accessory, the cloud collar. The Cloud Collar in Popular Prints

The cloud collar actually has a long history in Chinese dress, but it first appears as a fashion accessory in the so-called Gusu (Old Suzhou) prints from Suzhou’s Taohuawu district that are dated to the early eighteenth century, due to their export to Japan during this period.64 Figure 1.6, an anonymous print later titled “Playing the Qin in the Double Osmanthus Veranda,” shows early Qianlong period styles worn by the focal female, the central qin player; her companion’s size suggests lower status, likely

Figure 1.6. Both women in this anonymous print wear dress and hairstyles of early Qing Suzhou. Playing the Qin on the Double Osmanthus Veranda (Shuang Gui Xuan tanqin), Qianlong period (1736–95). 95.4 × 54.4 cm. Reprinted from Feng Jicai, Zhongguo muban nianhua jicheng, Riben cangpin juan, 87, with permission from the Zhonghua Book Company.

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a maid. Both have the fashionable “goose heart” (e’dan xin) hairstyle, and though their dress is still styled to late Ming proportions, the appearance of the cloud collar is new.65 Contemporaneous prints from Yangliuqing in north China show quite different styles, evidence of the variations encoded in place. A Qianlong period Yangliuqing print depicts ladies out visiting for the Spring Festival, wearing, like the Suzhou prints, waist-length jackets and vests over longer jackets, layered over skirts (fig. 1.7). In this mid-Qing aesthetic, the emphasis upon structured garments, such as waistcoats and jackets, divides their bodies in thirds, each portion emphasized by the patterns: large floral medallions against geometric backgrounds, and narrow monochrome patterned trimmings.66

Figure 1.7. This rare Yangliuqing print, Ladies Enjoying Spring (Youchun shinü tu), is symmetrically divided across the two separate prints (duiping). The ladies’ clothing, in particular the waist-length layering, reflects the transitions from late Ming to mid-Qing styles. Qianlong period (1736–95). New print from historical print-blocks, 63 × 110 cm. Tianjin Yangliuqing Museum, reprinted from Feng Jicai, Zhongguo muban nianhua jicheng, Yangliuqing juan, with permission from the Zhonghua Book Company

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Figure 1.8. This Yangliuqing print awards the viewer access to a lavishly furnished niched-off room, where two young beauties play happily with two plump boys. Soothing the Infants (Fu ying tu), later Qianlong period (1736–95). Qi Jianlong printshop, 61 × 109 cm. Tianjin Museum. Reprinted from Feng Jicai, Zhongguo muban nianhua jicheng, Yangliuqing juan, 68–69, with permission from the Zhonghua Book Company.

The cloud collar was absent in this Qianlong Yangliuqing print, suggesting the fashion had not yet reached the north (other than in the palace; see fig. 1.5). But by the nineteenth century, the cloud collar was central to Han women’s celebratory dress, and it became an integral component of Yangliuqing print beauties, though styled rather differently than the versions shown in the earlier Suzhou prints.67 The example in figure 1.8 has a print-shop brand mark, the “Qi Jianlong old print-shop,” suggesting a late eighteenth-century dating.68 Though both women—shown inside a well-furnished alcove, playing with two plump male children, and accompanied by various auspicious accoutrements—wear decorative collars, the central woman’s four ruyi-lobed (sihe ruyi) style would become most popular. By the nineteenth century, countless Yangliuqing prints, in particular those produced by the Daoguang period Aizhu Studio, would depict this style with its heavier, bordered outlines, worn over much embellished jackets and finely pleated skirts.69 It is this style that is described in the novel Tales of Heroic Lovers (Ernü yingxiong zhuan; ca. 1850), by Manchu bannerman Wenkang (ca. 1798–after 1865). The knight-errant heroine, Thirteenth Sister (He Yufeng), is wed dressed in “a crimson pifeng jacket embroidered with the ‘hundred flowers blossoming simultaneously’ pattern, and a sand-green gauze skirt embroidered with the ‘hundred butterflies meeting happily in spring’ pattern, matched with a ‘four joined ruyi’ cloud collar.”70 By the late Qing, the cloud collar jacket was integral to celebratory dress. In his description, Xu Ke quoted a poem that describes the cloud collar as metonym for

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fairy maidens—to secure one was to gain a night spent with such a maiden: “Women cover their shoulders with the cloud collar as adornment. Its use began in the Yuan dynasty with dancing girls. In the Ming it became ceremonial wear for women, and in this [Qing] dynasty Han women also wear it as wedding dress.”71 The Yangliuqing and Taohuawu popular prints enable us to understand how the cloud collar might have been visually spread across China, and how it became associated with Han women’s wedding attire; these beauty prints reference the values of beauty, fertility, wealth, cultural attainment, and happiness that women wished to evoke on celebratory occasions. The wedding day was one of the few days in a woman’s lifetime that she could wear such gorgeous dress, and the preparation process would have taken months, indeed years in the case of a childhood engagement. Critically, weddings involved not only the labor of the girl herself, as accounts of dress production have typically emphasized, but increasingly over the early modern period, also the labor of strangers, employed both in and outside the home. The Qing period saw an increasing expectation of (and thus pressure to achieve) a rich material consumption to adorn ceremonial occasions—births, marriages, festivals—yet most women would have struggled to afford the embellished formal wear so expensive in tailoring, fabrics, and decoration. Small accessories like the cloud collar or decorative borders succeeded precisely because of their ability to allow a wider range of women to participate in celebratory consumption. The cloud collar’s ceremonial role partly derived from its material presence, its ability to structure the shoulders, modifying the body shape to create width and presence, and offering a clear, auspiciously framed canvas to “carry” motifs of good fortune. Like other components of ritual dress—detachable neck pendants, overskirt lappet aprons, and belt hangings—the cloud collar created movement and presence that demarcated the ceremonial space in which the bride was transferred to her new home and family. The cloud collar was often trimmed with silver pieces, bells, and tassels, additions which ceremonialized the procession and drew attention to the bride. In Henan, for example, brides wore cloud collars with hanging ribbons and bells, their tinkling walk accentuating their movements.72 Equally, less prosaic points also favored the cloud collar. Its practical function in protecting the clothing from hair-oil was early noted by taste arbiter Li Yu (1611–1679): “Cloud collars are used to cover the clothes, to avoid dirt and oil, and made into the most beautiful shapes.”73 Many women could only afford one or two items of formal clothing for celebratory occasions, and protecting them from dirt was challenging— embroidered silks were not easy to wash.74 Cloud collars not only adorned, they also protected from and covered up stains, an association explicit enough in the early nineteenth century for Lin Sumen (ca. 1748–1809) to name the cloud collar “hair-oil collar” (you jian).75 They could also facilitate the rejuvenation of dated outfits and, like the growth of secondhand clothes shops, hire-shops, and pawnshops, should be understood as responding to the challenge of securing new clothes for New Year celebrations or other formal events.76 34  |  CHAPTER 1

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Both ceremonial associations and practical functions may have contributed to the appearance of a style central to nineteenth-century fashions: ao or shan jackets with appliqué cloud collar and coordinated bottom and overlapping front borders, as seen in the nineteenth-century Yangliuqing prints. The attachment of the cloud collar to the jacket had been anticipated by Li Yu, who advised coordinating the cloud collar’s coloring with the main jacket, so as to prevent the lining from being exposed through the cloud collar’s movements. After further thought he found this still unsatisfactory: “If the collar moves and the color is the same, it is still not as good as the collar not moving at all.” His solution to the problem was prescient: “The [cloud collar] is suitable for wearing at home, but if you go out visiting, then you must subtly afix [the collar] with threads, so as to avoid it coming apart from the clothing.”77 Ethnicity and Embellishment in Nineteenth-Century Fashions

These cloud collar embellished and bordered jacket styles, worn with similarly adorned skirts and trousers, defined the look of the late Qing. Taohuawu and Yangliuqing print shops filled the markets with these fashionable beauties, shown in their boudoir or garden accompanied by a younger maid or female relative, and rollicking sons. The rise of these beauties in popular prints occurred against shifts in the defining characteristics of gentlewoman and courtesan. The archetypical late Ming–early Qing courtesan was a talented beauty renowned for music, performance, and poetry. As companions to gentlemen in a society where men and women, even within the same kin unit, were not expected to intermingle, their presence effectively removed the function of education or culture on the part of the gentlewoman’s wife. But Manchu attempts to regulate entertainment quarters in cities like Nanjing or Yangzhou accompanied commercialization of the industry to make the late Qing courtesan figure a hollowed-out version of her late Ming rendition.78 This coincided with a growing acceptability, at least among affluent families, that daughters should receive a full and rich education, and an assertion by gentlewomen (guixiu) that their identities as wives and mothers should be defined not just by their gentry status, but also by their own cultural achievements.79 The gentlewoman’s newly articulated claims of culture and literacy was accompanied by a shift in the representation of beauties, now surrounded by symbols of literary attainment—brushes, scrolls, books. In addition to the continued production of overtly erotic renditions aimed primarily at a male viewer, another genre of woman’s portraits that “present women more as subjects in their own right” suggests women’s increasing involvement in purchasing and commissioning vernacular painting.80 Popular prints also support this argument. Whereas earlier depictions of beauties were dominated by courtesan figures sporting flirtatious poses that highlighted sexualizing motifs, late Qing popular prints portray women as validated by symbols of literary attainment, rather than erotic implications. In a print like figure 1.9, it is symbols of literacy and V isuali z ing Fashion  |   3 5

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Figure 1.9. The elegantly dressed mother and her son hold the viewer’s eye as they gaze out calmly, surrounded by emblems of literacy—ink, brush, paper, books. Educating Sons in the Women’s Quarters (Guifang jiaozi), mid-late Qing. Yishengcheng printshop, 90 × 54 cm. Xinjian County Museum, reprinted from Feng Jicai, Zhongghuo muban nianhua jicheng, Jiangzhou juan, 205, with permission from the Zhonghua Book Company.

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education—brushes, books, scrolls, painting—in addition to the male child that award the female sitter cultural heft. These women assert a newly defined social function— their education justified by their roles as teachers to their sons, and as such, responsible for family fortunes. But in turn, their fashionable clothing, featuring details such as the embroidered border or the cloud collar, came to reference the social status of being a cultured and educated lady. The print workshop’s circulation of this ideal had wide influence. Both Yangliuqing and Taohuawu prints were highly commercialized endeavors, with printshops establishing branches to consolidate market share and reach. Yangliuqing, whose location on the Grand Canal meant it could access paper and dyes from Suzhou, had more than seventeen shops during the mid-late Qing period, and the most well-known shops opened branches beyond Yangliuqing, disseminating not just the artistic style and content of their prints but also fashionable styles.81 For example, when the Wan Chang print shop established a branch in Weixian, Shandong Province, print designers and print carvers were sent to help; even the prints themselves were sent along. Thus, the Yangliuqing print aesthetic infiltrated Weixian’s local print tradition (Yangjiabu).82 In Yangliuqing, most families worked in this trade, either full-time or part-time, and women’s labor was particularly important. Each year, during the spring quiet, or after the autumn harvest had been gathered, the print shops would distribute work to women in the surrounding forty-six villages. Their labor was most critical during the final stage, when color was added (some was printed, but much applied by hand): women had a reputation for talent in tinting facial features and dress details.83 With the expansion of Yangliuqing’s commercial reach, its style eventually reached the court. Successful print shops like Qi Jianlong opened a branch in Beijing’s Qianmen Gate neighborhood, and Yangliuqing print artists traveled to the capital, to work in locations such as Langfang Toutiao and Longfu Temple Street, and perhaps even at court.84 In providing a point of connection between imperial and vernacular styles, artists infused Yangliuqing prints with influence from imperial workshops, while at the same time this vernacular art form impacted imperial art, something evident from the nineteenth-century Manchu court’s “enjoying pleasures” portraits. These informal dress portraits (bian fu xiang) were the counterparts of the official court dress portraits (chao fu xiang), and like today’s carefully curated magazine-spreads of celebrities at home, dress was a key way in which the desired construct of informal domesticity was communicated.85 Thus, in several examples from the Daoguang and Xianfeng periods (1859–61), the imperial consorts wear informal robes as standard. One example, Autumn’s Overflowing Happiness Courtyard (Xiyi qiuting tu), shows the Daoguang emperor sitting together with his third wife, Empress Xiaoquancheng (1808–1840), along with consorts and children on an autumn day in the Garden of Perfect Brightness (Yuanmingyuan; also known as the Old Summer Palace). The women all wear chenyi robes, which by that point was the established informal robe for Manchu women (fig. 1.10).86 V isuali z ing Fashion  |   3 7

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Figure 1.10. An anonymous family portrait of the Daoguang emperor and his third wife, Empress Xiaoquancheng, alongside consorts and children. Autumn’s Overflowing Happiness Courtyard (Xiyi qiuting tuzhou), nineteenth century. Ink and color on paper, L 181 cm, W 202.5 cm. Palace Museum. Photograph by Hu Chui.

Xiaoquancheng was raised in Suzhou, apparently with artistic talents, and she had been swiftly promoted to first-rank concubine and then empress in 1834 after giving birth to the Daoguang emperor’s first prince, Yizhu (later the Xianfeng emperor). But intrigue blighted her rise, and she died suddenly at thirty-three after plotting to kill Prince Yixin, who was competing with Yizhu to become emperor.87 In images of Xiaoquancheng and female contemporaries, the vision of Manchu dress promoted by the regulations, and which circulated through imperially sponsored media like court painting, contrasts sharply with the Han-style dress seen in the earlier Yongzheng period beauties. These images present a new mode of informal beauty: a more confident assertion of Manchu style and a quite different bodily aesthetic—their heads larger in proportion than before, with sharply pointed chins and widened foreheads. 38  |  CHAPTER 1

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This development is especially significant given the lack of Manchu female figures in popular prints.88 And yet, likely influenced by the Yangliuqing print workshops and probably professional workshops in Beijing (compare, for example, the women in the Mactaggart painting in fig. 1.2), similar facial shapes and figural proportions are found in another painting of Empress Xiaoquancheng in informal dress, Portrait of Empress Xiaoquancheng in Informal Dress (Xiaoquancheng huanghou bianzhuang xiang), unusual in presenting a woman and girl pairing (fig. 1.11). The empress wears a floral silk chenyi embroidered with plum and cherry blossoms, accessorized with embellished sleeve-bands, an elaborate, three-layer, willow-leaf-shaped cloud collar, and the Manchu headdress (liang ba tou) of stiffened black satin adorned with artificial flowers and precious stones. She stands, wrist exposed, leaning in behind the corner of the wooden table topped with a bowl of peaches, while the girl, likely her daughter, adopts a similar posture, playfully positioned by the stool. Both composition and fashionable dress visually connect this depiction with the Yangliuqing and Taohuawu beauties, a comparison particularly striking next to this Taohuawu print of a Suzhou gentlewoman (fig. 1.12).89 One wears a Manchu robe, the other a Han jacket and skirt, but the comparison hints at the convergence of each group in their confident presentations of fashionable dress. By the mid-nineteenth century, the chenyi, previously close-fitting around the chest and sleeves as in figure 1.4, had evolved into a loose, embellished garment, generally worn underneath outer garments, unless in private.90 In his anecdotes on the Daoguang and Xianfeng courts, Mongolian scholar-official Chongyi (1885–1945) described the social mores that dictated how Manchu women wore these garments: “[When] inside [women] don’t wear [formal] pao robes but instead wear chenyi robes in green, yellow, peach, or moon white, but not crimson.”91 In the Mactaggart painting (see fig. 1.2), the women wear chenyi with long sleeveless vests (da kanjian) on top.92 But the chenyi was often combined with another less formal garment, the changyi outer gown. This had developed around the same time as the chenyi and was similar in style—straight-cut, round-necked, ankle-length—but it could not be worn alone and was even more decorative in style, particularly in the ruyi-headed slits on each side extending up to the armpit (kaixi).93 Chongyi described both styles in some detail: “The next most formal dress styles are the changyi and the chenyi, both have wanxiu sleeves (large cuffs turned back and bordered with patterned trimmings). The changyi comes in crimson, lotus pink, or moon white (either embroidered or plain, depending upon the wearer’s age and seniority). These styles are worn by married women, but if the woman is widowed, then she should wear a blue changyi, or if [she wears] a dark reddish brown chenyi, then it should match the color of the outer changyi.”94 This explains why the senior and widowed birthday-celebrating matriarch in the Mactaggart painting is wearing the somber blue color (with stylized shou longevity-character roundels as befits the occasion), and her younger relatives are wearing admittedly not very much brighter shades of brown and blue bamboo and V isuali z ing Fashion  |   3 9

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Figure 1.11. An anonymous portrait of Empress Xiaoquancheng and her daughter. Empress Xiaoquancheng in Informal Dress (Xiaoquancheng huanghou bianzhuang xiangzhou), Daoguang period (1821–50), before 1840. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on paper, 177 × 96.5 cm. Palace Museum (GU 6582). Photograph by Liu Mingjie.

Figure 1.12. A mid-late Qing Taohuawu print of a well-dressed mother, while her son plays with a sprig of osmanthus (guihua) symbolizing nobility (guizi). A Beauty and a Vase of Flowers (Meiren chahua tu), 80 × 55 cm. Reprinted from Feng Jicai, Zhongguo muban nianhua jicheng, Taohuawu juan, shang, 87, with permission from the Zhonghua Book Company.

chrysanthemum patterned silks, with touches of green and red. Writer Xia Renhu (1873–1963) concurred that “the color of women’s dress is determined by age. Clothing of gold embroidery and pale colors is only worn by newlyweds or young ladies [guixiu]. Once one is married, then proper colors are black, blue, purple and dark reddish-brown.”95 The muted shades singled out by these writers partly explains the trend toward embroidery and ribbon-trimming in both chenyi and changyi garments and their popularity. The records of Empress Dowager Cixi’s maid, He Rong, note these embellishments’ appeal: apart from a few special occasions such as imperial birthdays, when they could wear red, the rest of the year consorts basically wore two colors: green in spring—light green, dark green, or old green, as they wished, but not be too eye-catching—and purples and browns in autumn. Hence the primary site for color and decoration were the woven ribbons and embroidered borders applied to the 40  |  CHAPTER 1

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Figure 1.13. Scottish photographer John Thomson has positioned these two women to show off their contrasting hairstyles and garments. “Tartar Lady and Maid,” from Through China with a Camera, 420.

sleeve-bands, collars, hems, and shoe bases.96 But another reason for the prevalence of this fashion was its ease of participation, regardless of ethnicity—whether chenyi robe or shan jacket, both offered equally good sites for repeated bordered embellishment. Thus the bordered garment can be understood as providing Manchu women with a chance to participate in the same fashion site as Han women, something visualized in a striking photo showing a Manchu woman in a long robe and liang ba tou hairstyle, with her Han maid wearing a jacket and skirt, and hanging bun (Suzhou ji) hairstyle (fig. 1.13). Even while each ethnic group maintained defined styles of dress—Manchu women wore changpao, changyi, chenyi; Han women wore ao, shan, gua—the fashionable border breached the sartorial separation theorized in regulations and moral discourse.97 V isuali z ing Fashion  |   4 1

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Just as the Daoguang period Enjoying Pleasures portraits present a more confident vision of Manchu femininity, so too, in the nineteenth century, did “banner” (qi) begin to be used to mark Manchu women’s dress. Hu Shiyu, whose thoughts on fashion began this chapter, considered that “when it comes to the splendid in women’s clothes, none can surpass that of Wu Prefecture” where “borders are exceedingly wide, and they trim [clothing] with the ‘devil railings’ [guizi langan].” But he also singled out another style: “When the border is extremely broad, perhaps even two cun, then these are called “banner borders” [qi bian]; woven with gold and colored threads, they compete in the new and contend in the fine, and are not a bit concerned with the cost of workmanship.”98 The Palace Museum collection shows a notable shift in the use of banners to label Manchu women’s dress, beginning in the early nineteenth century and becoming ubiquitous in the Tongzhi and Guangxu period (1875–1908) archives. Clothing containers featured banner labels like “banner gown,” “banner robe,” and even the handkerchief (shoujuan) was renamed qi pa.99 A length of silk yardage, prepared for but not made up into a chenyi gown, now in the Mactaggart collection (fig. 1.14), demonstrates the use of this terminology and specifies the instructions for making and labels it a qi chenyi garment (fig. 1.15). Despite the assertive Qi fashion terminology, there is little difference between the sleeves of the Han woman and that of the Manchu women in the Mactaggart painting (see fig. 1.2). They wear the same makeup, the same style earrings (three connected rings rather than three separate earrings), and the same ribbon trimmings. Distinction has been reduced to three places: the skirt and knee-length jacket rather than ankle-length gown, the bound feet, and the hair ornaments—the Manchu women’s oversized fake flowers are contrasted with the Han woman’s kingfisher coronet.100 Many have seen this period as the final movement in the merging of Han and Manchu women’s dress, as described in bamboo ballads like “New Words on the Fashions” (Shishang xin tan): “More than half of the bannerwomen have changed to Han dress, palace robes are cut [in the style of the] short jacket and skirt.”101 Like Qing emperors, observers narrated this development with reference to an age-old assimilation of the ethnic outsider: “Recently, the Manchu women have all changed to the Han styles, and since then the difference between Han and Manchu people, just like the difference between the Han and the Hu, the Qiang, the Rong, the Qidan, and the Nüzhen of former history can no longer be distinguished.”102 Women’s fashions modeled wider processes of cultural separation and assimilation. And yet this process worked both ways. Though southern urban centers of Suzhou and Yangzhou dominated accounts of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Qing fashion, late Qing trends like the beribboned chenyi seem to have been created in the capital.103 The nineteenth century saw a shift away from the Grand Canal route towns of Suzhou and Yangzhou toward new urban hubs like Shanghai and Tianjin, questioning assumptions of continuity between fashions of the early-mid Qing period and those of the late Qing. By the nineteenth century, structures of controlling taste 42  |  CHAPTER 1

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Figure 1.14. A length of unmade plum silk yardage, embroidered with lotus flowers in the three blues palette and gold thread, ca. 1900. Silk floss; silk gauze. Mactaggart Art Collection (2005.5.366), University of Alberta Museums. Gift of Sandy and Cécile Mactaggart. (right) Figure 1.15. Detail of notation from figure 1.14, listing color, number of embroidered flowers and intended usage.

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had been altered and the state system had lost much of its purchasing power; both the Daoguang and Xianfeng emperors implemented frugality measures reducing imperial patronage.104 In painting and porcelain, private patronage filled this space, tilting the market toward the tastes of wealthy merchants in cities like Shanghai. In dress, this shift resulted in the emergence of new decorative themes of drama and literati culture, explored in more depth in the second half of the book.105 But this geographical shift explains Hu Shiyu’s argument for the dominant role of the Beijing style in late Qing fashions. Hu tells a story of meeting an acquaintance who had recently arrived in the capital, and being about to call upon a senior, wished to confirm that his clothing was suitable. The acquaintance assumes it must be, for “the silhouettes and colors are the newest styles coming from Suzhou, how can it not be suitable for Beijing style?” But Hu informs him, with some pride, that “nowadays the patterns and styles are completely different.”106 Whether fashion-seekers sought to imitate the style of the Manchu mansions or the Suzhou boudoirs, this dress-historical reconstruction demonstrates how ethnicity and place were critical to determining women’s engagement with fashion. As a microcosm of the Beijing fashion system, the Mactaggart painting suggests the ways in which both Manchu and Han women contributed to the fashion trends of the period. Styles like the chenyi and changyi enabled Manchu women to re-create their traditional narrow-sleeved robes, applying the broader sleeves, ribbon-embellished sleeve-bands, and ruyi-lobing found in Han women’s ao and shan styles. The detailed depiction in visual sources like popular prints and professional painting may be read alongside bamboo ballads and novels to reconstruct this consumption as an arena of creative autonomy for women. The images studied here suggest that, by the nineteenth century, both Han gentlewoman and Manchu nobility had evolved a valid mode for depicting themselves in fashionable dress. And yet, curiously, texts throughout the Qing continue to assert the courtesan’s power as fashion leader. To understand this, it is necessary to investigate the moral discourse of fashion. For many male critics, fashionable accessories, in fundamentally confusing social distinction, threatened a sartorial assimilation that denied more normative attempts to order. As an 1817 bamboo ballad inquired, “The young ladies of the famous brothels have faces like flowers, they sit alone in the scented chariot loving the bright yarn shades. Their paired sleeves are wider than one chi, neither Manchu nor Han style, from which family do they come?”107 Such critiques present a discursive force quite different from that of popular prints and urban rhymes, but they too shaped the Qing fashion system.

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2 “Outlandish Costume and Strange Hats” MORAL DISCOURSES OF FASHION

When I was young, clothing styles were simple and unadorned. This was especially the case in my family. As I have mentioned, one garment was sometimes handed around among my sisters, aunts, and sisters-in-law. My father detested showy things and gave written instructions forbidding us to wear jackets with wide borders and skirts decorated with multi-colored patterns. Zeng Jifen, Testimony of a Confucian Woman, 1933

H

ow did a morally upright woman dress in nineteenth-century China? The above quote affords us some understanding of what dress meant to a gentlewoman who followed her time’s normative precepts, summarized as follows: “training of girls in homemaking . . . the confinement of pubescent girls and mature young ladies to special quarters, the limitation of female social contacts outside the family, and the impropriety of coeducation.”1 Zeng, daughter of Hunanese statesman Zeng Guofan (1811–72), tells of her father’s strict frugality with a mixture of pride and resentment, and it is hard to separate hyperbole from reality in this passage. Writers often alluded to the sartorial simplicity of times past; observing the plain styles of one’s youth was a standard way of setting up commentary on the luxurious styles of the day, a conventionalized progression from simplicity to extravagance (you jian ru she). |   4 5  |

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Still Madame Zeng was likely not exaggerating her father’s control over her wardrobe. Elsewhere she detailed how he limited the garment numbers in each of his daughter’s trousseau chests, and his careful selection of his family’s clothing in ritually significant times of mourning and festivity.2 Small wonder that Zeng herself equated extravagance in dress with moral failing. When she attended a prominent official’s son’s wedding, she provided an enthralled description of the outfit of her husband’s accountant’s concubine: “She wore a court necklace and embroidered jacket, and her whole person dazzled with gems and diamonds. I heard then that the gold, jade, pearls, and malachite she wore were worth more than twenty thousand taels.” They were later to discover that this accountant had stolen funds from her husband’s new office prior to his arrival, and though Madame Zeng is discreet in her allegations of wrongdoing, the couple’s moral illegitimacy is highlighted through her description of the “upstairs wife,” a figure of ornamental excess wearing inappropriate objects like a court necklace.3 In viewing a dazzling appearance as masking an untrustworthy character, Zeng and her father were espousing beliefs about the moral functions of dress that can be traced back to early writers, such as Jia Yi (200–169 bce), who explained: “The way to systemize clothing is to choose the most comfortable for the people and the most magnificent and sacred for the emperor. Different styles and patterns are applied to higher and lower, to differentiate the noble and the humble.”4 Similarly, the historian Ban Gu (32–92) wrote: “Why did the ancient sages create jackets and skirts? . . . In order to illustrate virtue and encourage good example, and to distinguish between the noble and the common.”5 The principles of li (propriety) meant that, beyond shelter and warmth, clothing’s primary function was to distinguish: gender, age, wealth, status, and taste. But as material culture became the stuff of market economies, social distinctions became confused and common people “overstepped” themselves (jianyue) in their material consumption. Some sought to resist such transgressions, though apparently to little avail. Jin Anqing, a Zhejiang official (1817–1880), bewailed servants wearing woolen clothing (likely European imports) in a color previously forbidden to them: “Recently sky-blue [clothing] is everywhere, and accordingly there is no way of making social distinctions, and yet no one comes forward to criticize this.”6 The very problem with fashion was that it made sartorially based social distinctions increasingly unreliable. Concern with unfettered consumption is characteristic of periods of imperial change and social upheaval: texts cluster around locations like late Ming Nanjing or late Qing Shanghai. Nanjing memoirist Fan Lian’s worries that the dress of late Ming elite women resembled that of women in the entertainment quarters was echoed two centuries later by a scholar quoted in 1894 in the newspaper Shenbao, who sighed: “Twenty years earlier, gentlewomen and courtesans could be distinguished, but nowadays the courtesans are at will to lead the way in clothing and adornment; the gentlewomen follow in their footsteps of constantly changing patterns. I fear this is inappropriate: [though] it ensures a beautiful body and face, it affords the viewer no way of distinguishing the gentlewomen from the courtesan, and where can that end?”7 46  |  CHAPTER 2

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As the comparison suggests, such moralistic texts typically centered upon the female figure, and as with the sartorial expression of ethnic identity examined in the previous chapter, this discourse was fundamentally concerned with distinction. Didactic texts written, published, and circulated by officials and scholars in genres like family instructions (jia xun), local gazetteers, and “brush-notes” set out to challenge a material consumption seen as out of control: to pull women (and the men who consumed on their behalf ) back from the brink of a chasm of unconstrained consumption, and promote a more frugal mode of living.8 Two idealized extremes orient this literature: the prudent elegance of the virtuous gentlewoman and the embellished vulgarity of the immoral courtesan. Using concepts of fashion, luxury (shechi, shemi), and “outrageous dress” (fuyao), critics identified fashionable consumption in general, and female consumers in particular, as threatening social order, invoking historical precedent and environmental catastrophe to emphasize its consequences.9 Fashion offended long-held principles of morally correct dress. As moralists confronted the commercial handicrafts that dominated late Qing fashions, their antagonism differed markedly from the validation of fashionable clothing found in novels and urban rhymes. Both forms of discourse offer insight into Qing women’s engagement with fashion. The Virtue of Simplicity

Morally upright dress had two primary components: simplicity and appropriateness. Material simplicity as a morally superior way of existence is a central tenet of neo-Confucian belief, related to ideas about frugality and industriousness as integral to female virtue. Moralistic ideas on clothing consumption have long been espoused—late Ming writers presented chaste women as models of extreme virtue who denounced luxury and waste.10 But gentry anxiety over material consumption seems to have gathered pace during the eighteenth century. Huang Ang (d. 1757), a gazetteer editor born into a poor Wuxi family, described how, as a boy during the Kangxi period, clothing had been simple and plain: most wore cotton everyday dress, and only two or three in a hundred wore furs during winter. By the time he wrote, however, people were ashamed to wear cotton; all competed to wear the newest styles of satins and gauzes, and in winter the wealthy wore a range of furs.11 Another Wuxi observer, secretary Qian Yong (1759–1844), commented on the widespread consumption of previously elite materials in similarly disapproving tones: “When I was five or six years old, the customs of my county were still simple and plain . . . more than fifty years later, no matter whether wealthy or poor, whether in the city or the countryside, men all wear lightweight furs and women wear embroidery and brocade.”12 These writers were responding to a highly competitive social environment, in which established privilege positions were being usurped by the nouveau riche, making it, as historian Kai-wing Chow argued, “urgent for gentry families to differentiate their women’s conduct from that of the lower social classes.”13 The ever more fervent and “ O utlandish C ostume and S trange H ats ”   |   4 7

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stringent imposition of neo-Confucian values, particularly on women and commoners, was a direct response to such pressures. These values were entrenched through publications like Fang Xiang’s (1789–1852) Four Books for Women (Nü si shu), which compiled earlier works of female education, or Lan Dingyuan’s (1680–1733) Women’s Learning (Nü xue; preface 1712), which elaborated upon the four areas of conduct to be observed by a virtuous women: virtue, speech, comportment, and work.14 In smaller-scale publishing ventures—consisting of the numerous individuals who echoed these larger didactic efforts by sharing their own instructions for the edification of others—we find more specific attempts to control dress consumption. Often these were locally rooted efforts. For example, Family Treasure (Chuan jia bao), a morally informed reference book compiled in 1739 by Shi Chengjin (b. 1660– after 1739), a member of Yangzhou’s lower gentry, was widely read both then and in the nineteenth century, and contains numerous stipulations against luxurious dress.15 More extensive instructions are found in the writings of Chaozhou magistrate Zheng Zhiqiao (jin shi degree 1737). A disciple of Lan Dingyuan, author of Women’s Learning, Zheng’s guide to frugality was aimed at reasonably well-off farming families in his Chaozhou region, and he cautioned against extravagance: “In life, clothing is meant to keep out the cold and no more, to distinguish status and no more. . . . Farming families should first attend to food, and then to clothing.”16 Zheng also included household budgets and practical instructions: “In order to suitably run a household, all clothing should be made from local [cotton] cloth. When it is cold, add more cotton, when it is warm, change into kudzu vine cloth. For visiting and receiving guests, if you use fine silks, do not take one robe after another, you should use up your stores rather than seek up-to-date clothing.”17 For writers of this ilk, utility should determine clothing, not fashion. Thus, Li Lüyuan (1707–1790), Henan author of the didactic novel A Lantern at the Crossroads (Qi lu deng), instructed his family: Cloth shoes and cotton stockings should as far as possible be appropriate to one’s status (lit., fit the foot). Nowadays people cover these objects with embroidered clouds and flowers, this is pure waste! What do women know? Only how to show off their cleverness. Why must their husbands compete in their level of waste? There is also no need for satin stockings, and to further weave designs on top, this only irritates the wearer’s foot! As for belts, why do they need to be made of silk? Belts are used to secure one’s waist, they do not need to be gaudy or magnificent. This should also be forbidden.18 Similar ideas can be found throughout gazetteers and family instructions of this period. Their widespread existence does not, of course, tell us how consistently the message was received.19 But it does suggest an accepted dichotomy between thrift and luxury, 48  |  CHAPTER 2

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cotton and silk, plain weaves and embroidered surfaces—essentially, between simplicity and adornment. In general, simplicity communicated values of self-control and restraint, but for women, to be simple in dress was to express an elegance grounded upon social superiority. It was part of a behavioral complex defining gentility—the attributes that distinguished literati and officials from commoners.20 An image of such genteel dress is found in the portrait of the mid-Qing painter and poet Wang Yuyan (fl. ca. late 18th c.) (fig. 2.1). Wang had been raised in a well-connected and artistic family. That she herself became a respected artist was partly due to the support of her grandfather, Wang Wenzhi (1730– 1782), an important official, poet, and calligrapher; the portrait, a validation of her talents, was painted by her grandfather’s friend, the artist Pan Gongshou (1741–1794). She is shown in a literati garden setting, sitting on a root-wood chair and painting upon a stone table: these components of scholarly identity assert her artistic abilities and female virtue, following in an established visual genre of the gentleman-scholar depicted in cultured garden.21 But her dress supports this assertion: a simple pale jade robe and long white skirt, showing only her wrists and face, with her hair pulled back from the forehead. Color is not absent—her sleeve’s red lining picks up the crimson of her lips and the pot, but she wears little jewelry—jade hoops and a bracelet, and only light makeup. Her vision of simplicity in dress relates to what art historian Jonathan Hay terms “literati taste”: the “material manifestation of neo-Confucian values of thrift, reserve, and self-control.” But “literati taste” was also defined against another system of taste: “a fashionable and showy urban taste characterized by the juxtaposition of rare materials and richly worked surfaces.” It is this taste that is displayed by the late nineteenthcentury woman, photographed in figure 2.2: embroidered embellishment, bright colors, overlapping patterns.22 Likely from Shanghai, her pearl-trimmed headband was fashionable among Shanghai women during this period, and her positioning displays both the main embroidered portion of her skirt and the decorated trimming on her under jacket beneath the outer jacket’s wide sleeves. In this respect, the elegance of the simply-dressed gentlewoman could only be fully understood by reference to its implicit opposite, the vulgarity of the overadorned courtesan. This opposition is visualized for us in a bamboo ballad by Yuan Jinglan (act. 1820–73), “Fashions of the Times” (Shishi zhuang) which, inspired by Bai Juyi’s famous poem of the same title, describes the latest styles in early nineteenth-century Suzhou: Sparrow hairpins sway at dawn stilling the golden barrettes, their hair worn in the latest fashions. The mirror is filled with spring, graceful in every aspect, courtesans and travelers see the spirit dissipate. Hundred-butterfly jackets and hundred-pleat skirts, the pleasure boats and brothels daily gather. “ O utlandish C ostume and S trange H ats ”   |   4 9

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Figure 2.2. This photograph of a luxuriously dressed Shanghai woman (ca. 1870) illustrates the densely layered aesthetic of this period. Albumen print, 21.9 × 16.5 cm. Peabody Essex Museum (Ph22.56). Museum purchase made possible by the Frederick Townsend Ward Memorial Fund.

(opposite) Figure 2.1. Pan Gongshou (1741–1794), Portrait of Wang Yuyan Drawing Orchids (Wang Yuyan xie lan xiang), 1790. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 111.3 × 41.6 cm, detail. Palace Museum (XIN 100935).

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One bun five hundred twists, two buns one thousand, the wrapped heads have all gone—the song, the dance, and feasting. With “toothache smiles” and “bowed waist gaits,” the city folk’s tall coiffures are admired across the country. The newly worked patterns have no basis, [and though] nowadays only the courtesans’ styles are emphasized, still those who wear “thin white silks and dark gray headcloths” do not heed them. Yuan uses historical allusion to shape the distinction between the fashionable courtesan clothed in “hundred-butterfly jackets” and the gentlewoman clothed in “dark gray headcloths.”23 Through such dichotomized conceptions, simplicity and plainness became associated with the frugal gentlewoman, and in turn, color and adornment became associated with the pleasure boats and brothels. Theoretically, this made it hard for either side to breach such associations, but in spite of the clear-cut distinctions laid out in discourse, in practice things were more complicated. “To Everything There Is a Season”: Fuyao and Appropriate Dress

Beyond simplicity, the most important aspect of morally correct dress was suitability: each member of society’s clothing should be appropriate to the season, occasion, and most of all, identity. But in an age where status had gone awry, where, as one Suzhou bamboo ballad put it, “[Ordinary] men dress up like dukes, [wearing] rank badge coats, dragon roundels, and jewel-topped hats,” the escalation of luxurious consumption upended social hierarchies.24 This was partly, of course, because many desired gentility. The Painted Boats of Suzhou (Wumen hua fang lu), a collection of courtesan biographies, tells of a visit to “Yu Fengxiao, who was ranked number two and lived in Shangtang. I recently got to know her and found her to be elegant without compare.” But when the writer visited, “she emerged from the curtained door . . . wearing plain clothes that were nothing like the fashions.”25 Here, the courtesan’s rejection of fashion serves to assert desirability, sequestered like the guixiu gentlewoman.26 Such was the hegemony of literati values that simplicity itself could become fashionable: “The women dress just like Suzhou, even wearing short sleeves and magua jackets so as to be up-to-date [shishi] . . . recently the trend is for elegant simplicity—engraved patterns and carved threads are increasingly no longer favored.”27 The need to dress according to one’s status upon celebratory occasions comprised another complicating factor.28 As Furth observes, while the economic structure of the joint family system meant that stability depended upon controlling individual excess, at the same time, “extravagance in sons was mirrored by ritual display in elders”: if frugality was necessary to ensure the family’s continuity and stability, so too was expenditure necessary to identify and honor ritual participants.29 Ceremonial occasions presented sites of discordance, where debates constellated as to how Confucian 52  |  CHAPTER 2

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ritual should be properly marked: tenets such as “clothing and food for weddings and funerals and such events should be calculated according to the family’s means” were both conveniently flexible and problematically ambiguous.30 Objects like the cloud collar highlight the conflict between virtuous frugality and the ritual participation presented by commercialized material culture. Though critics hit back at this phenomenon from the late Ming onward, what distinguished the mid-late Qing period was the expanse and professionalization of handicraft producers. Critics bemoaned women’s luxurious ways and the excessive styles worn for celebrations, even as specialist guilds formed to provide embroidered objects that would appropriately mark the occasion, and artisans gathered at households preparing trousseaus and weddings.31 Thus, as historians like Huang Jingben and Chao Xiaohong have noted, the debate on luxurious spending focused not upon the gentry or the wealthy but rather groups like servants, prostitutes, and actors, who were seen as transgressing their lowly position.32 The 1881 dowry-list for a Zhejiang gentlewoman, Yu Qingceng, provides insight into the kinds of luxurious wardrobes possessed by the gentry (appendix 1). Titled A Complete Record of One Hundred Blessings and One Thousand Fortunes (Bai fu qian xiang zonglu), the dowry was given to her by her grandfather. Yu Yue (also Quyuan Laoren, 1821–1906), a prominent official, scholar, and educator from Zhejiang, was anxious to provide for his granddaughter, in part to make up for his failure to provide properly for his oldest daughters.33 It contained eighty-nine garments, including a court cape, court skirt, ao jackets (ten winter, thirteen summer, nine lined), short jackets (one winter, five lined, four summer, three lined, three unlined), sleeveless jackets (three winter, two lined, one summer), shan jackets (ten summer), skirts (nine winter, seven summer), one chenshan undershirt, and six danshan undershirts. The list does not detail adornment, but it testifies to the expanse of a privileged Qing woman’s wardrobe: ten winter jackets in ten different colors, fabricated in Ningchou silks, Huzhou crepes and carved velvets, and lined in different furs and wool; they would be worn with a choice of nine skirts, in a rainbow array of colors. Rather than focusing on women like Yu Qingceng, the commentary on luxurious dress was explicitly concerned with preserving social hierarchies. Hence Zheng Zhiqiao bemoaned: “Once people could distinguish one another. But lately people’s dispositions grow more luxurious each day . . . do not permit servants and hired laborers to wear silks: this will prevent a gradual change toward willful, unrestrained [behavior], and also maintain a distinction between upper and lower status.”34 The framework through which these writers understood social confusion in dress was an ancient concept called fuyao, which made a causal association between the wearing of outlandish dress with political and ecological upheaval: “clothing that is inappropriate to one’s status will bring disaster to one’s person.”35 The earliest use of the term is the second century bce “Great Commentary to the Book of Shang” (Shang shu da zhuan): “Those whose appearance is not respectful are insufficiently solemn, their arrogance is their culpability, frequent floods are their punishment, for “ O utlandish C ostume and S trange H ats ”   |   5 3

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in its extreme this is evil, and then fuyao occurs.”36 However, the most cited source, still referenced in the Qing dynasty, was the History of the Han (Han shu), dating from 111 bce: “When customs are dissolute and disrespectful, then rituals change and political upheaval easily occurs, thus the wearing of strange and frivolous dress creates fuyao.”37 The theoretical basis of fuyao was derived from theories of Yinyang and the Five Elements (Yinyang Wu Xing), forms of correlative thinking: scholars Li Jianguo and Meng Lin have argued that detailed records of fuyao began as an extension of disaster theory (zaiyi zhi shuo), to provide commentators with political tool.38 But this ancient concept was still being deployed well into the Qing dynasty. A poem by Xia Zhisheng anthologized in The Bell of Qing Poetry (Qing shi duo) in 1869 explained: “(Fuyao) is commonly considered ‘evil.’ It is caused by people’s minds; the evil of clothing [is] the depravity of people’s minds. It begins from the hats and shoes, the jackets and collars.”39 Fuyao tells us much about the environment in which Qing women engaged with new or fashionable styles of dress. Often used to describe clothing seen as strange in some way, sometimes involving transgressions of gender or sexuality, it could also be used to position popular styles in opposition to traditional dress, in particular styles deriving from outside Han Chinese culture, the so-called barbarian clothing (hu fu) from Central Asia and the northern borders.40 Xia Zhisheng’s second explanation cast back to this: “You are not a Uighur, so why is your cap so sharply pointed? You are not in battle, so why is your jacket so short? These things foretell ominous events.”41 And it tended to focus on popular clothing styles worn by women, as described in Xia’s third explanation: “Lined shirts of lotus red, single pleats in eggplant purple. [The women] stared at on the road know no shame.”42 Fuyao can be understood as connecting three larger tenets of belief: first, the idea that women’s behavioral role in familial and domestic arenas was implicated in the country’s security and well-being. Threats of disorder related particularly to women as daughters-in-law, external agents who might potentially compromise the son’s allegiances and destabilize family harmony.43 Second, fuyao was the product of a society that invested garments with political implications. The sleeve-band, for example, was something of a touchstone for those who concerned themselves with changing fashions; many a Ming and Qing writer, preoccupied with social distinction, obsess over sleeves.44 Witness Henan magistrate, Shen Chiran’s concern (act. 1768–1783): “Ten years or so years into the Qianlong reign [1745], women in my province wore jacket sleeves about eight cun wide, later they widened to one chi, and gradually they widened to one chi, two cun, and after twenty or so years [1755] they were as much as one chi, five or six cun, nearly like that of Buddhist and Daoist clothing.”45 Both robe lengths and sleeve widths were understood as part of a regulated clothing system that originated with the earliest and most culturally important of garments, the shenyi, a long, enveloping robe whose pattern measurements were described in The Book of Rites (Liji).46 These sartorial parameters were one way in which the first 54  |  CHAPTER 2

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Ming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang (1328–1398), sought to recover the authoritative rituals of Han officials: “Officials’ robes should fit their bodies. The length of those worn by civil officials is one inch from the ground. The sleeves should be long enough to reach the elbows when they are folded back from the end of the hands; they should be one foot wide, with cuffs nine inches wide.”47 Such political associations meant the width of a woman’s sleeve-band, even while participating in fashion, carried references well beyond. Finally, fuyao was conceptually concerned with genre distinction, hence it tended to be invoked in response to clothing that moved genres, blurring the line between foreign dress and Han Chinese dress, or mixing elements of mourning dress into secular dress, for example. Zhejiang official Jin Anqing (1817–1880) wrote: “In the Jiawu [1834] and Yiwei [1835] years, the styles suddenly changed to plain simple robes and jackets, [people] used white thread to wrap the hair-bun, but if asked, there was no death of a close relative [with which one could explain this], therefore this is a sign of great disorder: is this not what the ancients called fuyao?”48 The recurrence of fuyao commentary within Qing debates about luxurious ornamentation and fashionable dress reflects unease about the conflict between social boundaries and status expression. This textually authoritative idea opposed the creation of new styles of dress and bound women’s dress to the country’s political fortunes. Clothing judged to be fuyao would incur the wrath of the heavens, resulting in ruin for the individual wearer, their community, or even country. Nineteenth-century Shanghai writer Hu Shiyu described how “Jiangsu men all like to wear their decorative purses and shoes in white, and . . . furthermore, I have seen courtesans in the provincial capital wear waistcoats made from white mourning dress fabrics [trimmed] with colorful tasseled fringe—I have no idea who initiated this style.” But he tied these styles to the ecological disasters that beset the Jiangnan region during the 1830s: the floods, crop failures, and famines that caused widespread suffering in Nanjing, Suzhou, and Songjiang. And to understand how sartorial oddities led to natural disasters, he turned to historical precedent: “Consider how Emperor Wu of Wei [r. 216–20] sought to imitate the ancients [by wearing] a deer hide cap, and lily shapes cut from fine silk. Or the last emperor of the Northern Qi [Emperor You Zhu, r. 570–77], whose palace women liked to order palace maids to fold white Yue cloth into a forehead [cover], shaped like a zhua headdress with white cover. Many considered these actions to be signs of terrible mourning—so-called fuyao. Those involved in today’s tragedies should study [these cases]!”49 Hu’s insistence on the relevance of Emperor Wu’s deer hide cap may convey to the reader a concept specific to Chinese history. But morality is always a conservative force: art historian Eileen Ribeiro describes the “constant battle against the introduction of new styles, which may be thought of as ‘immoral’ until their novelty is muted by the passage of time.”50 And there are intriguing parallels between fuyao and fashion theories like “zeitgeist theory,” the assertion that fashions echo or predict social, “ O utlandish C ostume and S trange H ats ”   |   5 5

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political, and cultural change. Moreover, the asserted correlation between material consumption and environmental disaster was not incoherent: Jiangnan’s natural disasters partly derived from ecological degradation caused by displacing rice cultivation with lucrative cash crops like mulberry, cotton, and tobacco. Certainly, Hu was not alone in tying extravagant consumption to food insecurity and land degradation. In Fujian, official Guo Qiyuan called for frugality—“exchange gauze and fine silks for cotton cloth”—as moral imperative. If instead, “in their clothing and headwear, they continued to compete in extravagance with Suzhou, Hangzhou and Yuezhou [Shaoxing],” then there could be no hope for the Fujian people.51 Extravagant Jiangnan and the Immortality of the Fashionable Trimming

As Guo’s warning suggests, Jiangnan was the preeminent model of unrestrained consumption and outrageous clothing. Jiangsu scholar-official Gong Wei (b. 1704) described the “customs of Wu County” as “the most luxurious in the entire world.”52 And it was Suzhou that drew the ire of critics of the fashionable border, the most heavily criticized of nineteenth-century clothing trends. As described by nineteenth-century Shanghai writer Hu Shiyu: When it comes to luxurious women’s clothing, none can surpass Wu prefecture. The clothing borders were already broad, and then they added the “devil borders” [guizi langan]. Recently, fairly broad styles are called “lotus border,” “peony border,” and such names. Those especially wide styles near two cun are called “banner borders” [qi bian]; woven in bright shades and golden threads, they compete in the new and contend in the glorious, and do not consider the cost of workmanship. We only need study the [ancient text] Treatise on the Shenyi Robe [Shenyi tu] to find the making of “trimming” [yilan] is just like today’s “robe edges” [yibian]. And “border” [xiangyuan] is actually the so-called devil borders; for the devils [i.e., foreigners] produce borders of this style and apply them on top of the edging, so it appears as if it is a trimming, but really it is just superfluous to an existing sickness, and indeed where will this luxury end? Is it not a willful waste!53 Though Hu’s drawing of historical precedent was intended to ridicule the new trimmings, he was right that the bordered edge has featured in Chinese dress for thousands of years. Excavated textiles and carved figures from Warring States (475–221 bce) tombs show that the most prestigious silks—colorful, patterned, heavier weaves—were used to border garment openings, hems, and cuffs.54 Practically, this strengthened the garment edge. Symbolically, it communicated elite privilege: luxurious textiles were controlled by the royal workshops and given as gifts to officials as signs of honor and 56  |  CHAPTER 2

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prestige—hence the term “collars and cuffs” [ling xiu] to refer to people in leadership positions. But while the ornamental edging of luxury silks delineated rank and status during the early imperial period, some two thousand years later it was a moral issue laden with associations of the wasteful woman. The mounting outcry correlated to an aesthetic increasingly taken to an extreme. While bordered components had always been used to emphasize the layered aesthetic of Chinese women’s clothing (the manipulation of length, silhouette, and opening: sleeveless waistcoat upon long robe, knee-length jacket over long skirt, bordered trousers beneath), during earlier periods robe trimming was restrained. In the Song dynasty (960–1279), garment edges featured narrow black bias-cut binding or thin borders of decorative damask or brocade, as seen in the elegant gauze beizi jacket preserved in Huang Sheng’s tomb, edged with gold-printed and patterned fabrics displaying the latest floral designs from Southern Song Fuzhou.55 During the Ming dynasty (1368– 1644), trimmings were still minimally applied; extant objects—for example, those of the Kong family collection—feature narrow and singularly applied trimmings.56 And even during the early-mid Qing period, as seen in figure 1.3, the decorative value was derived from fabric patterns and contrasts; by comparison trimmings were minimal. Besides images or objects from the nineteenth century, the difference is dramatic: the openings and edges of the garment are greater in proportion and importance, particularly the patterned bands at sleeve and collar, which appear in different widths and styles, multiple arrays of weaving, and embroidery. The stiffly layered and weighted feeling of this period’s clothing is evident in the photograph of the richly adorned Shanghai woman (see fig. 2.2). As long and loosely layered jackets and skirts became more structured, and robes, skirts, and sleeves widened in cut, the emphasis moved away from the ground fabric to creating decorative harmonies and dissonance through borders, sleeves, and collars. Decorative trimming no longer comprised a minor note, but rather the fashionability of the entire dress object. This feature of late Qing women’s dress has often been scorned, most wittily in Zhang Ailing’s (1920–1995) assertion that “Chinese fashion designers of old” failed to understand that “a woman is not a Prospect Garden,” the large and elaborate garden in the novel The Story of the Stone (Shitou ji), also known as The Dream of the Red Chamber (Hong lou meng).57 The popularity of the border has also led some to argue that fashion in Chinese dress consisted of only these details—openings, fastenings, collars, hemlines, sleeves, splits—rather than the basic silhouette or cut that is often viewed as fairly static.58 But there were also shifts in silhouette: the stiffly worked lines of the late Qing jacket and skirt possess a quite different feel to its more unstructured Ming predecessors. Beyond our present focus on modular accessories such as collars, borders, sleeve-bands, and appliques, late Qing women’s fashion was ultimately a combinatorial interaction between distinct garment shapes; varying parameters like sleeve-widths, collar-heights, and garment lengths; and modular components like borders, trimmings, and appliques. “ O utlandish C ostume and S trange H ats ”   |   5 7

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The fashion for the border has also led to zeitgeistic interpretations, fuyao-like deployments of the period’s styles as metaphor for the increasingly overburdened Qing dynasty. Yet it would be mistaken to particularize late Qing fashion in its emphasis on trimmings and accessories. Mass consumption of fashion in early modern Europe also began with small outlays; objects like handkerchiefs or purses formed an integral part of fashionable dress that not only carried lower price tags but were also inherently consumable, requiring regular replacement.59 Though Chinese and Western fashion systems are typically treated as discrete systems, it bears emphasis that the border is playing a similar function in nineteenth-century Suzhou as the ribbon of nineteenth-century London, Paris, or Philadelphia. In all of these places, trimming provided an affordable, accessible means to update garments, a cheap and cheerful consumer item that even poor women might buy into.60 Like the fashionable ribbon of early modern Europe, its popularity ultimately derived from a rise in commercial production of trimmings. And, like the fashionable ribbon of early modern Europe, male commentators criticized female consumers of these objects for their luxurious, money-wasting ways. The singling out of sleeve-bands and trimmings as a battleground for controlling fashionable dress is something seen across the country, from southern Han gentlemen to the Manchu emperors. As seen in the previous chapter, the imperial court considered southern fashions a dangerous influence on court women.61 Throughout the nineteenth century, they sought to create more frugal forms of court consumption. For example, the Xianfeng emperor (r. 1850–61) produced an edict in the second year of his reign, declaring: “The clothing of the Empress, pin, guiren, and changzai is excessively magnificent, and does not concur with Manchu customs.” The edict further commanded that neither “ribbons” nor “wide turned-back cuffs” were to be permitted “on fur and gauze changyi, chenyi robes, narrow sleeve chenyi, or narrow sleeve chenxiu.”62 He ordered his edict hung in the empress’s palace and the consorts’ apartments so they would see his words at all times. The emperor was echoing many others who honed in on the fashionable trimming as representing out-of-control consumption that wrought a path of social confusion. One of the best descriptions of the look of these beribboned women comes from the late Qing novel Tales of Heroic Lovers (Ernü yingxiong zhuan). Auntie An (An Taitai) is described as wearing the following outfit: . . . a fish-white “one hundred butterfly” design chenyi jacket, outfitted with a deep red changyi outer jacket patterned with two “five bats holding longevity characters” woven with scenes of earth [dijing’er]. With narrow sleeves and a slender figure, her entire body was covered—definitely not with those wide embroidered and woven borders, but rather those pig-tooth ribbon and dog-tooth borders, and those foreign-style inlaid edgings, which use three widths [fen] of dark-blue 58  |  CHAPTER 2

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gold-leaf narrow borders, opened up into those ribbons of thirteen sections worked inside and out in gold thread, together with a pair of two fold-back sleeve-bands. . . . She was nearing fifty years of age, and yet she looked no more than forty.63 Like the “populuxe goods” of eighteenth-century France, these new consumer goods—trimmings, purses, and appliques—were distinguished by a cheapness that enabled middle-class consumers to challenge established consumption hierarchies.64 Thus, commentators, like Henan magistrate Shen Chiran (act. 1768–83), saw the fashion in terms of an urban style gone viral: At first women’s jackets were all center-fastening, without any kind of trimming, but recently they have enlarged the lapel into the large lapel style, and no matter whether shan or ao jacket, skirt or trousers, all are edged with several strips of blue silk ribbon, and [those jackets that] are not are called “rural-style.” At first only the city women were like this, but gradually even women in the countryside and market towns also all consider this beautiful. So now the cost of a single jacket and skirt has increased by a half and luxurious beauty has become a trend. Things were not like this at the beginning of the dynasty.65 Quantity defined the border aesthetic: the more numerous the borders, the wealthier and more socially prominent the wearer appeared. Hence the terminology for multiple border groupings—“three borders and three trims” (san xiang san ya), “three borders and five trimmings” (san xiang wu gun), “five appliques and five pipings” (wu xiang wu gun), and even, urban myth had it, “eighteen borders and trimmings” (shiba xiang gun)—for these suggested that the wearer could afford numerous layers of extravagantly bordered garments, even if, in fact, an extravagant border was all the wearer could really afford. It was especially this fact that worried critics—that even the poor or hard-up might waste their money on such frivolities. In magistrate Li Guangting’s (fl. 18th c.) early nineteenth-century collection of rhymes from his native town Tianjin, he satirizes the fashion-loving woman’s desperation: “The time for receiving clothes is here, and again no clothes, the woman patches her garments and searches for strips of cloth; at the bottom of the jar is just half a sheng of rice, she sells this to buy three chi of dog-tooth patterned ribbon.”66 Such critiques were informed by socially defined notions of what was necessary or fundamental in dress, and what was frivolous or superfluous. Again, it was likely acceptable for a gentlewoman like Yu Qingceng to possess a dowry containing 174 embroidered objects, including eight lengths of skirt insets, sixteen fan cases, sixteen four happiness purses, sixteen eyeglass cases, ten betelnut cases, ten smoking cases, four tobacco pouches, ten name-card cases, ten ink brush cases, ten handkerchiefs, “ O utlandish C ostume and S trange H ats ”   |   5 9

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ten mirror-cases, four pairs of socks, six pairs of knee socks, and more; but for a less privileged woman, the fashionable accessory was viewed as diverting food money into fripperies.67 Notably these critiques were also informed by ideas about purchasing clothing rather than making it: “But the cost of making one jacket is very high, for each button, border, trimming, and inset must be in the newest styles, and the old styles must be rejected, and all must be extremely ingenious and finely made.”68 Writers on the topic were preoccupied with cost and, in turn, the producers who provoked such expenditure. The commercial producer’s role is a central theme in one of the lengthiest expositions on the fashionable border, Mongolian official Yu Qian’s (1793‒1841) Items of Instruction (Xunsu tiaoyue). Yu Qian had been sent to Jiangnan as provincial governor in 1839. That year he wrote about Suzhou consumption and began by admitting that luxury consumption derived first and foremost from a region dependent on handicraft production: It is suitable to esteem elegant and orderly clothing. In the Wu region, [there is] silk tapestry, Gu embroidery, gold thread-weaving,69 and metal inlay,70 and each of these handicrafts have their workshops and retailers who depend on this for their livelihoods. Originally blanket prohibitions were unnecessary, but this material consumption cannot exceed proper limits, not only because material resources should be cherished, but also because the inappropriate leads to disaster. For example, men wear forest-green shirts and don small green hats, fastened with embroidered, patterned belts. And others wear even more despicable styles. And as for womenswear, their jackets come in the pipa [lute] style, center-fastening style, qin-instrument style, big-lapel style, hundred pleats filled with patterns, foreign-printed [cotton], piece of jade, and many other styles.71 Since Yu Qian acknowledged that the handicrafts enabling these fashions were supporting countless livelihoods, why did he view commercial production as a drain on society? Partly because, for all that the status of merchants and artisans had improved during the Qing period, nineteenth-century China remained a political economy in which some considered “to create wealth there is nothing better than encouraging agriculture and repressing commerce.”72 But also because, for Yu Qian and others, material consumption could not be increased ad infinitum—limited resources should be cherished, and to do otherwise was to tempt disaster. And this was precisely the problem with the fashionable border: “But the cost of borders is even more extreme: there are the so-called white banner border, gold and white devil edgings, peony piping, coiled gold embroidery, and other variations. By itself, the cost of silk for a single jacket and skirt is fixed, [but] the cost of the trimming [may be as much as] double 60  |  CHAPTER 2

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this. Furthermore, the jacket constitutes six-tenths [of the price], and the borders occupy four-tenths. If this is so, then only six parts of the jacket is silk.” In Yu’s eyes, the fashionable trimming had inverted the entire value system of dress, leading to a material consumption that was not only extreme but no longer focused on the primary silk material. As one bamboo ballad astutely commented: “Keep buying Chengdu brocades and Suzhou silks, wide borders with flowery patterns [all] love the Suzhou [styles]. [Nowadays when one] buys a common set of light jacket and collar, [they] only see the wide borders, not the silk beneath.”73 And yet, as Yu ruefully admitted: “These new styles initially seemed bizarre, now it is hard to change back.” In order to counter the decline in public morality, he pleaded with women that “the clothing of poor women [lit., thistle hairslides and cloth skirts] better reveal feminine virtue.74 What need is there for fine clothing and gorgeous makeup?” He continued in this filial line: “One’s own money does not come easily, how can one willfully spend so extravagantly? The money spent could provide clothing for the whole family. The [cost of ] making one outfit for a wife or concubine would be better offered to one’s parents. . . . If the elder generations wear blue rags, but in the boudoir they compete in magnificence, then the more splendid they become, the more immoral it becomes!” In conclusion, Yu, like Hu Shiyu, invoked historical precedents and ecological calamity to emphasize the serious implications; if this extreme consumption was not scaled back, then ultimately this would surely incur or provoke natural disaster: “In this ministry, over the last twelve or thirteen years I have seen how the Wu region encounters natural disasters of floods and famines that lead to worries and cold. Stores of wealth are easily exhausted by everyday extravagance. The Book of Changes says, ‘Those who are not frugal will lament.’ . . . I hope that my people will not forget our poor if they become wealthy. Be elegant without indulging in luxury. Dismiss the fashions. . . . Be sure not to wear ‘outlandish costume and strange hats’—the wise sneer at such habits.”75 In emphasizing limited resources and the need for people to reconsider their allocation of those resources, Yu Qian’s commentary bears comparison to his contemporary, Nanjing writer Guan Tong (1780–1831), who also appealed for frugal consumption. Unlike Yu, Guan’s 1833 essay, “Discussion on Forbidding Foreign Goods” (Jin yong yanghuo) focused upon the consumption of foreign goods—Norwich camlets and Manchester metalware—“marvelous and ingenious [but] entirely useless” Western objects that were tempting his people. But like Yu, he saw the problem as acute: “The population grows day by day, and so do obscenities and luxury; they accumulate with the officials who integrate with wealthy merchants, causing country and people difficulties.” Like Yu, he turned to the ancient sages to offer a different vision, in which “clothing was systemized, and those who made marvelous and licentious objects punished.” And like Yu Qian, his paternalism sought to protect the poor from such easily accessible articles: “Even the poorest wanted to exhaust their money following the trend for foreign goods.”76 “ O utlandish C ostume and S trange H ats ”   |   6 1

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Moralistic discourse on female consumption was common throughout the early modern world. In colonial America, male writers regularly blamed women for consumer excess, personifying luxury as “she”—effeminate, soft, and weak. They viewed women’s acquisition of goods as an assertive declaration of agency, intimidating as expression of personal independence.77 In early modern England, notions of moral dress were grounded in religious thought, particularly the link between outward appearance and inward soul, and the preoccupation with not emphasizing sexual anatomy. Still, like China, this discourse was driven by notions of propriety, frugality, and social mobility through sartorial emulation.78 Compare for example, Chinese reactions to the fashionable trimming with the English balladeer commentary on the “top-knot”—a flamboyant and fashionable female accessory made of ribbons and lace.79 This fashion provoked numerous sermons circulated in illustrated satirical ballads and pamphlets, which, like the Chinese moral commentators, thundered against female “insolence and impudence,” casting back to “women of old” who did not chase such fripperies. They too emphasized the importance of maintaining social differences through dress, and they too sought to associate this unworldly style with natural unrest (in this case, a spate of monstrous animals born in countryside farms). But two noteworthy differences separate these two cases otherwise so similar in their misogyny: the sermon’s Christian religious framework and the fact that in England, the interests of clothing workers were also represented in the ballad print—they defended both top-knot fashions and excessive consumption as an economic virtue lubricating the local economy.80 In mid-late Qing China, a proconsumption lobby seems to have little voice, other, that is, than the novels, bamboo ballads, and bannerman songs that enticed readers and listeners with their descriptions of fashion: “Gold thread purses with narrow hanging ties, gauze gowns and fan nets in the freshest colors. . . . Collars and belts a strip of seat-otter tail, hat brims lined in marten fur.”81 Shopping and the Confined Gentlewoman

Collectively, the features discussed here—the idealized poles of the Confucian paragon’s virtuous frugality and the southern courtesan’s embellished adornment; the correlation fuyao established between new styles and socioenvironmental upheaval—created an atmosphere, in many respects, hostile to fashion. The case of the fashionable border raises the question of how far this moral discourse inhibited the Qing fashion system. To be sure, this genre of writing should be understood first and foremost as a strategy enabling individuals and their families to occupy and maintain social privilege. The photographs and drawings of Madame Zeng that intersperse her self-published biography text convey two kinds of images (fig. 2.3): on the one hand, a frugal elderly woman making her own clothing—robed in plain cotton, simply sketched in the bare lines of the woodblock print; on the other, a splendidly upright member of society wearing luxuriously trimmed dress, as befitted her station, postured and photographed 62  |  CHAPTER 2

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a Figure 2.3. (a) A woodblock print of Madame Zeng making cotton clothing with her daughter, contrasts with (b) a photograph commemorating her fortieth birthday. Reprinted from Zeng Jifen, Chongdelaoren bashi ziding nianpu. b

to maximize the details of that dress. Both were simultaneously true, and each image served different functions: women of Madame Zeng’s station were privileged in their choice, able to wear both plain and splendid dress. But the text emphasizes the former image and assertions of consumer restraint made a claim for moral authority that benefitted her powerful family: an age-old method for justifying privilege through industriousness and frugality, to declare not just a higher moral ground but a higher social ground. These moralistic viewpoints represent extreme perspectives on consumption, written in genres encouraging idealistic positions rather than everyday practice. We cannot know how widely the views promoted by Madame Zeng’s father were echoed by his contemporaries, but not every elite woman’s father wrote family instructions, not every gentlewoman had her clothing choices so strictly circumscribed. The self-selection intrinsic to these sources—only those men sufficiently concerned about women to espouse their conservative positions would write the family instructions that survive and allow us any understanding on this area—makes it hard to determine the prevalence of their position.82 It is necessary to distinguish between women from different “ O utlandish C ostume and S trange H ats ”   |   6 3

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social levels and geographical areas: lower-level gentry, elite officials, wealthy merchants, artisans, tradesmen, farmers, laborers, and street workers—the experience of women from each of these families differed in fundamental ways. Family instruction author Lu Yiting (act. late 19th c.) forbade the women in his family from visiting temples to burn incense, but descriptions in bamboo ballads and novels suggest that, in practice, many women did so.83 Surviving prints show women interacting with men in urban locations (fig. 2.4). Perhaps this is the exception proving the rule: the image ties public appearance to a sexually informed representation. The women—in beribboned and brightly shaded jacket and skirt—attract the attention of male workers in the street; distracted by their beauty, the tea seller overshoots the hot liquid. Still, the gulf between these “competing representations” begs us to nuance the high ground of mid-late Qing moral discourse. Bamboo ballads and vernacular songs temper the idealized surface of family regulations and gazetteers, offering insights into the material lives of those outside the officials and scholars whose representation dominates the textual canon.84 But so too do the objects. Many features of late Qing fashions—multiple borders, embroidered surfaces, figural content—would have been viewed unsympathetically by the commentators cited here. For someone like Madame Zeng’s father, this decorative vision of dress was inherently immoral. But it is these features that characterize nineteenth-century trends, and it is these kinds of objects that fill museums. For all these caveats, the words of such authoritative male writers surely meant that the decisions women made about dress—whether these related to making, commissioning, purchasing, or wearing clothing—were bounded by these viewpoints. Women had to navigate the boundaries expressed by moral discourse to participate in the Qing fashion system. In particular, the positioning of commercially produced objects against neo-Confucian virtues of thrift and self-reliance created a hostile relationship between female consumers and professional producers. Though the ability to commission others—whether house servants or urban workshops—to produce clothing was a status symbol, the discourse surrounding producers, shops, and markets was highly conflicted. Commercially embroidered objects embodied references to the fashionable woman, whose image was entangled in the amorality of the Jiangnan courtesan houses. This tension is most visible if we consider how women shopped for fashionable dress. Appendix 2 compiles names of Suzhou shops selling textiles, clothing, and accessories, from four mid-Qing sources: (a) the Qianlong-commissioned scroll Prosperous Suzhou (Gusu fanhua tu) by artist Xu Yang (ca. 1712–after 1779);85 (b) the related Qianlong Southern Inspection Tour Scrolls (Qianlong nanxun tu);86 (c) the “List of Street Shops [Seen] in Suzhou Prefecture, Jiangnan Province” (Jiangnan sheng Suzhou fu jiedao kaidian zongmu), based on Japanese interviews with Chinese merchants during the Qianlong period;87 and (d) Suzhou writer Gu Zhentao’s list of early nineteenth-century shop brands in Revealing Things Obscured from the Wu Area (Wumen biaoyin).88 None 64  |  CHAPTER 2

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Figure 2.4. In this Yangliuqing print, the two young women, both with young sons, attract the attention of a tea seller and a knife sharpener, causing them to lose focus on their jobs. Scenes on a Street Corner (Jietou feng xi), lateQing. Dai Lian Zeng printshop, printed and painted, 34 × 54 cm. Reprinted from Feng Jicai, Zhongguo muban nianhua jicheng, Eluosi cangpin juan, 262, with permission from the Zhonghua Book Company.

of this material should be read as a transparent record of Suzhou commerce; each has its own agenda and discursive commitments, but collectively they portray a city at the height of its commercial glory.89 For Suzhou textile producers, the eighteenth century was a time of shop openings and guild-hall foundations. Since Suzhou was also known as the center of mid-Qing fashions we might expect to find some evidence of the shops responsible for perpetuating these styles. But while officials are well supplied by the numerous shops selling robes, hats, and boots, there are no examples of shops selling women’s dress. In Prosperous Suzhou, for example, the scroll portrays fourteen silk shops, five dress-making shops, and nine accessory shops, almost all of which focus on court and official dress goods: the “Shop selling fashionable court boots,” shown next to a dress shop, the “Studio of three entrances court shoes,” or “Hat retail and trade, selling court hats, silk court hats for winter and summer, serving our customers without fail” (appendix 2, table a).90 In all four sources, court and official dress goods are highly visible, for example, “Court dragon robes and rank badge gowns woven to order” and “Studio of heavenly marvels capital-style court hats.” Meanwhile, women’s clothing and accessory shops are entirely absent. It is hardly surprising that official dress occupied such a substantial proportion of the urban retail environment. Within the wider environment of expanding consumption that stimulated Ming and Qing commercial textile and garment production, “ O utlandish C ostume and S trange H ats ”   |   6 5

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both state and private workshops were supported by court and official needs.91 This market was relatively stable, large, and expanding due to the purchase of positions so prevalent in the nineteenth century. And officials necessarily spent considerable sums upon their dress. Late Qing official Li Ciming (1830–1894) kept an expenditure diary for the years 1862 through 1889. The clothing costs he detailed—for himself and women in his household—included garments, tailors, and accessories. Acquiring suitable attire was evidently a sizeable expenditure; in 1863, he spent half his income (266 liang) on his wardrobe expenses (more than 127.2 liang). Official garments like dragon robes were expensive; in 1870 he spent fourteen foreign yuan on a dragon robe.92 Moreover, the dependence of clothing producers and retailers upon official rank-holders resulted in increasing interactions between merchants and officials to invest in in production and establish shops in Suzhou.93 Nor were these theoretically regulated objects necessarily immune to fashion.94 With the increasing purchase of official positions, status-gaining sartorial complements like hat finials or rank badges became available to those with sufficient money, connections, or philanthropy. Shop signs often advertised their production of “fashionable court hats” or “fashionable court boots” (see appendix 2): their stylistic change became increasingly determined by shifting rules of taste that judged some consumer behaviors vulgar and others refined. In Appadurai’s framework, they shifted from a “coupon” or “license” system (restricted to those socially “licensed” to possess them) to a “fashion system.”95 Still, if the presence of official dress shops makes sense, the absence of women’s dress shops in a region famous for fashionable women’s dress also requires explanation. How did Qing women buy commercially produced trimmings, appliqués, or purses? How did they commission the tailors to make up their jackets and skirts? How did they peruse the latest designs for the embroidered shoes and purses? Though imperial-commissioned urban scrolls omitted images of women’s dress shops, it was a more popular subject matter in exported watercolors. One album in the Peabody Essex Museum details a Guangzhou (Canton) clothing shop, New Profit (Xin Li Hao) in some detail. Women’s jackets with decorative sleeve-bands and pleated, embroidered skirts hang on the wall, advertising the shop’s capabilities (fig. 2.5).96 Textual descriptions corroborate this image. Reverend John Henry Gray, who lived in Guangzhou through the 1860s and ’70s, wrote: “several shops [selling] . . . amongst other articles, richly embroidered silk shoes for the use of Chinese ladies”; “a large store in which richly embroidered Chinese robes of silk are on sale. This shop is called Jin Ta’s New Clothes Shop . . . we were enabled to form a tolerably correct idea as to the nature and value of the dresses which, by Chinese gentlemen and ladies, are, respectively, worn.”97 But when it comes to the issue of shopping, both visual and textual records imply absence: in the Peabody Essex album, the only people in the shop are men: throughout the entire album, the only women are servants running errands. This is an export object projecting an image of China to satisfy foreign markets, but it does not appear unrealistic. Western visitors to China often noted the absence of 66  |  CHAPTER 2

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Figure 2.5. Clothing shop (chengyi dian) named New Profit (Xin Li Hao), from an album of Canton shops, showing women’s garments hanging on either side of the entrance and silk and cotton fabrics piled high on the shelves at left and back, ca. 1825. Gouache on English watercolor paper, 27.9 × 36.8 cm. Peabody Essex Museum (E8067.15). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. B. Rionda Braga, 1977.

shopping as activity for elite women: “We never meet ladies going shopping in China; goods are brought to the house for them to choose from, or they send a servant to make purchases for them.”98 “A stranger in China may go from one store to another every day of the year, and never meet a female face in any of them. Men, none but men, he sees at every turn.”99 Again, we cannot generalize—each geographical location and social sphere possessed different local cultural expectations. In Beijing, women were more visible consumers: historian Weikun Cheng concluded that they “constituted the bulk of clients at temple markets.”100 American travel writer Eliza Scidmore described the “Four pailows silk-shop,” where “in the mirrored salesroom near the street Manchu matrons, in their flowered and gold-barred coiffures, deliberate over the stuffs for their future finery.”101 But purchases were still often undertaken from the home. In his memoir, the Manchu prince Pujie (1907–1994) recalled how his female relatives purchased Manchu-style accessories from craftsmen who delivered their wares.102 Should the concept of domestic confinement—that elite women and those aspiring to elite status should remain within the home, and not frequent public places like temples or street shops—be understood as an obstacle to fashion?103 “ O utlandish C ostume and S trange H ats ”   |   6 7

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Scholars have brought a range of interpretations to the putative norm of domestic confinement. Some have suggested that this norm allowed Han gentlewomen to inhabit a space untethered by political dress regulations, a place of autonomous expression.104 Others have viewed separate spheres as prescribing discursive ideals, rather than capturing real-life gender interactions, and emphasize private-public continuums rather than sharply demarcated spaces.105 Recent scholarship demonstrates that women did leave the domestic sphere: for religious and seasonal festivals, to visit scenic and leisure spots, or to travel together with fathers, husbands, and sons to official appointments.106 Temple and garden locations offered relatively legitimate sites of worship, nature, and exploration; increasing female visibility in such spaces created more opportunities for sartorial interactions.107 This mobility was more accessible further down the social ladder. Reverend Hampden C. du Bose, a missionary based in Suzhou during the mid-nineteenth century, commented on the “comparatively more freedom awarded the gentler sex in this city. . . . Those of the middle class go about the streets a great deal and visit the stores, and also at times, the pleasure gardens.”108 Urban rhymes evidence the kinds of women with the freedom to participate in Suzhou’s festive outings: maids (“Seven li on the road from Tang Heng west to east, the maid-servants tread crimson in a soft cloud”109) and fashionable courtesans (“The women freshly made-up elegant and light, their glossy thrice-coiled coiffures. They wear the latest shuang fei bin hairstyles. . . .”110). But for gentry women, restrictions—particularly in their youth when public appearance would cast aspersion on their virtue and hence marital value—limited access to shops and markets outside the home, thus determining the development of women’s fashions. Though notions of gendered spheres may have meant female consumption was controlled by women rather than being dictated by male tastes or finances, there are enough fictional and factual records of women’s jewelry and clothing being commanded by men, to suggest a need to complicate this positive reading.111 The normative confinement of women to the home did not prevent consumption, but it certainly shaped it. This impact is most evident in regard to two features of Qing fashion: mediation and modularity. In order to acquire commercially produced, fashionable objects, elite women relied upon go-between figures: merchants, relatives, and peddlers. Sometimes these were sympathetic male relatives; for example, in The Story of the Stone, Tanchun asks Baoyu to buy her a nice painting (she will embroider him a pair of slippers in return). Baoyu seems somewhat mystified by the appeal of urban shopping, telling her: “In the trips I make to bazaars and temple fairs, whether it’s inside the city or round about, I can’t say I ever see anything really nice or out of the ordinary. It’s all bronzes and jades and porcelain and that sort of stuff. Apart from that it’s mostly dress-making materials and clothes and things to eat.” Tanchun is little interested in such wares (“Now what would I want things like that for?”) and Baoyu hardly wishes to regulate her dress consumption, but other women surely encountered moralizing fathers, brothers, and cousins, confining their clothing consumption.112 68  |  CHAPTER 2

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Women also relied on a whole range of merchants, peddlers, and tailors. The British explorer Emily G. Kemp described a visit to Sichuan: “The missionaries who were entertaining us kindly sent out to a silk merchant to bring pieces for us to select from, as it is not very usual for ladies to go out shopping in this city.”113 Confinement created a need for in-home purchase—visits by hairdressers, tailors and peddlers.114 Male peddlers were a common sight, as recorded by Guangzhou artist Guan Lianchang (act. 1840–70) in his painting of a peddler selling purses and daily articles (Guangdong hebao tanzi). Female peddlers were regarded with some suspicion, classified within the san gu liu po (three aunts and six grannies), a controversial, oft-forbidden grouping of female labor roles.115 Yangzhou moralist Shi Chengjin cautioned against letting such women enter your home,116 and Madame Zeng’s father forbade her mother from purchasing wares from itinerant sellers who visited the house.117 Their controversy derived partly from their ability to traverse both inner and outer spheres, allowing confined women to buy accessories and cosmetics, as well as sell their own embroidered and woven products. Modularity is the second mark of this impact. Hence the emphasis seen in late Qing fashion upon certain areas of the dressed body—borders, accessories, and coiffures—whose fashionable significance was far more easily realized than a tailored object of dress (which depended upon the skills of male tailors, who had to maintain a respectable distance from the female body). In Gu Zhentao’s listings of Suzhou’s best shops (see appendix 2, table d), the only ones devoted to female consumption sold small objects like accessories or cosmetics: “Zhu Kewen’s scented cosmetics,” “Wu Longshan’s scented powder,” and “Huang Guoben’s handkerchiefs.”118 The moral discourse analyzed here directs us to understand such trends in terms beyond aesthetics. Women’s access to commercially produced clothing and accessory objects contributed to the focus of Qing fashions upon small components like the collar, sleeve-band, and border sets, “modular accessories” easily purchased from a shop or peddler and assembled at home. Two jackets from the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art afford insight into how modularity evolved to meet this consumer system (see figs. 2.6 and 2.7). Both were collected in 1909 by Gertrude Bass Warner (1863–1951) and her husband, keen traveler-collectors in Asia and important donors to the University of Oregon’s art museum. She purchased them from Madame Silva, a wealthy Belgium lady living in Shanghai, so it is plausible that they originated from the same shop or dealer. They bear obvious similarities: both cut with curved “wide sleeves” (guang xiu), made from cream silk damask and lined with peach-orange silk (unfinished, awaiting the addition of sleeve-bands), both feature matching cloud collars and ruyi-shaped side borders. Still, these similarities mask significant price differences: the first jacket (fig. 2.6) features ten scenes from The Story of the Stone worked in the laborious and expensive kesi technique, and accompanied by border scenes from The Legend of the White Snake, also worked in kesi.119 The second jacket (fig. 2.7), meanwhile, contains scenes from The Story of the Western Chamber, worked in a less fine and cheaper embroidered gauze technique. “ O utlandish C ostume and S trange H ats ”   |   6 9

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Figure 2.6. White silk woman’s jacket with ten roundel scenes of The Story of the Stone in polychrome silk and gold thread kesi (tapestry weave); the brown-silk trimming set (cloud collar, side and bottom trimming) contains scenes from The Legend of the White Snake. 1875–1900. 95.2 × 172.8 cm, Murray Warner Collection of Oriental Art, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (MWCH45-11).

Presumably they were aimed at different customers, both wishing to participate in the trend for the figural roundel cloud collar jacket (studied in more depth in chapter 4), just at different price-points. Another pair of garments—a sleeveless beixin vest and a jacket—though styled differently, share similar patterning (figs. 2.8 and 2.9). Both are in aniline green silk, a popular color in the last decades of the century, and feature roundel scenes of military romances: the man and women spar with feathered hats and spears flying (fig. 2.10). They are from different collections, the Hangzhou Silk Museum and the private collector Alex Bass, and the lack of provenance obscures their origins. But the comparison is striking: the shared stances of the hero and heroine pair, the low balustrade in background grounding the scene, and the floral rock motif separating the figures. The differences between the two objects—different embroidery colors and roundel framing motifs (stylized shou longevity characters versus bats)—likely informs upon customer decisions. Embroidery shops offered different quality grades (see appendix 3), derived from the longer tradition of professional painting workshops, which had evolved a process of producing paintings of a same theme for a range of customers by adjusting the number of figures, architectural elaborations, and palette complexity according to the target price. Determining decorative content and corresponding price 70  |  CHAPTER 2

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Figure 2.7. White silk-gauze woman’s jacket with scenes from The Story of the Western Chamber embroidered with silk polychrome floss and gold thread. 1875–1900. 91.7 × 151.2 cm. Murray Warner Collection of Oriental Art, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (MWCH45-12).

was likely a negotiated process between customer and workshop using pattern-books and samples. But evidently embroiderers knew how to tailor the stitch complexity and pattern density to their object’s requirements: one embroidery manual noted, “categories such as grasses, floral sprigs, bees, butterflies, animals, and birds—all can be added, subtracted, or increased according to your judgement.”120 Figure 2.5 depicts the kind of shop where such negotiations took place. Chengyi is sometimes translated as “ready-made dress shop,” but shops like this were unlikely to possess either the funds or status to maintain inventory, and of course, prior to the Republican period, the absence of standardized sizing prevented the possibility of ready-to-wear garments. The rise of the secondhand dress shop would have increased the circulation of finished clothing (though social attitudes restricted higher ranking visitors to this shop).121 Larger tailor shops, especially in big cities, perhaps carried sample stock for customers to select, along with fabric, color, trimmings, for the tailor to make up according to their measurements. Tailors would have also worked through silk shops, an image of which is shown in figure 2.11. Behind the front sales counter, another room contains silks packed into cubicles: the shop specialties are listed on the boards on the back and side, and notably they include both fabric and clothing, such as “Ten Hundred Pagoda Tree Hall silk,” “Fashionable crepe,” “New-style “ O utlandish C ostume and S trange H ats ”   |   7 1

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Figure 2.8. Woman’s short sleeveless jacket in bright green silk, with embroidered roundels of military romances and trimmed in white embroidered silk borders. Late nineteenth century. Alex Bass Collection.

Figure 2.9. Woman’s shan-style jacket in bright green silk, trimmed in white embroidered silk borders and embroidered with roundels of assorted scenes, including military romances. China National Silk Museum, Hangzhou (0057).

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Figure 2.10. Roundel detail from figure 2.8 showing a sparring male and female couple wearing theatrical costume. Alex Bass Collection.

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Figure 2.11. A well-stocked silk shop, Dazhang’s Silk Damasks, Gauzes, Crepes, Camlets, Cocoon Silk [lit.] Trade and Retail (Dazhang Hao Lingluo Zhousha Yusha Jianchou Yeke), from a watercolor album of Canton shops, ca. 1825. Gouache on English watercolor paper, 27.9 × 36.8 cm. Peabody Essex Museum (E80607.19). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. B. Rionda Braga, 1977.

patterned silk,” “Gu-style embroidered cape,” “First-class court clothes,” and “Civil and Military Rank Badges.” Modularity has long featured in Chinese handicraft production. But modularity also popularized fashion, democratizing what had once been courtly and elite consumption. Even if you could not afford the slate-blue satin gown finely embroidered with delicate floral roundels from the Palace Museum collection (fig. 2.12), you might be able to stretch to a set of eight floral roundels, with large peony surrounded by prunus, lotus, and butterflies, embroidered in bright shades of rose, poppy, and blue in the latest seed stitch (dazi) style, and adhered to paper backing to be easily appliquéd to one’s gown (fig. 2.13). Embroidered appliqués, borders, and accessories of this kind brought the world of fashionable dress much closer to the ordinary consumer, but their existence was predicated upon both the moral discourse of women’s dress and the commercialization of textile handicrafts that aggravated this didacticism.

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Figure 2.12. A yellow inventory slip attached to this robe reads: “Qianlong fourteenth year [1749], first month, twenty-first day, one slate-blue satin-lined woman’s gua robe embroidered with multicolored eight floral roundels.” Palace Museum (00044494). Photography by Sun Zhiyuan.

Figure 2.13. Eight appliqué roundels of a large dark pink peony, surrounded with prunus, lotus, and butterflies, embroidered in seed stitch and gold couching, on paper backing. Average diameter 22 cm. Royal Ontario Museum (962.67.36a-h). Gift of Miss Adelaide Lash Miller, 1866–1933.

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3 Workshop, Boudoir, Village PRODUCING EMBROIDERED DRESS

A loom without a pattern is not a loom, clothing without embroidery is not finished. Bao Gao (1708–1765), in “Bamboo Ballads from Old Suzhou, Twenty Verses”

W

hereas late-Ming styles were patterned primarily through weaving, from the seventeenth century onward, embroidery began to prevail as dominant patterning technique. Embroidery dominated the Qing material environment to an extent that is hard to fathom from the perspective of multimaterial twenty-firstcentury life: requisite in weddings, funerals, festivals, it was applied to every imaginable object within genres of dress, furnishings, art, and accessories. Fully embroidered dress was of course a luxury. Sir John Barrow (1764–1848), secretary of the Macartney mission, listed extremely high figures: an official’s “common dress” cost “ten pounds; of ceremony about thirty pounds; and if enriched with embroidery and gold and silver tissue, between two and three hundred pounds.”1 And even the lower figures seen in the 1911 Hunan embroidery-shop price list in appendix 3—eighteen yuan for an embroidered skirt, eight yuan for an embroidered cap—would have been beyond reach for the majority.2 But the fashion for the embroidered accessory suggests that embroidery was available not only to elites, but also to the middling classes—merchants, clerks, artisans—particularly in silk regions. |   7 7  |

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Commercial production and distribution networks enabled this escalating consumption, yet most histories of Chinese dress have not broached issues of production or marketing, in contrast to European studies, where reconstructing such networks has been a major current.3 Where production has been considered, the focus has been on reasserting the elite nature of imperial dress—dragon robe passports, for example.4 But the consequences of constructing a history of Chinese dress absent of commerce is most felt in our understanding of how people outside the court consumed embroidered dress. Though professional workshops produced the majority of Qing embroidery for both domestic and foreign markets, purchased for rituals, gift-giving, celebrations, and festivities, we know little about the individuals and businesses producing items such as “mandarins’ dresses or ladies’ tunics,”5 “richly embroidered silk dresses, for the use of play actors,” “covers as decorations for tables, and altars, or large banners as ornaments for the walls of ancestral halls.”6 This omission is partly due to museum narratives. Most twentieth-century curators avoided the idea that objects classified as Chinese art were produced by professional workshops. Commerce ran counter to the “trousseau narrative” of Chinese women’s dress, the idea that all Chinese women produced their own wardrobes. From the earliest catalogs onward, curators espoused an idealized vision of the Chinese gentlewoman sitting in her courtyard garden amid nature, embroidering her trousseau, slowly materializing her virtue through a skilled act.7 Hence descriptions of commercial production by foreign observers were conflicted: “The crape shawls, for the manufacture of which the Chinese are so justly famous, are embroidered at the town of Pakkow, in the province of Kwang-tung [Guangdong]. I was much surprised on visiting this town to find work so really beautiful, executed in houses so mean and dirty as are those that form the streets of Pakkow.8 Missionary John Henry Gray’s (1828–90) sense of dissonance (how could such an ugly environment produce such beautiful objects?) exposes the ambiguity of nügong— caught between the two senses of “womanly work” and “women’s work.” The former is a gendered activity producing objects of moral and symbolic value; the latter produces commodities within the market economy.9 Disregarding commercial embroidery has ensured the prevalence of the “womanly work” side of nügong, the “trousseau narrative” that envisages Chinese women secluded deep within their chambers, immune from outside influences. This current in museum scholarship has contributed to the denial of a domestic commercial market for embroidery.10 A Eurocentric view of Chinese production underpins this view, yet most Chinese silk was produced for domestic consumption, not foreign export, and even after foreign markets rose in volume, exports were primarily raw silk, not silk fabrics.11 Foreign markets and merchants certainly changed producers and markets: Canton trade with European merchant companies and the 1842 opening of the treaty ports introduced new markets, tools (European needles and thread), and techniques (oil painting, photography). But these changes have obscured our understanding of producers and 78  |  CHAPTER 3

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consumers within the domestic market. Though the nineteenth century is oft framed as in decline in respect to material culture, it was during the mid-late Qing that dress objects were first produced in large quantities outside the home, in commercial workshops. Evidence from before and after the Opium Wars, including guild sources, local gazetteers, and the objects themselves, suggest thriving markets for embroidered dress. Evidence also signals that many features of early twentieth-century production—localized, specialized systems managed through intermediary agents—derived from existing systems that reoriented themselves toward foreign markets. In contrast to the collectors’ vision of embroidery—a highly skilled leisure activity for elite women—most of the embroidered articles preserved in museums are far more likely to have been produced commercially rather than in the boudoir. Reconstruction of the development of the commercial dress and embroidery industries shows how embroidery developed from female activity in the boudoir (produced as part of household economy or exchange in market) to organized commercial workshops throughout China employing both men and women. Since regardless of production setting all objects were produced by hand, it is difficult to distinguish professional work from amateur on stylistic grounds. Of course, many smaller accessories may have been produced by their wearers or produced by a friend or relation as a gift. Self-sufficiency in clothing production was much prized; weaving, sewing, and making clothes were central to women’s education, regardless of wealth.12 Doubtless, many women would have made clothes for themselves and their families out of want, necessity, and cultural expectations. But equally, many embroidered objects were produced by strangers entirely unconnected to the wearer, sold through commercial transactions involving urban shops, markets, and peddlers. A Zhejiang gentlewoman like Yu Qingceng (see appendix 1) did not make the eighty-nine objects of dress in her trousseau herself. The material complexity of the embroidered garments in this book suggest the work of a diffuse group of individuals, rather than the wearer. Commercialized embroidery and dress production was just one sector of the commodity economy that first flourished in the late Ming. The Single Whip Reforms (systemized between 1570 and 1580), which computed land taxes and labor services into silver, the flood of New World silver, later demographic growth, the eradication of corvée labor, increased credit access, and expanded transportation systems all combined to monetize rural economies, shifting state production to private enterprise and spatially widening markets. Local specialization in “rural petty commodity production” was found across numerous sectors (food, beverages, porcelain, printing, flowers), particularly in Jiangnan and the Pearl River Delta. But this explosion of regionally specialized commerce was seen most of all in the silk and cotton textile industries, both of which depended upon a large urban and rural labor force, employed through varied labor arrangements, including a putting-out, merchant capital basis.13 In the Lake Tai region around Suzhou, locations developed specialties for different handicrafts and production stages: previously small villages became substantial market W or k shop, B oudoir , V illage  |   7 9

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towns and intermediaries between rural producers and regional markets, vital nodes in the network of Suzhou’s prosperity.14 The dependence of rural households upon the sale of domestic handicraft goods was ultimately a dependence on female labor.15 Peasants did not give up subsistence farming: they reallocated family labor to maximize production of both sericulture (or cotton) and rice. As such, families depended on women doing part-time labor (fu ye), in a pattern similar, in some respects, to the protoindustrialization of eighteenth-century Europe: rural, household-based manufacturing of textiles and other consumer goods for extra-local markets, mainly by women and children, which absorbed the underutilized labor of landless or land-poor households.16 Female labor has always been central to Chinese economic history. The term nügong has shifted across space and time, but from early China onward, women’s work was defined by textile production.17 Historian Bret Hinsch argues the early pairing of men and agriculture and women and textiles demonstrate that “spinning, sewing, weaving, and dyeing” became socially normative practices, ways of performing gendered identities.18 Hence the stress in the classic texts of women’s education on women’s work. But the late Ming rise of the market economy placed increasing emphasis upon the industrious wife and daughter as the key to household wealth and honor: statecraft and epitaphs extolled the ideal working woman who led her household in industrious spinning and frugal consumption.19 Though scholars have widely recognized the importance of women’s work during the Qing period, they have reached very different conclusions to its implications, partly because of the difficulties of quantifying the productivity and share of female labor.20 Women were increasingly marginalized in textiles, displaced to work in less skilled and respected tasks.21 Yet in regard to embroidery (also a means of remunerative labor for women), because scholars have followed the museum narrative of embroidery as a highly skilled, leisurely practice confined to upper-class elites, we know little of women’s position in the industry. Ideas about proper female and male labor permeated the embroidery industry, from the male-fronted urban guilds, downward to the urban workshops and male employees, and finally the female embroiderers. Women fill the many stories idealizing values around needlework in Chinese history: Lady Zhao, the wife of Sun Quan (182–252), the King of Wu (present-day Suzhou region), caused marvel by “embroidering the countries onto a square piece of silk,” detailed with “the five sacred kingdoms, the seas and the rivers, the cities and towns, the armies and battle formations.” Or Lu Meiniang (ca. 791), a Guangzhou woman who embroidered seven volumes of a Buddhist sutra onto a small handkerchief, “the strokes as fine as a hair, no larger than a half-grain of rice, and not a single character missing.”22 From the earliest minutely worked chain-stitch tigers of the Chu Kingdom, embroidery was esteemed as the most highly skilled and gendered of textile labors: it’s necessary dexterity and command over expensive materials gave skilled female practitioners great value in the labor market. And yet women are near-invisible in 80  |  CHAPTER 3

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Chinese economic history, particularly in commercial handicrafts, where the evidence is fragmentary and frustrating.23 Reconstructing production systems requires reading what Dorothy Ko calls the “silences and gaps” that “are in themselves valuable clues as to how . . . contemporaries regarded the female artisan and her work.”24 It also necessitates looking not only to guild regulations and local gazetteers, but also ephemera like advertisements, commercial wrappings, and object inscriptions, as well as later material like Republican-period commercial surveys and women’s biographies, to understand how commercialization confounded the intimate associations between feminine virtue and embroidered dress—both the “facts of economic activity” and “its representations.”25 The Embroidery Guild: Gender and Handicraft Networks

In the early seventeenth century Ye Mengzhu described the shift from woven patterns to embroidered ones: When I was a child, the most beautiful of women’s unregulated clothing that I saw were patterned using kesi silk tapestry or weaving; the collar, sleeve, lapel, and belt were trimmed with kid fur and gold. If embroidery [was used] then the colored threads were applied directly making it coarse and weighty; patterned brocades were used lightly. Later, these woven and tapestry patterns were abandoned, and instead embroidery was used to adorn damasks and gauzes. This embroidery imitated the style of the “Dew Fragrance Garden,” using silk threads of dyed hues—it was increasingly exquisite.26 His account singles out technological factors: the growing lightness of embroidery threads, enabling embroidery to be applied to lighter fabrics, and the increasing availability of silk threads in varied hues. Improved thread technology was also highlighted in a 1631 gazetteer that discussed “Changes in Embroidery” alongside changes in other forms of material culture: “In the past there was embroidery floss [rongxian)] and kesi tapestry. But nowadays embroiderers separate the silk thread to create a naturalism [xiesheng] like that of painting.”27 The ability to finely split and tint silk thread was critical to enabling the popularization of embroidery: where late Ming embroidery was a luxurious technique, “only applied to the lapel strip, the belt, or sleeve-band,” by the early-mid Qing, styles “featured entirely embroidered roundels.”28 Ye also singled out the newly fashionable Gu embroidery [Gu xiu]. Dew Fragrance Garden (Lu Xiang Yuan) was the Gu family’s Songjiang estate where, during the mid-seventeenth century, their embroidery achieved nationwide repute. Headed by the family patriarch, Gu Mingshi (1508–1588), a Jiade period official, three women in this cultured family used embroidery to create art and provide an income that the W or k shop, B oudoir , V illage  |   8 1

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Gu men increasingly failed to do: Miao Ruiyun, concubine of Gu Mingshi’s son Gu Jiying, who first established the family reputation; Han Ximeng (fl. 1634–41), wife of Gu’s grandson Gu Shouqian, who developed Gu embroidery; and Gu Yulan, Gu Mingshi’s great-granddaughter, who consolidated and expanded the style.29 Their ability to do this depended upon the idealization of boudoir embroidery (guige xiu)—the educated beauty sewing in her boudoir, as talented as the literati painter. Imbued with this setting, their embroidery was transfigured into art: signed by the embroiderer, merging literati imagery and calligraphy, endorsed by collectors and tastemakers, infused with cultural capital.30 Their primary innovation was to use embroidery to recreate paintings and calligraphy that used imagery and stitchwork to make an explicit connection with late Northern Song pictorial embroidery.31 Thus, the standard narrative locates the genesis of Gu embroidery in the spring of 1634 when Han Ximeng first acquired an album of Song and Yuan paintings and was inspired to translate them into embroidery.32 This account was later gently satirized in The Story of the Stone, when the novelist tells of the latest sensation, a Suzhou girl named Hui Niang, “an accomplished amateur painter” who “embroidered only occasionally for her own diversion and not to make money.” Described in the model of Han Ximeng, market demand leads many to copy her style, and when Miss Hui dies at a tragically young age, literati acclaim turns her embroidery into an art form of “unlimited” price.33 Cao recapitulates key aspects of the Gu embroidery narrative: training in calligraphy and painting, use of classical models, object rarity, market imitation, and ostensive lack of commercial intent that might taint artistic integrity. In fact, Huang Yifen’s scholarship has shown that commercial viability was long part of the Gu women’s agenda, and that they engaged in embroidery to support themselves and their families much earlier than assumed.34 In so doing, the Gu women facilitated a legitimate means by which both gentrywomen and less privileged women could support their families. They also sparked a commercial industry staffed by men. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Gu-style embroidery became steadily more commonplace; it was no longer boudoir embroidery, but commercial embroidery (shangpin xiu, shi xiu, fang xiu) practiced by men and women.35 As a mid-eighteenth-century local gazetteer described: “The common people all learn Gu xiu to make a living, rather like [they once practiced] weaving and the like. They split the thread and use fine needles like the tip of a brush. More than half are male workers.”36 Expansion was also found in the product range: the gazetteer listed Gu-style embroidery screens, paintings, and clothes.37 This development was found across Jiangsu Province and beyond. By the Qianlong period in Louxian, near Songjiang, “people both in and outside of the prefectural city practiced this [Gu embroidery].”38 But arguably Suzhou was the primary beneficiary: as its repute spread, Gu-style embroidery became stylistically entwined with Suzhou embroidery: by the mid-Qing Suzhou was known as the “embroidery market” (xiu shi).39 Suzhou already possessed a reputation for embroidery: a late Ming gazetteer 82  |  CHAPTER 3

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distinguished it as “fine and elegant,” more sophisticated than other regional styles.40 Suzhou’s commercial embroidery industry was also bolstered by its reputation as China’s fashion center, the reputation of Suzhou dress producers spread across China as commercially produced handicrafts became more accessible.41 Tailor shops became increasingly commonplace over the course of the late Qing, particularly in cities.42 The employment of tailors and embroiderers was no longer only for the wealthy, nor solely upon special occasions. Sociocultural factors interacted with increased consumption to create specialist production categories: producers of officials’ clothing gained from the increase in numbers of those “licensed” to wear official clothing; theatrical costumers (xi yi) profited from the growth in regional theatrical troupes;43 and the entire sector benefitted from a widened participation in celebratory ritual that necessitated burial clothes (shou yi; lit., longevity clothes), used-clothing sellers (gu yi), and religious clothing.44 As clothing producers increased in number and range, handicraft guilds were established, collective communities of tailors, hat-makers, and sock-makers. Though informal communities existed earlier, handicraft guilds formed later than that of native place guilds or textile trade guilds; their founding stele dates cluster around the mid-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as demonstrated in appendix 4, which details the formation of dress- and accessory-related guilds.45 The earliest example is the Suzhou tailor guild (chengyi gongsuo), whose 1898 regulation stele opened with this statement: “We are all engaged in the business of making clothes and we previously had a guild. It was created in the Gengzi year [1780] of the Qianlong reign, in the place of Zhengsantu, north of Jin and Chang.”46 The mid-late Qing grouping reflects the growth in luxury and everyday handicraft productions, as well as increasing official approval to allow gatherings of commoners. It also underscores the advantages that guild formation offered the craftsman and shop owner. Guilds served to define and constitute a community and to protect community interests by preventing market consolidation and price cutting, restricting entry, and regulating standards and wages.47 But charitable work was also critical to their remit, made necessary by “population growth, urban migration, and the development of the market economy.”48 Much of the guild data involves accessories: four-fifths of the guilds established in the eighteenth century were for accessory producers, like the Hankou sock makers or the Suzhou ribbon producers. Accessories brought commercially made goods closer to the ordinary consumer, an integral part of fashionable dress that was not only accessible, but also inherently consumable, requiring regular replacement.49 John Thomson observed how embroidered men’s dress shoes were “used by all except the poorest class.”50 Similarly, early Republic writer Zhao Ruzhen described the embroidered purse (xiang dai) as an essential accessory: “No matter whether rich or poor, noble or common, people of all walks of life, during summer days, none would be without a scented purse . . . even lower rungs of society felt compelled to purchase or W or k shop, B oudoir , V illage  |   8 3

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make them with care.”51 The accessibility of shoes, hats, fan-cases, collars, purses, and handkerchiefs is reflected in their frequent mention in gazetteer “regional goods” listings.52 Smaller-scale manufacturing was also made appealing by political and economic factors: the gradual decline of the state workshops; the rising costs of raw silk; the destruction caused by the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64), a fourteen-year civil war that decimated the wealthy silk industry districts in and around Nanjing and Suzhou, halving loom numbers.53 Though international markets aided a speedy recovery, increased competition and lessened opportunities for silk weavers likely contributed to the rising production of modular accessories, and hence the formation of professional groups during the nineteenth century. These factors explain why, though the Suzhou embroidery industry developed through the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, guild formation didn’t occur until the nineteenth century. During the Daoguang period (1821–50), a group of embroiderers gathered and purchased a temple site in Fengxi, near Feng Gate in east Suzhou (A; see map 3.1), in order to make offerings and help each other. The Fengxi temple was destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion, but by 1867, embroiderers in the west part of town had regrouped and gathered funds to build a guild hall in the Chang Gate area (B), near the Taohuawu printshops. The stele announced the Jinwen guild name and listed the sixty-five member houses and objectives of assisting member welfare, managing business, and making offerings to their guild god, Gu Mingshi.54 Another guild, the Yunhua Embroidery Guild (Yunhua Xiuye Gongsuo), for producers of embroidered accessories (lingjian Gu xiu), was also founded, in 1866, at a site not far from the Jinwen Guild, in Xiao Wang Jia Alley (C). This guild also worshipped Gu Mingshi as their embroidery ancestor (xiu zu).55 Why did both guilds worship the Gu family patriarch as guild god? The Jinwen Guild stele portrays the decision as self-explanatory. The art of embroidery had come to Suzhou from Songjiang, and according to gazetteers, it was either transmitted during the Yuan dynasty by Huang Lao (b. 1245?), the putative female transmitter of cotton technology, or else Gu Mingshi.56 While Suzhou already had a temple for worshipping Huang Lao, there was no such temple for Gu Gong, and so the Jinwen Guild was simply filling this gap. Two omissions in the foundation steles problematize this account. First, their emphasis upon Gu Mingshi ignored the preguild embroidery ancestor temples (xiu zu miao), of which Suzhou had two, both located near the silk weavers who, by the Qianlong period, dominated the east part of town.57 According to a late Qing local history, one was to the side of Shuixian Temple, between Gunxiu Fang Hang and Suanku Hang, near Feng Gate, built in the Qianlong period (D).58 Another temple was located to the side of Zhou Xiaoyu (Xiaozi) Temple (E), where they worshipped a local man, Gu Taitai, a Gu embroidery practitioner. After his death, people came to see him as a founder of Suzhou embroidery and went to the temple to make sacrifices to him, hence it became known as Embroidery Ancestor Temple.59 Both temples 84  |  CHAPTER 3

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Qi Gate

Lou Gate

TAOHUAWU PRINT WORKSHOPS

C

Tiger Hill

B Chang Gate

E

Feng Gate

D Xu Gate

A

Pan Gate

City Wall A. B. C. D. E.

Canal

Road

Daoguang-period embroiderer's temple, Fengxi Jinwen Embroidery Guild (Jinwen Gongsuo), 142 Xiatang Street Yunhua Embroidery Guild (Yunhua Xiuye Gongsuo), Xiao Wang Jia Alley Embroidery Ancestor Temple (Xiu Zu Miao), by Shuixian Temple Embroidery Ancestor Temple (Xiu Zu Miao), by Zhou Xiaoyu Temple

Map 3.1. Embroidery temple and guild locations in the city of Suzhou. Based on “Map of Suzhou Town” (Sucheng dili tu) in Zhang Yinglin et al., Suzhou gucheng ditu ji.

were destroyed in the 1960s, but a photo of the Shuixian Temple was included in a mid-twentieth-century Suzhou local newspaper report.60 These accounts reveal small craftsmen communities, who coalesced around male leaders, possibly relations or disciples of the original Gu family. From this perspective, the decision to worship Gu Mingshi begins to look more like gentrification, W or k shop, B oudoir , V illage  |   8 5

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necessary or at least advantageous for official approval. The Gu embroiderers established the profitability of embroidery; as the Suzhou trade had originated with Gu practitioners and largely continued in the Gu style, they adopted Gu Mingshi as the embroidery ancestor and adopted the term Gu embroidery to represent their own Suzhou embroidery. The second omission in the guild account is that of women. Today, Gu family embroidery is known primarily through the family’s three female embroiderers, not its male representatives. Nor is this a modern understanding. The late Qing Taicang scholar, Gu Zhangsi, also explained: “Embroidery is called Gu embroidery: the name derives from the Gu women of Ming dynasty Songjiang, who excelled at embroidery.”61 Institutionalization—the formation of male guild communities—apparently contained little space for the female embroiderer. But to really understand the decision to worship the Gu brothers, we need to look not to institutionalization but to commerce, and to understand how commerce impacted gender values, we need to look to guild records from elsewhere. Like Jiangnan, Sichuan experienced dramatic demographic growth during the mid-Qing, shifting the commercial core from the Chengdu plain to Chongqing in the Yangzi River Valley.62 Commercial embroidery started flourishing around this time. Chengdu bamboo ballads record the appearance of Gu-style embroidery and suggest a process of imitating Jiangnan styles: “For New Year’s buy lamps at Examination Alley, recently they have added Gu embroidery [styles] just like that of the Three Rivers [Zhejiang].”63 In the Chongqing metropolis, two embroidery guilds were established in the early nineteenth century. The Yongsheng Guild was actually first established in the mid-eighteenth century, but in 1842 it revised and republished its regulations, ostensibly to defend itself against perceived encroachment by a competing guild. Yongsheng members (bosses, craftsmen, and apprentices) were forbidden from accepting work from a member of the Three Emperors Guild, or even entering the Three Emperors Guild.64 In 1849, the previously unofficial Three Emperors Guild issued a regulatory code of its own, with typical regulations restricting apprentice numbers and guild membership. But one regulation was unusual: “Male artisans produce men’s work. Female artisans produce women’s work. It is prohibited for a woman to do half the work and then turn it over to a man to finish. If a male worker is discovered taking on work in this deceptive way without reporting it, he will be publicly penalized, and those concealing it will also be penalized.”65 Historian William Rowe, who first highlighted these regulations, observed that cheap female labor threatened male artisans, but since he followed Susan Mann in seeing embroidery as “women’s work of a particular kind, highly skilled, associated with upper class women of leisure . . . seldom commercialized,” he rejected what he considered the logical conclusion—that “emergent capitalists used semi-skilled female labor as a wedge to debase the artisanate and establish the wage-labor factory system” as early modern European merchants did. 86  |  CHAPTER 3

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Instead he hypothesized that since the Yongsheng Guild did not stipulate its constituents’ gender, perhaps the Yongsheng Guild were mainly female, and its members were working on the side to subcontract for their male rivals.66 Yet local authorities would hardly have tolerated the Yongsheng Guild’s public activities if they had been female. Despite women’s critical production role, guilds rarely mention gender, unless to forbid women from entering guild property or participating in guild religious activities.67 How then to explain the Three Emperors’ curious regulation? They were so concerned by female embroiderers’ corrosive influence that two further regulations widened responsibility to all workshop members: “[If ] the head of the workshop is found to be secretly giving work to female workers then he will be fined one thousand wen, and furthermore the workshop craftsmen will be fined five hundred wen.” “If masters within our guild observe male workers giving [work] to female workers inside a workshop and do not speak of it, then they will be fined two thousand wen.”68 The attention to targeting a workshop’s entire labor body suggests that, in seeking to expel female workers, the Three Emperors were promoting a different kind of workshop. Rather than the family workshop model whereby family members, male and female, worked side by side, the Three Emperors were protecting a craftsmen model whereby male members of the workshop—owner, master, and apprentice—worked side by side. And here, they were likely influenced by Guangzhou workshops.69 Unlike Suzhou and Chongqing, Guangzhou embroidery production was stimulated largely, though not entirely, by foreign trade. But there too, the success of the embroidery trade led to guild formation. By the late nineteenth century, one thousand embroiderers belonging to around fifty workshops were located around major streets like Zhuangyuan Fang and Xinsheng Jie.70 This caused migration from surrounding regions like Chaozhou and Foshan. According to one local gazetteer: “Embroidery is worked by Chaozhou embroiderers, and embroidery [silk] is also best from Cheng County cocoons; all consider male embroiderers as better than female workers.”71 Their workers were men like Xu Liancheng, great-grandfather of contemporary embroidery master Xu Zhiguang (b. 1937), who migrated from Panyu to Guangzhou during the late nineteenth century, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, to take up a four-year apprenticeship.72 Doing so required entering the embroidery guild, the Silk Orchid Hall (Qilan Tang), established toward the end of the Qianlong reign in 1793. Though no stele texts survive, they apparently had a guildhouse and rigorous regulations, particularly around gender.73 Male embroiderers (xielao) possessed much higher status than female embroiderers, who were forbidden from apprenticeships or entering the guild. So while Western visitors saw the “open shops where men and boys were working beautiful patterns on silk or satin in frames,” they didn’t see female embroiderers, who worked from home in the surrounding villages of Panyu, Shunde, and Nanhai.74 These women, apparently two thousand–odd by the late Qing, were kept out of the Canton workshops, firmly at the bottom of the production.75 Talented women like Woman Bai, who lived outside Shunde’s East Gate, taught many young girls—Shunde W or k shop, B oudoir , V illage  |   8 7

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had hundreds of embroidering households. After she died without children, her followers celebrated her birthday on the twenty-fifth day of the eighth lunar month and worshipped her as a teacher of women’s work.76 Histories of Guangzhou embroidery often claim their male embroiderers as unique, but workshop apprentices in Suzhou, Chongqing, and Guangzhou alike were male. What was unique about Guangzhou was how firmly they maintained the craft workshop model rather than the family workshop model, their own version of the protectionism seen in the Chongqing regulations. There were other forms of protectionism. Hunan’s Changsha Embroidery Bureau issued a price list in 1911 (see appendix 3), which shows an urban embroidery workshop’s typical offerings: formal dress, accessories, and ritual objects. Ritual furnishings were a key category for the embroidery workshop: longevity hangings (shou zhang), hanging scrolls, banner flags, door hangings, and table frontals that marked birthdays, anniversaries, shop openings, and guild gatherings. These ranged in size but could be very large. A deep crimson example, made in Guangzhou, is over four meters high (fig. 3.1). The central rectangle inscription details the occasion—the ninetieth birthday of Mr. Huang of Guangdong—and lists in gold thread the many well-wishers who contributed to the hanging’s cost. Above the inscription is the play The Insignia-Laden Bed (Man chuang hu), often chosen for longevity celebrations, and scenes of male friendship are depicted down both sides, as befits the occasion.77 Workshop production of such objects suggests the Chongqing regulations’ distinction between “men’s work” and “women’s work” was based upon size and weight. An 1881 customs report noted that in Suzhou men were required for the heavy work involved in “large hanging embroidery.”78 Similarly, an early Republican-era survey of Ningbo embroiderers divided them into those who produced shoes and small objects and those who produced dragon robes, theatrical costumes, and large pieces. The former was given the paper-cut pattern and bought the thread (zuohua); the latter used frames with already patterned material (zuobeng).79 This workplace distinction excluded female workers from larger, more profitable objects, which were difficult to embark on without the space of a workshop setting.80 Thus far we have seen how embroidery commercialization fundamentally side-lined female workers, a process exacerbated by guild formation and shop proliferation which facilitated male control of production networks. This tale fits in the wider early modern context, established by Bray, in which women were gradually displaced from more skilled textile tasks.81 And yet, returning to Suzhou, the guild worship of Gu Mingshi can be read not only as protectionism but also validation for the inherent conflict created through the masculinization of traditionally feminine practices. One of the key functions of handicraft guild gods was to legitimize groups long denigrated in literary and popular traditions. Craft guilds often worshipped historical or legendary figures, providing self-esteem and respect against the official ideology placing handicraft workers below scholars. Most clothing guilds worshipped the Yellow Emperor, who “allowed the upper and lower garments to hang down, and the world 88  |  CHAPTER 3

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Figure 3.1. Silk longevity hanging embroidered in polychrome and gold, headed by The Insignia-Laden Bed (Man chuang hu) framed by a four-clawed dragon, phoenixes, and Daoist emblems. Either side of the central inscription are other fictional scenes, separated with auspicious flowers and animals. 1863, Guangdong. H 436.9 cm, W 250 cm. Victoria & Albert Museum (T.159-1964).

was in order”: claiming heredity to this venerable tradition awarded a veneer of hegemonic literary culture to strengthen their trade.82 Tailors’ records demonstrate the need to self-aggrandize the male textile practitioner. Uniformly maligned, the tailor’s lowly status is clear from the “Gusu fanhua tu” data (appendix 2, table a), where the dressmaking shops either had no sign or a very plain sign, and a far humbler shopfront than the textile establishments. Louise Crane observed that the Beijing tailor “enjoyed little respect in the community, received a wage lower than that of almost any other craftsman, and was universally believed to be on the watch for . . . means of defrauding his patrons.”83 The dishonest tailor was a common trope in fiction and nonfiction alike; the honest tailor (yigong) was unusual enough to warrant a short essay by Li Guangting (1812–1880), who contextualized his assertion that “weaving and sewing is women’s work” with recourse to the classics—The Classic of Poetry, The Book of Rites—before observing that men were increasingly making clothes “now this practice is commonly called tailoring.” He then told of a fairly honest tailor from his hometown who produced good quality work, but he qualified: “Generally speaking, for men to do women’s work is to be in an inferior position; this is an act of evil that W or k shop, B oudoir , V illage  |   8 9

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will store up trouble for future generations.”84 Li’s remarks suggest that deity worship assuaged both the male textile practitioner’s lowly status and conflicts inherent to pursuing traditionally female activities. As men took on work that once belonged to women, masculinizing what was culturally feminine and domestic, and fraying the ties between textile work and female virtue, tensions emerged. A poem by mid-Qing poet Sun Yuanxiang (1760–1829?), titled “Male Embroiderers,” describes the men in workshops like those in Guangzhou: Fine embroideries and brocades harm women’s work, but nowadays this matter simultaneously harms our peasantry. All year round [farmers] cultivate crops without alleviating [their] hunger; it is easier to see the ingenuity of threading the needle. [But those who] thread a needle do not learn how to sew cotton clothing, [rather they] follow the times and learn how to embroider paired mandarin ducks. Young boys of fourteen or fifteen sit in rows by the red window as tranquil as girls, making wedding clothes for others, their tender hands only good for pressing gold thread.85 Robes embroidered with spring clouds five-inches high, the rousing fragrant breeze dispels one hundred folds. Fitting the bodies of slender and graceful beauties, long robes drag upon the ground covering their magnificent shoes. Filled with butterflies, threaded with pearls, “ten households of people” make clothing for one.86 Connect the dragon, complete the phoenix, colors light and dark; their intelligence is consumed, their young male minds exhausted. When the boudoir is full of spring breeze, in the third month these youths skillfully ply the embroidery needle. The embroidery needle’s eye no larger than a millet grain, [yet] the entire family’s clothing and food depends upon this. In the household, sisters paint pairs of moths, to adorn sleeves whose hands sit the entire morning.87 Filled with poetic allusions to the poor Tang dynasty textile worker, when commercial textiles first transformed fashion, the poem is fascinating for its victimizing narrative of young rural men, like Xu Zhiguang’s great-grandfather, forced to migrate to city workshops. It demonstrates how the inversion of “womanly work” was blamed upon women: the poet finds fault with the fashions that “follow the times,” but ultimately it is the luxury-loving “slender and graceful beauty” “whose hands sit the entire morning” that exhausts young male minds.

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As the market took over women’s work (embroidery as livelihood), maintaining the morally validated womanly work became ever harder. But associations between gender, labor, and virtue incited prejudices against both the woman who did not make her own dress and the male dressmaker who made it for her. The truly virtuous woman provided her entire family with clothing, as extolled by the late Qing Zhejiang writer Tong Qianmeng: “My respected deceased mother Mrs. Yao, wife of a high official, excelled at clothes-making, and even when she was over sixty years of age, still more than half her children’s and grandchildren’s clothes and shoes were produced by her good self. However, later generations could not reach her level and when [I] see tailor-made articles coming into the house, I understand why.”88 His remarks were annotated to a bamboo-ballad-style lament for the rise of the decoration-making needle over the clothing-making scissors and ruler: “The tailoring trade requires specialist skills and training; nowadays male workers have gradually replaced female needlework. In the lively boudoir the needle pricks the hand, no need for knife and ruler to study clothes-making.”89 Tong’s perspective on the rise of market-made clothes and embroidery was widely shared: “In the past things like shoes and socks were generally made by hand by women, nowadays, however, they get supplies from the market.”90 A moral ambiguity can be discerned in these critiques: who was to blame for the commercialization of dressmaking and embroidery? Had the market “taken over” this work, or had women “given over” this work to the market? The Embroidery Shop and the Maker’s Mark

The sixty-five names listed on the Jinwen guild stele donated varying amounts to the guild hall and likely encompassed a range of businesses, from larger-scale enterprises combining workshop and retail store—employing apprentices, pattern drafters, and managers—to smaller-scale shops who sourced embroidered objects from local embroiderers.91 The Foshan Gu embroidery guild included those who employed people in a workshop and those who purchased embroidery work from countryside women.92 Chinese embroidery historians distinguish between “embroidery workshops” (xiuzhuang ye), which produced objects for imperial and official consumption; “theatrical costumers” (xi yi juzhuang ye), which produced theatrical, religious, and ceremonial items like deity costumes (shen pao), banner umbrellas, and burial garments; and, at the lowest level in the pecking order, the “accessory embroiderers” or “scissors trade” (lingjian ye), which produced small objects like pillow-covers and purses.93 All produced embroidery, but they served fundamentally different consumers, and a primary means by which those consumers distinguished themselves was the maker’s mark. Objects in China have long been marked with producer names, location, and production context. Scholars have found brand-name labels assigned to goods spanning medicine, scissors, silk, and cotton, particularly regional specialties—words and images

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used to increase product recognition, create loyalty, and mark status.94 Literati consumers like Gu Zhentao (1790–?), who listed Suzhou’s most renowned craft producers in 1843—“Jin Fangzhai’s purses,” “Qing Yunshi’s collars,” “Sanzhu Tang’s fan-bags,” “Huang Guoben’s handkerchiefs,” and “Tian Qizhai’s buttons” (see appendix 2, table d)—were crucial mediators in shaping these brands.95 He classified Suzhou objects according to whether they were named by brand, geographical locale, craftsman name, or a combination thereof. His interest in doing so reflected both the value of such knowledge and the marketing function served by literati like himself. But despite this value and the widespread application of branding to shop signboards, object wrappings, advertisements, and loom marks, only a tiny amount survives to help us comprehend this once vast volume of commercial ephemera. Product names, first and foremost, reveal the kinds of markets objects participated in. Jiangnan’s silk and cotton products were sold throughout China, which necessitated targeting designs and measurements to different tastes. Regional merchants who came to Suzhou placed orders with different requirements.96 As one small Jiangnan town gazetteer described: “Patterned styles, light and heavy [weaves], must suit our northern customers’ tastes, otherwise the higher shops return them.”97 Beyond localized patterns and dimensions, silk names also had to achieve recognition to succeed in national markets. As silk and cotton weaves became increasingly varied in terms of colors, styles, and materiality, so naming became increasingly complicated.98 Of the various fabrics that featured in Yu Qingceng’s trousseau, several were regional specialties: Sichuan satin, Ningchou silk, Huzhou crepe. The watercolor scene of a Guangzhou textile shop—“Dazhang’s silk damasks, gauzes, crepes, camlets, cocoon silk trade and retail”—suggests various forms of naming (see fig. 2.11), including contemporary trends (“fashionable crepe,” “new-style patterned silk”), patterns (“ten-thousandcharacter-patterned crepe,” “three chrysanthemums gauze”), and locality (“Grand Cao [family] silk,” “Hangzhou silk”). The importance of place names highlights the importance of locale in premodern and preglobalized production: the evocative relationship between place and object was intrinsic to conceptions of “local products” (wu chan, te chan). More than making a strange product familiar by locating its production, producers and distributors used specialties like “West Lake crepe” (Xi hu zhousha) to reference locations made famous by the growth of domestic tourism—conveying associations of travel romance to augment object value.99 The dominance of place names in textile marketing also reflected an understanding of localized materialities fundamental to interregional textile markets. Pawnshop texts devoted considerable attention to articulating the material manifestations of local silk specialties: dealers had to differentiate between the embroidered dragon robes of Nanjing, Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Guangdong, or the gold thread of Nanjing and Suzhou workshops.100 Beyond the invocation of geography as marketing strategy, these texts demonstrate that materiality was understood as deriving from the workshops and craftsmen responsible for object quality. Indeed, 92  |  CHAPTER 3

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this geographically ordered knowledge was ultimately a defense against the proliferation of workshops and craftsmen: “In regard to debating silk and satin qualities, all depends on their place of origin, all can be divided into best and worst, expensive and cheap. For there are multiple workshop brands, and diverse craftsmen’s techniques, and moreover, measurements and dimensions are different, and furthermore, silk quality, dye freshness, and measure weights, all are different.”101 Workshop brands provided an additional shield in this wilderness of objects and makers, hence pawnshop dealers also detailed producer names upon their objects, for example: “Plain tribute satin, one pi, length four zhang four chi, width two chi eight cun, every chi is worth four qian, the edge has a De Yuan workshop mark.”102 Silk selvedges were a primary site for workshop branding. Extant silk lengths from private workshops in Nanjing and Hangzhou often feature loom marks on the selvedge; for example, one late Qing Nanjing brocade (yun jin) is marked: “Treasury gold [cloud brocade] genuinely woven by Fang Yongtai’s looms.”103 But much more information could be placed on the printed product wrappings (fangdan). Figure 3.2 shows an example from a Guangdong silk shop, He Shunyang, that includes the shop address (“Located in Guangdong Province, outside Chengxi Gate, in Dongshen workshop, turn at Guanyin workshop block [jiequ], in Ziyun Alley, we are open [there]”); lists specialties (“We have selected shining silk thread, Linghu silk thread, woven in all colors, very finely twisted thread, patterned and plain, eight silk. Ning silk screens, gauze, tribute satin, printed ramie silk crepe—all goods are genuine and fairly priced”); and emphasizes customer relationships (“The respected customer is invited to take a look, please remember the brand so as not to make a mistake”).104 Like woven silks, embroidery floss circulated in national markets and, by the nineteenth century, global markets as well. Several examples survive in American collections, where they were collected by Western traders from Guangdong shops. Like silk merchants, floss sellers used printed wrappings to appeal to the discriminating customer seeking quality and fair pricing. One example for the Renchang shop is as follows: “This shop has selected the finest Huzhou thread and Beijing floss, ingeniously colored in all shades, every single one bright and brilliant. . . . We respectfully ask the honorable customer to carefully bear our shop name in mind [when shopping].” As with the preceding example, it uses formulaic phrases to reference quality production and shop loyalty: Qili linghu for the best-quality Huzhou silk thread; the plea to “the esteemed customer to respectfully bear our shop in mind for patronage.” Other examples feature similar texts and designs, suggestive of the standardization of professional shop-sign production.105 Shops likely bought the floss up in bulk and then repackaged it under the proprietary name in colored groupings: “oil-greens,” “yellows,” “assorted colors.” The labels’ aesthetic demonstrates close ties to popular prints; for example, this mid-nineteenth-century printed floss label from the ROM collection (fig. 3.3) shows a round-faced scroll-carrying boy straight out of a popular print. W or k shop, B oudoir , V illage  |   9 3

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Figure 3.2. He Shunyang Shop printed paper-wrapping for silk textiles, late nineteenth century, Guangzhou. RISD (66.0165.55ab). (below) Figure 3.3. Folded paper printed in red ink containing small hanks of multicolored embroidery silk, labeled “The Old Shop of Heavenly Virtue” (Tian De Lao Dian) across the top. Right: “The shop’s address is in Guangdong Province, Cheng Tian Ping Street”; left: “When the customer is shopping, please bear our shop’s name in mind”; center: “Huzhou thread embroidery floss.” Midnineteenth century, Guangzhou. 16 × 11 cm. Royal Ontario Museum (981.45.1). Gift of Cora Ginsburg.

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What about embroidered goods? Despite the often emphasized Qing origins of the “four regional schools of embroidery” (si da ming xiu)—Jiangsu region’s Su xiu embroidery, Guangdong’s Yue xiu, Sichuan’s Shu xiu, and Hunan’s Xiang xiu—this place-defined collective was not marketed prior to the Republican period (when a national marketplace for embroidery did develop, centered around competition between Suzhou, Hunan, and Guangdong).106 With the exception of Suzhou embroidery, which had gathered a national reputation, most embroidered goods probably circulated in local or provincial markets, which proliferated over the Qing.107 By the end of the eighteenth century, there were at least twenty-two thousand local markets, most handling petty merchandise, much of which would have circulated within provinces, rather than along interregional trade networks.108 The following provides a good description of a local market selling dress accessories: Many Suzhou people congregate at Yao Family Alley, Lishe Bridge, Peach-Leaf Crossing to sell their goods. They sell handkerchiefs, snuff, wind bonnets, umbrellas, gauze and crepe collars, leather and velvet collars, pearwood clogs, piled platform shoes, perfumed cummerbunds, foreign-printed cotton sleeve facings, Gu-style embroidered sleeve facings, cloud collars, rain jackets, decorative knots, purses, tapestry purses, coral purses, precious-stone purses, decorative-knot fan cases, tapestry fan cases, coral fan cases, precious-stone fan cases, woven borders, embroidered borders, gold and multicolored foreign borders, marten fur-trimmed headbands, satin headbands, wigs, dangling adornments, knotted tassels, delicate flower buds, and all those goods that dazzle the eye and captivate the heart. Nine out of ten are boudoir objects, so the glamorous courtesans are very familiar with this place. Since the styles are all different, they also view these goods as most unique.”109 Markets like this presumably bought in local producers, confirming G. W. Skinner’s model of the macroregion as an integrated socioeconomic system. But not all embroidery circulated in small marketing communities with limited external interaction: both Suzhou and Guangzhou embroidery had wider markets. And though Skinner’s model predicts the creation of local specialties, fostering cultural differentiation, in the case of Suzhou embroidery, its reputation spread its style.110 Suzhou embroidery’s fame was founded upon a more general repute for fine handicrafts, hence the formulation: “Suzhou styles, Guangzhou craftsmen” (Suzhou yang, Guangzhou jiang), current from the Qianlong period onward.111 This reputation was founded upon individual craftsmen and their migration, but it was also encouraged by print media. These two early nineteenth-century Canton pattern books have different W or k shop, B oudoir , V illage  |   9 5

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a

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Figure 3.4. (a) An early nineteenth-century embroidery pattern book, Gu Embroidery Patterns from Old Suzhou (Gusu Gu xiu huapu); (b) along the spine of an interior pattern, a rural scene titled “Shepherd boy, singing and playing” (Mu tong chui chang), is a different title: Contemporary Art from the Green Window (Lü chuang shiyi). Ca. 1824, Rongde Tang, Guangzhou. Collection of Robert Morrison (1782–1834), School of Oriental and African Studies, RM c.500.y.2(11).

titles: Gu Embroidery Patterns from Old Suzhou, published by Rongde Tang in Guangzhou (fig. 3.4), and Figural Patterns from the Green Window, published by Fuwen Tang in Foshan (fig. 3.5). But both have very similarly designed covers and were likely previously sold with different titles: Contemporary Art from the Green Window and A Complete Book of Decorated Textiles, respectively, as seen from the titles along the spine of the interior pages. The use of “Gu embroidery” and “Old Suzhou” as revamped title keywords is suggestive of a marketplace in which Guangzhou embroiderers sought to profit from Suzhou embroidery’s renown, providing another dimension to Gu embroidery’s transmission. Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the term Gu embroidery became ubiquitous, found on shop names from Chongqing to Foshan and Shanghai to Changsha.112 Shops such as Guangzhou’s Yuetai Gu Embroidery Shop were described by missionary John Henry Gray as “prepared to sell their richly embroidered articles at most reasonable prices.”113 As Gu embroidery marketing became more common, the label was applied to an ever wider, often stylistically disparate, range of objects. A rare

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a

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Figure 3.5. (a) An early nineteenth-century embroidery pattern book, Figural Patterns from the Green Window (Lü chuang renwu huapu); (b) along the spine of the first page, showing the Heavenly Official holding a scroll “May the heavenly official bestow blessings” (Tianguan ci fu), is a different title: A Complete Book of Decorated Textiles (Jinxiu quanben). Fuwen Tang, Foshan. British Library (15255.e.12).

source, a nineteenth-century advertisement for the Guangdong Caiyuan Embroidery Shop (figs. 3.6 and 3.7), tells us of these producers’ rationale. Placed upon an embroidered screen (chaping), the advertisement would only be seen from the back. By this juncture, Guangzhou embroidery was well known for such densely embroidered pictorial furnishings, filled with birds or flowers stitched by the workshop ensemble. Like the floss and silk wrappings, the ad uses a handscroll format to detail the shop address on two side columns and shop specialties in the central text. These specialties span clothing and accessories for officials and upper classes (“civil and military dragon robes, pearl robes, court robes and court skirts, woman’s dragon robes and court vests”); art and domestic furnishings (“folding screens, longevity curtains, table covers, standing screens, small hats, hanging screens, kang curtains, eight-section screens, large and small zuo screens, central hall paired banners, sets of hanging scrolls, beam decorations, cushions, quilts, room curtains, lantern covers, hanging cloths”); and fashionable accessories (“all styles of sleeve bands, borders, skirt insets, palace-style cloud collars, banner-style embroidered goods. . . . Gu-style embroidered

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Figure 3.6. A wood-framed table screen (chaping) embroidered with birds, flowers, and antique motifs, Guangdong, nineteenth century. 40 × 51 cm. Palace Museum. Photograph by Ping Hui.

Figure 3.7. Advertisement for Guangdong Caiyuan Embroidery Shop on back of the table screen in figure 3.6. Right column: “The original shop founded in Guangdong, before Fantai, facing North Gate, is now open to the public.” Left column: “A branch shop has now been established in Guang Prefecture, in front of the entrance to Small Horse Stop, facing North Gate.”

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Figure 3.8. The furnishings in this 1864 portrait by Milton M. Miller (1830–1899), A Mandarin and His Wife, including the Guangzhou embroidered table screen, were key to constructing the visual idiom of studio portraiture of this period. Albumen silver print, 25.4 × 32.5 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, from William Pryor Floyd, “Hong Kong Views,” 1860s.

purses and court belts—large and small, Manchu and Han . . . fashionable trouser ties, feathers, round fans, borders, jacket borders”). It ends this lengthy text with a final bid for trustworthiness, signed by the “Caiyuan embroidery shop owner, He Zhu.” An 1864 photograph by Milton Miller shows one such embroidered screen, used to formally separate the “Mandarin and His Wife” (fig. 3.8). It was likely produced as a staged scene to satisfy the Western desire for Chinese “stereotype” photographs. Wu Hung’s insightful analysis of Miller’s costume portraits has demonstrated their “dubious historical credibility”—similar figures are reproduced with a range of labels, suggesting they were sitters rather than spouses. Nonetheless the screen indicates how such furnishing props were used to convey a cultured setting, and to localize the photographic practices developing across the treaty port cities.114 Guangzhou embroidery is often assumed to be entirely export oriented, but this shop was evidently concerned with the domestic market. Like many Chinese marketing texts, this ad appeals to the discriminating customer, warning that “recently, shameless bandits take ‘countryside embroidery,’ deceitfully selling it at a low price, they intend to maximize profit by using fake goods instead of quality goods, this results in the W or k shop, B oudoir , V illage  |   9 9

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confusion of ‘fish eyes for pearls.’” Guild regulations often rejected such peddlers from the business community; one 1883 Hunan silk regulation cautioned against the “profit-seeking apprentices” (sheli zhi tu) who go door to door peddling Xiabu cloth, cotton cloth, qingjuan silk, and such items. This is nothing more than trickery, known as confusing “fish eyes for pearls.”115 Hence the Caiyuan shop’s attempts to convince the consumer, through both the expansive object list that separated them from itinerant dealers, and their marketing text: “we do not stint on materials, we select the finest workmanship of adroit handicraft, [and employ] famous embroiderers able to imitate all the famous painters and calligraphers, and never display countryside workmanship.” The customer who “carefully discriminates and respects quality” would realize this, but the term “Gu embroidery” equally served as shorthand for these features. Thus, even though embroidered objects labeled as Gu embroidery differed stylistically, their producers shared a desire to market the repute achieved by the Gu women for their gendered artistic production.116 The term served as marketing spin because it conveyed a specific idea of embroidery as imagined in the Jiangnan boudoir setting. As the advertisement’s opposition between pearls and fish eyes (urban handicraft versus “country workmanship”) suggests, the term enabled professional embroidery to separate itself from folksier styles to increase market worth. The Embroidery Middlemen: Pattern Drafters, Cutters, and Agents

Workshop embroiderers were one component of handicraft-producer networks embedded in local economies. Specialized production required closer producer connections, and the changing face of clothes production benefitted not only producers of silk fabrics and thread but also other auxiliary industries—gold thread, needles, scissors, and buttons. Suzhou’s reputation for embroidery, in part, derived from its reputation for locally produced materials like silk fabrics (Wu ling),117 silk thread (Su xian),118 gold thread,119 needles,120 and scissors,121 all of which were stimulated by the growth in commercial embroidery. Commercial embroidery also created new specialist jobs, most of which were filled by men: workshop managers and finishers, embroidery agents who distributed embroidery work to countryside embroiderers, professional design drawers who prepared patterns for embroiderers, and ribbon weavers. Professional pattern drafters were often called “white-chalk drawers” (hua baifen), because they used white chalk to sketch the patterns upon the silk.122 English missionary Edwin Joshua Dukes described one in his 1885 narrative of a walk along Amoy’s “Facing Kwan-tai’s Temple Street”: Stop a moment to see what this man is doing as he sits at the door-step. . . . Seated on a low stool, he has placed on his knees a board upon which is spread a piece of fine linen, and, undisturbed by the busy 100  |  CHAPTER 3

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traffic, he is drawing with a camel’s-hair pencil dipped in Indian ink patterns to be sold to persons skilled in working with colored silks. At the present moment he is tracing a rectilinear Greek pattern for the border of the skirt of a lady’s gown. He uses neither rule nor compass, yet every stroke is produced with mathematical accuracy. Some of the finished pieces are covered with flowers and wreaths, and birds, and human figures, portrayed with a delicacy of touch, which would do credit to a first-class lithographic artist.123 The appearance of pattern drafters as “design middleman” was significant to the development of commercial embroidery. Access to printed patterns reduced the tasks and skills, leaving the embroiderer to focus on design execution, specifically selecting design characteristics like thread, stitch, and color.124 Duke’s description implies an independent worker supplying the embroiderer, but this development favored domestic and workshop embroiderer alike: the workshop employed draftsmen, the home practitioner utilized printed pattern books. An ephemeral object, pattern books were printed on flimsy paper that enabled the design to be traced onto the cloth or repeated onto paper, often destroying the pattern in the process.125 But embroidery patterns were likely widely available—images of embroidering women, like the one from an album of Ningbo workers bought back by French industrialist Isodore Hedde (1801–1880), typically show the pattern book aside the embroiderer, here along with candle and scissors (fig. 3.9). Patterns were sold in various formats: single sheets, specialist compilations like those in figures 3.4 and 3.5, or household encyclopedia like the Precious Mirror of Feminine Virtues (Kunde baojian; 1777). Filled with patterns for small objects—sleeve-bands and collars, headbands and purses—most accessible to the female home embroiderer, the target audience was likely “minimally educated” women wishing to supply commercial workshops “but lacking artistic education.”126 Pattern books like Gu Embroidery Patterns from Old Suzhou or Figural Patterns from the Green Window provided a vital access to the market for such women. As professional embroidery grew in profitability, both pattern books and pattern drafters became increasingly important components of urban design. Hence, the later Suzhou embroidery guild, the Yunhua Xiuye Gongsuo, founded in 1866, was a collaborative grouping of embroiderers and pattern drafters.127 In his study of Chinese industrial arts, Sir Henry Charles Sirr described the pattern book as that “in which the most approved styles of embroidering, arrangement of the colors and patterns, are set forth.” Marketed with decorative paper and sometimes color printing, late Qing examples also clearly target the domestic embroiderer. Hence the title, Figural Patterns from the Green Window, as one foreign observer explained: “This book is dedicated to those ‘who belong to the green window,’ which signifies the working classes, as all those in China who gain their bread by embroidery are said to belong to the green W or k shop, B oudoir , V illage  |   1 0 1

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Figure 3.9. An embroiderer working “double-sided embroidery,” from a series on Ningbo industries. 1845, Ningbo. Gouache on paper. MT 14520.1. Don Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Lyon, 1865. © Lyon, Museum of Fabrics and Decorative Arts–Pierre Verrier.

window . . . there are between two and three hundred designs in this work, the price of which was forty cash, less than fourpence.”128 In addition to pattern drafters, commercialization enabled new roles for managers and middlemen. We know the most about the functioning of these networks for imperial production. When the Qing court reestablished the imperial workshops in the 1650s in Jiangning (Nanjing), Suzhou, and Hangzhou, they effectively continued the weaving-to-order (lingzhi) system that had developed through the Ming to allow workshops to contract weavers from private workshops.129 Each of the Suzhou imperial textile workshops had embroiderers: eight in the Northern Service (Beixin Ju); six in the Southern Service (Nanxin Ju).130 Given that most of the court’s embroidered clothing and furnishings came from Suzhou, these were very small numbers compared to overall employee numbers.131 Suzhou’s reputation for embroidery meant it received the 102  |  CHAPTER 3

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majority of orders, first designed by artists in the imperial design workshop (Ruyi guan). But to fill these orders, the imperial workshop’s embroidery rooms, like the weaving rooms, contracted work out to private workshops, embroidery houses like the members of the Jinwen Guild. As the Silk survey noted, “A certain number of houses known for their specialties receive orders and divide work out among different families.”132 Though this process likely developed through the eighteenth century, we know most about the production system during the post–Taiping Rebellion period, when the decline of the imperial workshops accelerated demand for private workshops. Interviews cited by early twentieth-century Suzhou embroiderer Zhu Feng (1910–1993) confirmed that only a few embroiderers were employed by the state workshop and that most work was done in private workshops. According to Zhu, the Beijing-based Guangyuan Jingzhuang, which managed the production of imperial embroidered goods, established a Suzhou branch, the Guangyuan Fenzhuang, in Wang Shumi Alley (today’s Wushou Alley). After the Beijing department was given a palace order, they would notify Suzhou to prepare the patterns and send an imperial envoy to ensure they were satisfactory. Then the production would begin: purchasing material, preparing a garment pattern on the fabric, drawing the design, and preparing pattern-drawn pieces. Project managers (xiu ren fentou) distributed the work to embroidery workshops (xiu hu) like the House of National Gold or the House of Fortune and Gold.133 Though some of these workshops would have employed male embroiderers, as well as pattern drafters, cutters, and finishers on their premises, many workshops outsourced some work, in particular pattern design and even embroidery. According to Zhu Feng, the exchange of materials, design instructions, and payment was managed by intermediary agents (faxiu ren, baotou)—by the late Qing numbering around one hundred and fifty—who sent out piecework to female embroiderers in the surrounding Wu countryside.134 While the Jinwen Guild omitted these women entirely, there are glimpses of them in other sources: an early Qing gazetteer, “women in the city work at embroidery,”135 or a satirical mid-Qing print of Suzhou customs, depicting the hard-working embroiderer “adding patterns,” alongside typical city scenes of snack sellers and cardplayers.136 More details come from foreign visitors: the Silk report observed that most of the 1,050 embroiderers in Suzhou were women and young girls, and an early American visitor to the city concurred: “In and around the city embroidery employs one hundred thousand women. Mandarins’ robes, ladies’ dresses, and stage actors’ apparel are all embroidered. The Superintendent of the Silk Looms twice a year sends on one thousand trunks of embroidered clothing for the emperor’s household. In this yamen one thousand men, it is said, sublet the jobs to the women.”137 Thus, despite guild emphasis on male progenitors, the embroidery houses were ultimately fueled by female workers. This production system took advantage of two long-standing characteristics of Chinese handicrafts: specialization and labor division. Map 3.2, based on Zhu Feng’s account, illustrates how place and technique interlaced to develop material nuances W or k shop, B oudoir , V illage  |   1 0 3

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N

6b

6c 3 6a

Suzhou

5

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LAKE TA I

Map 3.2. Mapping embroidery production in the countryside around Suzhou. Based on map by Gao Yuanzai, “Up-To-Date Touring Map of Suzhou” (Zuijin Suzhou youlan ditu, waicheng), inset, “Beyond the City” (Waicheng), in Zhang Yinglin et al., Suzhou gucheng ditu ji.

City 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

0

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Canal

Road

Mountain

Hengtang: Goldwork (pingjin) Lishu: Seed stitch (dazi) Baimajian: Scaled dragon embroidery (kelin xiulong) Soutou, outside Feng Gate: Gauze embroidery (chuosha) Shanren Bridge: Robes and badges (paogua buzi) (a) Guangfu; (b) Xihua; (c) Dongzhu: Quilts and pillows (beimian, zhentao) Xiangshan: Longevity dress and quilts (shou yi, shoubei)

spanning the Wu countryside: goldwork was produced in Hengtang (1); seed stitch in Lishu (2); embroidered dragon scales in Baimajian (3); gauze embroidering in Soutou outside Feng Gate (4); robes and badges in Shanren Bridge (5); quilts and pillows in Guangfu, Xihua, and Dongzhu (6); longevity dress and quilts in Xiangshan (7). Only portraits, net embroidery, and pictorial embroidery were produced inside the city.138 Locale-specific specialization was a feature of Jiangnan sericulture: different locations specialized in producing mulberry trees or raising silkworms, for example. Embroidery required only fabric, thread, needle, stool, and frame, all easily available to women in silk-producing regions, and so was a labor practice easily pursued “in their leisure time from farming” or, more accurately, when they were not cooking, cleaning, or caring for children, husbands, and parents-in-law.139 Embroidery also developed in these locations because they were logistically advantageous for accessing Suzhou markets, or because they were stimulated by handicraft production in surrounding villages.140 104  |  CHAPTER 3

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Distributing work to different artisans was only possible because the production process had been divided into separate labor stages of pattern drafting and tracing, piece cutting, embroidering, and assembly. This modularized system explains the direction of late Qing fashions toward the embroidered modular component. An example is the border trimming set from the Mactaggart Collection, featuring a cloud collar and side and bottom borders for a women’s jacket. Each component is carefully laid out upon the sheet, and a workshop’s or embroiderer’s name is noted on the back (fig. 3.10). Similarly, it is a productionist account that explains why the “folded sleeve-band” (huan xiu) style—in which sections of embroidered cream satin fabric, typically forming a separate decorative field to the collar and hem borders, were stitched to the internal lining and then folded back—is little seen prior to the mid-Qing (see, for example, figs. 4.17 and 4.23). First described by Li Dou (1749–1817) in the context of eighteenth-century Yangzhou fashions, the style flourished through the nineteenth century, concurrent with the expansion of the embroidery industry.141 Another sales mode was to sell paper sheets of embroidered motifs or roundels, ready to be cut

Figure 3.10. Set of cream satin trimmings embroidered in polychrome silk floss and gold couching, late nineteenth century. Mactaggart Art Collection (2005.5.47), University of Alberta Museums. Gift of Sandy and Cécile Mactaggart.

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out and appliquéd to one’s skirt or jacket (see figs. 2.13 and 5.9). The popularity of these features in Chinese fashion cannot be understood in the absence of commercial workshops—they arose from specific features of this production system. The division of different production stages across networks involving participants of different gender and social status depended most of all upon the middleman. This figure, common in the silk and cotton industries, emerged around the eighteenth century to fill a niche created by expanding commercial producers and merchants. Eighteenth-century Suzhou and Songjiang merchant houses hired middlemen brokers who were familiar with local weavers, the “cloth masters” (bu shi), and “cloth-inspecting friends” (kan bu pengyou), responsible for inspecting cloth quality and regulating production.142 Often trained as a craftsman, they were able to evaluate objects and negotiate prices. Similarly, Suzhou weaving households could only obtain accounts with the zhangfang (silk account houses) through middlemen, weavers themselves, whose embodied knowledge enabled them to fill this lucrative niche.143 In embroidery, it was this mediating figure who decided the best place to take the object according to object type and technique, and negotiated the correct payment for an object.144 Much communication within this production network was oral or in written ephemera long lost to us, but objects sometimes feature annotation detailing shop or workshop names and design details. For example, a pair of eighteenth-century hanging scrolls embroidered with scenes from the Twenty-Four Scenes of Filial Classics contain two small inscriptions on pillars giving color instructions to the embroiderers, ready to be covered up by stitches, an “embroider by numbers.”145 The embroidered plum silk yardage from the Mactaggart Collection (figs. 1.14 and 1.15) contained a short inscription detailing the object type and numbering, probably written by the embroidery workshop. Such evidence is fragmentary and hard to decipher, but it contextualizes the object not as a piece of art to be admired in formal terms, but as one mediating different producers. In European histories, putting-out systems—when merchants “put out” materials to rural producers, which were then returned as finished products paid on a piecework basis—are seen as critical in the progression from protoindustrialization to industrialization. As such, they have also taken on some import in regard to Chinese history’s sprouts of capitalism debate. Both the silk and cotton industries relied on forms of putting-out systems, which may have originated quite early on. In 1844, Zhenze silk shops carried two kinds of thread (xiangjing and liaojing): the former produced by independent spinners who spun their own raw silk and sold their products to the shops; the latter produced by those who worked for the shopkeepers for wages (the shopkeepers provided the raw material).146 For economic historians like Lilian Li and James Shih, rather than being a new, “higher stage of economic organization” participating in a “universal and necessary” development “from a putting-out system to factory production,” putting-out systems enabled greater numbers of people to join handicraft production and provided merchants a means of quality control. These 106  |  CHAPTER 3

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functions served to diffuse risk and responsibility among the many, rather than concentrate profit in the hands of the few.147 The question of when putting-out systems arose in Suzhou embroidery is difficult to answer. Duan and Zhang argued late Qing commercialization changed production systems. Whereas embroidery shops originally made money by collecting embroidered objects from household embroiderers and then selling them (the handicraft system; shougong zhi), later they began giving the material to the households to be embroidered and then paid them accordingly (the intermediary system; baomai zhi).148 In 1899, du Bose detailed how the imperial workshops “sublet” work to outside embroiderers. But he also described how Suzhou women purchased embroidery thread on credit: “This [embroidery] business makes the trade in silk thread a very extensive one, and as the shopkeeper unrolls a package he displays two dozen shades of one color. The women come to the shops to purchase one cent’s worth of floss. At the first of the year, when the country women buy on credit, a popular shop may do a business of $1,500 in two weeks.”149 Putting out is not detailed in Suzhou until 1933, in a regional survey that noted: “The embroiderers get silk fabrics and floss from the embroidery shops.”150 But we also need to be careful. In early Republican-era Ningbo, those embroiderers producing shoes and other small objects received the paper-cut pattern but purchased the thread.151 The two forms of production likely overlapped: some shops sold objects purchased from local women, who embroidered material they had bought or made themselves; other shops began distributing the material first to the pattern drafter to prepare pattern-drawn pieces and then giving these pieces and thread out to the embroiderers through the intermediary agents. Regardless, Suzhou women were clearly dependent upon this industry: “The female embroiderers gather at the embroidery guild, which gives them food and drink, and they provide needlework; each month they get five or six yuan.”152 Records of pay vary widely and it is hard to find good records for the early-mid Qing to enable comparison, though it is likely that as the numbers of embroiderers rose over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, remuneration fell.153 In 1899 Suzhou, du Bose found embroidering women earned “three to eight cents a day, unless a skilled hand is selected to embroider a robe for the princesses.”154 In the same year in Canton, John Thomson described “men designing patterns of birds, butterflies, and flowers on satin robes. The wages of the people who do this lovely work are very small indeed. The artist who furnishes the designs receives about £1 5s [approximately 3.75 taels] a month.” Skilled embroiderers received just over half this amount, fifteen shillings (2.69 taels) a month with food, the same as a shoemaker, and close to a painter (18s), although considerably less than an ivory-carver (£2 8s), blacksmith (£1) or silversmith (£1 12s). He pondered at how anyone could profit from the practice: “It takes about ten days to complete the embroidery of a pair of shoes; and these, when soled and finished, fetch fifteen shillings a pair. The wages of the embroiderer, according to this calculation, would amount to six shillings or thereabouts, and W or k shop, B oudoir , V illage  |   1 0 7

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the balance, to cover cost of material and making, would leave but a modest profit to the master; but then embroidered shoes are in constant demand, and a lady of rank will require some thirty pairs for her marriage trousseau alone.”155 The Female Embroiderer: “Goddesses of Needlework”

Female countryside embroiders were employed in Guangdong and Hunan, but it was the Wu region, above all others, that gathered a reputation for women’s embroidery work.156 A Qianlong-period gazetteer describes this process in a gender-polarized account: “In Wu County, many men engage in handicrafts, each type has a specialist; though these are but ordinary objects, their skillfulness exceeds those of other areas. [Wu County] women excel at dexterous practices like weaving and embroidery, their exquisite work appears in great quantities; though other places imitate their work none can achieve their level.”157 Thus, in areas like Pingwang (a market town south of Suzhou), it was said that “eight or nine out of ten girls worked at weaving cotton, even the well-off. . . . Those women along the [lake] coast also worked in agriculture, raising silkworms, silk weaving, and embroidery, done in their leisure time.”158 In Guangfu, a large market town about sixteen miles west of Suzhou (see map 3.2), embroidery was a local specialty: “Men work at agriculture; women work at raising silkworms, weaving, and embroidery.”159 Apart from the spring planting, the autumn harvest, and summer months, embroidering at home would have been their primary work outside housework and childcare. Women’s skill was a point of local pride: in historian Wang Xiujuan’s analysis of sixty-four Suzhou women’s tomb epitaphs, twenty-three did embroidery.160 A popular print that visualizes this ideal shows a young, simply dressed Suzhou gentlewomen, intently focused on stitching her shoe; the carved stool and fretwork table convey her status; the hanging basket of chrysanthemums flowers symbolize longevity (fig. 3.11). Found in a collection of Suzhou prints preserved in Japan, the image lacks title or artist signature (the publication titles it “A Beauty Sewing”), but the audience would have understood the reference—Suzhou was renowned for both needlework and beauty. Such romanticized associations between place and female producer were obvious even to foreigners: “Whenever, in Shanghae, I have been attracted by any beautiful piece of embroidery . . . I was told it came from Soo-chau; and if by any chance I happened to see a fair, gracefully formed, pleasant-expressioned girl, she too came from Soo-chau.”161 Who were these fair girls? As noted, Mann argued embroidery to be the definitive art of the gentlewoman, requiring “light to work, a clean and spacious room for the frame, and servants to fan their delicate hands and foreheads in the summer heat to prevent perspiration from marring their needlework.”162 Yet viewing embroidery as privileged practice dependent on one’s environment is, arguably, accepting much of the Gu embroidery spin at face value. The premise of Gu embroidery was certainly 108  |  CHAPTER 3

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Figure 3.11. A popular print of A Beauty Sewing (Meiren caifeng tu), with pattern book, scissors, and other tools on the table, Mid-Qing. 41.2 × 25.8 cm. Reprinted from Feng Jicai, Zhongguo muban nianhua jicheng, Taohuawu juan, shang, 103, with permission from the Zhonghua Book Company.

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to imply certain standards of working conditions; literati imagery, highly variegated palette, and finely shaded stitching communicated hours of leisurely practice and a privileged environment rather than crowded workshops, minimal pay, and poor materials. But style, after all, could be deceptive. Foreign observers suggest that the beauty of the object had little to do with the producer’s circumstances: “We find ourselves in a very poor neighborhood with dingy, dirty hovels filled with operatives, who are busily at work; some weaving silk; others embroidering satin robes.”163 And production references in urban rhymes consistently depict humbler figures: “Which of the poor family’s girls have the prettiest hands? Weaving scented gauzes [that sell] at extraordinary prices,” albeit perhaps for their romanticizing potential.164 Records of female embroiderers suggest that commercialization widened the social range of its producers. For biographical accounts of female embroiderers, we are beholden to Republican-period textile connoisseur and writer Zhu Qiqian’s (1872–1964) compilation Brief Records of Needleworker Biographies (Nühong zhuan zheng lüe).165 Based on local gazetteers and biographies, the compilation is of course highly biased toward those women with sufficient skill, literacy, and connections to be recorded, but it suggests embroiderers came from two main groups: gentlewomen from impoverished gentry families and lower-class women from merchant and artisan families. Most records are of the former, but we also find examples of lower-status women like Man Shu of Fengtai, Nanjing, the daughter of a flower seller. At the age of ten she studied embroidery and then began making paper-cut designs of flowers, figures, and animals, at which she was wonderfully skilled. Once, a merchant bought her luxuriously embroidered lamp for a thousand qian.166 This description of two village girls by an American observer, a Mr. Lay, accounts for the social expansion: They were seated upon a low stool, and extended their legs across another of twice the height of their seat. In this way a support was provided for the frame on which the piece to be embroidered was spread forth. Their faces were a sickly hue, which was owing, perhaps, to close confinement and the unnatural position in which they were obliged to sit. The finest specimens of embroidery are, as far as my observation goes, done by men, who stand while at work—a practice which these damsels could not imitate, as their feet were small. They were poor, but too genteel, in their parents’ idea, to do the drudgery of the humble housewife, and so their feet were bandaged and kept from growing beyond the limits of gentility. Their looks were not likely soon to attract a lover, and hence they were compelled to tease the sampler from the glistening dawn till dewy eve.167 Embroidery was suitable for impoverished genteel daughters partly because of the confinement and bound feet Lay observed. Like other textile tasks, embroidery 110  |  CHAPTER 3

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gained legitimacy because domestic seclusion’s “powerful symbol of respectability” enabled these two girls to earn not only money but also class. 168 But beyond confinement, there was a more fundamental notion of gentility as defined by leisure in operation. The rise of the market economy and the move away from self-sufficiency created a complexity of associations around women, work, and leisure. Hence embroidery’s ambivalence in late Qing eyes: in some contexts, time-wasting; in others, highlyskilled—marred as a symbol of industry by connotations of adornment and sexuality.169 As a patterning process, it presented a conundrum in its potential expression and ornamental excess.170 From one perspective, it kept idle hands—considered a threat to women as moneyed lifestyles spread—occupied and out of mischief, and so became a symbol of leisure. But equally, the notion of filling idle time occupies much of the writing on women’s work, and numerous didactic writers espoused teaching daughters a skill, warning against becoming accustomed to a life of leisure.171 Being overly accustomed to leisure, like “cursing servants, talking in a loquacious and careless way, [or] having a frivolous disposition,” would ultimately shame the parents.172 And so pursuits theoretically practiced in leisure, like embroidery, became similarly conflicted—both desirable and frivolous. Much of this conflict depended, of course, on whether it was necessary to make money from the pursuit. A woman not needing to earn money from her leisure was a sign that the family was advanced in rank and wealth, as one Western observer discovered to his surprise: Some [women] indeed are constantly employed in working embroidery on silks, or in painting birds, insects, and flowers on thin gauze. In the ladies apartments of the great house in which we lived in Pekin, we observed some very beautiful specimens . . . , and I brought home a few articles which I understand have been much admired; but the women who employ their time in this manner, are generally the wives and daughters of tradesmen and artificers, who are usually the weavers both of cottons and silks. I remember asking one of the great officers of the court, who wore a silken vest beautifully embroidered, if it was the work of his lady, but the supposition that his wife should condescend to use her needle seemed to give him offence.173 Barrow’s account suggests that in China, as in Victorian England, women of this social status had become what the sociologist Thorstein B. Veblen called “indexes of the household’s pecuniary strength”: he argued fashion’s primary function was to display this index. For late Victorian commentators like Veblen, it was critical to draw a line between the speed of Western fashion and the “relatively stable styles and types of costume” of places like “Japanese, Chinese, and other Oriental nations,” where “the class to which the costume in question belongs is relatively homogenous, stable, and W or k shop, B oudoir , V illage  |   1 1 1

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immobile.”174 But his theorizing of fashion as a display of consumer and leisure ability—both functions of social worth and enabling a society defined by instability and social mobility—aptly describes the fashionable Qing women in figure 3.12. The print depicts three beauties around a table comparing embroidered rank badges and embroidery floss: though it purports to show the women engaged in productive labor, the conceit is that these women—wearing expensive beribboned jackets and embroidered, narrowly pleated “fish-scale” style skirts requiring a slow and graceful movement, and fresh flowers in their hair—appreciate embroidery rather than produce it. The print pivots on the signifier of rank badge as status—one that reflected back upon the woman whose rank was determined by that of her husband or son. The desire expressed here, often simplified as auspicious wishes to give birth to sons to continue the family wealth and status, was not simple. Aside from fertility and procreation, beauty and fashionable clothing was one of the only ways they could contribute to the family endeavor. This idealized presentation of household status seems entirely appropriate as an illustration of Veblen’s ideas—fashionable consumption for a leisurely elite, guided by the principles of expense, ineptitude (imposed on the wearer), and novelty of ensemble. They sit on elegant stools around an intricately carved table, their lives filled with pattern and privilege. A cultural disdain for explicitly discussing financial transactions of women’s work means that needlework for profit was typically narrated in hyperbolic terms, whether as virtue, talent, or sacrifice. Sacrifice for children was perhaps most common. Li Qinghui, a Qianlong-period poet from Fuyang, Anhui, and the sister of imperial academy student Li Chunlin, married an untalented government student called Ning and was forced to use women’s work to support the family. When her daughter returned home following her husband’s death, Qinghui used embroidery to provide food for her grandchild.175 Most typically, educated mothers worked at embroidery to educate their sons. For example, scholar Zhang Huiyan (1761–1802) recalled how his mother, Mrs. Jiang, impoverished by deaths of male relatives, worked at needlework to support her sons’ studies. At night, using just one lamp, she and his aunt would do needlework, while Huiyan and his brothers studied. In a satisfyingly dualistic picture of gendered work responsibilities, he described how they chanted in unison with the women’s sewing.176 If you were a young widow with small children to raise, embroidery was one of the few acceptable means of supporting your family. The hyperbolic emphasis upon labor was part of the construct of the virtuous women, but it also deflected from the reality of producing objects for others, a legitimatized way of distinguishing embroidery for leisure, from embroidery for livelihood. Mrs. Zhao, wife of Zou Tao, was forced to turn to needlework after both families’ fortunes declined, laboring day and night through hot summers and bitter winters.177 Miss Zhang, recorded in the Qianlong-period Fuzhou Gazetteer, whose husband died when she was just twenty-four, went blind as a result of her unceasing pursuit of embroidery work.178 112  |  CHAPTER 3

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Figure 3.12. Embroidering the Rank Badges (Xiu bu fu), one of a pair of Yangliuqing woodblock prints, Guangxu period. 61 × 26 cm. China National Art Museum.

An alternate route to social acceptance was talent. The most talented women were channeled into working for the imperial workshops. These included women like Zhang Xushi (1866–?) from Lishu Village, renowned for seed stitch and so exceptional at embroidery that she once embroidered a dragon robe for Emperor Tongzhi and a court vest for the empress.179 Xu Nüda, from Hengtang, Shuangqiao, famous for its goldwork, specialized in gold-thread-couched embroidered robes.180 Xu Meibao of Hexi Village specialized in gold-couched embroidered rank badges for officials, and embroidered sleevebands, jackets, and skirts for their wives.181 All these examples involved goldwork, presumably the most expensive of material components and typically done in a workshop setting, suggesting the women were sufficiently socially validated to be trusted with such a costly material.182 When women were recorded as working for profit, it was typical to emphasize the artistic nature of their skills: they produced embroidered pictures (hua xiu), not embroidered objects (riyong shipin). For example, a woman from Liangzhou (today’s Wu’an, Gansu) once embroidered a large garden scene onto a silk handkerchief; though W or k shop, B oudoir , V illage  |   1 1 3

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just five cun in size, all the garden’s details could be seen and later it was purchased by a Westerner for a high price.183 Wu Jue, the daughter of Wu Caigong of Jingkou, excelled at embroidery and weaving. At seventeen she married and moved to the city with her husband, Zou Zhu, but he died early, leaving her with parents-in-law to support. She first studied painting with her older brother and then applied these design principles to embroidering brilliant patterns. People competed to purchase her work and she often labored through the night, ignoring exhaustion to support her family.184 This artistic emphasis reflected the idealized embroidering gentlewoman first defined by the Gu women. Yun Zhu (1771–1833) of Wujin (Changzhou, Jiangsu) was the editor of the women’s poetry compilation Guixiu zhengshi ji and talented at poetry, painting, and embroidery. While in Tai’an she embroidered The Five Pines; when in Yingzhou, she embroidered The Eastern Garden. Her accolades included that of “Needlework Goddess,”185 a reference to Xue Lingyun (fl. 220–26; Xue Yelai), the clothes-making beauty adored by the Emperor of Wei (Cao Pi, 187–226).186 During the late imperial period, Xue’s name was used as a byword for a talented needleworker: regardless of class, it was a useful allusion for the embroiderer navigating the pitfalls of gendered labor.187 One of the peculiarities of the museum collection is how objects that historically existed in separate realms have become mingled, confounding the Qing visual order. A Cixi-style waistcoat might sit in a storage drawer atop a folk belly-cover; an official rank badge might be next to a Buddhist priest’s crown. Yet in Qing China, embroidered objects possessed socially distinct identities that conditioned their circulation. Members of society identified themselves partly by the textile objects they used and those they did not. Textiles and dress provided a primary means of constituting and claiming social status, with imagery, stitch work, and coloring serving as the coded markers of taste. When embroidered textiles were transferred from Chinese society to the Western museum, museum curators typically identified them as boudoir embroideries. This framing followed the marketing spin of the embroidery shops and secondhand clothes sellers, who used the boudoir embroiderer’s image to brand their objects with associations desired by their Chinese customers, just as they were ultimately desired by foreign collectors. But these objects are more realistically considered in the context of the commercial workshop. Rather than the products of gentlewomen, they were formed by professional communities—collaborative networks enabled by guild foundation and handicraft specialization, connecting the urban male workshop embroiderer with the countryside female cottage embroiderer, crossing boundaries of gender and geography. The complex materiality of woven borders and embroidered collars, appliquéd roundels and knotted buttons depended on producer connections between tailors and embroiderers, border makers and gold thread producers. With their densely patterned surfaces, hyper-pigmented palettes, and popular imagery, these jackets and accessories speak both to the tastes of their urbane, nineteenth-century consumers and the influences of their commercial producers. Commercial embroidery 114  |  CHAPTER 3

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was a product of the town and the marketplace, informed by vernacular media not literati painting; drawing models from illustrated dramas and novels, popular prints and professional paintings.188 This “imagery circuit” informed themes of popular culture in late Qing women’s dress.189 Producers imitated the latest artistic themes emerging from professional painters and the Taohuawu print workshops and followed the latest dramatic trends coming out of Chang Gate, where the Suzhou tailors established their guild hall and where the local scholar Gu Gongxie (act. 18th c.) wrote: “The merchants gather and hold banquets at all hours. There are ten different playhouses, and every day there is a performance.”190

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PART T WO

Plays and Poems FASHIONING NINETEENTH- CENTURY DECORATION

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4 Performance, Print, and Pattern POPULAR CULTURE IN FASHION

They liaise with their sisters-in-law, arrange to meet their sisters, bring the children, invite the neighbors. They gather in throngs to watch plays, goading each other on to watch plays day after day, night after night. Yu Zhi, The Record of Getting One (De yi lu), 1869

S

ome features of the fashion phenomena investigated thus far can be found in earlier periods. Male writers were critiquing the oddities of fashionable dress as early as the Han dynasty; poor women were sewing wedding dresses for wealthy women in the Tang; clusters of shops in small towns were making shoes for the market during the late Ming. In addition to the ethnic interactions resulting from the Manchu’s new fashionable garments, what distinguished the mid-late Qing period was the increased expansion of professionalized dress handicraft production and dissemination of fashion imagery through painting, prints, and rhymes. Both enabled a wider social span of women to participate in fashion, allowing broader consumer reach to handicraft techniques such as embroidery, with its pictorial potential. Accordingly, nineteenth-century dress decoration came to feature novel decorative forms, including scenes taken from popular plays and stories, and motifs and components relating to literati culture. |   1 1 9  |

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Handicraft commercialization widened not only the numbers of producers and objects but also the possibilities of embroidered expression. To grasp how conceptions of embroidery imagery changed between the late Ming and the late Qing, consider the figural spectrum assembled by the Ming embroiderer Zhang Shuying (n.d.) in her short treatise, Charting Embroidery (Cixiu tu): “Apart from embroidering the Buddha, the Nymph of the Luo River, the Dragon Girl, Crimson Tree, and Blue Zither, other [scenes] such as the Chu River, Spring morning in the Han palace, Prince Teng’s butterflies, the Pei family’s parrots, a single-rooted lotus, and the seventy purple mandarin ducks . . . all these may be chosen.”1 Her list is eclectic and literate, composed of allusions to classic myths, poems and paintings. By the late Qing, figural imagery in embroidered textiles was inspired instead by popular plays, prints, and novels. The stimulus of market demand and widespread availability of prints and patterns enabled embroidery to express contemporary themes of popular culture, in particular, dramatic narrative.2 Narrative permeated women’s lives: spoken idioms allegorizing virtue and vice through historical figures, play excerpts performed for festivals and celebration, woodblock prints hung in halls to welcome guests, carved wood railings adorning houses and temples, shadowed silhouettes of window paper-cuts, oral ballads singing of tragic lovers. Recent studies of visual narrative forms have demonstrated how social and geographical factors shaped choice and telling, and highlighted contemporary repercussions—the ways stories were “manipulated for changing times.”3 Yet the media perhaps most intimate to women, that of textiles and dress, has been disregarded as a carrier of narrative, overshadowed by auspicious motifs in museum accounts of dress decoration. For most Western collectors and curators, narrative and figural themes were of little interest. Narrative textiles were displayed to maximize formal qualities of color, shape, and texture, rather than narrative significance,4 and specific figural content was dismissed as simply “figures in garden.”5 To be sure, many late Qing dress objects do feature gentle ladies and handsome scholars engaged in appropriately gendered but generic pursuits. But many more textiles and dress objects depict known narrative content. Scenes from dramas appear on jackets in which roundels and borders frame either episodes from single narratives such as The Story of the Western Chamber or “figural medleys” mingling scenes from different dramas.6 Narrative has formed decorative theme in Chinese material culture for thousands of years: murals and engravings of good omens, filial stories, and historical scenes are found in elite tombs from the Han period onward.7 By the late imperial period, narrative themes and historical figures were popular content on a wide variety of media: porcelain, lacquer, even letter paper designs.8 Scholars have highlighted the seventeenth century as a transition, when new money demanded luxury porcelain with novel themes, and potters incorporated designs from illustrated literature and art. But handicraft commercialization circulated these themes further, to architecture 120  |  CHAPTER 4

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Figure 4.1. John Thomson, A Mandarin’s House, Peking, 1874. Collotype, 17.6 × 22.1 cm. Getty Collection (84.XB.757.3.4.12).

and furnishings.9 Architectural adornment may have served as inspiration: that most fashionable feature of nineteenth-century women’s dress, the controversial langan border, drew its name from the wooden borders carved with figural imagery and auspicious motifs. Scottish photographer John Thomson’s 1874 photograph of a wealthy official’s Beijing household reveals these designs: the official on the ground-level courtyard and the women and children lined up on the carved wood balcony above, watching the photographer (fig. 4.1). Figures and stories were engraved upon balcony railings, as well as doors, windows, spirit walls and gates, beams, columns, decorative brackets, arches, and ceilings.10 Found in houses, temples, and ancestral halls, where plays were sometimes staged, narrative imagery formed a visual record of these performances, and a reminder of the instruction imparted. By reaffirming morally sanctioned behavior and accepted gender and status roles, the figures functioned as “instructive ornamentation”; hence, conservative themes like the twenty-four filial exemplars were prevalent in ancestral halls where brides were acknowledged and sons entered into the lineage.11 P erformance , P rint, and Pattern   |   1 2 1

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In textiles, figural imagery first appears during the Tang dynasty, partly stimulated by the growth of Buddhist imagery, which led to satin stitch supplanting chain stitch to better render scenes of donor figures. Fictional figural designs emerge during the Yuan dynasty, but particular groupings such as “boys at play” or immortal ladies were not established until the Ming, perhaps stimulated by seasonal celebrations, as when, during the Qingming Festival, imperial women wore gauze robes patterned with maidens on swings to reference the idea of going outside and enjoying the spring.12 As art historian Yuhang Li observed, “The social discourse of human relationship, such as morality and romance” was expressed on dress for the first time.13 By the early Qing, historical narratives appeared in embroidered hangings and albums, such as the ten-leaf album by the Gu embroiderer Han Ximeng.14 But outside these genres, figures were rare. How, then, did figural imagery come to be considered suitable decorative matter for late Qing women’s dress? Why did narrative become so popular on embroidered jackets, skirts, and collars? Did dressmakers take inspiration from visual best sellers such as The Story of the Western Chamber, which were found all over China, or from more localized narratives from regional repertoires? Do the jacket scenes present defining moments in the lives of Confucian exemplars and historical personages, or more risqué, romantic themes challenging parental and social binds? The growth of figural content in embroidered art likely contributed to the spread of these themes to clothing. Genres were not necessarily sharply demarcated—Gu-style embroidery was marketed in clothes and paintings alike.15 As appendix 3 demonstrates, embroidered hangings were a key product for the professional workshops, and these often featured narrative content like The Insignia-Laden Bed.16 A drama about General Guo Ziyi’s long career, it was particularly popular for longevity celebration, hence the focal scene of Guo’s birthday celebrations surrounded by his family is at the head of Mr. Huang’s birthday hanging (see fig. 3.1). Narrative imagery was also suitable for other genres: one mid-Qing Suzhou bamboo ballad singled out carriage decoration: “When commoners get married their carriages are outstanding. Four pi of red gauze for a servant’s jacket. One hundred pairs of festive lanterns, red and black hats, large fans marked with ‘Hanlin Academy’ carried high on shoulders.” A note further detailed the carriages featured not just brocade curtains, but also finely wrought theatrical stories, or twelve multicolored scenes of palace women worked in satin and gauzes.17 The growth of narrative themes in these textile formats perhaps habituated the viewer’s eye to figural imagery on embroidered dress and accessories. Another factor was likely consumer demand from places like Shanghai. Courtesans had led fashions throughout the Qing, but after the 1850s, when prostitution, along with printing, publishing, and performance, shifted to Shanghai from Suzhou, Yangzhou, and Nanjing, the Shanghai courtesan took center stage. Encyclopedist Xu Ke described how “their gorgeous dress and beautiful attire closely followed the fashions, and these were always changing . . . invariably women from respectable families also imitated these trends, and before long, they also spread to the interior.”18 122  |  CHAPTER 4

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The close relationship between courtesans and tailors stimulated these changes: “All clothing styles are driven by the brothel trends. Shanghai courtesans all come from Suzhou and therefore mostly dress in the Suzhou style. The patrons arrange for the courtesans to have their clothing made in Colored Clothing Lane: beautifully designed, elegantly cut, and chosen by themselves. At that time, lower-status courtesans were often called tailors [because] they were provided with the latest styles, fitted with various decorative forms, extremely ingenious and exceedingly wasteful.”19 Notoriety was key to remaining desirable in the market: only by the most provocative costumes could courtesans be assured of the gossip and publicity that ensured their continued relevance and desirability.20 They chose styles that singled them out: brightly shaded woolen fabrics and printed cottons; daring color variations; cross-dressing in men’s hats and coats; or, as shall be seen in this and the following chapter, assertions of culture and literacy.21 But ultimately, to explain the appearance of dramatic narrative on dress we must acknowledge the primacy of performance and print. Mid-late Qing performance conventions established associations between celebratory occasions and popular acts, awarding auspicious values to scenes, making them suitable subject matter for women’s dress. Illustrated drama anthologies, popular prints, and pattern books formed a vast image bank of scenes for craftsmen and women to adapt to their own materials, tools, and depictive capabilities, causing the circulation of visual themes, despite disparities of materiality and technique. This imagery circuit is demonstrated in this chapter through jackets depicting imagery from Jingdezhen porcelain, Taohuawu prints, and Suzhou tanci narratives. Yet close object study shows how embroidery pattern designers presented a distinct portrayal of narrative, in part by manipulating the possibilities offered by dress formats. The visual and thematic continuities between performance, prints, and jackets evidences the participation of embroidery producers in urban handicrafts, but the comparisons also highlight embroidered narrative’s unique visuality—related to performance and print culture, but not derivative of it. Figural Imagery and the Eight-Roundel-Style Robe

The earliest example of a figurally decorated robe comes from Prince Guo’s (1697– 1738) tomb, whose looting was discussed in the preface (see fig. P.1).22 Presumably once worn by either his primary wife, Lady Niohuru, daughter of Duke Guoyi, or his concubine, Lady Meng, the daughter of Dase (?–1780), the damaged robe survives in three fragments. Two of these fragments contain figural roundel scenes, worked in a muted palette of browns, blues, and greens, familiar from contemporaneous Gu embroidery. The first fragment contains a single roundel depicting five women playing with a ball. The second fragment from the front of the robe contains four roundels: each one shows several beautifully dressed women conducting themselves in leisurely activities—carrying vases of flowers, writing calligraphy, burning incense (fig. 4.2). P erformance , P rint, and Pattern   |   1 2 3

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Figure 4.2. Roundel from front fragment of the “Water Garden” robe showing four women around a seated woman holding a brush, tomb of Prince Guo, eighteenth century. The NelsonAtkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust, 35-279/104. Photograph courtesy Nelson-Atkins Media Services / Tiffany Matson.

A range of stitches are used—pine-needle stitch, net stitch, split stitch, and couching—to highlight luxurious materials and furnishings: huge peacock feather fans, low balustrades, large lanterns to light their path, and other elegant accoutrements. The scenes are framed with rocks, tree peonies, paulownia trees, clouds, and banana plants. As generic scenes of palace women, the roundels compare closely in style and subject matter to early-mid Qing albums of imperial consorts by court artists such as Jiao Bingzhen (act. ca. 1680–1726), Chen Mei (act. 1700s–1740s), Ding Guanpeng (act. 1726–70), and Yao Wenhan (act. 1739–52).23 Their faces, hairstyles, clothing, and activities conform to the standards of palace-ladies paintings (gongxun tu), a subcategory of beauty portraits (shinü hua, meiren hua), often presented in album formats, with their activities organized according to seasonal or monthly criteria. In extolling a particular kind of behavior for imperial beauties, the genre possessed both decorative and normative functions. Since only three sections of the robe survive, the original roundel layout cannot be reconstructed. Still it is fascinating to discover such imagery, presumed to be the realm of albums and paintings, applied to embroidered dress, not least of all because its existence implies an imperial lady wearing scenes of imperial ladies performing idealized activities. The use of the roundel as a decorative device to present a scene, mediating a design transfer from album format to embroidered robe, may well have been stimulated by porcelain: the embroidered roundels strongly evoke contemporaneous porcelain designs. Take, for example, this Shunzhi period blue-and-white dish decorated with a scene from the Yuan dynasty zaju play, Gold Thread Pond (Jin xian chi), in which scholar Han Fuchen invites his love, Du Ruiniang, and fellow courtesans to a banquet 124  |  CHAPTER 4

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Figure 4.3. Mid-seventeenth-century porcelain dish with a scene from Gold Thread Pond, ca. 1650–60. H 7.5 cm, D 33 cm. Butler Family Collection. Reprinted from Sir Michael Butler et al., Treasures from an Unknown Reign: Shunzhi Porcelain (1644–1661), 202–3, with permission from the owner and publisher.

(fig. 4.3). Compare the use of natural features like mountains and clouds or the balustrade to subtly frame the scene. The roundel has a long history in Chinese decorative arts, with precedents in the material culture of both Han Chinese and northern ethnic groups. Its most well-known content was the dragon motif, first seen during the Yuan dynasty and evolving during the Ming into the “dragon roundel robe,” which came in three varieties: the twelve-roundel version displaying the twelve imperial symbols, as well as four- and eight-roundel styles. The Manchu Qing rulers initially continued all three versions, but as they established their own dress system, the twelve-roundel style became obsolete and the four- and eight-roundel style prevailed, each associated with a certain group. Princes wore four-dragon roundel-style surcoats as their version of the rank badge surcoat.24 The difference between the official’s square rank badges marked cosmological significance: the circle embodied the heavens, the square the earth.25 By contrast, the eight-dragon roundel robe was considered a female auspicious court robe (ji fu) style—a primary means of distinguishing the emperor from his empress and consorts—though Palace Museum research has shown that this gendering didn’t occur until the mid-Qing.26 By this juncture, the male dragon-roundel surcoat had widened to become a diplomatic gift used to control internal courtiers and external diplomats alike. Outside the court, dragon-roundel silks also gained wider currency: scholar Gong Wei (b. 1704) complained of the dissolute luxury of the Wu region where “adorned with roundel dragons and profile dragons, clothed in gold thread and carved gold [patterns], commoners all overstep themselves [in wearing these styles].”27 Meanwhile court designers experimented with the roundel to frame not just imperially prestigious dragon and phoenix, but also more secular motifs, like flowers and P erformance , P rint, and Pattern   |   1 2 5

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butterflies.28 The “robe with eight embroidered floral roundels” (ji fu gua xiuhua ba tuan) style (see fig. 2.12) was a regulated style of court dress, worn by the wives of the Manchu-ranked Dukes Who Guard the Country and Dukes Who Assist the Country, as well as the Han wives of the commoner dukes.29 Chongyi (1885–1945) described it in his anecdotes on nineteenth-century courts: “This [style of ] women’s outer robe with eight roundels is also reddish-black, but lacks waves at the bottom; rather it has eight embroidered roundels edged in black [one roundel at front, one at back, one on each shoulder, and two on each of the front and back lapels]. It is worn over the chenyi instead of the pao robe, and may be green, yellow, peach, or moon-white, but not crimson. Those senior in age do not wear the embroidered eight-roundel [style] but rather the rank badge surcoat.”30 Another Manchu writer, Zhenjun, further detailed that only newlywed women wore the eight-roundel formal robe, underlining an association with celebration.31 In fact, well before these writers, the eight-roundel style had evolved beyond court environs, entering Yangzhou and Suzhou fashions. In mid-eighteenth-century Yangzhou, Li Dou (d. 1817) commented on the eight roundels in a fashion context: “Yangzhou clothing favors the new styles. Ten years ago, the satins were all patterned with eight roundels, but later they changed to the ‘large Western-style lotus’ and the ‘large jade orchid’ patterns.”32 Around the same time, in Puyuan, a Zhejiang location famous for its silk production, a local gazetteer detailed the fashions: “Women’s outer robes are called pifeng, or also da gai (large shell); they are decorated with Gu-style embroidery, colorful threads, woven fold, coiled gold, gold leaf, stitched gold, also vertical threads; there are two-color brocades, eight-roundel patterns, eight gold roundels, and other such styles.” The writer also observed how Puyuan consumers dressed “just like in Suzhou.”33 Though the eight-roundel style perhaps originated in the northern court, down in the south it was associated with urban fashion rather than court princesses. For the curators who purchased the looted Prince Guo tomb finds, the value of this robe lay in satisfying their fetish for Qing court elegance; for our purposes, the robe is more important for being the earliest known example of the figural roundel style. Though this early example was a Manchu robe, by the nineteenth century, the widespread numbers in museum collections suggest it became a trend primarily in Han-style clothing. Its discovery in the wardrobe of a mid-Qing princess not only suggests the style’s court origins, but also corroborates the wearing of figural or narrative decoration, something denied by some historians who argue the style was instead a form of theatrical costume.34 In the context of the Chinese predilection for auspicious decoration and a more general cultural inhibition against figural decoration on dress, the presence of narrative imagery is certainly curious. However, the vast numbers of extant narrative-decorated collars, sleeve-bands, and purses demonstrate narrative was acceptable sartorial subject matter for many women, at least at an accessorizing level. While the lack of provenance information makes it difficult to reach definitive conclusions on this question, evidence suggests that, at least sometimes, 126  |  CHAPTER 4

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narrative-decorated dress was worn in nonperformative arenas. A jacket featuring one of the most fashionable narratives of this period, The Pearl Pagoda (Zhenzhu ta), exemplifies how and why narrative came to decorate dress. Decorative Narrative

One of the earliest examples of Suzhou tanci (lit., “plucking rhymes,” a prosimetric form), the anonymous Pearl Pagoda was hugely popular in the nineteenth-century Jiangnan area in both oral and written genres.35 Set in Ming dynasty Kaifeng, it tells of the love between Cui’e and her cousin Fang Qing, a talented, handsome scholar whose family has fallen on hard times. Fang Qing seeks financial help from his aunt, who, ashamed of her shabby nephew, denies their connection. He is saved by his beautiful cousin Chen Cui’e, who gifts him a pearl pagoda to fund his study and exams; later her father, Chen Lian, an imperial censor, catches up with Fang Qing at Nine Pine Pavilion and promises him Cui’e in marriage. Fang Qing is robbed of the pearl pagoda and nearly dies in a snowstorm but is rescued by his old classmate, Bi Yunxian. Fang recovers at Bi’s house where he charms Bi’s mother and is betrothed to her daughter Bi Saijin as a second wife. Fang Qing’s mother, begging her way, goes to look for her son and finds rescue at the Culminated Fortune Nunnery, where she encounters Cui’e. Fang Qing succeeds in the exams and becomes the number-one candidate. He returns to the Chen household disguised as a Daoist, chanting songs in order to shame his aunt and test Cui’e, but eventually reveals his true persona and new status. He forgives the aunt, marries both Cui’e and Saijin, and takes the maid, Caiping, as a concubine. There are two known jackets featuring The Pearl Pagoda set into ten roundels, one in the Peabody Essex Museum (figs. 4.4 and 4.5), the other in the Wadsworth Museum. Both date to the mid-late nineteenth-century, a period when The Pearl Pagoda was a popular subject matter in Suzhou popular prints, and it is instructive to compare the two jackets with contemporaneous prints.36 There are at least three examples of two-part Pearl Pagoda prints by Suzhou and Shanghai workshops. The earliest is a twenty-two-scene version by the Lu Jiashun workshop, active in the Daoguang period (1820–1850). The other two, a sixteen-scene (fig. 4.6) and twenty-scene version signed by the Suzhou Wang Rongxing workshop (act. ca. 1850–75), are clearly related, with near-identical scenes.37 The sixteen-scene print is unsigned but resembles both the Wang Rongxing print and a Legend of the White Snake print in the same format, signed by Sun Wenya, one of the small Shanghai printshops that flourished in the late nineteenth century. These links reflect the dominance of Suzhou printers during the nineteenth century, even after the Taiping destruction of Suzhou’s Taohuawu print quarter in 1860. The success of the Shanghai print industry was predicated upon the migration of Suzhou printers and designers, and Taohuawu print culture provided a foundation for the new visual cultures of photography and photo-lithography in Shanghai. P erformance , P rint, and Pattern   |   1 2 7

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Figure 4.4. Bright-pink silk jacket with ten polychrome and gold-thread embroidered roundels of scenes from The Pearl Pagoda, 1850–1900. 105.4 × 144.1 cm. Peabody Essex Museum (E76699). Gift of Miss Marion Ralph, 1989.

(right) Figure 4.5. Roundel detail from The Pearl Pagoda jacket showing the marriage of Fang Qing and Cui’e (tuan yuan).

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a

b Figure 4.6. Two serial nianhua prints (for the lunar New Year) narrating the story in sixteen scenes: (a) The Pearl Pagoda, Part 1; (b) The Pearl Pagoda, Part 2. Color woodblock print, 54 × 32 cm. Collection of the Shanghai Library. Reprinted from Feng Jicai, Zhongguo muban nianhua jicheng, Shanghai xiaoxiao chang juan, 219–20, with permission from the Zhonghua Book Company.

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All three prints are in the “multiple frame” or “cartoon strip-style” (lian huan tu hua), though only the later two prints actually separate the scenes with equal-sized square grids.38 This grid sectioning enables the print designer to use something of a cut-and-paste approach to narrative, implying that narrative imagery was conceived as a series of frames, comprising both the main story and subplots, which might be inserted or removed, in a manner analogous to the oral storyteller’s practice of combining longer narratives from segments (tiao shan ge). Thus, while certain scenes are common to all four versions—the giving of the pearl pagoda, Censor Chen promising Fang Qing his daughter, Fang Qing assuming the guise of a Daoist monk—other scenes are optional. The earliest Lu Jiashun version provides the most complicated telling, introducing military and supernatural elements through the substory of Marshall Bi Yunxian (Fang Qing’s old classmate), who is sent into battle by the emperor and assisted by Golden Boy, sent by the Primal Woman of the Nine Heavens. This military tale is offered instead of the substory of Qiu Liuqiao’s theft of the pearl pagoda and later attempted sale in the pawnshop. Both the later prints devote three scenes to Qiu’s apprehension, trial, and execution. Each telling lays a slightly different emphasis, and the four scenes added to create the twenty-act version form a more didactic rounding of the main characters: Fang Qing bidding his mother goodbye and Bi Yunxian rescuing Fang Qing from the snow.39 While the comparison between the prints and the jacket is helpful, the embroiderer has not simply replicated the print scenes. The comparison of one scene, “Selling the Pearl Pagoda,” in the two jackets and the popular print demonstrates the differing compositions (figs. 4.7, 4.8, and 4.9). Notably, compared to the prints, both jackets tend to shun any unpleasant content, dispensing with any kind of military or supernatural details. This is particularly true of the PEM jacket: while Fang Qing is shown abandoned in the snow, this is only to include his rescue by his loyal classmate. The reason behind this—Qiu Liuqiao’s theft of the pearl pagoda—is avoided, and the only reference to this character is the pawnshop scene; there is no illustration of Qiu meeting justice. Rather than the subplots, the selection focuses on the most auspicious moments: the farewell of a filial son, the rescue by a loyal friend, the talented man marrying virtuous women. Compared to the prints, they also show far less variability. Nearly every scene found on the jacket is also found in the prints: seven of the ten jacket scenes feature in all three prints, and the remaining three scenes feature in two of the three prints. The jacket employs the most prototypical content of the narrative—the core events and characters constituting the narrative’s identity. The ordering of the scenes on the jacket surface also demonstrates an auspicious reading. The last scene, Fang Qing’s marriage, is placed in the front central roundel (see fig. 4.5), nearest in position to the first scene, Fang Qing bidding farewell to his mother, in the front bottom right roundel. The scene ordering is neither linear nor random: scenes two and three appear together on the front shoulder and scenes four and five on the back shoulder. Rather, the ordering is explicable in terms of the need to 130  |  CHAPTER 4

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Figure 4.7. “Selling the Pearl Pagoda” (Dang zhu ta) scene from the embroidered jacket in figure 4.4 (see also figs. 4.8 and 4.9). Peabody Essex Museum (E76699).

Figure 4.8. Another version of the scene “Selling the Pearl Pagoda” from an embroidered jacket. Note the sign with the character 當 (dang), meaning “pawnshop.” Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (1959.77). (left) Figure 4.9. The scene “Selling the Pearl Pagoda” from a popular print. See figure 4.6 for entire print.

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compromise narrative and decoration functions. For narrative to function, preceding scenes needed to be close to their ensuing scenes, and for decoration to succeed, the scene of the marriage of Fang Qing and Cui’e had to be front and center, both because this is the most auspicious and important scene and because the figural roundel jacket evolved from the dragon roundel robe and accordingly preserved some of the dragon robe’s conventions as to the positioning of important visual information. Not only was the front roundel most prominent in the viewer’s field of vision, it also allowed the wearer to participate in the joining of husband and wife as the jacket was fastened, a technique suggesting the bodily symbolism of imperial dress.40 The jacket designer used other techniques to cast narrative in auspicious terms. All the roundel scenes portray couples rather than individuals, using a zoomed-in perspective to highlight their interactions.41 This emphasis assimilated figural content into the established auspicious repertoire of dress decoration: paired figures provided connotations of a happy and harmonious marriage. Another method was to integrate narrative scenery with auspicious motifs, recontextualising the figural content amid the standard pavilion, rocks, and trees conventional to “beauty” prints. This strategy of ornamentally grounding the figures is particularly effective in the “narrative medley” jackets, which contain diverse scenes from multiple dramas. The jacket-print comparison demonstrates one of the primary influences upon the jackets’ aesthetic, and designers’ conflation of decoration and narrative. But to place narrative on dress, embroidery designers also had to satisfy the conventions of auspicious decoration, a process best explained through performance. Drama’s power over narrative-decorated material culture has been evidenced in objects diverse in both materiality and audience, from The Story of the Western Chamber porcelain to Three Kingdoms popular prints. Artisans conveyed a performative visuality in different ways, some of which are seen in the jackets. Theatrical costume, makeup, and dramatic gestures and poses are common to the jackets, and made clear reference to the stage.42 Less obvious characteristics also communicated dramatic associations to their viewers: viewing angles or figural proportions stimulated an audience’s perspective, for example.43 The roundels display a keen awareness of gesture and movement: hands brought together in obeisance, servants kneeling to their mistress, martial actors fencing, fans fluttering between lovers. Like performance illustration, theatrical conventions were reproduced through acting gestures (ke, jie) conveying greeting, crying, bowing, and shyness. In this Story of the Western Chamber jacket (fig. 4.10) it is only by attention to these postures that we can distinguish between Cui Yingying and Scholar Zhang reuniting (fig. 4.11) and parting (fig. 4.12). In the absence of this knowledge they are simply a scholar and a beauty in a garden. To be sure, narrative-decorated material culture was not simply a direct reflection of performance. Qing fictional narratives possessed multimedia identities across an array of oral, visual, and performative forms: ritual opera, shadow or puppet opera, folk songs, tanci and “drum ballads” (guci), prints, illustrated plays, carved wood, 132  |  CHAPTER 4

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Figure 4.10. Black satin woman’s jacket, with roundel scenes from The Story of the Western Chamber, embroidered in polychrome, gold, and silver thread and enhanced with painted pigments. L 94.5 cm, W 164 cm. Minneapolis Institute of Art (RBL 51.424). Bequest of Margaret McMillan Weber in memory of her mother Katherine Kittridge McMillan. Photograph by Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Figure 4.11. Roundel detail, “Returning home in brocade clothes,” from figure 4.10.

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Figure 4.12. Roundel detail, “Bidding farewell at Chang Pavilion,” from figure 4.10.

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painted porcelain, pattern books, temple-wall paintings, and proverbs. Each form had their own conventions, requiring different skills of their audience.44 While a mountain song interpretation might lack the visual potency of the theatrical interpretation, these genres still possessed the ability to shape narrative.45 Still, the special position of drama across social and urban-rural divides and its role in marking celebrations and festivals made it a primary source for visualizing narrative in material culture.46 Yet we know little of how dramatic performance as a “cultural mediator” affected scene selection in object decoration, nor the mediation between object, imagery, and occasion.47 Scholars have shown how play content and language was differentiated in distinct settings (private residence, village festival, commercial guilds).48 But regardless of setting, all eighteenth- and nineteenth-century celebratory performance utilized scenic highlights (zhezixi) rather than the entire play. Whereas the earliest Song and Yuan theatrical genres (nanxi, zaju) called for plays to be performed in their entirety (zheng ben xi, quan ben xi), around the mid-sixteenth century, Ming plays (chuanqi) began being abbreviated. By the Wanli period (1573–1620), this “highlight” performance style was increasingly prevalent, partly because repertoires and plot lines were familiar, lessening the audience’s patience for sitting through whole plays.49 Instead audiences sought more perfect renditions of the most prized scenes, and actors began to specialize in those scenes. Scenes acquired independent status, referenced with abbreviated two-character titles rather than their play titles. They began being performed in combination with scenes from different plays, and attention was increasingly paid to the aesthetics of the combination itself. The possibility of the highlight mode—that a scene could be self-contained—derived from the chuanqi play structure, audience familiarity, and social mechanisms intrinsic to private performance. Hosts sought an atmosphere suitable to the occasion and location, something easier to achieve through the flexible zhezixi format. For audiences and performers needing help in choosing the appropriate play scene, publishers began producing dramatic anthologies (qu pu), a genre that served to popularize and standardize scenes performances.50 Anthologies first appeared around the early sixteenth century, and some filled an overtly social context, like the late Ming compendium The Red Coral Ballads (Yuefu hong shan). Prefaced 1602, but reprinted in 1800, it anthologizes one hundred dramatic scenes categorized into sixteen thematic chapters. For example, juan 13, “Love” (Fengqing), in which lovers manage to meet despite difficulties, combined dramatic acts from The Story of the Western Chamber, The Tale of the Jade Hairpin, and others, facilitating scene selection for performance.51 Performance customs also standardized correlations between drama, celebration, and occasion. The mid-Qing novel The Scholars describes the celebration of Qu Xianfu and Lu Xiaojie’s wedding with a performance of “Dance of Official Promotion,” followed by “Immortal Zhang Brings a Son”52 and finally “Golden Seal” (a satirical dig at the foolish Qu Xianfu’s dismal prospects of gaining official promotion by exam, an irony given edge by his bride’s intellectual talents).53 This combination was so widely performed together that it gained the title “Three Raised Heads” (San chu tou).54 134  |  CHAPTER 4

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The choice of dramatic performance could be a delicate matter. In the novel The Story of the Stone, Grandmother Jia is uncomfortable when the three acts “chosen” by the gods to be performed at the Daoist Temple of the Lunar Goddess include “The Insignia-Laden Bed,” which implies the family is conceited, and “The South Branch,” which likens the world to an anthill, a tale of power and glory ultimately revealed as a dream.55 Just as important as performing a scene appropriate to the occasion was avoiding scenes inappropriate to the occasion. In Six Records of a Floating Life, when Shen’s family celebrate his mother’s birthday, his father requests “The Sad Parting” from The Legend of the White Snake, upsetting his wife Yun because it is inauspiciously tragic for a happy occasion.56 The occasion was, of course, just one factor determining scene selection, and the celebratory associations possessed by a narrative scene may have been fundamental or superficial to the artisan’s choice. Still, the correlation between scene and occasion certainly impacted the play’s depiction in material culture, something most obvious in The Story of the Western Chamber. The story of two lovers—Scholar Zhang and Cui Yingying—and their trials to unite, despite parental dictates, Western Chamber was probably the most widespread of all Qing dramas. There are a number of jackets featuring this drama: one of the most striking is this black silk jacket combining Western Chamber roundel scenes with auspicious motifs representing the wish “May you have prosperous descendants” (Mianmian gua die), and gold-thread embroidered waves (li shui) on the skirt (in the style of imperial robes), from the Minneapolis Institute of Art (see fig. 4.10). Though the other jackets vary in embroidery stitch, figural style, and palette, certain scenes dominate.57 All three jackets feature the following scenes: “Climbing over the wall” (Tiao qiang), when Scholar Zhang surreptitiously meets Yingying; “Bidding Farewell at Chang Pavilion” (Chang ting song bie), when they bid a sad farewell as Zhang goes to the capital to take the exams; and “Suddenly awakening from a dream” (Jing meng), when Zhang dreams of Yingying on his way to the exams. Figures 4.13 and 4.14 compare the “Climbing over the wall” scene on two of the jackets, and though certain features are consistent—the wall decoration, Cui Yingying’s book—both scenes are substantially different in figural outlines and scene composition. Standardization characterized scene choice rather than scene rendering. Standardization derived primarily from the widespread circulation of these scenes in illustrated compilations.58 Performance popularity fed into pattern availability to determine the widespread visual existence of The Western Chamber. Story imagery is found throughout embroidered silk objects, not only on the presumably expensive jackets, but also on lower-cost options. An important pattern source for lower-income women lacking access to printed pattern books, the paper-cut in figure 4.15 shows the “Climbing over the wall” scene. Appliqué roundels were another low-cost way of buying into the fashion for roundel decoration and were sold in sheets for the customer or tailor to affix to a jacket or hanging. The American Museum of Natural History contains a set of twelve embroidered roundels depicting the Western Chamber scenes. Collected by Berthold Laufer in 1901 Shanghai and cataloged as “embroidered silk P erformance , P rint, and Pattern   |   1 3 5

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Figure 4.13. “Climbing over the wall” from The Story of the Western Chamber. Cream silk-gauze jacket embroidered in gold and polychrome thread. Rhode Island School of Design (37.044). See figure 4.14 for comparison.

Figure 4.14. Comparison of the roundel scene, “Climbing over the wall.” Black satin woman’s jacket embroidered in gold and polychrome thread. Minneapolis Institute of Arts (RBL51.424).

Figure 4.15. A paper-cut roundel pattern of “Climbing over the wall,” Qing dynasty, Pujiang, Zhejiang. D 23 cm. Reprinted from Wang Bomin, Zhongguo minjian jianzhi shi, 92–93, with permission from the author’s family.

pieces for appliqué work, to be used for bed cover,” such roundels were also applied to clothing.59 The Chinese pattern book is rarely acknowledged as a cultural mediator, and yet, as British consul Mr. Tradescant Lay (1799–1845) observed, the pattern book, with its “cover of a fair yellow, studded with spangles of gold,” contained “between two and three hundred figures, culled from the varied stores of nature and art . . . so well selected and so numerous, they might serve as illustrations to a small encyclopedia. One acquainted with Chinese literature and Natural History, might deliver several lectures with this book before him.”60 Mr. Lay was based in Fuzhou, where he might have seen pattern books like the Gu Embroidery Patterns from Old Suzhou or Figural 136  |  CHAPTER 4

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Figure 4.16. Top frame: the “Climbing over the wall” scene; bottom frame: a design for “One hundred boys at play.” Late nineteenth-century embroidery pattern book, woodblock print on paper, collection of Don J. Cohn.

Patterns from the Green Window, discussed in chapter 3. While these only featured religious figures like the Eight Immortals or Ma Gu, examples from later in the century illustrate the mass of narrative imagery in circulation. The “Threads of Meaning” collection of pattern books, from American collector Don J. Cohn, span the late Qing and early Republic and often feature figural and dramatic themes: sometimes in roundel format, sometimes divided into top and bottom sections, combining scenes like “Climbing over the wall” with scenes of “Boys at play” (fig. 4.16).61 Some narrative scenes are identifiable, others more obscure. Nineteenth-century popular prints often featured figural medleys, combining single narrative frames (echoing the zhezixi practice of combining disparate scenes). Similarly, “narrative medley” jackets featured several scenes taken from different dramas and stories, each set into a single roundel. These medley jackets raise the issue of meaning: do the individual scenes function to reference the plays to which they belong, or do the scenes take on new meaning when juxtaposed with other scenes? How we should interpret this interplay of disparate characters? P erformance , P rint, and Pattern   |   1 3 7

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Playing with Narrative

The figural assortments found in the “Threads of Meaning” pattern books reflect the development of dramatic illustration through the late Qing period, a period often cast in decline in comparison to late Ming luxury publications. The pace of newly compiled, finely illustrated publications abated substantially by the eighteenth century, a trend attributed to mid-Qing prejudices against luxuriant ornamentation, but also caused by expanded markets and producer competition. Nineteenth-century drama and novels catered to customers through lower prices, reprints in new formats, and later, lithographic reproduction, rather than high-quality illustration.62 But illustration was also regenerated by the printing industry’s post-Taiping shift to Shanghai and new consumer demands, shifting tastes away from officials and literati-painters toward trend-setting courtesans, merchants, and artists, and popular subject matter like historical legends and popular novels. This applied not only to print and painting, but also porcelain and textiles.63 Rather than decline, visual and material evidence indicates that the late Qing audience sought ever more novel designs predicated upon their visual knowledge of these much-loved narratives. Hence a key characteristic of mid-late Qing dramatic compilations was decontextualized imagery separated from its text, suggestive of an audience deeply familiar with these narratives. For example, in the late eighteenth-century drama anthology, The Patched White Fur Robe (Zhui bai qiu), the illustrations were grouped together at the beginning of each juan of extracts, rather than positioned at the appropriate plot juncture.64 The jackets also evidence audience familiarity. In one Pearl Pagoda embroidered border, for example, rather than scenes, the characters are shown in key poses with representative objects: Fang Qing bidding farewell to his mother, Cui’e giving Fang Qing the pearl pagoda, Lady Fang rescued by the nunnery, Fang Qing singing Daoist sutras, and so on. That even these scanty depictions could be identified by the viewer and associated with The Pearl Pagoda demonstrates late Qing society’s familiarity with these stories. Visual presentations could be seemingly entirely contingent on a single cue—an easily identifiable characteristic like a companion figure, a notable setting, or an associated object (Scholar Zhang atop a wall, or Xu Shilin next to a pagoda in The Legend of the White Snake)—that enabled the identification process and obviated the need for textual support. The visual autonomy of these sparsely detailed renderings suggests they functioned somewhat like narrative characters in literary personification, or like the linguistic use of “canonical incidents” (dian gu)—literary phrases that referenced historical stories. A single character frame could represent the narrative whole.65 The visual sufficiency of the single, decontextualized character scene and their reference to the dramatic narrative offered nineteenth-century pattern-drafters considerable potential. The late Qing audience’s ability to read narrative references from a single figure or scene meant designers could reconfigure characters and scenes to 138  |  CHAPTER 4

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recreate new narrative presentations. Narrative plots and characters became synecdochic elements to be played with, as seen across different media. Figure 4.17 shows one of a pair of sleeve-bands, embroidered with a striking narrative structure that paired zodiac animals with appropriate dramatic scenes. For example, a snake is shown as part of a scene from The Legend of the White Snake, or a sheep is shown within the scene “Su Wu looks after sheep.” Another example of a sleeve-band pair with this design survives in the Suzhou Museum.66 The popularity of this combination of zodiac animal and play scene likely related to the late Qing Shanghai calendars (Yuefenpai). In February 1885, the Dianshizhai Pictorial distributed a calendar to subscribers: “China and the West have combined their expertise to create Twelve Drama Scenes, each correlated with the Zodiac Animals of the Terrestrial Branches, printed on quality white paper and designed by famous artists.”67 This specific calendar is no longer extant, so it is not possible to establish whether the lithographic and embroidered versions shared content in addition to conception, but overlap can be seen in a later 1906 version, based on a 1896 print from a Shanghai print shop (fig. 4.18). Twelve pairings of zodiac animals and dramatic scenes surround the center calendar (removed here). Despite the duplicated concept, the print-designer and embroidery-designer have chosen different figures, depicted in differing orders.68 These instances of shared themes is not surprising: Suzhou designers dominated the Shanghai print industry, and nianhua themes are characteristic of transitional print objects like the calendars.69 But the sleeve-bands demonstrate how professional dress producers participated in a circuit of commercially produced visual and material culture. The “narrative medley” jacket style (fig. 4.19), with its heterogeneous selection of historical and fictional characters, demonstrates this imagery circuit. This example presents a miscellany of figures with no obvious organization in chronology or theme. Models of loyal friendship like “Su Wu bids farewell to Li Ling”—in which Han dynasty imperial envoy Su Wu, held prisoner by the Xiongnu, bids farewell to his close friend Li Ling, knowing they will never see each other again (fig. 4.20)—mingle with Zhang Qian and the Weaving Maiden—a legend in which the famous Western Han explorer took a raft on the Milky Way and encountered the Weaving Maiden, who gave him the stone that supported her loom as a clue to her true identity (fig. 4.21).70 This latter scene may have been inspired by the Suzhou workshops: the pair were popular among mid-late Qing carvers who worked the figures in material like rhinoceros horn or nephrite.71 Some of the figures may have been sourced from Peerless Figures (Wu shuang pu), an album of imagined portraits by Jin Guliang (fl. 1661), which comprised forty male and female historical figures from the Han to the Song dynasties.72 This album of famous historical figures was first printed in 1694 and then reprinted many times throughout the Qing period. It was particularly popular for nineteenth-century designs on vernacular porcelain—brush-pots, bowls, and vases.73 Like the jackets, porcelain designers often reconstituted the original images; for example, one cup combined Liang Gong P erformance , P rint, and Pattern   |   1 3 9

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Figure 4.17. One of a pair of embroidered silk sleeve-bands with twelve scenes of zodiac animals, each one set within an appropriate dramatic scene, late Qing. Petterson Museum (1999.1.1). (below) Figure 4.18. Chinese and English Zodiac Animal Calendar (Huaying shengxiao yuefenpai), 1906, based on an 1896 print by the Wang Rongxing printshop. 50 × 29 cm. Suzhou Taohuawu Woodblock Print Museum. Reprinted from Feng Jicai, Zhongguo muban nianhua jicheng, Taohuawu juan, 393, with permission from the Zhonghua Book Company.

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Figure 4.19. Woman’s domestic semiformal coat (ao), embroidered with figural scenes, including several from Peerless Figures (Wu shuang pu), an album of historical figures by Jin Guliang (fl. 1661). Qing dynasty, 1860–70. Silk damask embroidered with silk and couched gold-wrapped threads, 111.5 x 149.2 cm (437/8 x 583/4 in.). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Miss Alison Haughton (50.2480).

Figure 4.20. Roundel detail, “Su Wu bids farewell to Li Ling” (Su Wu bie Li Ling), from figure 4.19.

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Figure 4.21. Roundel detail, Zhang Qian and Weaving Maiden (Zhi Nü), from figure 4.19.

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and Empress Wu Zetian. Peerless Figures treats these two figures separately, but the porcelain highlighted their historical connections: Liang was chancellor under the empress.74 The departure from the original album points to the wider social meaning characters communicated to audiences through their representation in performance, proverbs, print, and objects. Narrative scenes were also put to other temporal uses beyond the zodiac animals. In the Yangliuqing print “Popular Songs on the Twelve Months as Flower Drum Performances” (Shixing shi’er yue dou huagu), hero and heroine pairs have been apportioned to the twelve months (fig. 4.22). The characters stroll around an elegant pavilion, mingling across the print surface: no graphic device divides them, but they are clearly delineated. Each one faces inward to their companions or the side, none turn outward to characters from other months: Xu Xian and Miss White from The Legend of White Snake’s “Borrowing the Umbrella” flank Weaving Maiden and Cowherd from A Match in the Milky Way, but they do not interact. Each pair of actors is accompanied by a flag labeled with play or scene title, and the couplet above them details the month and appropriate flower and plot section. For example, The Legend of the White Snake shows the umbrella-carrying Xu Xian and Miss White, accompanied by Miss Blue.75 The couplet reads: “[In] the fifth month flower-drum song performance, the pomegranate flower blooms, borrowing the umbrella is lovers’ destiny for the White Snake and Green Snake. Drinking the realgar liquor reveals [her] true form; their relationship severed at the head of the bridge, Leifeng Pagoda produces an honorable son with a golden flower inserted in his hat.”76 The print demonstrates the close ties between nianhua imagery and vernacular songs —the conception was likely related to the “Twelve Month Flower Songs,” which integrated narrative texts, either from a single drama like The Legend of the White Snake or twelve scenes taken from different dramas.77 The print works on several levels: it may be appreciated for its colorful and detailed assembly of beautiful people, for the clever references to drama, or the inventive seasonal links. Narrative recreations like these examples were not only based on temporal or philosophical formats, they were also based on “narrative commonality.” The thematic organization of the drama anthology referenced earlier, The Red Coral Ballads, suggests that by the early Qing, viewers categorized scenes according to thematic structures—parting, marriage, birth of a son, and so on, and that audiences connected, at least to some degree, scenes with shared themes. For example, both “Cui Yingying sees off her lover at Chang Pavilion” from The Story of the Western Chamber and “Chen Miaochang sees off her lover at the Qiu River” from The Tale of the Jade Hairpin were characterized as parting (fenli). Examples of such narrative commonality are found throughout late Qing literature and imagery. One Chaozhou song connected Chen San from The Tale of the Lychee Mirror (Li jing ji) with her colleagues from similar tales: “The east side had the wife of Xu Mengjiang, the west side had Su Liuniang, the north side had Yingtai for Shanbo, the south side had Chen San for Wu Niang.”78 In 142  |  CHAPTER 4

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Figure 4.22. Popular Songs on the Twelve Months as Flower Drum Performances. Yangliuqing polychrome woodblock print with some color added by brush, 100 × 55 cm. Collection of Institute of Ethnography, Russia (Sulian Kexueyuan Minzuxue Bowuguan). Reprinted from Wang Shucun and Li Fuqing, Sulian cang Zhongguo minjian nianhua zhenpin ji, no. 169.

this case, the characters are all famous tragic love stories, but the link might be based on various features—shared narrative moral, character type, or even seasonal setting. In dress, we find it in a pair of sleeve-bands that connect the tragic heroines Cai Wenji and Wang Zhaojun, both imperial beauties captured by or married to barbarian tribes (fig. 4.23). Cai Wenji was captured by the Xiongnu, but when later ransomed by Cao in the name of her father, she returned to China leaving behind her two children, a story depicted in the illustrated handscroll Eighteen Songs on a Nomad Flute. Wang Zhaojun was sent to the Xiongnu by Han emperor Wang in 33 bce, after he was misled by a portrait that concealed her beauty. Aspects of the sleeve-band’s drafting are strikingly similar to a contemporaneous Suzhou print of Cai Wenji by the Lu Jiashun printshop (fig. 4.24), particularly the official standing by her horse. But the embroidery pattern designer has also offered a personal touch—the geese fly above Wang Zhaojun, famously so amazed by her beauty that they forgot to flap their wings. And, of course, it is the dress format that makes explicit their shared biographical structures. The ingenuity of these designs—forcing narratives into themed and numbered categories—requires the viewer to reflect upon fictionality and framing.79 Late Qing narrative designs are often viewed in terms of degeneration, omitted in surveys of illustrated printing. But these nineteenth-century objects speak to innovation founded P erformance , P rint, and Pattern   |   1 4 3

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Figure 4.23. Pair of sleeve-bands embroidered with thematically linked dramas: (a) Cai Wenji’s Return to the Han (Cai Wenji gui Han); (b) Wang Zhaojun Leaves for the Borderland (Wang Zhaojun chu sai), 1850–75. Silk and metal thread embroidery on silk. Denver Art Museum Neusteter Textile Collection. Gift of James P. Grant and Betty Grant Austin (1977.466.1-2). Photographs © Denver Art Museum. (below) Figure 4.24. Suzhou print of Cai Wenji’s Return to the Han shows heroine Cai Wenji bidding farewell to her children. Lu Jiashun printshop (est. 1820–50), Daoguang period. Reprinted from Feng Jicai, Zhongguo muban nianhua jicheng, Taohuawu juan, xia, 294, with permission from the Zhonghua Book Company.

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upon greater audience familiarity. By the late Qing, knowledge of plays like The Story of the Western Chamber was so deeply ingrained that artisans began to experiment with new ways of alluding to the narrative. A final example illustrates this kind of knowledge. The porcelain teapot and cover shown in figure 4.25 date to the Tongzhi period (1862–74) and are decorated with seals containing kaishu script characters referencing The Story of the Western Chamber. The characters allude to the marriage intrigue between Scholar Zhang and Cui Yingying; for example, “Words of farewell” (bieci) reference the couple’s parting as Scholar Zhang leaves to take the exams, while “To become relatives” (cheng qin shi) alludes to Cui Yingying’s mother finally giving permission for the couple to marry. The sophisticated design reflects the prevalence of The Story of the Western Chamber narrative in various media. The teapot functions as a kind of meta-reference. Once removed from the narrative illustrations, the viewer’s narrative knowledge is a requisite for full appreciation. Notably, while comprehension of the teapot relies on literacy, in the embroidered examples the decoding is purely visual. In a social context, such references created common ground among those sharing the cultural education that enabled the identification. Consider this description of narrative-decorated dress from the early nineteenth-century Yangzhou novel Dreams of Wind and Moon (preface 1848), which tells of the relationships between

Figure 4.25. Teapot and cover decorated with characters referencing scenes from The Story of the Western Chamber. Marked “Great Qing, Tongzhi period.” H 10.5 cm. Previously in the collection of the Berlin collector Georg Weishaupt (1906–2004).

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five courtesans and their lovers. Early in the novel, courtesan Fragrance changes her gown in preparation for a day trip with some men she has just met: “It had a round collar piece of pale blue, eight-treasure-patterned imported crepe, edged with gold-couched black satin borders colorfully embroidered with figures and scenes from The Story of the Stone, double- and triple-edged trimming in yellow, green, and pale pink, and gold-plated cassia buttons.”80 The Story of the Stone told of the rise and fall of a wealthy and connected Manchu family estate. The novel provided something of a fantasy world for urban courtesans like Fragrance, who fashioned themselves after the characters.81 Its wild popularity during the late Qing resulted in a considerable volume of material culture decorated with scenes and characters from the novel, particularly textiles and dress.82 By describing a character wearing a jacket detailed with The Story of the Stone scenic roundels, the author could connect Fragrance to the other novel’s characters, and Dreams of Wind and Moon to The Story of the Stone. The fictional description highlights how, as a representational mode, embroidered dress fundamentally differed from print or porcelain: it was worn on the body instead of hung on a wall, viewed in glances and snatched shots, and restricted by social relationships and cultural conventions rather than the controlled viewing of album leaves. The viewer’s interpretation depended upon “social distance”—only those whose relationship to the wearer was sufficiently intimate was granted sufficiently close visual access to identify the scenes. At a distance, the figures presumably possessed more decorative than narrative characteristics.83 Identification of the jackets’ characters perhaps functioned like a literary allusion, rewarding the successful viewer with a feeling of achievement comparable to that of a reader who traces an obtuse reference in a poetic text.84 Like the reader and writer of a poetic allusion, perhaps identification served to unite viewer and wearer, communing in shared cultural knowledge. Thus, for all the importance of print and performance in influencing the jackets’ presentation of narrative, these embroidered narratives constitute more than a simple reflection of tales circulated in song and on stage. Drama-embroidered garments and accessories reveal how fashionable clothing served as expressions of intertextuality, referencing networks of narrative representations and meanings. Women and Narrative: Meaningless Decoration or Concealed Meaning?

In her influential 1983 publication The Subversive Stitch, Roszika Parker (1945–2010) reevaluated seventeenth-century English-pictorial stumpwork embroidery, which had long been denigrated as “quaint.” She demonstrated how the use of needlework expressed new ideas on marriage and love, allowing women “their own interpretations and particular emphasis to the feminine ideal.”85 Later scholars went further, arguing that women’s choice of “courageous female figures” from biblical narratives formed an “imaginative alliance.” In using needlework, “the supposed instrument of their immobility and silence,” they connected themselves with narratives and “other women 146  |  CHAPTER 4

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across time.”86 Like English stumpwork’s biblical heroines, many of the embroidered scenes present strong women, determined to challenge fate and find happiness. What does embroidery tell us of how Qing women understood assertive female characters like Madame Shi from The Insignia-Laden Bed or Miss White from The Legend of the White Snake? Should we read these heroine’s embroidered presence as evidence of embroidery providing a tool, and dress a vehicle, for woman to challenge the injustices of a patriarchally dominated existence? The enquiry is not merely whether these images present a female choice of narrative. Obviously the jackets’ selection of scholar-beauty plays, such as The Pearl Pagoda, The Story of the Hairpin and the Bracelet, and The Story of the Western Chamber, spoke to concerns likely held by nineteenth-century young women: how to find companionate, romantic love, how to produce filial, successful sons, how to negotiate parental dictates in a filial manner, and so forth. There is a notable lack of bloody battle scenes or macho heroes that are characteristic of men’s narrative-adorned objects, as seen in this scene from Dreams of Wind and Moon, describing a male participant in a dragon-boat festival, strikingly conscious of the performance of dress: “On his left thumb he wore an archery ring of imitation emerald, and on his left wrist a green porcelain armlet. In his right hand he held a black oilpaper fan with a black bamboo spine on which were depicted the one hundred and eight warriors of Outlaws of the Marsh. This young man stood in the prow of the dragon boat, fanning himself constantly, watching the people in the passing boats, and throwing out challenges to a contest.”87 While the jackets undoubtedly speak to feminine norms, it remains unclear that we can locate a localized or gendered expression in the choice of characters or scenes. Indeed, how can we understand the process of investing agency through iconography, as told through the material surface of the embroidered jacket? Historians have pursued two prominent approaches toward interpreting meaning in textile iconography. In the first, “meaningless decoration,” figural scenery is essentially dismissed as generic and empty of significance. It is a stance often applied to nineteenth-century works: their decorative compositions viewed as conventionalized, their audience weakening in parallel with the dynasty, becoming more ignorant and less educated in their grasp of historical and graphic decoration. The objects discussed here have shown how, on the contrary, narrative decoration was not only increasingly widespread in diverse material forms, but also increasingly novel in its presentation. The accumulation of illustrated narrative scenes in dramatic compilations and popular prints formed a critical mass of pattern inventory and audience recognition, stimulating designers to play with narrative in a manner unique to the nineteenth century. The second approach, “concealed meaning,” occupies another extreme. Here the iconographical identification is key to both object and meaning, and meaning is concealed until the message can be deciphered. Hence books on Chinese textiles commonly feature titles involving notions of “hidden meaning.”88 By implication, the producer or consumer attempted to obscure meaning through iconographic choice, P erformance , P rint, and Pattern   |   1 4 7

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constructing a symbolically coded message to speak to a specific audience in locale and socioeconomic position. Given the undisputable restrictions that women of this period often experienced through the patriarchal system, the interpretation of these coded communications is commonly directed toward hegemonic challenge. For example, in an examination of narrative themes in folk embroidery, Kuang Yanghua concludes, “Such figures [Mu Guiying, Hua Mulan, Fan Lihua] indicate women’s desire to improve their social position, their aspirations to equal men in society’s work, and can perhaps be seen as a latent awareness of women’s rights.”89 These military heroines also appear in the jackets, for example the figural medley jackets, where they gracefully cavort, spear in hand, as seen in figure 2.10. This thematic choice reflects the boom in military romance texts (yingxiong chuanqi) that began in the mid-eighteenth century and continued through the nineteenth century. But should we understand these armor-adorned beauties as expressing a feminist consciousness? There are several reasons for rejecting this finding. First, as a group, the jackets are characterized by heroines who defied social conventions and parental pressures only to pursue their marital happiness: women like Cui’e from The Pearl Pagoda who gives her poverty-stricken scholar cousin a pearl pagoda to help him achieve scholarly success, or Bitao from The Story of the Hairpin and the Bracelet who gives her poverty-stricken scholar fiancé her jewelry to hasten the date they could marry. These heroines tend to exhibit proactive behavior only in regard to securing marriage; once this is achieved, they happily fall into the ever-after of married life with the scholar-official. In all other areas of their life, they display Qing normative values of filial piety and virtue. More fundamentally however, it is a misconception to think that meaning can be read directly from iconography, as in Kuang’s approach, which implicitly suggests the social and cultural ideas manifested in textile representations of dramatic themes are visible via iconographical depiction, as if it were possible to leap from the “natural and conventional subject matter” of iconography to the “intrinsic meaning or content” of iconology.90 Yet there is little evidence for the asserted audience subjectivity, or the channeling of intent and agency between maker and object. If we wish to understand embroidered iconography as coded message, then its construction is more fully considered as an interaction between numerous factors: the reasons why a woman embroidered (to earn money, to make a gift for a loved one, to produce an object for her wardrobe, etc.); the localized codes that constrained her choice and framing of iconography (in composition, stitch, palette, and style); and finally, the women’s understanding of that embroidered figural imagery. These boundaries were likely particularly rigid for commercial embroidery, with the choice of design perhaps controlled by male bosses and limited by market dictates. But any given socioeconomic group of embroiderers would have evolved their own stylistic and conceptual boundaries for how and which narratives were embroidered.91 So what, in the end, can we say about the significance of the jackets’ narratives for Qing women? 148  |  CHAPTER 4

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Theatrical narratives meant, first, a media restricted by men. The control over women’s wardrobes discussed in chapter 2 was part of a patriarchal complex that controlled how daughters, sisters, and wives engaged with the outside world. Just as Lu Yiting’s (act. late 19th c.) Guide for Families specified how the women of his family should dress, so too did he restrict their engagement with performance: “If women go to visit relations or watch a play, they must be chaperoned; they are not permitted to go alone.”92 Zhao Shanlin’s study of female audiences presents an array of restrictions faced by women. Watching plays was as undesirable as visiting monasteries or festival celebrations, partly because of the dangers of “men and women mixing at will.”93 Female audiences were often criticized in formulaic and fixed terms, with sexualized features like powder and stockings used to personify risk.94 Of course, daughters from official families likely faced the greatest strictures in engaging with drama: it is unlikely that lower-class women or the potential courtesan wearers of these jackets were affected by restrictions to the same degree.95 Other scholars have offered a subtler perspective on the relationship between women and patriarchal culture, noting how women carved a cultural space of their own despite regulations, chaperones, and edited programs.96 Certainly, novels and biography indicate that elite women were passionate viewers of drama, often enjoyed together with other women.97 The continual public and private bans against female audiences not only detail the obstacles women faced, they also demonstrate the unease about the emotional power drama wielded over women—the anxiety about dramatic fiction playing out in reality.98 In the mid-Qing, Li Zhonglin (fl. 1764) described women’s love of tanci storytellers who “roam the streets and tell stories in song and prose to the beat of a drum . . . because they are crude, easy to understand, and furthermore cost very little.” For Li, the worry was that “at first they tell stories of worthy, filial, chaste and pious people, but then they gradually lead in to ballads of indecent elopements and illicit love affairs. . . . Women listen to the point where they feel intense pity for the characters; they all heave sighs and shed tears. When they hear of passionate entanglements and secret unions, how can we guarantee that they will not become mentally excited and emotionally roused?”99 Still more concerning than mental excitement and emotional rousing was the possibility of women imitating the very dramatic narratives that so moved them. Or as a Zhejiang local proverb succinctly phrased it: “Suzhou opera stages ten performances of small plays, and nine out of ten widows will remarry.”100 In this school of thought, fiction inspired women to engage in inappropriate behavior and sexual misdemeanors. For example, a popular Chaozhou play, The Tale of the Lychee Mirror (Li jing ji), told of Chen San and Huang Wu Niang who fall instantly in love when they meet at a lantern show celebrating Yuanxiao (the fifteenth day of the first lunar month), but are thwarted by Huang’s rich father who wishes his daughter to marry into a wealthy literati family. Huang and her maid Yi Chun see Chen from the balcony where they enjoy summer lychees, and overjoyed, she embroiders “lovers destined from a former P erformance , P rint, and Pattern   |   1 4 9

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existence” onto a hanky and wraps it in a bright red lychee branch. Chen disguises himself as a mirror-maker to enters the Huang mansion, and the couple elope to Quanzhou with the help of her maid. The Lychee Mirror, like many popular plays, endorsed the individual couple’s choice to pursue romantic love and defy the status quo of parental choice and a matchmaker’s mediations as the route to marriage.101 Its popularity caused frequent bans that made a clear correlation between dramatic performance and real-life transgression. One local gazetteer, the Xiamen zhi (1839) recounted the rationale: “The play Tale of the Lychee Mirror used to be performed in Xiamen. It narrates in vivid detail how Chen San of Quan enticed Wang [Huang] Fifth Maid of Chao to elope and engage in obscene behavior. Women watched this play in great numbers, and many proceeded to also defy decency and elope. [Therefore] in the Tongzhi period Xue Ningu forbade this.”102 The concept of life imitating art was certainly foremost in the mind of the Zhejiang prefect Liang Gongchen (1814–?), who told of Zhexi, a Zhejiang village that set up a small stage in 1845. Within a month, six of the local women had remarried, including a widow of more than ten years previously obstructed from marrying, while a twenty-three-year-old single woman from an official family escaped to a traveling drama troupe!103 For those women for whom running away was just a dream, embroidery provided a means of making these narratives their own. In figure 4.26, a roundel is embroidered with a scene from a play from the Shaanxi opera repertoire (qinqiang), “The Fiery Stallion” (Huo yan ju), also known as “The Water-Seller” (Mai shui ji), by Shandong mid-Qing playwright Li Fanggui (1748–1810). Scholar Li Yangui, forced by poverty to carry water to eke out a living, meets his love Huang Guiying and her maid Mei Yingxiang in the garden, where they promise each other eternal love, despite Huang’s father’s opposition to their match. The embroidery style and pattern drafting suggests folk embroidery (the “fish eyes” that the professional embroidery shops in the last chapter sought to distinguish their “pearls” from): it shows how women used embroidery to express their responses to the dramas and scenes that most moved them.104 Such efforts were sometimes recognized for their artistry. For example, Long Renzhu of Changsha once embroidered a theatrical story onto a scented purse (for the Duanwu Festival) an inch square, a feat much admired by local literati.105 But this last anecdote is telling: Long’s efforts were only recorded because male literati permitted it. Drama-embroidered dress may have provided a way for women to participate in a media circuit dominated by men; it may have been a means of cultural expression or contribution; and it may have been a way of linking fictional narratives to personal ones, but any search for meaning is limited. Though this chapter has demonstrated the volume of narrative-adorned material culture in circulation during the late Qing, the weight of female knowledge concerning these tales and stories, and the close relationship between performance, print, and embroidered dress, in the end, their intended meaning is obscured. The same reasons that dress objects became a site for women’s cultural expression (lack of access to professional or public power, reduced 150  |  CHAPTER 4

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Figure 4.26. Embroidered roundel featuring a scene from The Fiery Stallion, nineteenth century. Silk satin with satin stitch, seed stitch, fishbone stitch, pine-needle stitch, stem stitch, overlaid stitch, couching, padding, some ink line for facial details; appliquéd silk satin with ink; silk braiding. D 30.5 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Purchased with the John T. Morris Fund from the Carl Schuster Collection (1940-4-672).

access to publishing and writing avenues, among other factors) explain our inability to fully grasp female agency as expressed through iconological decoration. The dramatic themes that appeared in dress decoration also manifested in dress and accessory names. For example, the Zhaojun hood (Zhaojun tao), named after heroine Wang Zhaojun, was described by Zhang Ailing as “absurdly colorful and gay: a black satin cap of the sort worn by men, but rimmed with fur and decorated with a large red pompom on top and a pair of pink satin ribbons streaming down the back.”106 Popular culture was also a source for fabric names, such as the Guangzhou silk products called “Cowherd silk” and “Maiden silk” after the famed legend of Cowherd and Weaving Maiden, suggesting that textile producers manipulated such associations for commercial gain.107 But dress object names also display other themes. For example, Shu Chen’s early nineteenth-century rhymes describe the latest border fashions in Suzhou, named after the official bureaucracy: “The ‘Civil and Military edging’ has become more famous than the ‘Moonlight’ style, even cutting brocade pieces into spring flowers.”108 Thus, the naming of fashion raises issues of authority and aspiration, the subject of the final chapter. P erformance , P rint, and Pattern   |   1 5 1

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5 “The Luxury of Words” FASHION AUTHORITIES AND ASPIRATIONS

Why does Fashion utter clothing so abundantly? . . . Why does it interpose, between the object and its user, such a luxury of words (not to mention images), such a network of meaning? Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, 1967

T

he visual qualities that define the narrative embroidered jackets—overlapping patterns, bright colors, popular imagery—speak to a system of taste particularly associated with late nineteenth-century Shanghai visual culture, one that was “colorful, decorative, and dramatic.”1 Inspired by famous beauties and generals, gods and immortals, legends and folk tales, Shanghai School (Haipai) artists produced art for a market led by wealthy merchants and urban intellectuals, rather than the scholar-literati and court groups whose patronage characterized previous centuries. Shanghai’s vision of urban culture was disseminated through new technologies like photography and lithography, and determined by transitional, hybridized figures, confronting the changes of the last decades of the Qing dynasty. Between the 1820s and 1920s, the Jiangnan region experienced “an unprecedented geographic shift of culture and society,” as economic activity and cultural power moved away from the Grand Canal and the river-based centers of Suzhou, Nanjing, Yangzhou, and Hangzhou to sea-route coastal cities.2 The state’s failure to maintain the Grand Canal and population-land ratio pressures were factors. But the rise of Shanghai, |   1 5 3  |

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along with Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, and Ningbo was primarily caused by war: the first Opium War concluded with the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, which forced the creation of these treaty port cities. And it was calamity that populated the city: the Taiping Rebellion’s (1850–64) destruction of the wealthy silk and cotton heartlands caused large-scale migration from the inland cities. Between 1843 and the end of the Qing, Shanghai established a unique urban identity, by the 1870s leading China in commerce, journalism, publishing, art, and entertainment. Foreign concessions and Taiping migration meant that Shanghai society was defined by social and cultural hybridity. The Chinese elites that shaped Shanghai culture in the post-1860 period were new renditions of previous distinct categories: literati, merchants, and officials. Of course, there was nothing new about men in commerce using money to gain official position and the collection of art to gain cultural power— what historian Wu Jen-shu calls a shift from examination culture to merchant culture was an ongoing one.3 But by this juncture, the civil examination process was being ridiculed and questioned, casting doubt upon the ideal of the scholar-official, already damaged by the Opium Wars, the Taiping Rebellion, and the increasing presence of Western learning. The “Foreign Settlement talents” (Yangchang caizi) were journalists, writers, artists, and publishers who had received a traditional education but could not participate in traditional careers.4 Shanghai School art patrons also came from the comprador merchants, who gained wealth and status through work for foreign companies. Often self-made from lowly families, they lacked the educational background to fully partake in literati tastes and gradually evolved their own more exaggerated and ostentatious taste, which was also more popular in subject matter.5 The Shanghai School thus contrasted with the more sedate Beijing School (Jingpai), propelled by bureaucratic elites. Shanghai School patrons filled a position left empty, in part, by the court’s disinclination to be art arbiters; many viewed the style as unsophisticated and vulgar, possessing a tacky insubstantiality. But its creative energy gave it an openness to experiment, a unique mixture of high- and low-brow forms, influenced by Cantonese merchants from Guangzhou, and Japanese and Western buyers alike.6 This creative energy was also seen in clothing. Shanghainese were renowned for their cosmopolitan chic, and it was here that China’s modern fashion industry formed in the 1920s. Catherine Yeh presents three main phases in nineteenth-century Shanghai fashion: before courtesans moved into the foreign settlements when Suzhou still set fashions; the 1860s, when Shanghai courtesans integrated Beijing, Canton, and Western elements; and the 1880s and 1890s when Shanghai courtesans’ trends spread through the country.7 Throughout these phases, silhouettes remained tied to the Qing dynasty, but surviving objects speak to the changes: new materials appeared, like British woolens, Indian cottons, and American ribbons, as well as new colors, such as the hugely popular aniline green, purple, and pink dyes.8 Dress decoration also took influence from new cultural forms. A deep pink jacket in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection (fig. 5.1), acquired by Nellie and Jeptha Wade, likely on a trip to Asia 154  |  CHAPTER 5

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Figure 5.1. Dark magenta-pink silk jacket embroidered with silk and gold thread, late 1880s. 94 × 177.8 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art (1916.1357). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Wade.

(1894–95), is embroidered with steamships and complete with small Western figures, as indicated by red hair and top hats. The same ship motif is found on other jackets of a similar dating; for example, one in the Peabody Essex Museum contains an array of different ships embroidered along the cloud collar and trimming borders, including steamers staffed by top hatted Western figures.9 The jacket also features large round mirrored sequins, likely imported. Thus, as a key site for exploring new influences and materials, fashion informs upon this period of change and adaption. The individuals who propelled these trends were the stars of the entertainment world: the city’s top-ranking courtesans (mingji) and male opera stars (mingyou), whose life and business were reported in the first mass-market entertainment papers. Late Qing novels and newspapers made celebrities out of high-class courtesans, now public figures, who established notions of leisure and fashion, and set the latest trends in clothing and hairstyles.10 This shift was a subtle one; after all, throughout this book fashioning power has been attributed to the courtesan. But earlier prints of fashionable woman had visualized gentlewoman, accompanied by sons and components of educational accomplishment, wearing bordered jackets and pleated skirts. The rise of “ T he L u x ury of W ords ”   |   1 5 5

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the courtesan to the front page, like the rise of the merchant to preeminent art patron, raises the question of the impact of these new cultural authorities. The relationship between fashion and text informs this question. A key nineteenthcentury fashion trend was poetry- and calligraphy-adorned garments and accessories, motifs found elsewhere in material culture. Ostensibly this trend suggests literati authority—attributable to official policies and expanded publishing regimes that disseminated elite values.11 Yet the popularization of literati culture through fashion suggests instead the mercantile power to manipulate these notions as social ideals in order to promote sales. This commercial authority is best seen not so much in the content or style of fashionable dress, as in its naming—found in novels, shop advertisements, and pawnshop guides. As elsewhere in the world, early modern consumption was driven not only by increasing choice in terms of fabrics and colors, but also an accompanying complexification of the “language of consumption,” enabling people to “distinguish with ever greater precision exactly what they wanted . . . able to shape new identities, to fashion themselves in exciting ways.”12 Clothed in Words

Assertions of literacy were a key decorative theme for mid-late Qing embroidered dress and accessories: poetic couplets, proverbs, signatures, and titles were applied to sleeve-bands, purses, handkerchiefs, fan-cases, and even jackets. Figure 5.2 shows a jacket from the Royal Ontario Museum, made from a yellow-and-blue chrysanthemum-patterned (chuanju jin, also called yanglian jin) “cloud brocade” silk (yun jin), a specialty of Nanjing.13 Aside from the sleeve-bands depicting gentlewomen in a garden setting, the primary decorative emphasis are the embroidered white-satin trimmings on the cloud collar, bottom, side, and overlapping borders. All are embroidered with calligraphic inscriptions of seven-character poetic lines, interspersed with landscape motifs. The lines appear in a total of eighteen sections on the borders, each presenting a different poem, many of which were well-known Song dynasty verses. For example, the back-right side border (fig. 5.3) contains the line: “The willows dark green, the blossoms bright, one more village comes into view,” from Southern Song poet Lu You’s (1125–1210) “Traveling to Villages West of the Mountains” (You shan xi cun). The poetic line is reinforced by the embroidered willows and blossoms. But often the line is not taken in its entirety but incorporates a section or phrase from a well-known poem. So, for example, a lobe of the cloud collar features the phrase “Returning late, everywhere my horse’s hooves tread” from a poem by Northern Song poet Ou Yangxiu (1007–1072), “To the Tune of ‘Butterflies Love Flowers.’” Notably, these embroidered inscriptions are used not just as a vehicle for literary expression, but also to record the moment when the jacket was created (or the moment where the poems were selected, written, or embroidered). Thus the jacket 156  |  CHAPTER 5

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Figure 5.2. “Cloud brocade” silk jacket, with embroidered cloud collar and borders patterned with landscape motifs interspersed with poetry, mid-nineteenth century. L 102.5 cm, W 140 cm. Royal Ontario Museum (979.107.3).

(left) Figure 5.3. Detail of the backright side border in figure 5.2, showing an embroidered scene of a pavilion and willow trees, accompanied by a poetic line.

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viewer is told where the piece was created, “Written at the Hall of Drunken Clouds and Grass”; who wrote it, “Written by Dong Ying”; and when it was written, “At the end of summer, Bingwu year”—together with the jacket style, this dates the object to 1846 in the Daoguang reign (fig. 5.4).14 The jacket highlights the aspirational role of literacy and words in Chinese society, the desire of fashionable wearers to put forward an educated self. Poetry-infused decoration was not unusual.15 A similar synthesis of word and image is found in a sleeve-band embroidered with landscape scenery and poems in the collection of Shanghai’s Donghua University Museum.16 It includes three poetic lines, each taken from well-known poems by Du Mu (803–852) and Su Shi (1037–1101) and combined with images. For example, “The ducks are first to know the warmth of the river in spring” (from Su Shi’s “In Worship of the Spring River’s Dawn Scenery”) is shown with an image of the ducks accompanying the fishermen on a spring river. Again, each of the three sections record an individual: “written by Xiao Qin,” “by Yun Ying the Female Historian,” and “written by Jiao Xi.” Given our lack of knowledge concerning these objects’ consumption, it is impossible to know how far literati themes appealed due to the signatures and seals that enabled women to record a moment or happening. But it is not hard to explain the appeal of such assertions of culture. Word and image had long been inextricably connected in Chinese art. By the Song dynasty, if not earlier, the relationship between poetry, calligraphy, and painting, the so-called Three Perfections, formed a fundamental art structure. Around the same time, a painting began to increase in value if it was signed by the maker or contained additions like seals, inscriptions, and poetic eulogies. Unsurprisingly, embroiderers and tapestry weavers also pursued these structures in their needlework paintings (hua xiu). This trend owed much to the Gu embroiderers, who utilized notions of literati art to increase the value of their embroidered reproductions of classic Song and Yuan dynasty paintings. Their innovations led to calligraphic inscriptions becoming an important part of embroidered and woven pictures, often used to record the artist’s name and place of production. Thus, jackets adorned with this content alluded to gentlewomen possessing the artistic skills and educational attainment to reproduce their cultural and natural environment.17 Women like Qian Fen of Wuqing (Tianjin), for example, who “once painted a river village picture based on the scenery around her home. She embroidered the image and poem onto a piece of silk.” “Poetry, calligraphy, drawing, embroidery—all were beautiful, and those who saw them praised them as the ‘four perfections.’”18 To wear a garment containing embroidered landscape scenery, complete with appropriate poetic line and artist signature, was to channel such esteemed gentlewomen. Yet while the literate gentlewoman informed this ideal, all the evidence suggests that it was the courtesan who spread it. The only record of women wearing characters on their dress is found in the novels describing the lives of urban courtesans. The following excerpt from Dreams of Wind and Moon describes a courtesan named 158  |  CHAPTER 5

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a

b

c Figure 5.4. Detail of sections of the bottom border in figure 5.2, showing top to bottom the embroidered inscriptions detailing (a) place, (b) author or calligrapher, and (c) date.

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Fragrance, who gets changed in preparation for an excursion with new clients. “After she had finished dressing, she used the commode, then washed her hands and with her right hand picked up a genuine ebony fan with a hundred ‘longevity’ characters inlaid in silver on its frame. On one side of the sheer white covering was the Huizhen ji story in microscopic characters as written by a famous contemporary, and on the other side the scene of the drunken Shi Xiangyun sleeping in a bed of peonies.”19 For courtesans, to reference “poetry and calligraphy” (wen mo) was a declaration of value.20 In cities like Yangzhou and Suzhou, courtesans were trained “in female propriety and the forms of politeness. The superior ones can perform on the zither, play chess, and sing. The very best are accomplished in calligraphy and painting, the less able in embroidery and other female arts.”21 Their actual literacy was likely limited, but so is the kind of literacy expressed in the jacket. The playful combinatory treatment of famous Song poems is reminiscent of drinking games (jiu ling), in which participants, like courtesans and their clients, composed poems with citations from classic novels, drama, Tang and Song poetry, and the Confucian classics. Late Qing courtesan novels demonstrate how poetic composition, in the context of drinking games, enabled characters to display knowledge and talent.22 Still, even beyond courtesans, there are many other potential wearers of this kind of dress. By the nineteenth century, the educated gentlewoman (guixiu) was a cultural ideal. The increasing commodification of courtesan culture and attention to women’s learning meant educated gentry women became preferable models for literate femininity, a move away from the elegant reputations of late Ming cultured courtesans.23 Courtesans remained fashion leaders throughout the Qing period, but it was “cultivated women of the inner chambers” who became sought-after authors, published alongside male authors and by themselves.24 And as we saw in the first chapter, it was this ideal that circulated visually in vernacular culture: Taohuawu and Yangliuqing popular prints presented scenes of beautiful gentlewomen in their boudoir, accompanied by signifiers of wealth, culture, and literacy—paintbrushes and scrolls, pictures and books—displaying their educational attainment as they teach their sons to pass the examinations, gain an official position, and with it, security and renown for their family. Ostensibly, the print in figure 5.5 is defined by fertility and communicated by auspiciousness: the pipe (chui di) and pomegranate (shiliu), held by the children, combine puns to mean “continually producing noble children” (you lian, you di, meaning lian sheng gui zi). But it is literati imagery that fills the surface: hanging scrolls and fans depicting landscapes, still-life fruit and bamboo-calligraphy combinations. The beauty, an upper-class woman clothed in beribboned jacket and pale pleated skirt, carrying the same art-adorned fan, is validated both by her male child and her surroundings of art and culture. Such an image was not necessarily either realistic or representative. Historian Evelyn Rawski estimated the number of women who could read and write as somewhere between 1 and 10 percent, depending on the region.25 In urban, wealthy, and 160  |  CHAPTER 5

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Figure 5.5. An elegantly tinted print, “Continually Producing Noble Children” (Lian sheng gui zi), featuring a stylish beauty and her two plump sons. Fan in hand, she wears a cloud collar and border jacket, with ruyi-shaped hair ornaments picking up on the ruyi-lobed bottom opening of the jacket. Jiaqing period (1796–1820). 108 × 59 cm. Tianjin Museum. Reprinted from Feng Jicai, ed., Zhongguo muban nianhua jicheng, Yangliuqing juan, shang, 71, with permission from the Zhonghua Book Company.

commercialized areas like Suzhou or Shanghai, rates were likely higher, particularly if minimal or functional literacy is included. The substantial place of written language (titles, commentary, explicatory notes) in popular prints and pattern books suggests that the division between literate and nonliterate is too simplistic, and that literacy is better considered as a continuum. Both examples of early nineteenth-century Canton pattern books featured titles and labels throughout: for example, in figure 5.6 a grouping of vases, antiquities, bats, and floral roundel is labeled “Peace and Auspiciousness as You Desire” (Ping’an jiqing, ruyi dingbi). These auspicious names enabled embroiderers to sell their wares to the embroidery shops or the consumer. By adding textual value to the designs, they enabled lower-class women to consume images accompanied by writing, as prescribed by the cultural majority. Thus, even if only a minority of women were educated, literacy cast a wide shadow in Qing society, representing not just recognition, respect, and community for individual woman, but also hope for their children. Social mobility was only seen as possible in popular perception because women internalized the ideal of the educated gentlewoman who taught her sons and placed them on the road to academic success and thus official position. It is little wonder that at the same time as this ideal became ever more pervasive, literate phrases appeared upon women’s embroidered accessories. However, the spreading expression of literati culture through the needle invited potential social conflict, something apparent from another scene from Dream of Wind “ T he L u x ury of W ords ”   |   1 6 1

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Figure 5.6. “Antique motif” embroidery designs, with written titles, from Figural Patterns from the Green Window. See figure 3.5.

and Moon, when the would-be gentlewoman Phoenix manages to shed her inferior status as courtesan and get “married” as a concubine to Jia Ming. Now living in a house, she spends her time embroidering gifts for her husband like calligraphic pillows: As Jia Ming took it in his hands, he noticed that it had a covering of crimson imported fabric that was embroidered with black silk thread and had a green hibiscus-style trim. Its white imported-crepe top had lettering in black characters: Cheek to cheek, willing to follow the embroidery thread; heads together, wishing to dispatch the golden needle. Two seals in ancient scripts were embroidered on the sides in fine crimson floss silk; one said, “Perfect harmony,” the other, “Presented by Phoenix.” Jia Ming treasured the pillow, noting how perfectly the characters were embroidered and how skillful the strokes were. Later he took it home with him and put it safely away.26 Phoenix’s perfectly embroidered characters permits her to align herself with a boudoir embroiderer, rather than a commercial embroiderer. But the description is ironic, as 162  |  CHAPTER 5

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Phoenix’s attempt to masquerade as a gentlewoman lets the author affirm her lowly status. As the French theorist Roland Barthes observed, in allowing the wearer a projective “sociocultural model” not necessarily coinciding with actual status, sartorial cultural references are inherently aspirational.27 Thus while the literate features incorporated into the poetry-embroidered jacket and accessories referenced an educated consumer, the discourse of the gentlewoman would have made it surely rather vulgar to wear this kind of embellished and novel adornment. To understand how this conflict played out in objects, I turn to another set of literati-related motifs, the antique motifs (bogu). Popularizing Antiques

One of the garments found in Princess Rongxian’s tomb was a pale pea-green informal robe (see fig. 1.4), embroidered in the Suzhou style with antique motifs: a vase of peony flowers, treasure ding vessel, a three-hole san duo vase, old books, fruit tray, river crab, lingzhi fungus, musical chimes, kui phoenix, brown vase, begonia, deer, round tray, cymbals, mountain crane, peach, bells, painting scrolls, peacock feather plumes, pheasant, jue vessel, ruyi, plum blossom coil-decorated vase, sword, toad, Buddhist duster, cattail-leaf fan, and phoenix. Many of these objects possessed individual auspicious significance: the crab expressed the wish for marital harmony (fuqi hexie), the flower vase the wish for “peace and fortune” (ping’an fugui), and so on. None of the motifs were repeated.28 The origins of the bogu design lie in the Northern Song (960–1127) in Wang Fu’s Illustrated Catalog of Antique Treasures from Xuanhe Hall (Xuanhe bogu tu), which listed bronze instruments together with illustrations and explanations. This assemblage evolved throughout the centuries to become a miscellany of bronze, porcelain, jade, and other objects, conveying ideas of scholarly taste. By the time of the Princess Rongxian robe, they were a popular decorative motif in porcelain, prints, and letter paper alike. The spread of bogu motifs was achieved through painting manuals and pattern books, media that, as the art historian Craig Clunas argued, commoditized knowledge.29 But in the late Ming and early Qing period that he wrote of, this knowledge remained relatively confined. Bogu design media could certainly be found. The antique motifs feature in several forehead cover designs (mei zhu), included in the early seventeenth-century woodblock printed book A Collection of Snipped Rosy Clouds (Jian xia ji), the earliest surviving Chinese embroidery pattern book (fig. 5.7). A preface by the Zhejiang calligrapher Shen Linqi (1603–1664) dates it to a few decades before the Princess Rongxian robe: this delicately printed pattern book, each image accompanied by titles, poems, and suggested usages, was one of the first color prints to utilize the multiple wood-block method (tao ban), which departed from the technique of inking different areas of the same block with separate colors. The preface “ T he L u x ury of W ords ”   |   1 6 3

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Figure 5.7. “Antique motif” embroidery designs, from Collection of Snipped Rosy Clouds (Jian xia ji), preface by Shen Linqi (1603–1664), early seventeenth century. Polychrome printed woodblock print, nos. 17–19. Private collection of C. von der Burg.

confirms a context of elite consumption, written in a densely allusive style that cites the genteel textile craftswomen of yore: Consort Ban’s round silk fan, Su Hui’s brocade palindrome; it targets a literate readership who would have enjoyed the work for its intrinsic aesthetic value as well as leisurely needlework.30 As a pattern book it was a luxury edition, targeting a narrowly defined audience.31 The tendency to compare such fine late Ming prints with material from the early nineteenth-century Figural Patterns from the Green Window (see fig. 5.6) mean the latter inevitably pales in comparison. The qualitative decline and imagery standardization engendered by commercial print culture has been viewed as degenerating the artistic imagination, evoking a gradual emptying of cultural meaning. But the late Qing pattern book, aimed at commercial embroiderers producing for the market rather than the leisurely gentlewoman, was also an enabler, allowing wider access to popular designs, and with this, financial profit and cultural participation. The embroidery pattern served to democratize, widening what had once been an elite consumption. In the early Qing, only princesses wore robes extravagantly embroidered with antique motifs, and only the wealthy could afford pattern books like A Collection of Snipped Rosy Clouds sumptuously printed in color. By the late Qing, consumers wishing for a jacket embroidered with bogu motifs (fig. 5.8) could purchase such inexpensive pattern books or even appliqué sheets with motifs that could be appliquéd onto the garment (fig. 5.9).

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Figure 5.8. Center-split red silk jacket fully embroidered in symmetrically positioned “antique motifs” and floral arrangements, mid-nineteenth century. 102 × 137 cm. The Textile Museum, DC (1985.33.267). Gift of The Florence Eddowes Morris Collection, Goucher College.

Figure 5.9. “Antique motif” embroidery sheets. Nineteenth century. 128 × 166 cm. The Textile Museum, DC (2010.10.4). Gift of A. Doak and Jeanne B. Barnett.

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Theoretically, this visual spread reflected the dispersal of the bogu motif ’s social capital: antique collecting was no longer the exclusive purview of the upper classes, but now engaged in by a wider audience to attain status symbols.32 In Sichuan, even rural women sewed such literati motifs onto their children’s embroidered cotton vests. Woodblock prints served as medium for this imagery: the phenomena demonstrated the wide-ranging hope of all Chinese women, regardless of social class, that their children would one day become an official.33 And yet they did so in a context surely defined by educated gentlewomen. Women like Lu Fengchi (n.d.), who confessed that her obsession with Qu Yuan’s (ca. 340–278 bce) Chu lyrics to “Encountering Sorrow” (Li sao) could not be satisfied in one lifetime. She once embroidered a jacket with antiquity motifs (bogu tu de yishan); her son-inlaw, who found the jacket in a trunk, said that “stitch by stitch, her painstaking effort and good fortune was stored there.”34 Or Mrs. Cao (n.d.), well educated, talented at poetry, and the second wife of Shanghai official Cao Yishi, who embroidered a jacket with antique motifs, said to be elegant without compare.35 Neither description details how the women patterned their embroidery, but it is likely that their jackets’ cultural value derived from a leisure-gained ability to spend hours embroidering bogu motifs of their own design rather than those copied from cheap pattern books. This social diffusion places the bogu motifs in an ambiguous place, caught between literati and popular culture. And yet as sociologist Stuart Hall argued, content is an unreliable means of understanding popular culture: The structuring principle of “the popular” . . . is the tensions and oppositions between what belongs to the central domain of elite or dominant culture, and the culture of the “periphery.” . . . But you cannot construct these descriptions in a purely descriptive way. . . . Popular forms become enhanced in cultural value, go up the cultural escalator—and find themselves on the other side. Other things cease to have high cultural value and are appropriated into the popular, becoming transformed in the process. The structuring principle . . . consists of the forces and relations which sustain the distinction, the difference: roughly, between what, at any time, counts as an elite cultural activity or form, and what does not. Hall was concerned with locating “the meaning of a cultural form and its place or position in the cultural field” within “the institutions and institutional processes” that articulated and sustained it, but his description captures the dynamic of fashion diffusion.36 It also raises the question: if content is unreliable, does visual style provide a better means of explaining what distinguished Mrs. Cao’s bogu-motif embroidered jacket?

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Xifeng’s Glance

In embroidery, distinctions in design, stitch, and color communicated the difference between an elegant lady, an urban consumer, and a countryside bumpkin. In The Story of the Stone, Xifeng is horrified when Lady Wang accuses her of having bought an erotic purse (“the design embroidered on it consisted not of the usual birds and flowers, but on one side of a pair of naked human figures locked in an embrace and on the other of some writing”) into the Prospect Garden. Her embarrassment stems not just from the content but from having such a vulgar object associated with her: “It wasn’t made here. One can see at a glance that it is a poor commercial imitation of ‘Palace’ embroidery.” She bolsters her case through material analysis: “Even the tassels are the kind you would buy from the market,” forcing Lady Wang to agree that the object was incongruous in her hands: “I may be young and frivolous but I’d be hardly likely to want a trashy thing like this.”37 This culturally loaded vocabulary—“commercial,” “imitation,” “trashy”—is revealing of the markers of taste. Xifeng and those of her ilk did not consume commercial embroidery; they had no need of imitation “palace embroidery” (gong xiu, stylistically similar to boudoir embroidery, guige xiu) when they could access the real thing. The encoding of status, gender, age, and even virtue within embroidered objects was achieved through both maker identity and object style. By craftsmen and women meeting the visual expectations of those for whom they produced—creating objects with appropriate decorative schemas and stylistic identity—they maintained the separation of different consumption spheres. Visuality constituted a meeting or “constellation of intellectual and executive skills” possessed by the producer and the viewer. In the terms of art historian Michael Baxandall’s “period eye,” sociocultural experience engenders a certain way of seeing: “Much of what we call ‘taste’ lies in this, the conformity between discrimination possessed by a painting and skills of discrimination possessed by the beholder.”38 We gain a sense of the “taste” of the boudoir, of how Xifeng’s glance distinguishes commercial embroidery from boudoir embroidery by comparing figures 1.4 and 5.8, both antique motif–embroidered gowns: the first produced by Suzhou imperial workshops in the eighteenth century; the second dating to the late nineteenth century. In the earlier gown, artistic impact derives partly from each motif ’s uniqueness and from the composition—the shimmering silk surface contributes as much as the delicately rendered motifs. Against its subtle shades, the bright red of the late nineteenth-century jacket is suggestive of celebration, with chromatic density added by the embroidery palette of bright pink and three blues, echoed in the embroidered borders on the bottom hem and sleeves. Eschewing emptiness, the main motifs are symmetrically balanced and enlarged to fill the space, with any remaining voids filled by auspicious flowers.

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Color and stitch were primary criteria for the boudoir embroiderer: achieving carefully harmonized coloring (xiangse heshun) and determining how to best interpret a painted palette in thread—“selecting colors” (duo xian)—occupied much of her work. Late nineteenth-century customs reports refer to thirty-five colors of sewing thread available in Suzhou, but in her Embroidery Manual (Xue Huan xiu pu) famed embroiderer Shen Shou (1874–1921) stipulated eighty-eight colors to be used in embroidery, with the potential total of 745 different shades.39 By contrast, commercial embroidery sought a less blended palette, partly due to the need to save money by using fewer threads: subtle shading required an expensive range of threads, time to split threads and meticulously build up areas of tone and light through complex shading stitches. Hence the professional embroiderer’s “cruder, more garish” creations. In stitchwork, boudoir embroidery was valued according to the qualities of Su embroidery—“fine, flat, neat, spare” (xi, ping, qi, bo)—an ideal that can be traced back to Song dynasty embroiderers, who first used finely split threads, short stitches placed over long stitches to create pictorial realism, heighten naturalism, and simulate literati painting techniques.40 They relied particularly on the shading effects of long and short satin stitch (tao zhen), built up over single and multiple layers, irregular long and short stitch, or mixed straight stitch (chan zhen, souhe zhen), swirling stitch (xuan zhen), and hair and fur stitch (shi zhen). Boudoir embroiderers were prized according to their ability to hide the needle’s trace (zhen jiao, lit., needle’s foot), partly so that their images might stand as a visual equal to painting, but also because displaying the tool through which they worked was considered vulgar. Commercial embroiderers lacked recourse to extensive thread palettes and painterly models, and accordingly emphasized dazzling the eye through vivid coloring and textural interest created from an array of stitches (satin stitch, seed stitch, fish-bone stitch, stem stitch, net stitch, couching) producing a highly patterned, embellished effect. Notably, this surface complexity was also seen in folk embroidery, as evident in the drama embroidered roundel in figure 4.26, but the two styles are separated by pattern. While the scene is stitched with enormous skill, the clumsy figural outlines, and the disproportionate handling of the characters compared to the plants and flowers distinguish the piece from professional work. These theoretically distinct stylistic spheres and visual expectations make it tempting to assume that the objects studied in this book would have been rejected by the gentlewoman. But the commercialization of embroidery fostered connections between urban male-fronted guilds and rural female embroiderers in Jiangnan and Guangdong, mechanisms of interaction between separate embroidery styles. The Suzhou and Guangzhou workshops’ employment of rural women linked them with urban workshops; the imperial workshop’s employment of gentlewoman connected palace trousseaus to Suzhou. Both are examples of the intersections of visual acuity and technical knowledge. The popularization of literati culture through fashion demonstrates the contributions of women—as wearers and producers—to this 168  |  CHAPTER 5

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process. Instead of polarized stylistic distinctions, the direction of commercialization was to “extend the circle of participants in the system” through graded and modular production.41 Accounting for the complexity of such interactions posed a challenge for Baxandall’s “period eye,” which implicitly has wider reach than painters and their “patronizing classes,” given that many groups would have participated, to some extent, in their sociocultural activities, just as other groups beyond the elite gentlewoman engaged in looking at embroidery or watching plays. The period eye’s mapping from social activity to cognitive thinking cannot capture overlapping social groups or interrelated visualities, an issue most visible at the edges of social circles. Fashion provides a critical framework for understanding these sites of emulation and derivation, group encounters where fashion worked its perpetual cycle of creation, imitation, and rejection. Yet as process, fashion diffusion remains poorly understood, both empirically and theoretically. Though both Veblen and Georg Simmel were interested in fashion as a means of social differentiation, the simple imitation of the “trickle-down” thesis provides little details. Veblen observed that as the wealthy leisure class expanded, fashion required a “progressively nicer discrimination in the beholder” to “exclude the baser elements of the population from the scheme even as spectators whose applause or mortification should be sought.”42 Simmel provided a subtler account, insofar as he saw fashion as a process of both imitation and discrimination, even “expressed at the same time, within a single fashionable act or object,” rather than a “mechanical model of sequential imitation.”43 But both insisted only upper classes could initiate fashion, limiting their explanatory weight for the workings of fashion in Chinese society. To understand the contribution of nonelites, we must consider how the naming of fashion reveals cultural authority. The category of color names provides a good starting point. Fictional descriptions list lotus color, slate blue, jade color, peach red, date brown, apricot yellow, Suzhou blue, bamboo green, out-of-the-kiln silver-red, class blue. Such names were inspired by nature, food, and flowers, common themes for color names. But they also contain nuances that elide the modern reader. Fabric dyes began to expand during the late Ming: At first the following reds were used: crimson, peach, out-of-the-kiln silver-red, and mauve red. Now we use clear-pale pink, golden pink, lychee red, orange red, and eastern red. In the past we had deep green, cedar green, and light green. Now we also have pale green, bright green, and orchid green. In the past we used bamboo-shoot green, peacock blue; now we have sky blue, jade green, moon green, and pale green. At first, we used incense, tea brown, and soy brown; now we have ink black, rice color, hawk color, deep incense, and lotus tint. In the past we had ginger yellow; now we use canary yellow and pine-flower yellow. In the past we used purple, now we also have grape blue.44 “ T he L u x ury of W ords ”   |   1 6 9

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By the time of Yu Qingceng’s marriage, her trousseau charted crimson, pink, powder lotus (pale red), and silver red; tea green, lake green, bamboo green, and sunflower green; sky blue, pale blue, moon white (pale blue), and reddish blue; black; blue lotus (white); lilac and fuchsia (see appendix 1). Evidently, complexification required new names, but these names conveyed values of temporality and place: slate blue didn’t appear until the late Ming in Nanjing; Suzhou blue was a specialty of the Suzhou dye workshops; “class” (pin) was the term given to the aniline colors that spread after the 1870s when they were imported to the treaty ports.45 Color names were also inspired by contemporary figures of fame. Li Dou (act. 18th c.) described how Yangzhou folks “previously favored the ‘three blues,’ vermillion, ink black, warehouse grey, gold-leaf yellow; but recently [people] use ‘rich food’ red and cherry red, and they call this ‘fortune color’—it is named after the great General Fu, who, when he suppressed the Tai bandits, came past Yangzhou wearing this color.”46 Manchu historian Zhaolian (1780–1833) confirmed this shift: while at first sky blue had been in favor, “during the mid-Qianlong period this changed to rose purple, and toward the end of the reign, because Prince Fuwen favored a deep crimson, all competed to imitated him, calling it ‘Fu color.’ More recently, [people] like gold-paint color, also pale grey. In summer months, no matter whether noble or common, all wear gauze clothes in brown.”47 Fu Kang’an (1754–1796), a Manchu noble and general, played a key role in suppressing the 1787 rebellion in Taiwan, as well as driving the Gurkhas out of Tibet a few years earlier.48 “Fu color” underscores cultural shifts in the naming of fashion attributes; it is hard to imagine Manchu military masculinity infiltrating Yangzhou color-names prior to the mid-Qing. By the nineteenth century, there were other examples of Manchu heroes. The “character ‘one’ lapel waistcoat” (yizijin beixin) was a late nineteenth-century trend, often worn over a gua-style robe. Bamboo ballads and novels chart its popularity among stylish young men.49 A sleeveless and short jacket featuring thirteen buttons at the top and sides, it was accordingly also known as “thirteen brigands” (shisan taibao). But these were southern names. In Beijing, it was named after the Manchu term for hero (batulu kanjian).50 The web of meaning these words added to consumption has been a key insight for the understanding of fashion in early modern Europe, a prototype of “modern capitalist society, [where] its enhancing qualities are, or can be, within the purview of virtually everyone.”51 Chapter 3 indicated some ways in which product branding and urban workshop names added associations of place and claims of urbanity to Qing dress objects. Objects like the cloud collar or the embroidered border were valued precisely for their “enhancing qualities,” the references to the cultured boudoir lady encapsulated within their surfaces. But who determined these references? Thus far, we have seen different social groups instrumental in the creation and consumption of fashionable dress: popular prints, official discourse, bamboo ballads, and the objects themselves; different sources suggest different authorities. Who was responsible for 170  |  CHAPTER 5

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determining the network of meaning evoked by naming fashion: the gentlewoman or the courtesan, the scholar or the merchant? Writing (on) Fashion

Zou Tao’s (1850–1931) late nineteenth-century novel Shanghai Dust (Haishang chentian ying) describes the lives of two courtesan-loving heroes and their lovers. Apparently based on Zou Tao’s failed love affair with his own beloved Shanghai courtesan, Shanghai Dust is similar to other courtesan fiction of the period—Shanghai Flowers (Haishanghua liezhuan, 1892) or Shanghai Splendor (Haisheng fanhua meng, 1903)— in which the brothel functions as “engine for a bustling Shanghai.”52 The following description of a courtesan is typical of his materially detailed style: [He] looked at Yan Liao’s goose egg–shaped face, slender neck, slim waist, and pair of pretty eyes, just past twenty years of age. In her hair was a fashionable satin hairband, above and below several tens of tiny new light pearls, in between several emeralds [forming] round longevity characters, with two clumps of tiny diamond-inlaid plum blossoms at center. Behind her piled cloud bun was a winter-sweet stamen, and in her ears diamond and gold chiseled hoops. She wore a bamboo-green Nanjing-silk short padded jacket patterned with large wan characters and the “five blessings rising sun” [wu fu chao tian], and trimmed with seven-cun tube sleeves, which were further trimmed with green-lotus satin borders patterned in foreign gold with fret scrolling plum blossoms, and aniline blue scrolling, and also double-tracked moonlight three paths edging. Below she wore a pair of kiln silver-red Nanjing-silk scattered tube trousers patterned with “one hundred longevities and one hundred fortunes,” trimmed with moon-blue satin borders with foreign gold “scattered flowers,” the trouser openings also had half-cun wide black thread netted tassels, and a fringe of tiny pearls, tied with an embroidered trouser belt of aniline green “mature” gauze with “plum, orchid, bamboo, and chrysanthemum” brocade inlay hanging from her waist. On her feet were a pair of fashionably edged thick-thread gauze gongxie shoes. It really was seductive and unusual.53 Zou Tao was hardly the first Qing writer to weigh his characters down in description. The material accumulation of detail that characterizes nineteenth-century fashions was matched by a textual accumulation of detail in fictional dress descriptions.54 Other examples include Hanshang Mengren’s Dreams of Wind and Moon (Feng yue meng; preface 1848), recounting the lives of five courtesans and their customers in mid-nineteenth-century Yangzhou;55 or Wenkang’s (1790–ca. 1878) Tales of Heroic “ T he L u x ury of W ords ”   |   1 7 1

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Lovers (Ernü yingxiong zhuan; ca. 1850–80), the story of the valiant beauty He Yufeng and the scholar An Ji, only son of a Manchu bannerman.56 Still, Zou Tao’s account is extreme in its lengthy particularity, a feature perhaps best appreciated in comparison with earlier fictional descriptions. Their writers were also concerned with using dress description to affix their characters. Yet in seventeenth-century novels like Xi Zhousheng’s Marriage Destinies to Awaken the World (Xingshi yinyuan zhuan, ca. 1628–61), a story of karmic retribution in the lives of two Shandong families, theoretically set in the fifteenth century but actually depicting the 1630s and 1640s, we get descriptions like: “Zhen Ge descended from the sedan, wearing a crimson shan jacket with woven design from chest to sleeve, a Gu-style embroidered white ling silk skirt, her hair full of pearls and jade, and entered the courtyard.”57 In such examples, clothing is typically described as color plus garment style—“a lavender silk center-opening jacket”—and only sometimes details fabric or decoration. This format places it in line with the functional listings of the trousseau list, A Complete Record of One Hundred Blessings and One Thousand Fortunes, discussed in chapter 2, which provided color, fabric, and garment name but not decoration; for example, “a blue-lotus Huzhou crepe-lined ao jacket,” “a lake-green Ningchou unlined undershirt.” This mode of description, intended to inventory rather than delight, continues through the mid-Qing. We find growing detail in The Story of Stone, Cao Xueqin’s tale of two wealthy Manchu noble families in decline, written around 1750 and set in eighteenth-century Beijing, which is considered seminal partly for its richly constructed material world.58 But even his descriptions were far from Zou Tao’s detailed lengths. It is not until novels like Dreams of Wind and Moon or Shanghai Dust, works of the last decades of the nineteenth century, that the minutely detailed dress description reaches fruition. It is somewhat artificial to select clothing descriptions from novels spanning three centuries and ignore the differing functions that dress description allowed authors in terms of scene setting or character development.59 Nonetheless, the comparison demonstrates a growing expectation of detail in describing fashionable dress, a trend often attributed to “realism.” It is true that clothing, like food or architecture, enabled a certain mode of verisimilitude. Still, realism doesn’t go very far as explanation. All the novels mentioned sought to be accurate to their setting in period, place, and materiality, for purposes that included social realism and satirical hyperbole.60 Both the mid-Qing didactic novel Lantern at the Crossroads (Qi lu deng) and the late Qing courtesan novel Dreams of Wind and Moon were admired for their realism. But where the author of the former, Li Lüyuan, was content to rely upon the term fashionable—“The hat on his head, the clothes on his body, the shoes and socks on his feet, every piece was fashionable and ingeniously made”61—the author of the latter, Hansheng Mengren, instead used lengthy descriptions to elucidate just what fashionable looked like. What explains this differing conception of realistic dress description? 172  |  CHAPTER 5

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To some extent, the development is an obvious one. Late Qing fashion was characterized by a turn to accessory and trimming objects—collars, purses, ribbons—low-cost, accessible ways of dressing à la mode. The novelists use such objects to clothe their characters because they evoked certain characteristics—urbanity and consumer identity—in the minds of their readers. Clothing description functions as what Roland Barthes called an “instrument of structuration” that creates “an organized duration into the unveiling of the garment.”62 Hence it made a good tool for character introductions: writers often gave major characters head-to-toe descriptions on their first appearance, but thereafter returned to cursory material and garment-style descriptions. It is also true that the weight of detail was perhaps first and foremost a source of reader pleasure. As the literature scholar Patrick Hanan observed, “specificity of dress and other trappings” may have been intended to “emphasize the characters’ shallowness, but specificity also seems to be regarded as a literary value in itself.”63 Specificity, as Barthes put it, “recharged” fashion’s message.64 Barthes is a thought-provoking theorist here. One of the earliest to conceptualize fashion as a system and to acknowledge the role of text in constructing its communication, The Fashion System (Système de la mode, 1967) outlined a semiological analysis of how modern media generated fashion by translating garments into language. It argued that any given dress object existed in three different structures: technological, iconic, and verbal, and that the circulation of fashion relied, to a great extent, on activities of transformation between these different structures, created by operators he termed “shifters.” In other words, fashion was created not just through objects, images, and descriptions, but also through the process of translating between these different representational forms. Of the three, he saw “written clothing” as most advantageous in possessing “a function of authority”: “The image freezes an endless number of possibilities, words determine a single certainty. . . . What language adds to the image is knowledge.”65 His logocentric underplaying of the visual, or the intertextuality of word and image, and his insistence that the material can be reduced to the discursive and representational are all methodological shortcomings. Much of Barthes’s analysis also speaks primarily to his material—mid-twentieth-century fashion magazines like Elle, the product of a coherent, mass-produced, homogenous media—which was quite different from the media system of Zou Tao’s day—Shanghai’s early mass-market publishing, whose magazines and books were ever changing to fit their new readers.66 But to understand the implications behind the parallels between the materially embellished dress object, and the textually embellished fictional description, there is much in Barthes’s account that is relevant to nineteenth-century Chinese fashion and its consumers, who, like Barthes, were so preoccupied with the prestige of the literate. Barthes’s theory is particularly useful for his attention to the wider media systems in which rhetoric circulated. He argued written clothing was a speech act reiterated on a cyclical basis by an exclusive authority (editors and journalists) who compounded and “ T he L u x ury of W ords ”   |   1 7 3

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normalized what is fashionable.67 Though comparable to other examples of courtesan literature, Shanghai Dust was distinctive in being one of the first Shanghai novels to be published in a serialized format; it initially appeared in 1898 in Amusement (Qu bao), a newspaper coedited by Zou Tao.68 The leisure or tabloid newspaper targeted a new readership, the “petty urbanites” (xiao shimin), providing them with a cheap form of leisure reading and introducing concepts of leisure that had previously belonged to an upper class. As Alexander des Forges observed, for popular fiction to function in a newspaper format, the novelist needed to hook the reader so they didn’t miss a single issue.69 Writers had different ways of achieving this, but installment fiction’s narrative complexity was grounded upon referentiality—“the practice of making intertextual references to the specific names, places, and moments that pervade the burgeoning field of Shanghai texts and images.”70 In this context, the detailing of fashionable dress, unprecedented in its accuracy and coherence, enabled the audience to participate in this “mediasphere.” Accuracy and coherence were created through detailing every aspect of the garment in full: fabric, color, decoration, and most of all, trimming. It is trimming terminology that is the main cause of the dress descriptions’ increased complexity. Novels like Shanghai Dust present some of the bewildering range of names awarded the ribbon: “appliquéd borders” (xiang), “pipings” (gun), “borders” (hua bian), “ribbons” (hua taozi), “dog-tooth piping” (gou ya’er), “white banner border” (bai qi bian), “peony border” (mudan dai), “gold-and-white devil borders” (jin bai guizi langan), and “coiled-gold embroidery” (panjin jian xiu).71 The force behind the terminological variety can be classified as what Barthes termed the detail or “little nothing,” a component that he argued was critical to fashion rhetoric, given its cheapness and accessibility.72 For him, the answer to the question quoted in the beginning: “Why does Fashion utter clothing so abundantly? . . . Why does it interpose, between the object and its user, such a luxury of words (not to mention images), such a network of meaning?” was ultimately an economic one: “In order to blunt the buyer’s calculating consciousness, a veil must be drawn around the object—a veil of images, of reasons, of meanings: a mediate substance of an aperitive order must be elaborated, in short, a simulacrum of the real object must be created.”73 That is, though we can understand the late Qing novel’s dress descriptions in terms of vicarious pleasures and hyperrealism, we should also understand it as arising from a commercially driven consumer environment. This environment is apparent when we consider the material that surrounded Shanghai Dust in the newspaper. Zou Tao’s novel was placed alongside advertisements, like this one placed in August 1898 for two shops, the Cui Long Clothing Shop and the Nine Prospers Silk and Satin Shop, which had opened three months earlier (fig. 5.10). The Cui Long Clothing Shop specialized in “making fashionable men’s and women’s clothing for all seasons, silks and satins, new clothes, Gu-style embroidery, court robes and skirts, new styles, Occidental-style gauzes and satins, foreign pearl gauze, all types of fine furs and robes.” The Nine Prospers Silk and Satin Shop was a 174  |  CHAPTER 5

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Zhejiang brand that manufactured “upon their own looms, superior quality silks and satins of all colors, especially gold and silver storehouse satins, self-connecting [zilian] Zhang velvets, gold and silver Diao velvets, real sea tiger velvets, gold and silver Jian velvets, multicolored gold-woven velvets and satins, mandarin duck satins, robe sets, magua jackets, “sesame” gauze and patterned gauze with tabby ground satin velvets, patterned gauze with tabby ground and “sesame” gauze storehouse satins, springtime gauze, “palace” gauze, “mature” woven luo and sha gauzes, “thread springtime” fabric, choumi tabby silks, monochrome figured “facsimile” satin damasks, Gu-style embroidered dragon robes, all colors of foreign gauzes and satins.” Change is evident in the inclusion of foreign fabrics, but the textual strategy—listing large multitudes of goods, asserting control over manufacture and hence quality, adding further assurances of reliable pricing, and ending with a “sincere” signature by the owner—is familiar from advertisements earlier in the century (see fig. 3.7).

Figure 5.10. Advertisement for the Cui Long Clothing Shop and the Nine Prospers Silk and Satin Shop. Amusement (Qu bao), August 1, 1898.

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To read Shanghai Dust alongside such shop advertisements is to realize the origins of the kind of language that Zou Tao used to describe his fashionable heroines. In highlighting commercial players as fashion authorities, this evidence diverges from the gentry hegemony in late Qing consumption found in other studies of the Qing commercial world. For example, Wu Jen-shu’s study of advertising demonstrated how the mercantile desire to appeal to the gentry class pervaded structure and content, illuminating phenomena like literati writings marketing the most popular craftsmen or the excessively textual nature of much late Qing advertising.74 Since most advertising was for “high-quality goods,” he argues it sought to target or identify with wealthy and educated gentry and officials, the key arbiters of taste and producer reviews. But these voices—like scholar Gu Zhentao’s (1790–?) listings of Suzhou’s most renowned craft producers in 1843 (see appendix 2, table d)—also survive far more often than the voices of those who made and sold these goods. When we consider this mercantile voice, found in sample books and pawnshop guides, the importance of these commercial players becomes apparent. Naming the Ribbon

The production of woven and embroidered ribbons increased exponentially through the nineteenth century, particularly following the Taiping Rebellion when their accessible production made them attractive to beleaguered producers.75 In 1850s Nanjing, there were only a few score looms producing silk ribbons; by the end of the century, there were about three thousand, employing four thousand men and producing three hundred different patterns of ribbons between two to three inches wide.76 In Shanghai, “ribbons are generally woven by women, young girls, boys, and old men. The organzine, as a rule, is mounted by the head workman and arranged according to the design required. There is a great variety of kinds and colors, and manufacturers have assured me that they can reproduce all kinds of Chinese patterns. Each family engaged in this work has from three to five looms; the price of each loom is from $2.25 to $3. The number of families manufacturing Ribbons in and around the city is estimated at 120.”77 The raw silk could be imported—in Jiujiang (Jiangsu), silk came from Sichuan, Hubei, and Zhejiang, and the tabby-weave ribbons required only a simple, cheap loom to produce “a great variety of kinds and colors,” patterned through a supplementary warp.78 While broader ribbons required a second man to weave the figured part (the wider the ribbon, the greater the number of heads or warps), narrower widths required just one loom operator, and one man could weave about forty feet per day, sold for 0.35 to 3.90 tael per fifty feet in 1880s Shanghai.79 Some locations supplied local markets; for example, in Foshan, near Guangzhou, there were just two or three producers of woven silk borders (langan hang) who “sold only to the surrounding areas, not to be compared with those provincial shops which sell to every province.”80 But producers elsewhere had more reach. In Canton, 176  |  CHAPTER 5

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one-tenth was exported to Hong Kong and on to places like the Straits Settlements (a former crown colony consisting of Penang, Singapore, Malacca, and Dinding); in Zhenjiang, only one-tenth of the ribbons were consumed locally, and the rest was sent to Beijing, Zhili, Henan, Shanxi, and Hubei.81 Ribbons were also an important category for international trade. Merchants exhibited varieties in late nineteenth-century global expositions.82 In England, “China Ribbon”—silk ribbon shaded across its width from light to dark—became the latest handicraft trend to adorn late Victorian women’s dress and homes.83 One of the earliest Western merchants to see this global potential was the St.-Étienne ribbon manufacturer Jean-Claude Philippe Isidore Hedde (1801–1880). Hedde travelled in China between 1843 and 1846, just after the first Opium War, and visited several cities, including Suzhou, Guangzhou, Foshan, and Ningbo, where he purchased samples to inspire European factories. He admired Chinese embroidery, particularly Suzhou embroidery.84 And he clearly recognized the accessory’s fashionability, observing of a pair of “light blue satin embroidered sleeve-bands” (priced two dollars) that they “should be a focus of [European] manufacturers wishing to produce designs for Chinese consumption. Doubtless, such ribbons would encounter great success among the elegant [ladies] of Nanjing, Suzhou, and Hangzhou.”85 Among the objects he bought back from China was an album of ribbon samples. The 1844 album, now in the Musée de Tissus, Lyon, contained 268 ribbons made in Canton, Hangzhou, and Suzhou. A concertina style album covered in a silk brocade, it has a French title on the front (Echantillons de Rubans de la fabrique de Canton, 1844) and a vase paper-cut affixed to the back. Four Chinese characters are annotated besides the French title: the name of Lunefoong, a small dealer who sold various goods and whose address (New China Street, No. 4) is stamped inside the back page (fig. 5.11).86 Similar sample books of silk fabrics are found in the PEM Museum (E82209, E8EE09), but Hedde’s is unusual in containing ribbons rather than fabrics. The ribbons span a range of widths, colors, and patterns, but they are all marked with their Chinese names, many of which can be correlated to the kinds of fictional descriptions found in Shanghai Dust or Dreams of Wind and Moon: “Pine and bamboo hero,” “Eight auspicious [motifs],” “As you wish happiness and longevity” (fig. 5.12). The names in the Hedde album can also be compared to a list of Shanghai ribbon samples sent as part of the 1881 Silk survey, and both lists show familiar auspicious combinations: flowers like sunflower, peony, or chrysanthemum; animals like dragon, deer, and butterfly; auspicious characters like wan (ten thousand) or shou (longevity); and objects like antique motifs or the ruyi scepter. Often it is hard to distinguish between content naming and desirable naming: the antique motifs in “Blue lotus and antiques,” for example, are stylized beyond recognition, suggesting auspicious values were gained primarily by virtue of their names.87 The album reflects the evident necessity of naming the objects to cover the increasing multitude of ribbon styles, but it also underlines how the predilection for the “ T he L u x ury of W ords ”   |   1 7 7

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a

b

Figure 5.11. Album of Chinese ribbon samples, Echantillons de Rubans de la fabrique de Canton, 1844. (a) Front cover with inventory marks and album title on paper label; (b) back cover with vase paper-cut. Cover: Lampas, satin background, silk. Album: Paper, ink, and various samples of silk ribbons and gold and silver metal threads. MT 9405. Don Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Lyon, 1864. © Lyon, Museum of Fabrics and Decorative Arts–Pierre Verrier.

auspicious was ultimately a commercial endeavor. Naming, after all, was a form of valuation—you couldn’t sell what you couldn’t name. Accordingly, the other textual record that displays a concern with naming fashionable motifs is the pawnshop guide. One late nineteenth-century example, Dang hang zaji, contained an entire category devoted to “borders, trimming, sleeve-bands, and skirt insets”; each entry lists measurements and prices.88 It is here that we find the hundreds of different silk names found in the late Qing novel—such as “mandarin duck satin” or “cowherd silk”—categorized into “silks, satins, gauzes, brocades, twills” (chou duan sha luo mo ling lei) and then by regional specialty, “Separating and describing regional production” (fen bie xingrong didao lei).89 And it is the pawnshop guide that details the naming of auspicious designs, telling us that the plum, orchid, chrysanthemum, and bamboo motif is titled “The Four Season’s Auspiciousness,” or that the gourd branches and vines motif, seen combined with scenes from The Story of the Western Chamber on 178  |  CHAPTER 5

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Figure 5.12. Ribbon samples with design labels: “The eight auspicious motifs” (ba ji xiang); “Blue lotus antiquities” (qing lian bo gu); “Phoenix and peony” (feng chuan mudan); “As you wish happiness and longevity” (ruyi xi shou); “Foreign strip” (yang dai); “Gourd and branch knots” (jie zhi luhu). MT 9405. Don Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Lyon, 1864. © Lyon, Museums of Fabrics and Decorative Arts-Pierre Verrier.

the jacket in figure 4.10, is called “May you have prosperous descendants.”90 The guide was written during the last years of the dynasty, and the charting of these details perhaps suggests a society in which such knowledge could not be relied upon—the expertise of premodern handicraft groups was often textually recorded rather than orally transmitted, following contact with outsiders. But it also points to the need for those producing and trading fashion to establish value through meaning. If the fashion discourse of the novel and the bamboo ballad can be understood at the level of consumer pleasures, then the Hedde ribbon sample book and the pawnshop guide is suggestive of a mercantile push to utilize the cultural acceptability of auspicious naming to create market worth. For early Western collectors, auspicious symbols were the only imaginable decorative theme on Chinese dress. Typically presented as long lists of monosemantic equivalencies implying an age-old, unchanging conception of decorative themes, for “ T he L u x ury of W ords ”   |   1 7 9

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connoisseurs like Bernard Vuilleumier iconographical study was key to establishing the purported original noble or imperial wearer who had once worn the object in the halcyon days of the Ming or Qing courts. “These little designs which are like hieroglyphics, and as a whole represent the synthesis of the Chinese soul, conceal much within themselves. They are the language of the ‘elite,’ the image of the nobility, of honor, constituting, so to speak, for the robe an aristocratic cuirasse.”91 From a twenty-first-century perspective, Vuilleumier’s account might be absurd in its orientalism, but it bears emphasis that it was the connoisseur perspective of collectors like Vuilleumier that accompanied the entrance of Chinese dress to the museum, and, in many respects, still guides their interpretation. Against this presentation of dress decoration as static and ahistorical, the last two chapters have demonstrated how nineteenth-century fashion introduced new themes from popular and literati culture. The connoisseur’s trivializing of narrative imagery—“highly conventionalized and devoid of much meaning,” reflected an understanding of the late Qing audience as declining in parallel with their dynasty, less educated in their grasp of historical and graphic decoration.92 But objects like the Wang Zhaojun and Cai Wenji sleeve-bands or the steamship-embroidered jacket suggest instead an audience interested in novel, increasingly referential themes—underpinned by auspicious values but expressive of contemporary concerns. Finally, where Vuilleumier approached this symbolic system as operating within discrete arenas, controlled by courtly elites, immune from either alteration or influence from other social groups, here we have seen the opposite. As examples like the fashionable cloud collar or Gu-style embroidery demonstrate, material culture rarely achieves such hermeneutic spheres of isolation. Print culture and commercial handicrafts increased consumer interactions, resulting in complexification and secularization in auspicious symbolism and causing visual expectations to become ever more entwined. Poetry-adorned borders and antique-embroidered jackets demonstrate how far the socially mobile late Qing society confounds any possibility of simplistic mapping between status and taste. The commercialization of fashion that increased the numbers of workshops and embroiderers also encouraged a dialogue between literati and popular culture, a dialogue revealed not in official texts or gentry morality, but in courtesan literature, pawnshop guides, and ribbon-sample books.

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Conclusion Silk Ladies. They are mostly shaped in the form of gentlewomen and decorated with colorful silk cloth. Their expressions are beautiful, their postures sometimes standing, sometimes sitting. Tourists come to the Tiger Hill markets [in Suzhou] and buy them as gifts. Gu Lu, A Record of Rested Oars on the Tong Bridge (Tongqiao yi zhao lu), 1842

B

y the end of the century, the fashion for the beribboned jacket had run its course. One final permutation completed its fashion cycle: Yangliuqing beauties now wore jackets trimmed with wide black-satin lengths featuring cutouts of auspicious shapes—bats, butterflies, and the like. This early Republican print, recognizably modern in its lines, colors, and posture, shows the new style (fig. C.1). In a familiar pattern, male commentators criticized the fashion’s neglect of precious silk resources: “Nowadays [women] use fine brocades and satins for trimmings, often the trimming costs even more than the actual garment . . . they also shape patterns into the trimming, pieces of silks and satin are carved into fragments, and not cherished.”1 Meanwhile, bamboo ballads described another new style—foreign trimming. “Tops and jackets have traditionally been edged with borders and trimmings, but nowadays it is popular to wear the foreign borders.”2 Museum collections occasionally feature such styles: robes edged with American “fancy trim” or trousers trimmed with European lace. In this example is a pair of yellow damask trousers that makes use of black European lace to set off a wide blue embroidered silk border (fig. C.2).3 As Qing dress gradually accommodated the introduction of Western fabrics and tailoring, so too did the Qing empire adjust to encroaching Western powers. An unceasing series of uprisings and battles fractured and weakened the court, empowering foreign imperialists and internal reformers alike. The financial burden of huge indemnities and the growing power of regional leaders hindered any imperial reform |   1 8 1  |

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Figure C.1. Beauty Sitting Alone (Meiren du zuo), depicting the new fashion for trimmings with cutout motifs. Woodblock print, 60 × 109 cm. Collection of Wang Shucun. Reprinted from Feng Jicai, ed., Zhongguo muban nianhua jicheng, Yangliuqing juan, shang, 89, with permission from the Zhonghua Book Company.

attempts, and in 1911, after an uprising in Wuhan spread, provincial assemblies across the country declared a new republic, with Sun Yatsen at its head. Encyclopedist Xu Ke described how clothing responded to this political upheaval: “During the Tongzhi-Guangxu period [1861–1908], the clothing of men and women became very full, with sleeves wider than one chi. Especially between 1894 and the 1900 Boxer Rebellion, with the increase of foreign aggression and political upheaval, so too were 182 | CON C LUSION

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Figure C.2. Yellow silk woman’s trouser leg, designed to be tied above the knee, combining foreign black-lace trimming with embroidered ribbon, 1890–1910. Silk and cotton, 74 × 31.5 cm. Presented by Dr. Bertha Hensman, 1991. Ashmolean Museum (EA1991.86).

the old ways of clothing and daily life reformed: short robes and narrow sleeves were preferred for military dress, and from then on novel styles were increasingly favored.”4 For Xu, this sartorial evolution was modernity in action. Speaking of Shanghai dress, he commented: “The stylistic progression from simple to luxurious reflects present-day customs, but there is also a trend from excessive detail to convenient simplicity, and this demonstrates cultural progress.”5 But while change bought opportunity for some handicraft producers—most noticeably the Hunan embroiderers who used new palettes and artist-drawn patterns to supplant Suzhou embroidery—for most, adjusting to a clothing style re-set in the new Republic was a challenge.6 Rank badges and dragon robes became obsolete; women’s dress was no longer trimmed with cloud collars or embroidered borders. A 1926 Foshan gazetteer described “the Republican revolution in clothing,” when “collars, dragon robes, and such objects were no longer used. Wide and narrow trimmings were no longer fashionable in women’s clothing, only [embroidered] screens, curtains, and cushions could be sold. Therefore, embroidery producers did not flourish as they had before.”7 For many wealthy families, silken clothing became an asset to be liquidated. For foreign visitors in Beijing and Shanghai, these same silk objects were a souvenir, an exotic emblem of the crumbling Qing empire. In this way, the jackets, skirts, and accessories presented in this book transferred from one cultural context to another. As Westerners eagerly bought up these items once belonging to Chinese families, understandings of these objects and, in turn, Chinese dress culture, subtly shifted. In the context of display and connoisseurship, museums and collectors effaced aspects like collecting circumstances or production conditions that might disrupt the often-fictionalized object narratives of imperial power and noble lifestyles. Elite objects like dragon robes and rank badges were privileged over more vernacular objects. Chinese dress was newly framed as art, a process at once as obvious as sewing together pairs of embroidered sleeve-bands and placing them behind a glass frame, CON C LUSION | 183

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and as subtle as hanging a narrative so high on the wall that all that could be appreciated were its silken textures and bright shades. Against the museum’s framing of the gentlewoman sitting in her courtyard quietly and passively embroidering her robes, this book has sought to place collections of women’s dress in a different context, a nineteenth-century China in which women employed embroidered dress to express a contemporary self. Rather than the attributes given in the museum setting—artistic, genteel, static—these embroidered jackets would have been viewed as fashionable, commercial, of the moment. This reconstruction of the late Qing fashion system affirms the centrality of objectfocused scholarship, not only in fashion history, but also in women’s history. The travels of fashionable styles from south to north China and back again through popular prints and pattern books tells us much about women’s contributions to local cultures and the use of dress to express a cultured, urban identity. Addressing these objects as fashion complicates our assumptions about women as cultural and economic producers and consumers, offering a different perspective on the established narrative of women as victims in a patriarchally dominated culture: decorative objects purchased and presented by men, to use a metaphor suggested by Gu Lu’s “Silk Ladies.” Late Qing fashions carried considerable potential for women. As producers, home-based embroidery offered a culturally acceptable livelihood that connected women with wider communities of commercial textile producers. And as consumers, the very accessibility of embroidered borders, collars, and sleeve-bands enabled a more widespread popularization of fashion, shifting the market away from literati and court tastes and toward consumers like merchants, courtesans, and artisans. This created new trends of narrative imagery, polychrome depictions, and layered decoration. The embroidery industry’s commercialization, from border sets to printed pattern books, ultimately served to connect women with the outside world, as both consumers and producers, moving fashion toward an “open cultural system.”8 From Qing to Republic

It is striking that just at the point that secondhand Chinese clothing entered the Western museum, secondhand Western clothing was becoming the stuff of modernity in China: “Old Western clothes are widely collected [from many places], [things] like hats and jackets, each in different styles. Factory and handicraft workers compete to buy them, to dress even more finely.”9 The early twentieth century marked the early globalization of the used clothing trade, a trade that was, and remains, closely tied to patterns of colonial enterprise.10 Western intervention is implicated in many of the events that contributed to the Qing dynasty’s demise—the Opium Wars, the Taiping Rebellion, and the Boxer Rebellion—events that also marked the origins of the Western collecting of Chinese dress that enabled this book’s source matter. However, this book has investigated a system of production and consumption that was created and 184 | CON C LUSION

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ran its full course before significant contact with the industrial West. This system ended because its formative social structures ended or adapted: the ethnic divide between ruling court and sociocultural elite; the guild-controlled production system fueled by poorly paid female workers; the norms that confined elite women to the home, prescribing frugality even while popular imagery presented the material excess demanded by higher status; the gulf between the holders of that status, and those controlling the production, design, and distribution of fashion. In 1920s Shanghai, a modern fashion industry took shape, “characterized by mechanized textile production, advertising through billboards and newspapers, proliferation of pictorial magazines, emergence of the graphic artist as fashion designer, promotion of retail outlets, connection between local and foreign products, and fashion parades.”11 Many of the concerns that preoccupied this system were distinctly new: anxiety about how to incorporate Western trends while preserving Chinese sartorial traditions; increasing dependence on technologies like Singer sewing machines, Toyota looms, spinning factories, and knitting machines; the rising stature of the tailor, denigrated for most of the Qing period; the emergence of shopping as public leisure activity, integral to a modern female identity; the growing importance of advertising, graphic artists, and pictorials, now specialized for women. But there are also continuities, features that first began in the nineteenth century. The styles, ostensibly so different in the figure-hugging qipao silhouettes, were still oriented around the base fabric plus trimming that defined the late Qing jacket; this continuation can be seen in the qipao trimmed with a late Qing cloud collar and border set in figure C.3. While design was tied to Shanghai, the preeminent center of global, cosmopolitan fashion, production remained in Suzhou and the surrounding Jiangnan villages, as well as new locations enabled by the treaty port shifts in coastal trade.12 Indeed, the conventional emphasis on industrial factory enterprise in the Republican era is misleading: production continued to depend upon poorly paid female homeworkers. These women were not in Shanghai, which had some of the highest wages in the country, but rather places like Shantou (Swatou), Guangdong; Wuxi, Jiangsu; and Yantai (Chefoo), Shandong. What distinguished these new needlework centers was the geographical distribution of commercial power: though the women worked to materials sent out by local bosses following orders from Shanghai, these bosses ultimately answered to the American and European owners of global trimming import/export companies. The women no longer produced the woven and embroidered ribbons of Qing tastes, but rather Western needlework forms—drawnwork (chousha), cutwork (diaoxiu), and needlework lace (huabian)—that foreign missionaries had introduced near the end of the Qing dynasty. In this way, Chinese women’s work shifted to meet the demands of a global fashion industry. The earliest forms of such enterprises were found not in the cotton mills or factories but in missionary workshops, where female missionaries taught European needlework CON C LUSION | 185

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techniques. The Soochow (Suzhou) Industrial Mission was one of the earliest to model the new industrial school, combining “daily systematic Bible teaching” with needlework that was retailed through missionary periodicals, which asked its readers to consume, in part, as charity: “To make it possible for these patient, skillful workers to earn a livelihood is something, but to give them the greater privilege of hearing the gospel message daily is still more. Will you not send orders to the school? Remember, every order for embroidery makes it possible for seventy-five women and girls to have daily systematic Bible teaching.”13 This 1911 article detailed the objects Suzhou embroiderers now produced—“dragon napkins” and floral-embroidered shirt-waisters—for female customers in London. The ease with which English and American missionaries established their needlework enterprises in places like Suzhou tells us much about the common ground of Qing and Victorian fashionable needlework. While for curator Alan Priest and his audience, Chinese dress appealed in being “beyond anything else,” this book has sought to identify a shared space revealed in the discourses and processes of fashion.14 Like their contemporaries in Victorian England, the fashionable Qing women comparing rank badges in figure 3.12 were criticized for their luxury-loving dress, their “hands sit the entire morning.” Both groups of women were viewed as “silk ladies,” their identity formed through their clothing. Chinese history has often positioned Qing women as illustrations to a text that omits them even while it welcomes their decorativeness, like Gu Lu’s silk cutouts, two-dimensional figures of colorful fabric. Yet exploring their history from the perspective of fashion reveals a world of economic and cultural production. Fashion provides a critical framework that enables us to describe and explain changing dress styles and explicate the evident concern of society toward those changes. But fashion matters most in acknowledging women’s active roles as cultural consumers—in making socioeconomic decisions about how they dressed—and as economic producers—in contributing to their families and local economies. Recognition of these roles has been a major factor in “the historical reclamation of the female consumer,”15 which has positioned European women as “crucial agents . . . in the development of a fashion culture,” even while historians have followed fashion theorists and connoisseurs from the past century, informed by imperialism, Orientalism, and social Darwinism, in excluding women outside that Western fashion culture.16 Qing fashion may look quite different from that of nineteenth-century England or France, just as the Qing commercialization of textile handicrafts differed from the production systems of Western Europe. But to its wearers and opinion makers, it felt like fashion. Those individuals would have surely found it odd that their clothing is now displayed and stored in American and European museums, but it is there that we find a material reminder of that system of creating fashion, and all the actions therein.

Figure C.3. Green silk qipao trimmed with a recycled cloud collar and border set, 1930s. Shanghai Textile and Costume Museum, Donghua University.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The process of writing this book, founded primarily upon American and Chinese museum and library collections of dress and images, has frequently beholden me to consider my privilege in being able to access such precious objects, and it is a great pleasure to be able to thank the institutions and individuals whose generosity, knowledge, and assistance have enabled my study. Shelagh Vainker was the first to recognize the importance of exploring collections of Chinese dress through the lens of fashion and commerce, at a point where my thinking was far more inchoate. I thank her for her guidance, encouragement, and support. Throughout the process of researching and writing this book, I have had numerous opportunities to be thankful for Dorothy Ko’s presence in the field of Chinese fashion, and all she has done to further the study of women’s history through material culture. I am deeply grateful for her belief in this book, insightful comments, and inspiring vision. From our first meeting, Paola Zamperini has welcomed me with her inimitable warmth and intelligence. I am fortunate to have been able to depend on her for sharp readings and candid comments, and thank her for all her support. The book has greatly benefitted from the assistance of friends and colleagues. I thank Amanda Phillips and Stephen McDowall for careful readings and thoughtful criticism. Conversations with BuYun Chen on Chinese fashion and beyond have been thought-provoking and fun. I am grateful for the opportunity to study historical dress objects with Yan Yong and Li Xiaojun. Sue Naquin provided a helpful reading of the first chapter along with general pointers and encouragement. I also thank Antonia Finnane and Ruth Barnes for their support and wisdom. I am particularly grateful to Xu Yongming for his generous help with translation and interpretation. In attempting to identify the jackets’ dramatic scenes, I was fortunate to consult with literary scholars like Ni Yibin and Fan Pen Chen. It goes without saying that any remaining mistakes are my responsibility alone. I thank the curators and librarians of the museums and libraries whose collections I consulted, in particular: Janine Andrews, Frannie Blondheim, Emily Beliveau (University of Alberta Museums); Graham Hutt and Frances Wood (previously British Library); Zhao Feng, Jin Lin, and Xu Zheng (China National Silk Museum); Clarissa von Spee and Lauryn Smith (Cleveland Museum of Art); Susan Brown (Cooper-Hewitt |   1 8 9  |

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Museum); Micah Messenheimer and Alice M. Zrebiec (Denver Art Museum); Jamie Kelly and Lauren Hancock (Field Museum); Bai Fang (Guangdong Museum); Huang Yan (Guangzhou Institute for Intangible Cultural Heritage); Anne Rose Kitagawa and Jonathon Smith (Jordan Schnitzer Museum); Heidi Raatz and Erin Threlkeld (Minneapolis Institute of Art); Audrey Mathieu, Romy Schäfer, and Isabel Bretones (Musée des Tissus); Pam Parmal and Diana Zlatanovski (Museum of Fine Arts); Stacey Sherman and Kate Butler (Nelson-Atkins Museum); Yin Anni, Yan Yong, and Liu Zhenghong (Palace Museum, Beijing); Daisy Yiyou Wang (previously Peabody Essex Museum); Carol Gil and Kaitlyn Bylard (Petterson Museum); Kristina Haugland, Dilys Blum, and Hiromi Kinoshita (Philadelphia Museum of Art); Bao Mingxin and Bian Xiangyang (Shanghai Museum of Textile and Costume); Ji Xuemei (Suzhou Museum); Shen Jie and Qian Yucheng (Suzhou Silk Museum); Lee Talbot (Textile Museum); as well as the librarians and curators at the School of Oriental and African Studies, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Harvard Yenching Library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was fortunate to begin my teaching career at the Rhode Island School of Design, and I thank the curators, Kate Irvin and Laurie Brewer, and the art history department, in particular Bolaji Campbell and Paola Demattè, for their support. I have also been welcomed into private collections and wish to gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Alex Bass, Christer von der Burg, Teresa Coleman, Don J. Cohn, Soren Edgren, Daniel Greenberg, Chris Hall, Alan Kennedy, and Shao Wang for their kind assistance in making objects and images available for my study. I also wish to express my gratitude to the following scholars: Nancy Berliner, Sarah Cheang, Craig Clunas, Fletcher Coleman, Lianbin Dai, Joyce Denney, Madeleine Yue Dong, Tom and Pat Ebrey, Fan Jinmin, Deborah Del Gais, Gao Chunming, Jacob Eyferth, Anne Gerritsen, Ellen Huang, Ifen Huang, Jiao Lin, Reşat Kasaba, Fiona Kerlogue, Beverly Lemire, Yuhang Li, Felicity Lufkin, Anne E. McLaren, Bruce Maclaren, Eugenio Menegon, Joanna Michlic, Pauline le Moigne, Jeannie Parker, Jenny Purtle, Mei Mei Rado, Giorgio Riello, Claire Roberts, Dagmar Schäfer, Eiren Shea, Regine Thierez, Hilde de Weerdt, Verity Wilson, Aida Wong, Wu Jen-shu, and Yulian Wu. I thank Zhou Songfang, Gu Wenzhong, Macy Zhu, Michael Chen, and Cheng Shaoxuan for their help locating material in China. Financial support came from the British Inter-University China Centre (BICC), the KS Scholarship in Chinese Art, the China and Inner Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, the Millard Meiss Publication Fund, the Pasold Foundation, the Institute of Historical Research (Scouloudi Foundation), and ACLS / Henry Luce Foundation. The Veronika Gervers Fellowship in Textiles and Dress allowed me to explore the treasures of the Royal Ontario Museum collection in depth, and I greatly appreciate the help of the curators and staff who assisted my research, in particular Sarah Fee, Karla Livingstone, Anu Liivandi, Alexandra Palmer, Wen-chien Cheng, and Chen Shen. The team at the University of Washington Press have been wonderful to

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work with, and I am very grateful to Lorri Hagman, Beth Fuget, Julie Van Pelt, and Caitlin Tyler-Richards for all they have done to ease my path. I thank my brother, Alex, and my sister, Josie, who first helped me move from Xi’an to graduate study. I owe my parents, Hazel and Michael, a great debt for love and support, and their equally unstinting childcare assistance, traveling across the Atlantic to enable me to participate in conferences and fellowships. My parents-in-law, Boris and Alla, have also been an enormous help and support and I sincerely thank them. My American family: Peter and Libby, Rya and Drew, and Jared and Rita have bolstered me with their interest and belief in the project. Finally, this book is dedicated to my husband, who has always supported and encouraged my interest in dress and textile history, and who, though in a field far from Chinese textiles, has taught me so much about academic integrity and resilience; and to our sons, who have borne my obsession with “the book” with great patience and enthusiasm. Their love and companionship have sustained me during the many years of research and writing: to co-opt the auspicious language that features in so many objects of Qing fashion, they have been my “one hundred blessings and one thousand fortunes.”

ACKNOWLED GMEN TS | 191

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APPENDIX 1 A Complete Record of One Hundred Blessings and One Thousand Fortunes 百福千祥 總錄: A Dowry List for Yu Qingceng, a Zhejiang Gentlewoman in the Late Qing No.

Full description

Color

Primary fabric

Other fabric

Object type

1

天青花緞朝披一件

Sky blue

Patterned satin

2

大紅寧綢刻絲朝裙一條

Crimson

Ningchou damask

Tapestry

Court skirt

3

粉紅寧綢狐皮襖一件

Pink

Ningchou damask

Fox fur

Winter jacket

4

品月寧綢狐皮襖一件

Pale blue

Ningchou damask

Fox fur

Winter jacket

5

月白寧綢羊皮襖一件

Moon white

Ningchou damask

Sheepskin

Winter jacket

6

品藍湖縐羊皮襖一件

Aniline blue

Huzhou crepe

Sheepskin

Winter jacket

7

茶綠寧綢灰鼠皮襖一件

Tea green

Ningchou damask

Gray squirrel fur

Winter jacket

8

茶綠刻絨灰鼠皮襖一件

Tea green

Carved velvet

Gray squirrel fur

Winter jacket

9

湖綠寧綢灰鼠皮襖一件

Lake green

Ningchou damask

Gray squirrel fur

Winter jacket

10

月白湖縐灰鼠皮襖一件

Moon white

Huzhou crepe

Gray squirrel fur

Winter jacket

11

竹青刻絨小毛皮襖一件

Bamboo green

Carved velvet

Wool

Winter jacket

12

月白湖縐小毛皮襖一件

Moon white

Huzhou crepe

Wool

Winter jacket

13

大紅湖縐羊皮小襖一件

Crimson

Huzhou crepe

Sheepskin

Short jacket

14

元色湖縐狐皮背心一件

Black

Huzhou crepe

Fox fur

Sleeveless jacket

15

元色湖縐羊皮背心一件

Black

Huzhou crepe

Sheepskin

Sleeveless jacket

16

元色湖縐灰鼠背心一件

Black

Huzhou crepe

Gray squirrel fur

Sleeveless jacket

17

大紅湖縐綿襖一件

Crimson

Huzhou crepe

Silk floss padding

Jacket

18

粉荷摹本緞綿襖一件

Pale red

Monochrome figured “facsimile” satin damask

Silk floss padding

Jacket

19

品藍羅緞綿襖一件

Aniline blue

Gauze satin

Silk floss padding

Jacket

20

竹青寧綢綿襖一件

Bamboo green

Ningchou damask

Silk floss padding

Jacket

21

茶綠甌綢綿襖一件

Tea green

Ou (Wenzhou) silk

Silk floss padding

Jacket

22

雪青紡綢綿襖一件

Lilac

Fangchou silk

Silk floss padding

Jacket

23

大紅湖縐絲綿襖一件

Crimson

Huzhou crepe

Silk floss padding

Jacket

24

品紅印花綢絲綿襖一件

Aniline red

Printed chou silk

Silk floss padding

Jacket

Court cape

•

|   1 9 3  |

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No.

Full description

Color

Primary fabric

Other fabric

Object type

25

品紅綿綢絲綿襖一件

Aniline red

Mianchou silk (made from waste silk)

Silk floss padding

Jacket

26

銀紅巴緞綿襖一件

Silver red

Baduan satin (from Silk floss padding East Sichuan)

Jacket

27

大紅湖縐綿襖一件

Crimson

Huzhou crepe

Silk floss padding

Jacket

28

月白綿綢綿襖一件

Moon white

Mianchou silk (made from waste silk)

Silk floss padding

Jacket

29

品紅綿綢綿襖一件

Aniline red

Mianchou silk (made from waste silk)

Silk floss padding

Jacket

30

元色湖縐綿背心一件

Black

Huzhou crepe

Silk floss padding

Sleeveless jacket

31

竹青摹本緞夾襖一件

Bamboo green

Monochrome figured “facsimile” satin damask

Lined jacket

32

青蓮湖縐夾襖一件

Blue lotus

Huzhou crepe

Jacket

33

月白摹本緞夾襖一件

Moon white

Monochrome figured “facsimile” satin damask

Lined jacket

34

粉荷摹本緞夾襖一件

Powder lotus

Monochrome figured “facsimile” satin damask

Lined jacket

35

湖色寧綢夾襖一件

Lake color

Ningchou damask

Lined jacket

36

湖綠羅緞夾襖一件

Lake green

Gauze satin

Lined jacket

37

品藍熟羅夾襖一件

Aniline blue

“Mature” gauze (from Foshan)

Lined jacket

38

湖色熟羅夾襖一件

Lake color

“Mature” gauze (from Foshan)

Lined jacket

39

月白綿綢夾襖一件

Moon white

Mianchou silk (made from waste silk)

Lined jacket

40

梨青湖縐襯衫一件

Pear green

Huzhou crepe

Underjacket

41

元色湖縐夾背心一件

Black

Huzhou crepe

Lined sleeveless jacket

42

品藍實地紗夾背心一件

Aniline blue

“True patterned gauze with tabby ground” (from Foshan)

Lined sleeveless jacket

43

湖綠寧綢單衫一件

Lake green

Ningchou damask

Undershirt

44

竹青寧綢單衫一件

Bamboo green

Ningchou damask

Undershirt

45

閃色杭線單衫一件

Flashing color

Hangzhou thread silk

Undershirt

46

雪青紡綢單衫一件

Lilac

Fangchou silk

Undershirt

194  |  APPENDIX 1

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No.

Full description

Color

Primary fabric

Other fabric

Object type

47

紅灰絲綢單衫兩件

Red gray

Silk

Undershirt (2)

48

青蓮絨小衫兩件

Blue lotus

Velvet

Short jacket (2)

49

蝦青綿綢小衫兩件

Shrimp blue

Mianchou silk (made from waste silk)

Short jacket (2)

50

湖色熟羅衫一件

Lake

“Mature” gauze (from Foshan)

Summer jacket

51

粉荷熟羅衫一件

Powder lotus

“Mature” gauze (from Foshan)

Summer jacket

52

月白實地紗衫一件

Moon white

“True patterned gauze with tabby ground” (from Foshan)

Summer jacket

53

竹青實地紗衫一件

Bamboo green

“True patterned gauze with tabby ground” (from Foshan)

Summer jacket

54

湖色羅紋紗衫一件

Lake color

Net-patterned gauze

Summer jacket

55

雪青亮紗衫一件

Lilac

Patterned (bright) gauze with gauze ground

Summer jacket

56

湖色官紗衫一件

Lake color

“Palace” gauze

Summer jacket

57

雪青官紗衫兩件

Lilac

“Palace” gauze

Two summer jackets

58

湖色芝麻地紗衫一件

Lake color

“Sesame” gauze (from Foshan)

Summer jacket

59

大紅湖縐花邊裙一條

Crimson

Huzhou crepe

Patterned border

Skirt

60

大紅湖縐青邊裙一條

Crimson

Huzhou crepe

Blue border

Skirt

61

品月湖縐裙一條

Pale blue

Huzhou crepe

62

品綠湖縐花邊裙一條

Aniline green

Huzhou crepe

Patterned border

Skirt

63

青蓮湖縐花邊裙一條

White (lit., blue lotus)

Huzhou crepe

Patterned border

Skirt

64

粉荷湖縐藍邊裙一條

Powder lotus

Huzhou crepe

Blue border

Skirt

65

葵綠湖縐藍邊裙一條

Sunflower green

Huzhou crepe

Blue border

Skirt

66

元色湖縐裙兩條

Black

Huzhou crepe

Skirt

67

元色紡綢裙一條

Black

Fangchou silk

Skirt

68

元色熟羅裙一條

Black

“Mature” gauze (from Foshan)

Summer skirt

69

大紅實地紗裙一條

Crimson

“True patterned gauze with tabby ground” (From Foshan)

Summer skirt

Skirt

•

APPENDIX 1  |  195

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No.

Full description

Color

Primary fabric

Other fabric

Object type

70

大紅小春紗裙一條

Crimson

Springtime gauze

Summer skirt

71

銀紅小春紗裙一條

Silver red

Springtime gauze

Summer skirt

72

雪青實地紗裙一條

Lilac

“True patterned gauze with tabby ground” (from Foshan)

Summer skirt

73

元色生紗裙一條

Black

“Raw” gauze (from Foshan)

Summer skirt

74

元色小青紗裙一條

Black indigo

Gauze

75

大紅湖縐絲綿小衣一件

Crimson

Huzhou crepe

Silk floss padding

Short jacket

76

品紅繭綢絲綿小衣一件

Aniline red

Pongee silk

Silk floss padding

Short jacket

77

品紅湖縐綿小衣一件

Aniline red

Huzhou crepe

Silk floss padding

Short jacket

78

葵綠湖縐綿小衣一件

Sunflower green

Huzhou crepe

Silk floss padding

Short jacket

79

月白綿綢綿小衣一件

Moon white

Mianchou silk (made from waste silk)

Silk floss padding

Short jacket

80

葵綠湖縐夾小衣​​一 件

Sunflower green

Huzhou crepe

Lined short jacket

81

品紅繭綢夾小衣一件

Aniline red

Pongee silk

Lined short jacket

82

粉紅繭綢夾小衣一件

Pink

Pongee silk

Lined short jacket

83

湖色湖縐單小衣一件

Lake color

Huzhou crepe

Unlined small jacket

84

月白紡綢單小衣一件

Moon white

Fangchou silk

Unlined small jacket

85

青蓮綿綢單小衣一件

Blue lotus (white)

Mianchou silk (made from waste silk)

Unlined small jacket

86

銀紅實地紗小衣一件

Silver red

“True patterned gauze with tabby ground” (from Foshan)

Short jacket

87

雪青官紗小衣一件

Lilac

“Palace” gauze

Short jacket

88

元色生紗小衣兩件

Black

“Raw” gauze (from Foshan)

Short jacket

89

雪青實地紗小衣一件

Lilac

“True patterned gauze with tabby ground” (from Foshan)

Short jacket

Summer skirt

Source: Yu Yue, Bai fu qian xiang zonglu (1888). For fabric terminology, see Kuhn, ed., Chinese Silks.

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APPENDIX 2 Clothing, Textile, and Accessory Shop Names in Mid-Qing Suzhou Table A. Shop Names from Prosperous Suzhou (Gusu fanhua tu) Shop type

No.

Translation

Silk shops 絲綢業

1

Silks and satins shop 綢緞莊

2

Mianchou silk (made from waste silk) 綿綢

3

Thriving fortune silk trade 富盛綢行

4

Silks and satins, robes and jackets 綢緞袍褂

5

Shandong pongee 山東繭綢1

6

Zhenze silk trade 震澤綢行2

7

Silk shop, Puyuan Ningchou damask 綢莊,濮院寧綢3

8

Mianchou silk old trade, Huzhou crepe waste silk 綿綢老行, 湖縐綿綢4

9

Shandong Yi River pongee, we sell faultless products 山東沂水繭綢發 客不誤5

10

Imperial quality gauzes and satins, silk satins, gauzes and Mianchou silk 上用紗緞, 綢緞, 紗羅, 綿綢

11

Imperial tribute satins from the capital, self-made “eight silks,” gold and silver gauzes and satins, selling faultless goods to our customers 進京貢緞, 自造八絲, 金銀紗緞, 不誤主顧6

12

Trades in silks, satins, and gauzes, selected from Imperial Household Departments’ “eight silks” tribute satins for sale to our customers, Hanfu “eight silks,” superior tribute silks and satins 綢行, 緞行, 紗行, 選置內造八絲貢緞發客, 漢府八絲,上貢綢緞7

13

This shop selects Hanfu “eight silks,” dragon-brocaded satins, pongees, palace silks, serges and camlets, and other products for the customer 本號揀選, 漢府八絲, 妝蟒大緞, 繭綢, 宮綢嗶嘰羽毛, 等貨發客8

14

This shop produces its own Suzhou and Hangzhou silks, satins, and gauzes, Mianchou silk and native silk for the customer 本店自制蘇杭 綢緞紗羅等口綿綢梭布發客9

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Shop type

No.

Tailor and dress shops 成衣業

1

Clothes making 成衣

2

Clothing shop 衣莊

3

Clothing for customers 衣莊發客

4

Damao’s clothing shop, best prices (no discounts) 大茂號衣莊, 不二階10

5

Zhao’s original barracks clothing for sale to customers 原營經營衣莊, 照號發客

1

Studio of Three Submissions court shoes 三進齋朝靴 11

2

Shoe shop 靴店

3

Studio of Three Entrances boot shop 三進齋靴鋪12

4

Studio of Three Happiness shoe and sock shop 三樂齋鞋襪店

5

Handkerchiefs 手巾

6

Self-manufactured turbans and handkerchiefs 自制包頭手巾

7

Trading in handkerchiefs for many generations 手巾老行

8

Handkerchiefs and fans 手巾扇子

9

Hat shop, hat trade, hat shop court hats, silk court hats for winter and summer, serving our customers without fault 帽鋪, 帽行, 帽鋪朝冠, 冬夏絲綢朝冠, 不誤主顧

Accessories 鞋帽手巾業

Translation

Source: Liaoning Bowuguan, ed., Qing Xu Yang Gusu fanhua tu, based on the transcriptions of shop data in Li Hua, “Cong Xu Yang ‘Shengshi Zisheng Tu’ kan Qing dai qian qi Suzhou gongshangye de fanrong,” and Fan Jinmin, “Qing dai Suzhou chengshi wenhua fanrong de xiezhao.” 1. Pongee (Jianchou) was woven from wild silkworms, making it a thicker, coarser, and sturdier fabric. It was a specialty of Shandong and often called Jianchou or Shan jianchou (Fan Jinmin, “Qing dai Suzhou chengshi,” 475). 2. Zhenze Town, Wujiang County, Jiangsu, was famous for its silk production. 3. Ningchou damask was a figured twill silk originally produced in Nanjing during the Ming, but by the Qing it was produced widely in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, especially in Puyuan Town, Tongxiang County, Zhejiang. 4. Huzhou crepe was produced in many Jiangnan towns during the Qing; see Kuhn, ed., Chinese Silks, 435. Mianchou was made by twisting the remains of the reeled silk cocoon to form a low-grade silk product. 5. This shop had five partitioned rooms and a shop front. 6. “Eight silks” means damask satin 暗花緞. Zi zao, ben hao, and ben dian zi zhi indicated the shop was actually a silk account house (zhangfang); see Fan Jinmin, “Qing dai Suzhou chengshi,” 481. This shop building was on two floors, with three partitioned rooms and a shop facade. 7. Hanfu indicates it was produced in the Jiangning (Nanjing) imperial weaving workshop (Zhizao ju). This shop building was on two floors, with five partitioned rooms and a shop facade. 8. Li Hua has a different version: “宮綢繭綢, 嗶嘰羽毛, 等貨發客.” 9. This shop had three partitioned rooms and a shop facade. 10. The appellation bu er jie indicated the shop sold genuine goods at a fair price, which was not negotiable. 11. San jin zhai is an allusion to a story in Records of the Grand Historian 史記 by Sima Qian (145–ca. 87 bce). Master Huang Shi (Yellow Rock) tested Zhang Liang (d. ca. 185 bce) by casting his shoes off a bridge three times and each time asking Zhang to retrieve them. Zhang patiently complied, and so the Master rewarded him with Classic of the Military Strategies, which enabled him to help the Han-dynasty founder to overthrow the Qin dynasty. 12. This shop had three partitioned rooms and a shop facade.

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Table B. Shop Names from the Qianlong Southern Inspection Tour Scrolls (Qianlong nanxun tu)

District 1 (Beyond Tiger Hill on the Grand Canal)

1A

Store selling silks 各種紗羅, 綢緞發客

1B

Store selling fine cotton from Taicang and Chongming [Well-known cotton producing areas in Jiangsu] 太倉崇明, 自淨棉花

1C

All kinds of cotton cloth, shuttle cloth, summer cottons, and homespun cloth; a venerable establishment selling all kinds of cotton cloth 各種布疋, 梭布老行, 棉夏大布, 新盛不行

1D

Store selling housemade “eight floss silk” from Hanfu [Nanjing]. This store also sells a variety of gauze and velvet fabrics. 本店自製漢府八絲, 純絨紗緞等貨發客

1E

Store selling fashionable court boots 時樣朝靴

1F

All kinds of bright colors, we dye cotton cloth for customers 各色鮮明勩著, 加染梭布發客

1G

Secondhand clothes shop 估衣舖

District 2 (Around Chang Gate)

2A

Cloth store selling bolts of cotton cloth, specializes in extra-long bolts of cloth and indigo dyeing本號加染真青加長標扣梭布布行

2B

Two cloth stores: Venerable establishment selling cotton cloth 梭布老行 Seller of xiewenbu, twill-like cloth with woven diagonal designs 斜紋布行

2C

Store selling cloth 布店

2D

Venerable establishment selling cloth, especially indigo-colored cloth 青布老行

2E

Shop selling fashionable court hats, including summer and winter hats 時式朝冠。冬夏朝帽

2F

Store selling summer pillows made of white rattan 白藤涼枕

2G

Sanjinzhai three submissions studio 三進齋朝靴

2H

Shop selling felt products made from pure wool 純絨氈貨

2I

Store selling silk-like cotton cloth made in Yanzhou Prefecture, Shandong Province, and tussah silk from Yishui and Qingshui, Shandong Province 山東府綢, 沂水小繭, 兗州府綢, 清水樹繭

District 3 (Between Xu Gate and Chang Gate)

3D

Store selling rugs from Shanxi, renowned elegant cosmetics and palace silks with adhered gold 山西毯貨, 雅式名妝, 泥金宮絹1

3E

This shop sells dragon roundel badge robes [dragon robes] to order, Eight Floss and Tribute Satins, Puyuan Western floss, damask-patterned Song-style brocade, and embroidered dragon robes to order 定做團龍補服, 八絲貢緞, 濮院西絨, 妝花宋錦, 定做預繡蟒袍

•

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District 3 (Between Xu Gate and Chang Gate) continued

3F

Store selling a variety of furs, including snow weasel fur, marten fur, and fox fur, also custom-made fur products 本客自製貂皮狐服, 銀鼠元ロ , 各色皮貨

3G

Store selling fine cotton from Puyuan, Mianchou silk from Huzhou Province, and satin from Cao, Shandong Province 濮院花紬, 湖州棉紬, 頭重曹綾

3H

Cloth store 布铺

3I

Store buying and selling piece-goods, dyeing fabrics—blue, crimson, or green— weaving extra-long textiles, and selling cotton cloth from Chongming [a well-known cotton-producing area in Jiangsu Province] 取賣布疋, 加染真青, 大紅砂綠, 加長本織, 崇明 大布

3J

Store selling tribute silk from Hanfu [Nanjing], eight-floss silk, Song-style brocade 漢府貢 緞, 八絲宋錦

3K

Shop selling all kinds of silk gauzes and satins, also rank badge robes and court robes 綢緞紗 羅, 朝衣補服

3L

Store selling fine and coarsely woven wool cloth and felt 绒褐氈貨

Source: Qianlong Southern Inspection Tour Scrolls (Qianlong nanxun tu), after the Columbia University website annotated version from the Metropolitan Museum collection: www.learn.columbia.edu/nanxuntu/district1/html/shops_d1.html. 1. Shops 3A, 3B, and 3C are not included here as they are duplications of shops from district 2.

Table C. “List of Street Shops [Seen] in Suzhou Prefecture, Jiangnan Province” (Jiangnan Sheng Suzhou Fu jiedao kaidian zongmu) Shop Type

No.

Shop Name

Silk fabrics 綢緞店

1

Gong Mao’s silk gauzes and satins from all provinces 公茂號發各省綢緞紗羅

Silk fabrics 綢緞店

12

Song Mao’s court dragon robes and rank badges woven to order 松茂號定織妝蟒朝衣補服1

Hats 帽店

21

Studio of Heavenly Marvels capital-style court hats 天奇齋京式朝冠

Dye shop 染店

22

Guang Ju’s crimson ingenious color dye shop 廣聚號大紅巧色染坊

Tailor’s shop 裁縫店

23

No sign2

Source: Gong Qi Cheng Shen, ed., Shi ting cao, juan 11, part 7, 202–8. 1. Zhuang mang indicates a brocaded dragon design. Since only the emperor could use the long dragon, the shop sign uses mang. 2. This shop lacks a sign, something Li Hua states was common to tailor’s shops.

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Table D. Shop Names from Revealing Things Obscured from the Wu Area Classification

Shop Name

Shop names derived from a brand name 業有招牌著名者

Studio of Heavenly Rarity’s Buttons 天奇齋紐扣 Hall of Springtime’s Oiled Shoes 世春堂油鞋 Heavenly Treasure Hall’s Ornaments 天寶鏤首飾 Jin Fang Studio’s Purses 錦芳齋荷包 House of Nobility’s Collars 青雲室領頭 Three Pearl Hall’s Fan Bags 三株堂扇袋

Shop names derived from a person’s name 業有人名著名者

Gao Zunwu’s Palm-Leaf Fans 高遵五葵扇 Zhu Sanshan’s Glasses 褚三山眼睛 Zhang Hanxiang’s Hats 張漢祥帽子 Zhu Kewen’s Scented Cosmetics 朱可文香飾 Wu Longshan’s Scented Powder 吳龍山香粉 Wang Suchuan’s Carved Fans 王素川刻扇 Huang Guoben’s Handkerchiefs 黃國本手巾 Cheng Fengxiang’s Woven Badges 程鳳翔織補 Wang Yimei’s Cloth 汪益美布匹 Li Zhengmao’s Hat Floss 李正茂帽緯 Huang Rongcheng’s Silks 黃宏成綢緞

Source: Gu Zhentao, Wumen biaoyin, fuji, 351–52.

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APPENDIX 3 Commercial Embroidery Price List from the End of the Qing Dynasty

No.

Chinese description

Translation

1

八尺長朱緞字帖壽屏 (每塊)

2

Top quality

Medium quality

Ordinary quality

(Shang deng)

(Zhong deng)

(Ping deng)

8 chi long crimson satin longevity hanging, with calligraphy (per piece)

1

18 liang

15 liang

14 liang

八尺朱緞走獸翎毛 壽屏

8 chi of crimson satin longevity hanging, with birds and animals

18 liang

15 liang

14 liang

3

六尺朱緞走獸翎毛花 卉壽屏

6 chi of crimson satin longevity hanging, with birds, animals, and flowers

16 liang

14 liang

12 liang

4

四尺白緞繡毛花卉 掛屏

4 chi of white satin hanging scrolls, embroidered with birds and flowers

14 liang

12 yuan

10 yuan

5

三尺對開白緞繡翎毛 花卉掛屏

Pair of 3 chi long white satin hanging scrolls, embroidered with birds and flowers

12 yuan

10 yuan

8 yuan

6

三尺羅漢白緞繡翎毛 花卉掛屏

3 chi long Luohan white satin hanging scrolls, embroidered with birds and flowers

13 yuan

11 yuan

10 yuan

7

二尺羅漢白緞繡翎毛 花卉掛屏

2 chi long Luohan white satin hanging scrolls, embroidered with birds and flowers

8 yuan

7 yuan

6 yuan

8

三尺白緞翎毛小條屏

3 chi long small white satin screen, embroidered with birds

6 yuan

5 yuan

4 yuan

9

六尺長一八寬白緞水 墨繡人物掛屏

6 chi long, 18 chi wide, white satin hanging scrolls, embroidered with figural scenes in inky shades2

40 liang

30 liang

20 liang

|   2 0 2  |

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No.

Chinese description

Translation

10

六尺長一八寬白緞水 墨繡走獸翎毛掛屏

11

Top quality

Medium quality

Ordinary quality

(Shang deng)

(Zhong deng)

(Ping deng)

6 chi long, 18 chi wide, white satin hanging scrolls, embroidered with birds and animals in inky shades

16 liang

14 liang

12 liang

四尺對開白緞水墨走 獸翎毛掛屏

Pair of 4 chi long white satin hanging scrolls, embroidered with birds and animals in inky shades

16 yuan

14 yuan

12 yuan

12

三尺對開白緞水墨繡 翎毛花卉掛屏

Pair of 3 chi long white satin hanging scrolls, embroidered with birds and flowers in inky shades

14 yuan

12 yuan

10 yuan

13

三尺長一五寬白緞水 墨繡翎毛花卉掛屏

3 chi long, 15 chi wide, white satin hanging scrolls embroidered with birds and flowers in inky shades

14 yuan

13 yuan

11 yuan

14

二尺對開白緞羅漢水 墨繡翎毛掛屏

Pair of 2 chi long white satin hanging scrolls, embroidered with Luohan and birds in inky shades

9 yuan

8 yuan

7 yuan

15

三尺白緞繡翎毛水墨 小條屏

3 chi long small white satin screen, embroidered with birds in inky shades

6.5 yuan

5.5 yuan

4.5 yuan

16

五尺五寸長白緞水墨 翎毛花卉帳檐(每個)。 白緞繡水墨大寫人物 於貢貨人物不同, 寫意 折半扣算

5 chi 5 cun long, white satin bed curtain pelmet, embroidered with birds and flowers in inky shades (per piece). The white satin embroidered with figures in inky shades in the da xie style are different from the tribute figures, the xieyi freehand style (of the former) is calculated with a 50% discount

12 yuan

10 yuan

9 yuan

17

寧綢貢緞繡花衣盤龍 五條繡八寶 (每件)

Ningchou tribute satin ceremonial dress, embroidered with five coiled dragons and the eight treasures (per piece)

140 liang

120 liang

100 liang

18

男女元方補服(每套)

Male and female round and square rank badge robes (per set)

14 liang

12 liang

10 liang

19

寧綢貢緞各色女衣繡 團花散花 (每件)

Women’s jacket in Ningchou tribute satin, various colors, embroidered with floral roundels and scattered flowers (per piece)

40 yuan

36 yuan

32 yuan

•

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No.

Chinese description

Translation

20

寧綢貢緞各色女褲繡 散花 (每條)

21

Top quality

Medium quality

Ordinary quality

(Shang deng)

(Zhong deng)

(Ping deng)

Women’s trousers in Ningchou tribute satin, various colors, embroidered with scattered flowers (per piece)

18 yuan

16 yuan

12 yuan

寧綢貢緞繡團花散花 馬褂(每件)

Magua jacket in Ningchou tribute satin, embroidered with floral roundels and scattered flowers (per piece)

30 yuan

28 yuan

24 yuan

22

寧綢貢緞繡團花散花 領褂(每件) 神袍長短大 小花樣, 面議

Collared robe with collar in Ningchou tribute satin, embroidered with floral roundels and scattered flowers (per piece), nb. the length, size and pattern of spirit robes can be negotiated in person

16 yuan

12 yuan

10 yuan

23

一丈長朱緞八副堂帳 繡翎毛花卉 (每件)

1 zhang long, set of 8 crimson satin hall curtains, embroidered with birds and flowers (per piece)

240 yuan

220 yuan

200 yuan

24

八尺長朱緞六副堂帳 繡翎毛花卉 (每件)

8 chi long, set of 6 crimson satin hall curtains, embroidered with birds and flowers (per piece)

200 yuan

180 yuan

160 yuan

25

一丈六尺長朱緞繡翎 毛花卉彩並檐 (每件)

1 zhang 6 chi long, crimson satin colorful pelmet pair, embroidered with birds and flowers (per piece)

100 yuan

90 yuan

80 yuan

26

一丈二尺長朱緞繡翎 毛花卉並檐 (每件) 堂 帳彩上走獸加半

1 zhang 2 chi long, crimson satin pelmet pair, embroidered with birds and flowers (per piece). For hall curtains, to add animals to the color, add half (the price)

80 yuan

70 yuan

60 yuan

27

二尺八寸高一丈長, 繡 翎毛花卉統傘 (每把)

2 chi 8 cun tall, 1 zhang long, tong umbrella, embroidered with birds and flowers (per piece)

60 yuan

56 yuan

52 yuan

28

朱緞繡翎毛花卉馬傘 (每把)

Crimson satin horse umbrella embroidered with birds and flowers (per piece)

36 yuan

32 yuan

28 yuan

29

朱緞繡龍鳳各色花卉 尖角旗(每面)

Crimson satin pointed banner flag, various colors, embroidered with dragon, phoenix, and flowers (per piece)

20 yuan

19 yuan

17 yuan

30

朱緞繡翎毛花卉宮燈 (每盞)

Crimson satin palace lantern, embroidered with birds and flowers (per lantern)

12 yuan

10 yuan

8 yuan

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No.

Chinese description

Translation

31

朱緞繡團花散花翎毛 披墊(全堂)

32

Top quality

Medium quality

Ordinary quality

(Shang deng)

(Zhong deng)

(Ping deng)

Crimson satin draped cushions, embroidered with floral roundels and scattered flowers and birds (complete set for room)

160 yuan

140 yuan

120 yuan

朱緞繡翎毛走獸被窩 褥子(每件)

Crimson satin quilt and mattress, embroidered with birds and animals (per piece)

30 yuan

28 yuan

26 yuan

33

朱緞繡翎毛走獸門簾 (每個)

Crimson satin door curtain, embroidered with birds and animals (per piece)

28 yuan

26 yuan

24 yuan

34

十六副朱紅湖縐帳子 繡團花散花翎毛副朱 紅湖縐

Set of 16, vermillion Huzhou silk crepe bed curtains, embroidered with floral roundels and scattered flowers and birds (per bed set)

180 yuan

160 yuan

140 yuan

35

朱緞繡翎毛花卉帳檐 (每個)

Crimson satin bed curtain pelmet, embroidered with birds and flowers (per piece)

10 yuan

9 yuan

8 yuan

36

朱緞繡翎毛花卉博古 散花床圍 (每個)

Crimson satin bed curtain, embroidered with birds, flowers, antiquities, and scattered flowers (per piece)

8 yuan

7 yuan

6 yuan

37

朱緞繡翎毛花卉博古 散花桌圍(每個)

Crimson satin table cloth, embroidered with birds and animals, flowers and plants, antiquities, scattered flowers (per piece)

8 yuan

7 yuan

6 yuan

38

各色綢緞繡團花散花 枕衣(每套)

Pillow covers in various color satins, embroidered with floral roundels and scattered flowers (per set)

7 yuan

6 yuan

5 yuan

39

二尺二寸長白緞大門 鏡繡翎毛花卉博古 (每個)

2 chi 2 cun long, white satin large door peephole, embroidered with birds, flowers, and antiquities (per piece)

10 yuan

9 yuan

8 yuan

40

一尺八寸長白緞中門 鏡繡翎毛散花(每個)

1 chi 8 cun long, white satin medium door peephole, embroidered with birds and scattered flowers (per piece)

9 yuan

8 yuan

7 yuan

41

一尺六寸長白緞大插 屏繡翎毛花卉走獸 (每個)

1 chi 6 cun long, large white satin screen, embroidered with birds, flowers, and animals (per piece)

10 yuan

9 yuan

8 yuan

42

一尺四寸長白緞中插 屏繡翎毛花卉(每個)

1 chi 4 cun long, medium white satin screen, embroidered with birds and flowers (per piece)

9 yuan

8 yuan

7 yuan

•

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No.

Chinese description

Translation

43

一尺二寸長白緞小插 屏繡翎毛花卉(每個)

44

Top quality

Medium quality

Ordinary quality

(Shang deng)

(Zhong deng)

(Ping deng)

1 chi 2 cun long, small white satin screen, embroidered with birds and flowers (per piece)

8 yuan

6 yuan

5 yuan

朱紅湖縐鏡滿繡時樣 通景散花裙(每條)

Skirt in vermillion Huzhou silk crepe, fully embroidered with the latest fashionable scenes and scattered flowers (per piece)

24 yuan

22 yuan

20 yuan

45

朱紅湖縐鏡搭繡翎毛 花卉(每個)

Mirror case in vermillion Huzhou silk crepe, embroidered with birds and flowers (per piece)

5 yuan

4 yuan

3 yuan

46

朱紅湖縐半繡時樣四 季散花裙(每條)

Skirt in vermillion Huzhou silk crepe, half embroidered with the latest fashion four seasons scattered flowers (per piece)

18 yuan

16 yuan

14 yuan

47

青藍緞換袖繡翎毛花 卉(每雙) 各色帳飄帶每 幅洋銀四元八角

Sleeve-bands in indigo and blue satin, embroidered with birds and flowers (per pair). For curtain streamers in various colors each set costs 1 foreign silver dollar, 4 yuan 8 jiao

3.5 yuan

3 yuan

2 yuan 8 jiao

48

朱緞方凳面繡翎毛花 卉(每條)

Crimson satin square stool top embroidered with birds and plants (per piece)

5.5 yuan

4.5 yuan

3.5 yuan

49

朱緞折椅凳繡翎毛花 卉(每條)

Crimson satin folding chair stool top embroidered with birds and flowers (per piece)

7.5 yuan

6.5 yuan

5.5 yuan

50

朱緞茶撘帽撘繡翎毛 花卉(每個)

Crimson satin tea cover (or) hat cover, embroidered with birds and flowers (per piece)

5 yuan

4 yuan

3 yuan

51

六寸湖縐漢巾朱緞漢 巾繡翎毛花卉(每條)

6 cun Huzhou silk crepe Hanstyle cap, crimson satin Hanstyle cap, embroidered with birds and flowers (per piece)

8 yuan

7 yuan

6 yuan

52

朱緞福祿壽喜四字字 內繡花卉翎毛中堂 (每塊)

Crimson satin main hall central scroll hanging, with the four characters (blessings, fortune, longevity, and happiness) filled with embroidered flowers and birds (per piece)

40 yuan

38 yuan

34 yuan

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No.

Chinese description

Translation

53

白緞滿繡花卉雲肩 (每 個)凡有各色水墨走獸 翎毛貢貨相片, 諸君照 顧, 面看議價

White satin cloud collar, fully embroidered with flowers (per piece). We have various types of ink paintings of birds, animals, or tribute (figures), we welcome you to purchase these, please first examine the photos, and then we can negotiate the price.

Top quality

Medium quality

Ordinary quality

(Shang deng)

(Zhong deng)

(Ping deng)

20 yuan

18 yuan

16 yuan

Source: “Embroidery Bureau’s Price Regulations” (Xiu ju yijia tiaogui), from Report on Hunan Commercial Affairs and Customs (Hunan Shangshi xiguan baogaoshu), 1911, reproduced in Hunan Diaocha Ju, ed., Hunan minqing fengsu baogaoshu: Hunan shangshi xiguan baogaoshu, 223–28. Note: Boldface in the Chinese characters and English translation highlights the object type. 1. 1 yuan = 10 jiao = 0.72 tael (liang). 2. “Shui mo xiu” was a late Daoguang period (1820–50) retake of the san lan xiu popular in Qianlong-period Suzhou, which simulated the palette of ink painting; see Wang Li, “Si da ming xiu yu nühong xianxiang,” 8. The color scheme became fashionable around the same time as photography was introduced to China.

APPENDIX 3  |  207

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APPENDIX 4 Qing Dynasty Commercial Clothing, Accessory, and Embroidery Guilds

Guild Trade

Guild Name

Dates

Place

Source

Burial clothing 壽衣業

Cloud Brocade Guild 雲錦工所

1822 (DG 2)

Suzhou

LYC, 23

Anren Guild 安仁公所

1899 (GX 25)

Suzhou

SZGSY, 226, 222

Theatrical clothing 戲衣業

Rainbow Skirt Guild 霓裳公所

Founding date unknown

Suzhou

LYC, 24

Secondhand clothing 估衣業

The Emperor’s Handwriting Guild 雲章公所

Founded 1856 (XF 6), dispute stele 1876 (GX 2); guild rebuilt 1879 (GX 5); republished regulations 1891 (GX 17)

Suzhou

SZGSY, 212, 215, 221

The Capital Great Market Secondhand Clothes Sellers’ Guild 燕都大市估衣行

1929 (R 18), 燕都大市估衣 行商會建築公所記

Beijing

BJGSHG, 178

Zhe Ci (Ningbo) Guild 浙慈會館

Probably established early Qing, 1890 (GX 16); revised regulations 1905 (GX 31); also known as the ClothesMakers Guild 成衣行會 館 and The God of Wealth Temple Clothes-Makers Guild 財神廟成衣行

Beijing

BJGSHG, 122; HHSL, 1032

The Clothes-Makers Guild 成衣公所 (Xuan Yuan [Yellow Emperor] Guild 軒轅公所)

Established 1780 (QL 45) in the Jin and Chang area 金 閶北正三圖地方; destroyed during Taiping; in 1866 (TZ 5) land purchased in the “Making Clothes and New Clothes Pavilions” 衣作/ 新衣台; dispute stele 1898 (GX 20)

Suzhou

SZGSY, 225

Clothing 成衣業

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Guild Trade

Guild Name

Dates

Place

Source

Clothing (continued) 成衣業

Huang Xiao Han Yang ClothesMakers Guild 黃孝漢陽成衣幫

Xuan Yuan (Yellow Emperor) Temple 軒轅殿, no date known

Hankou

HHSL, 143; Xiakou xian zhi

Xuan Yuan (Yellow Emperor) Temple 軒轅殿

1835 (DG 25); 1857 (XF 7); 1876 (GX 2); 1909 (XT 1)

Shanghai

SHBK, 283, 285, 287, 293

Clothes-Makers Guild 衣莊公所

Founding date unknown; revised old regulations 1877 (GX 3); revised 1880 (GX 6); built guild hall 1886 (GX 12)

Shanghai

HHSL, 1027 Short table

Clothes-Makers Trade 成衣業

Xuan Yuan (Yellow Emperor) Temple軒轅殿, established Qianlong period (1736–95), regulations reissued in 1895 (GX21)

Changsha, Hunan

HHSL,1010

The Western Group ClothesMakers Industry 西幫成衣業

The Changsha Tailor’s Shops established seven associations/guilds; these were revised during the Guangxu era (1875–1908)

Changsha, Hunan

HHSL, 1042 Short table, no. 554

Xuan Yuan (Yellow Emperor) Temple 軒轅祀

Regulations 1889 (GX 15); revised regulations 1903 (GX29)

Wugang, Hunan

HHSL, 1032

Xuan Yuan (Yellow Emperor) Guild 軒轅會

Established 1904 (GX 30)

Anhua, Hunan

HHSL, 1037

Blessings and Success Guild 福勝會館 (New Clothes Trade 新衣業)

1907 (GX 33)

Foshan, Guangdong

HHSL, 1040 Short table

Shoemakers Guild 鞋業公所 (originally Sunzu Pavilion 孫祖閣)

Established Qianlong period (1736–95); 1913 (R 2) changed name to Shoemakers Guild

Hankou, Liudu Qiao Dijie

HHSL,1010, 144, Xiakou xian zhi

Luyuan Guild 履源公所

Founding date unknown

Suzhou

LYC, 24

Sunzu Guild 孫祖會

Regulations 1873 (TZ 12); 1876 (GX 2) revised regulations

Changsha, Hunan

HHSL, 1025 Short table

Shoemakers 鞋業(津幫)

Regulations 1880 (GX 6)

Shanghai

HHSL, 1028 Short table

Sunzu Success Guild 孫祖勝會

Regulations 1881 (GX 7)

Yiyang, Hunan

HHSL, 1029 Short table

Northern Group of Shoemakers Store 北幫靴鞋店

Regulations 1904 (GX 30)

Changsha, Hunan

HHSL, 1037 Short table

God of Wealth Guild 財神會

Guild stele 1914 (R 3) and 1923 (R12)

Beijing

BJGSHG, 164

Footwear 靴鞋業

• APPENDIX 4  |  209

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Guild Trade

Guild Name

Dates

Place

Source

Socks 襪業

Sock Store 襪店

Regulations 1901 (GX 27)

Changsha, Hunan

HHSL, 1036 Short table

Sock Trade Guild 襪業公會

Established Qianlong period (1736–95)

Hankou, Daguo Jiahang

HHSL, 144, Xiakou xian zhi

Floss and collars 絨領業

Collar Trade Guild 領業公所

Established 1860, later entered the Yong Qin Guild 咏勤公所

Suzhou

HHSL, 1041 Short table

Hat trade 瓜帽業

Hat Trade Guild 帽行公所

Guild founded in the Qianlong period (1736–95) 東曉市藥王廟, dissolved at end of the Qing, and reformed in 1928 (R17); stele 1933 (R22)

Beijing

HHSL, 1009; BJGSHG, 181

Xianqing Guild 咸慶公所 (Lizi Guild 立子公所)

Founding date unknown; 1859 (XF 9); debated in 1836 (DG 16)

Suzhou

SZGSY, 207 LYC, 23

Ribbons 縧行

Jinfeng Sheng Guild 恭逢聖會

1775 (QL 40), 絛行恭逢聖 會碑記, 1818 (JQ 23), 絛行 公所碑

Beijing

BJGSHG, 128–29, 129–30

Embroidery 刺繡業

Jinwen Guild 錦文工所

Daoguang (1821–50); stele dated 1884 (DG 10)

Suzhou

SZGSY, 39

Magnificent Clouds Embroidery Trade Guild 雲華繡業公所

1866 (TZ 5)

Suzhou

LYC, 24

Yongsheng Guild 永生幫

1842 (DG 22) revised Qianlong period regulations, 渝城永生幫顧 繡老闆師友公議條規

Chongqing, Sichuan

BXDA, 234– 35; HHSL, 549–50

Three Emperors’ Guild 三皇公所

1849 (DG 29), 渝城男工顧 繡老闆師友公議條規

Chongqing, Sichuan

BXDA, 235–36; HHSL, 554

Gu Embroidery New ClothesMakers 顧繡新衣

“Southern and Northern Gu embroidery and new clothing shop mend the (guild) hall list of donors” 南北顧繡新衣鋪修殿捐項 花名碑, 南市區硝皮弄軒轅 殿舊址 (n.d.)

Shanghai

SHBK, 301, no. 137

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GLOSSARY

ao  襖  jacket style ba tuan  八團  eight roundels design baixian  白鷳  silver pheasant  baomai zhi  包买制  intermediary system baotou  包頭  intermediary agent batulu kanjian  巴圖魯坎肩  late Qing waistcoat style beixin  背心 vest Beixin Ju  北新居  Northern Service beizi  褙子  long, buttonless, center-opening jacket with side slits bian fu xiang  便服像  informal dress portraits bijia  比甲  long, sleeveless jacket bogu  博古  antique motifs bu fu  補服  rank badge surcoats Ceng yi pu  僧衣鋪  Buddhist clothing shops chan zhen, souhe zhen  羼針, 擻扣針  mixed straight stitch chang fu  常服  informal court dress changyi  氅衣  informal Manchu woman’s robe style chao fu xiang  朝服像  court dress portraits chengyi pu  成衣鋪  clothing shop chenyi  襯衣  informal Manchu woman’s robe chou duan sha luo mo ling lei  綢緞紗絡摩綾類  silks, satins, gauzes, brocades, twills chousha  抽纱 drawnwork chuosha  戳紗  gauze embroidery da kanjian  大坎肩  long sleeveless vests  Dase  達色 ?–1780 daxiu shan  大袖衫  center-fastening jacket style dazi  打子  seed stitch dian gu  典故  “canonical incidents” diaoxiu  雕繡 cutwork duijin shan  对襟衫  center-fastening jacket style duo xian  多線  “selecting colors” |   2 1 1  |

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e’dan xin  鹅胆心  “goose heart” hairstyle fang xiu  坊繡  commercial embroidery  Fang Yongtai benji zhen kujin  方永泰本機真庫金  “treasury gold” (cloud brocade) genuinely woven by Fang Yongtai’s looms fangdan  仿单  printed product wrappings fen bie xingrong didao lei  分別形容地道類  separating and describing regional production fengren  縫人 tailors fu gu  復古  return to the past Fu Kang’an (Fu Dajiang, Fu Wenxian)  福康安 (福大將, 福文襄) 1754–1796 fuqi hexie  夫妻和諧  marital harmony  fuyao  服妖  outrageous dress gong bi zhong cai  工筆重彩  fine line, rich color  gong xiu  宮繡  palace embroidery gong yang  宮樣  palace style gongxun tu  宫訓圖  paintings of palace ladies gou ya’er  狗牙儿  dog-tooth piping Gu Mingshi  顧名世 1508–1588 Gu xiu  顧綉  Gu-style embroidery gu yi  故/估衣  secondhand clothing guang xiu  广袖  wide sleeves Guangdong Caiyuan Zihao  廣東彩元字號  Guangdong Caiyuan Embroidery Shop Guangyuan Fenzhuang  廣源分莊  Suzhou branch of imperial embroidery production workshop Guangyuan Jingzhuang  廣源京莊  Beijing workshop for imperial embroidery production guige xiu  閨閣繡  boudoir embroidery guixiu  閨秀 gentlewomen guizi langan  鬼子欄桿  devil borders gulun gongzhu  固伦公主  princess of the first rank gun  滾 pipings Guoyi Gong (Aling’a)  果毅公 (阿靈阿)  Duke Guoyi Han Ximeng  韓希孟  fl. 1634–41 heshuo gongzhu  和碩公主  princess of the second rank hu fu  胡服  “barbarian clothing” hua bai fen  畫白粉  “white-chalk drawers” hua gong  畫工  pattern drafter hua taozi  花绦子 ribbons hua xiu  畫繡  embroidered pictures huabian  花邊  borders or ribbons; also used in the twentieth century to describe European needlework lace huan xiu  換袖  folded sleeve-band ji fu  吉服  auspicious court dress 212 | GLOSSARY

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jia qing tu  家慶圖  family auspicious pictures jia xun  家訓  family regulations jia yi pu  嘉衣鋪  celebratory clothing shops jianyue  僭越  to overstep oneself Jin Ta Xin Yi Pu  金綸新衣舖  Jin Ta’s New Clothes Shop Jing xiu  京繡  Beijing embroidery jinshen  缙绅 gentry  jiu ling  酒令  drinking games  kaixi  開禊  side slits langan  欄桿 borders li fu  禮服  ceremonial or formal court dress Li fu zhi  禮服志  Records of Ceremonial Dress Li jing ji  荔鏡記  Tale of the Lychee Mirror Lian huan tu hua  連環圖畫  multiple-frame narrative illustration liang ba tou  兩把頭  Manchu woman’s hairstyle (lit., “two bunches hair”) ling xiu  領袖  collars and cuffs lingjian Gu xiu ye  零剪顧繡業  “scissors” embroidery trade Lu xiu  魯繡  Shandong embroidery magua  馬褂  short jacket mati xiu  馬蹄袖  horseshoe cuffs  Mianmian gua die  綿綿瓜瓞  “May you have prosperous descendants” Miao Ruiyun  繆瑞雲 mingji  名妓  courtesan stars mingyou  名優  male opera stars minjian xiu  民間繡  folk embroidery mudan dai  牡丹帶  peony border nan gong  男工  men’s work nanxin ju  南新局  southern service nei zao yang  內造樣  style of the inner household Niuhuru Shi  鈕祜祿氏  Lady Niohuru niulang chou  牛郎紬  “cowherd silk” nü’er chou  女兒紬  “maiden silk”  nügong  女工  women’s work Ou xiu  甌繡  Wenzhou embroidery panjin jian xiu  盤金間繡  coiled gold embroidery pankou  盤扣  fabric knot-and-loop buttons pifeng  披風  knee-length, buttonless, center-opening jacket pin  品  “first class” (aniline dyes) ping xiu  平袖  straight sleeves GLOSSARY | 213

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pingtan  評彈  Suzhou oral storytelling Prince Teng (Li Yuanying)  李元婴 ?–684 qi bian  旗邊  banner border qi pa  旗帕  banner handkerchief  Qilan Tang  绮兰堂  Silk Orchid Hall (Guangzhou embroidery guild) qinwang fujin  親王福晉  wife of a first-degree prince qunzi  裙子 skirt riyong shipin  日用飾品  embroidered objects Rong Fei  容妃 Rongxian  荣宪 1673–1728 rongxian  絨線  embroidery floss ruan chi tou  軟翅頭  soft wings hairstyle ruyi guan  如意官  imperial design workshop san chu tou  三出頭  “three raised heads” san lan xiu  三籃繡  three blues embroidery san xiang san ya  三鑲三牙  three borders and three trimmings san xiang wu gun  三鑲五滾  three borders and five pipings san yuan wu gun  三圓五滾  three circles and five pipings shan ge  山歌  mountain song shangpin xiu  商品繡  commercial embroidery shechi, shemi  奢侈, 奢靡 luxury  sheli zhi tu  射利之徒  profit-seeking apprentices shen pao  神袍  deity robes shenshang  绅商 gentry-merchants shenshi  绅士 gentry shenyi  深衣  ancient robe style shi xin  時新  fashion (lit., “new times”) shi xiu  市繡  commercial embroidery shi yang  時様  fashion (lit., “style of the times”) shi zhen  施針  hair and fur stitch shi zhuang  時裝  fashionable dress shiba xiang gun  十八鑲滾  eighteen borders and pipings shimao  時髦 fashion shinü  仕女 beauty shisan taibao  十三太保  late Qing waistcoat style shishang  時尚 fashion “Shishang xin tan”  時尚新談  “New Words on the Fashions” shishi zhuang  時世粧(妝)  fashions of the times shixing  時行 fashionable shou yi  壽衣  burial garments shou zhang  壽帳  longevity hanging shougong zhi  手工制  handicraft system 214 | GLOSSARY

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Shu xiu  蜀繡  Sichuan embroidery si da ming xiu  四大名繡  four regional embroidery styles sihe ruyi  四合如意  four joined as you wish Su xiu  蘇繡  Suzhou embroidery Suzhou jue  蘇州撅  Suzhou bun Suzhou tou  蘇州頭  Suzhou-style coiffure Suzhou yang, Guangzhou jiang  蘇州樣, 廣州匠  Suzhou styles, Guangzhou craft tao zhen  套針  long and short satin stitch te chan  特產  local specialty tiao shan ge  條山歌 mixing mountain song (segments) wanxiu  輓袖  Manchu term for large turned-back cuffs with patterned trimmings wen mo  文墨  “poetry and calligraphy” wu chan  物產  local products Wu ling  吳綾  silk fabric specialty of Suzhou region  wu xiang wu gun  五鑲五滾  five borders and five pipings xi, ping, qi, bo  細平齊薄  fine, flat, neat, spare Xi hu zhousha  西湖縐紗  “West Lake crepe” xi yi juzhuang ye  戲衣劇裝業  theatrical costumers xiang hebao, xiang dai  香荷包, 香袋  embroidered purses Xiang xiu  湘繡  Hunan embroidery xiangse heshun  鑲色和順  harmonized coloring xiao shimin  小市民 urbanites Xiasha xiu  下沙繡  regional embroidery from Xiasha, Songjiang xielao  花佬  male embroiderers (Guangzhou) Xiezhi  獬豸  mythical creature Xin Li Hao  新利號  New Profit xin qi  新奇  new and curious xin shi shi  新時式  fashionable (lit., “new time style”) xin yang  新樣  fashionable (lit., “new style”) xingle tu  行樂圖  “enjoying pleasures” pictures xiu hu  繡戶  embroidery workshops xiu nü  秀女  women selected for the imperial harem; lit., “elegant ladies” xiu ren fentou  繡人分頭  embroiderer managers xiu shi  繡市  embroidery market xiu tou  繡頭  embroidery manager xiu zhuang ye  繡莊業  embroidery workshops xiu zu miao  繡祖廟  embroidery ancestor temples xiujiang  繡匠 embroiderers Xu Liancheng  許練成  Guangzhou embroiderer (n.d.) Xu Zhiguang  許熾光  Guangzhou embroiderer (b. 1932) xuan zhen  旋針  swirling stitch Xue Lingyun (Xue Yelai)  薛靈芸 (薛夜來)  fl. 220–26 GLOSSARY | 215

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xue Wu jie  学吴姐  to imitate the styles of the Wu beauties xunsu tiaoyue  訓俗條約  Items of Instruction yangchang caizi  洋腸才子  Foreign Settlement talents yigong  衣工 tailor yizijin beixin  一字襟背心  “character number one” lapel waistcoat style Yong’an Zuoyi Pu  永安做衣舖  Yong’an’s Clothes-Making Shop Yongsheng xiujin pu  永盛繡巾鋪  Yongsheng’s embroidered shawl shop you jian  油肩  “hair-oil collar” you jian ru she  由儉入奢  from simplicity to extravagance Yu fu zhi  輿服志  Records of Carriage and Dress Yue xiu  粵繡  Guangdong embroidery Yuetai Gu Xiu Pu  悦泰顧綉舖  Yuetai Gu Embroidery Shop yun jian  雲肩  cloud collar zhangfang  賬房  silk account house Zhaojun tao  昭君套  (Wang) Zhaojun hood zhen jiao  針腳  traces of the needle (lit., “needle’s foot”) zheng ben xi, quan ben xi  正本戲 / 全本戲  complete performance of a play zhengong ju  针工局  needlework bureau zhezixi  折子戲  scenic highlights zihao  字號  shop name/brand zuobeng  作繃  to embroider with a frame zuohua  作花  to embroider

216 | GLOSSARY

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NOTES

PREFACE

  1 A Buddhist scholar, calligrapher, and collector, Yunli was made a second-degree prince in 1728 and a first-degree prince in 1733. He died childless during the reign of his nephew, the Qianlong emperor. See Sun Wenliang, Manzu dacidian, 118.   2 Hughes, “The Kuo Ch’in Wang Textiles,” 130.   3 The robes went to the William Rockill Nelson Gallery, the Atkins Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.   4 Hughes, “The Kuo Ch’in Wang Textiles,” 141–42.  5 Mirror New York City, March 7, 1945.  6 Priest, Costumes from the Forbidden City, n.p.   7 The earliest was the “International Exhibition of Chinese Art” held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1935–36. Bernard Vuilleumier’s collection was first displayed in 1936 Paris, at the Musée des Gobelins, and later in 1939 London. Priest and Simmons, Chinese Textiles; Priest, Catalogue of the Exhibition of Imperial Robes and Textiles of the Chinese Court; Fernald, Chinese Court Costumes.   8 de Tizac, Les Étoffes de la Chine, 5.  9 Priest, Costumes from the Forbidden City, n.p. 10 Letter from Lucy Calhoun to her sister Dora Louise (1913), while in Beijing, cited in Elinor Pearlstein, “Color, Life and Moment,” 81. 11 Vollmer, Ruling from the Dragon Throne; Vollmer, Dressed to Rule; Wong and Szan, eds., Power Dressing. 12 “Chinese Theme Favored for Fall,” New York Journal of Commerce, March 23, 1945. 13 Women’s Wear, New York City, March 23, 1945. 14 New York Sun, Sept. 19, 1945, “New Tricks in Lip Painting.” 15 Ko, “Bondage in Time”; Finnane, Changing Clothes in China. 16 Sirr, China and the Chinese, 317. 17 Ko, “Bondage in Time,” 7; Finnane, Changing Clothes in China, 19–23. 18 Silberstein, “Other People’s Clothes.” 19 de Tizac, Les Étoffes de la Chine; Priest and Simmons, Chinese Textiles; Vuilleumier, The Art of Silk Weaving; Priest, Catalogue of the Exhibition of Imperial Robes and Textiles of the Chinese Court; Priest, Costumes from the Forbidden City; Fernald, Chinese Court Costumes. 20 Wilson, Chinese Dress; Vollmer, Clothed to Rule the Universe; Jacobsen, Imperial Silks; Dusenberry, Flowers, Dragons and Pine Trees; Kuhn, ed., Secret Splendors of the Chinese Court. 21 The Imperial Wardrobe; Garrett, Chinese Dress. 22 Embroidered shoes are a notable exception. See Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters.

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INTRODUCTION

 1   2  3   4

Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion, 19. McKendrick, “The Commercialisation of Fashion,” 36. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, 155. On exclusion, see McNeil, Fashion: Critical and Primary Sources, which contains few nonEuropean case studies; on denial, see Watson and Ho, eds., The Arts of China, 211.   5 See the discussion in Lillethun et al., “CSA Forum: (Re)defining Fashion,” Belfanti, “Was Fashion a European Invention?” and Lemire and Riello, “East and West.”  6 Entwhistle, The Fashioned Body, 47–48.  7 Bogatyrev, The Functions of Folk Costume in Moravian Slovakia, 1.   8 Qian Yong, Lü yuan cong hua (1838), 12.187.   9 Yuan Jinglan, Wu jun suihua ji li (1849), 386. 10 Shi zhuang was used in early twentieth-century texts (HYDCD, 5.704) to mean fashionable dress before being supplanted by the modern-day shimao; see Yue, Jindai Shanghairen shehui xintai, 111–12. 11 Brook, Confusions of Pleasure, 220, citing Chen Yao, Yangzhou fu zhi (1733), 10.2a-b. 12 By the late Qing novelty prevailed over time in fashion terminology, hence xin shi shi. See Finnane, “Yangzhou’s ‘Mondernity,’” 412. 13 Qian Yong, Lü yuan cong hua (1838), 12.187. 14 Polhemus, Fashion and Anti-Fashion. 15 Tortore quoted in Lillethun et al., “CSA Forum: (Re)defining Fashion,” 89. 16 Wu Jen-shu, “Ming dai pingmin fushi de liuxing fengshang”; Finnane, Changing Clothes, 44–47. 17 Cannon, “The Cultural and Historical Contexts of Fashion.” 18 Entwhistle, The Fashioned Body, 46–48. 19 Craik, The Face of Fashion, 5. 20 Ko, “Bondage in time,” 7. See also Finnane, “Yangzhou’s ‘Mondernity.’” 21 Illustrated Catalogue of the Chinese Collection of Exhibits (1884), 10–11. 22 Chen, Empire of Style. 23 Brook, Confusions of Pleasure; Clunas, Superfluous Things. For economic overviews, see von Glahn, An Economic History of China. 24 Wu Jen-shu, “Ming dai pingmin fushi de liuxing fengshang”; Shechi de nüren. 25 Lin Liyue, “Yishang yu fengjiao.” 26 Dauncey, “Illusions of Grandeur.” 27 Finnane, “Yangzhou’s ‘Mondernity.’” 28 Taylor, “Doing the Laundry.” For studies integrating close object study, see Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters; Dauncey, “Illusions of Grandeur.” 29 Fine and Leopold, The World of Consumption, 93. 30 Rowe, China’s Last Empire, 122; Pomeranz, The Great Divergence. 31 See Cao Shuji, Zhongguo renkou shi, 704, table 160-2. 32 Chu-Tsing Li, “Looking at Late Qing Paintings with New Eyes,” 18; Brown and Chou, eds., Transcending Turmoil. 33 Zamperini, “Clothes That Matter”; Yeh, Shanghai Love, 143–56; Finnane, “Yangzhou’s ‘Mondernity.’” 34 Wilson, “Studio and Soirée,” 235. 35 Fernald, Chinese Court Costumes, 8. 36 QBLC (1917), 13.6184, “Xu dong zhi changfu.” 37 A 1930 survey found that low- and middle-income families (75 percent of Beijing’s population) had an average of three pieces of summer clothing, 1.5 pieces of fall and spring clothing, and 2.4 pieces of winter clothing (Dong, Republican Beijing, 156–57). On the clothing consumption of the poor, see Huang Jingben, Minsheng yu jiaji, 111–28. 38 Pomeranz, “Standards of Living.”

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39 Chang Chung-li, The Chinese Gentry, esp. 51–57, 83–90, 137–41. Pomeranz, “Standards of Living.” 40 On clerks and runners, see Pomeranz, “Standards of Living.” 41 On social mobility see Feng and Chang, Qing ren shehui shenghuo, 45–48; on rank-selling, see He, The Ladder of Success, 46–52. On merchants see Lufrano, Honorable Merchants. On scholar-artisans, Ko, The Social Life of Inkstones. 42 Silk: Replies from the Commissioner (1881), 36. Shen Congwen, Zhongguo gudai fushi yanjiu, 635; Fan and Jin, Jiangnan sichou shi yanjiu, 361–76; on vernacular silk weavers, see Yan Yong, “Qing dai minjian sizhi ye.” 43 Fortune, A Residence among the Chinese (1857), 353–54. 44 Fairchilds, “The Production and Marketing of Populuxe Goods.” 45 Breward, The Culture of Fashion, 5. 46 Schneider, “Cloth and Clothing.” 47 Johnson, “Communication, Class, and Consciousness,” 34. Ko challenges historians’ preference for words over objects and the hierarchy of gender and status intrinsic therein in The Social Life of Inkstones. 48 McCracken, Culture and Consumption, chap.4. 49 Barthes, The Fashion System. 50 Xiaoxiaosheng, Xinke xiuxiang piping Jinpingmei; 1.13.159; my translation is adapted from Xiaoxiaosheng, The Plum in the Golden Vase, trans. Roy, 1.13.254. For dress definitions, see Zhou Xun and Gao Chunming, eds., Zhongguo yiguan fushi dacidian; Gao Chunming, Zhongguo fushi mingwu kao. 51 Zou, Haishang chentian ying, 3.29. 52 von Glahn, Economic History of China, 306. 53 Rawski, “Economic and Social Foundations,” 33. 54 Xiaorong Li, “Gender and Textual Politics during the Qing Dynasty.” 55 Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, esp. 1–67; Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters, 291; Fong, “Female Hands.” 56 Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 115–17. 57 Mann, “The Education of Daughters in the Mid-Ch’ing Period,” 19.

CHAPTER 1. VISUALIZING FASHION

  1 Jin Anqing, Shui chuang chun yi (1877), 78–79, “Suzhou tou.”  2 Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion, 19.   3 Fashion dolls were circulated around the European courts from the sixteenth century onward to transmit new styles of dress and textiles. They became obsolete in 1785 with the first French fashion magazine. See McKendrick, “The Commercialisation of Fashion,” 44–49.   4 Li Bozhong, Jiangnan de zaoqi gongyehua, 145–46, citing Li Zongding, Jingshan zhuzhi ci, juan 9, “Lushu,” “Feng bian zhong.”   5 For an outline of their development, see Finnane, Changing Clothes, 127–34.   6 Wang Shucun, ed., Zhongguo minjian nianhua shi tulu, 74.   7 Lemire, “Developing Consumerism,” 252; Styles, “Fashion and Innovation in Early Modern Europe.”  8 Mukerji, From Graven Objects; Purdy, The Tyranny of Elegance; Roche, The Culture of Clothing.   9 Zhang Ailing, “A Chronicle of Changing Clothes,” 439. 10 Wang Di, Street Culture in Chengdu, 9; Ropp, Dissent in Early Modern China, 35. 11 Cahill, Pictures for Use. 12 The 2014 exhibition and catalog Beauty Revealed: Images of Women in Qing Dynasty Chinese Painting, ed. Cahill et al., highlighted this genre, long overlooked in museums and scholarship. 13 Cahill, Pictures for Use, 6; Nie Chongzhang, ed., Qing dai gongting huihua. 14 On attitudes toward nineteenth-century court art, see Brown, “Painting in Beijing in the Late Qing Dynasty.”

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15 For Taohuawu prints, see Zhou Xinyue, Suzhou Taohuawu nianhua; and Ōshajō bijutsu hōmotsukan, ed., Shoshū hanga. On Yangliuqing prints, see Feng Jicai, ed., Zhongguo muban nianhua jicheng, Yangliuqing juan; and Pan and Wang, Yangliuqing banhua. 16 Pan, “Yangliuqing banhua de yishu jiazhi,” 11, 19. On the locations of Yangliuqing production, see Bo, “Ji Yangliuqing nianhua de zhizuo ji qita,” 49n1. 17 Hanshang, Feng yue meng (1848), 2.4; Hanshang, Courtesans and Opium, trans. Hanan, 2.12. 18 For geographical collections, see Li Jiarui, Beiping fengsu leizheng (BPFSLZ) (1937); Yang Miren, Qing dai Beijing zhuzhici, shisan zhong (QDBJZZC); Gu Bingquan, ed., Shanghai lidai zhuzhici and Shanghai yangchang zhuzhici; Suzhou Wenhuaju, ed., Gusu zhuzhici (GSZZC); Shu, Qian An Sutai zhuzhici baishou cao (1860); and Lin Kong, ed., Chengdu zhuzhici. As a source for social history, see Wang Di, Street Culture in Chengdu; Fan Jinmin, “‘Suyang,’ ‘Suyi’”; and Xu Xing, “Zhuzhici zhongsuo miaohui de Qing dai Suzhou diqu fushi shishang.” 19 Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion, 19. 20 The style bears some resemblance to the anonymous paintings (gouache on paper) from Guangzhou, but differs in its photo-realistic rendering, skilled use of perspective, and highly choreographed postures. 21 Kleutghen, Imperial Illusions. 22 Ruyi scepters were a key gift for imperial celebration, and the Manchu court, especially those of Qianlong and Cixi, were renowned for doing so in large numbers. There are two classical sources for auspiciousness of the number nine: the Yi jing, where the number nine represents the solid line (i.e., yang or male) called yangyao; and the “nine wishes” (jiu ru) of the Shi jing (in the Xiaoya section, “luming zhi shen, tianbao”). See Yao Yuanzhi, Zhuyeting za ji, 1.4; Zhang Shuzhi, “Qingchao yuyi jixiang zhi wu—ruyi,” 73–78. 23 One of the senior men wears the silver pheasant (baixian) rank badge of a fifth-rank civil official, together with the corresponding clear-glass hat knob. The other wears the xiezhi (a mythical animal said to be able to distinguish between good and evil) badge of an imperial censor (yushi), however his hat-knob stone (mao xiang) does not correspond (blue glass, not a first-ranking imperial censor’s clear red stone). The three younger men’s rank badges are fifthrank and fourth-rank (wild goose or yunyan, with a lapis-lazuli hat knobs). These discrepancies are possibly attempts to up their status. 24 Zhao Erxun, ed., Qing shi gao (1927), 103.3056. 25 Shunzhi’s 1649 decree permitted Han and Manchu intermarriage to encourage ethnic harmony; after 1655 Manchus could only marry banner Han Chinese. Rawski, “Qing Imperial Marriage,” 175, 181; Wang Shuo, “Qing Imperial Women,” 141. 26 Zhenjun, Tian zhi ou wen, 10.723; Fuge (fl. 1856) also makes this distinction, Ting yu cong tan, 160. Other differences were Han bound feet versus Manchu natural feet, and Manchu hairstyles (jiazi tou, liang ba tou). Sun Yanzhen, Qing dai nüxing fushi wenhua yanjiu, 77; Zeng Hui, Manzu fushi wenhua yanjiu. 27 For imperial dress regulations, see Zhao Erxun, ed., Qing shi gao, 102.3033–63. 28 On fashionable Ming dress, see Shen Congwen, Zhongguo gudai fushi yanjiu, 559–61; Gao Chunming, Zhongguo fushi mingwu kao, 548–49. 29 Wilhelm and Baynes, trans., The I Ching or Book of Changes, book 2, “The Great Treatise” (Dazhuan), “History of Civilization,” 332. 30 Qing shi lu: Gaozong Chun huangdi shilu, 919.320 (QL 37, 1772). 31 The Hong Taiji 1638 edict told of the Jin dynasty’s demise as a cautionary tale: “Do not neglect the old ways of the ancestors. Wear Jurchen clothing. . . .” (Zhao Erxun, ed., Qing shi gao, 103.3033). 32 Women are little mentioned in the earliest regulations—e.g., the Shunzhi emperor’s 1652 Qinding fuse jianyu yonglie (comp. Luo)—other than specifying that wives of nobility and officials should follow their husband’s rank badges and unmarried daughters follow their father’s. On Qing dress regulations, see Hua, Zhongguo lidai “yu fu zhi” yanjiu, 448–51. 33 The objects are now in Chifeng Museum, Inner Mongolia. See Xiang, “Neimenggu baiyin’erdeng Qing dai Rongxian gongzhu mu”; Qin, “Chifeng bowuguan cang san jian gongzhu paofu.”

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34 Qinding Da Qing huidian tu (1899), 49.1630. Princesses’ ji fu are also described in Zhao, ed., Qing shi gao (1927), 103.3049, 3053. 35 Both Da Qing huidian and Fuse jianyu yonglie stipulated that titled ladies (mingfu) should wear garments of incense pale-gold or slate blue, unless given the right to wear bright yellow. Qin, “Chifeng bowuguan cang san jian gongzhu paofu.” 36 The earliest object to bear the chenyi term is a “moon white” (pale blue) satin embroidered with one hundred flowers and butterflies, dating to 1778 (QL 43). Zhang Qiong, ed., Qing dai gongting fushi, 199. 37 See Han Quan, Qing dai Huangzu nüxing jicang yanjiu, 179, for a full description of these robes. 38 Yu Shanpu, “Guanyu Xiang fei chuanshuo de bianwei.” 39 Yu cites documentation for Suzhou production of Rong Fei’s gowns, “Detailed list of the labor expenditure for producing an embroidered apricot-yellow satin robe with eight dragon roundels and filled with phoenixes and clouds” (1785, QL 50). Ibid., 10–11. 40 Qinding Da Qing huidian shili, 1114.81 (1761). 41 The first four banners began in 1601, expanded to eight in 1615, added eight Mongol banners in 1635, and eight Chinese banners in 1642. On restricting Han jun eligibility, see Wang Shuo, “Qing Imperial Women,” 143. 42 Qing shi lu: Renzong Rui Huangdi shilu, 160.75. 43 Qinding Da Qing huidian shili, 400.470 (DG 18, 1838). 44 On possible artists, see Cahill, Pictures for Use, 42–44. 45 On Manchu women’s hairstyles, see Zeng Hui, Manzu fushi wenhua yanjiu, 148–51. 46 Shen Congwen, Zhongguo gudai fushi yanjiu, 629–30. 47 Wu Hung, The Double Screen, 215–18. The painting is The Qianlong Emperor Enjoying Pleasures (Qianlong xingle tu) by Jin Tingbiao (act. ca. 1750–68). 48 See the album “Yongzheng xingle tuce,” in Nie, ed., Qing dai gongting huihua, 118–23, fig. 18.1-13; a Qianlong album is on 200–201, fig. 45. 49 Qing shi lu: Shengzu Ren huangdi shilu, 120.260 (KX 24, 1685). Bao, Concubinage and Servitude in Late Imperial China, 261; Xu, Qingbai leichao (QBLC, 1917), 1.363–64. 50 Shunzhi had at least four Han Chinese consorts (Liu, ed., Qing gong ci xuan, 15). During the late Kangxi reign, several Han women lived in the palace without titles, and were only given low-ranking titles of guiren in the final year of his reign (1722). Wang Shuo, “Qing Imperial Women,” 141; Zhang Naiwei, Qing gong shu wen, 668; Wang Peihuan, Qing gong hou fei, 337. 51 Liu, ed., Qing gong ci xuan, 15. 52 Shan, “Gentlewoman Paintings of the Qing Palace Ateliers,” 59. 53 Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), “Dress as an Expression of Pecuniary Culture.” 54 Ye Mengzhu, Yue shi bian (17th c.), 178. 55 Wu Jen-shu, “Ming dai pingmin fushi de liuxing fengshang,” 79–87, 90–94. 56 Entwhistle, The Fashioned Body, 62–63, 98–101. 57 Dauncey, “Illusions of Grandeur.” 58 Wang Xiaoyong, Hou hai shu tang za lu, “yishi.” 59 For a discussion of brothels’ influence upon fashionable consumption more generally, see Wu Jen-shu, Shechi de nüren, 63–86. 60 Handler, “Alluring Settings for Accomplished Beauties.” 61 Wei, The Thin Horses of Yangzhou, trans. Finnane, 48. 62 Shu Chen, Qian An Sutai zhuzhici baishou cao (1860), no. 94. 63 See Fan, “‘Suyang,’ ‘Suyi,’” 130n14, 131, citing examples from Wenzhou (Yu Sicheng, Jingdu zhuzhici) and Hunan (Xiangtan xian zhi, juan 9). 64 See Jin et al., Suzhou Taohuawu muban nianhua. 65 Gao Chunming, Zhongguo fushi mingwu kao, 49, cites description of this style by Fan Lian, Yunjian jumuchao (preface dated 1593). 66 This style is corroborated in other Qianlong-period Yangliuqing prints; see, for example, four prints, signed by Rusheng Hao Dai Ji, a famous print shop of this period, now in the Museum fur Asiatische Kunst, Berlin. See Laing, “Mothers and Sons.”

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67 Ye Mengzhu describes early Qing cloud collar styles in Yue shi bian (17th c.), 181; Gao Chunming, ed., Zhongguo fushi mingwu kao, 586–87. 68 For another Qianlong-period print signed by Qi Jianlong, see Feng Jicai, ed., Zhongguo muban nianhua jicheng, Yangliuqing juan, 64–65, 66–67. 69 For examples, see ibid. 70 Wenkang, Ernü yingxiong zhuan (1878), 27.365–66. 71 QBLC, 13.6215. 72 Mao, Qing dai jiazhuang yanjiu, 38, citing Yongcheng xian zhi, 13.1–2. 73 Li Yu, Xian qing ou ji (1671), 157. 74 Gao, Zhongguo fushi mingwu kao, 586; Xu Ke connects this function to a late Qing fashionable hairstyle, Suzhou jue, a bun that hung down upon the shoulders (QBLC, 109). 75 Lin, Hanjiang sanbai yin, 6.86; for analysis of his rhymes, see Finnane, “Yangzhou’s ‘Mondernity,’” 405–8. 76 Qi Rushan (1877–1962) notes that hire-shops developed well before the end of the Qing and were used by Manchu families for celebratory wear, if their clothing was insufficiently fashionable and they could not afford new garments (Beijing sanbai liushi hang, 159, 161). 77 Li Yu, Xian qing ou ji (1671), 158. 78 Mann, Precious Records, 126–42. 79 Ko, “Pursuing Talent and Virtue.” 80 Cahill, Pictures for Use, 21. 81 Pan, “Yangliuqing banhua de yishu jiazhi,” 10. For example, Dai Lianzeng opened branches back in Yangliuqing (Dai Meili, Lian Zengli) as well as shops in Suibei, Beijing, and south, in Dongfengtai and Chaomidian. Qi Jianlong opened two branches called Qi Huilong. 82 Pan, “Yangliuqing banhua de yishu jiazhi.” 83 Wang Lixia, “Yangliuqing nianhua de youlai.” 84 Wang Shucun, Yangliuqing nianhua ziliao ji, 5, 7; Wang Lixia, “Yangliuqing nianhua de youlai,” 17. 85 On these categories, see Li Di, “Wan Qing gong zhong huajiaqun,” 101. 86 Another example, Daoguang di xingle tujuan, shows the Daoguang emperor together with his children and consorts (Zhu Chengru et al., eds., Qing shi tu dian, 9.217). Both works are anonymous, but possible Ruyi guan artists include Shen Zhenlin (act. 1821–82), who was responsible for imperial portraits, or his colleagues He Shikui (who painted “Thirteen Roles of Beijing Opera”) and Shen Huan. See Li Di, “Ruyi guan huashi Shen Zhenlin ji qi yu rong xiang.” 87 Zhu Chengru et al., eds., Qing shi tu dian, 9.228. Empress Xiaoquancheng was of the Niohuru clan. See Wang Peihuan, Qing gong hou fei, 348; McMahon, Celestial Women, 197, 200n25; Bao, Concubinage and Servitude, 289; Zhang Ertian, Qing liechao houfei zhuang gao, 2.50–57. 88 Workshops produced images predominantly of Han women and their dress. For one exception, see the Suzhou print “Qiren chuyou,” in Wang Shucun, ed., Zhongguo minjian nianhua shi tulu, shang, 269. On the Xiaoquancheng painting, see Ruitenbeek, ed., Faces of China, 108. On the distinct figural modeling of the Daoguang court, see Brown, “Painting in Beijing in the Late Qing Dynasty.” 89 By the Tongzhi period, professional influence upon the court artists was so pronounced that in Mei Guifei Chun guiren Xingle tu, Noble Consort Mei (Mei Guifei), Noble Lady Chun (Chun Furen) and Xin Chang are labeled in the manner of court style theatrical paintings. On interactions between theatrical artists and the Yangliuqing workshops, see Zheng Jiang, “Qing dai de Jingju banhua.” 90 On the chenyi, see Yin, “Qing gong houfeimen de chenyi.” According to the recorded memoirs of Cixi’s maid, He Rong, palace women received four outfits: under-robe (diyi), an inner robe (chenyi), an outer robe (waiyi), and a waistcoat (beixin). See Jin and Shen, Gong nü tanwang lu, 14. 91 Chongyi, Dao xian yilai chaoye zaji, 33. 92 This combination could apparently serve in lieu of the formal li fu. Chongyi describes the da kanjian as the same length as the chenyi, worn in plain or embroidered blue fabrics. Ibid.

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 93 Yin, “Qing dai gongting changyi tanwei,” 149–61; Vollmer and Simcox, Emblems of Empire, 107–8, for a red silk gauze example from the Mactaggart collection.   94 Chongyi, Dao xian yilai chaoye zaji, 33.  95 Xia, Jiu jing suo ji, 1.39.  96 Jin and Shen, Gong nü tanwang lu, 14.  97 Dealers Li Lilai and Li Yufang suggest that in Beijing Han women also wore an outer robe (waitao) known as a Han-style changyi (Ming Qing xiupin, 258, 261).  98 Hu, Dou cun (1841), 3.61.  99 Yin, “Wan Qing gongting changyi yu chenyi.” 100 They were inserted into the “dalachi.” See Zeng Hui, Manzu fushi wenhua yanjiu, 148–51. 101 BPFSLZ, 1.242. 102 Wei Yuankang (jinshi 1895), Jiao an sui bi, comp. in BPFSLZ, 242. 103 On Yangzhou styles, see Finnane, Changing Clothes, 52–56; for Yangzhou’s and Suzhou’s influence on Sichuan consumption, see Wu Jen-shu and Wang Dagang, “Qianlong chao defang wupin xiaofei yu shoucang de chubu yanjiu.” 104 Pierson, Chinese Ceramics, 41n17. 105 Hay, “Painters and Publishing in Late Nineteenth-Century Shanghai.” 106 Hu, Dou cun (1841), 3.44–45, “Shi dou.” 107 “Funü” from De Shuoting, Cao zhu yi chuan (“A Strand of Grass Pearls,” Jingdu zhuzhici, 1817), in QDBJZZC, 52.

CHAPTER 2. “OUTLANDISH COSTUME AND STRANGE HATS”

  1   2   3  4  5  6   7

Zeng Jifen, Testimony, xxviii. Ibid., 37, 40. Ibid., 68–69. Jia, Xin shu jiao zhu (ca. 2nd c. bce), 1.543, “Fu ni.” Ban, Baihu tongyi (ca. 79), 37.850–59, “Yishang.” Jin, Shui chuang chun yi (1877), 67, “Fu se yi zhen.” Fan Lian (n.d.), Yunjian ju mu chao, ji fengsu (preface 1593), cited Dauncey, “Illusions of Grandeur,” 58; Shenbao quote cited Yue, Jindai Shanghai ren shehui xin tai, 115.   8 On this genre, see Xu and Chen, Zhongguo jia xun shi, esp. chap. 30; Martin Huang, Negotiating Masculinities, chap. 9; and Furth, “The Patriarch’s Legacy.”   9 On luxury and women, see Wu Jen-shu, Shechi de nüren, esp. chap. 2, 51–54. 10 See Dauncey, “Sartorial Modesty and Genteel Ideals,” 135; Dauncey, “Illusions of Grandeur,” 64. 11 Huang Ang, Xi jin shi xiao lu, 1.81, “Fengsu bianqian.” 12 Qian Yong, Lü yuan cong hua (1838), 7.192–93. 13 Chow, The Rise of Confucian Ritualism, 209n25, also chap. 8. 14 Xu and Chen, Zhongguo jia xun shi, 557–59. 15 Shi, Chuan jia bao, chu ji (preface 1739), 1.40. 16 Zheng Zhiqiao, Nong sang yi zhi lu (1760), 3.408–9, “Jian fushi.” 17 Ibid., 3.410–11. He also included household budget calculations (3.409–10). 18 “Li Lüyuan’s Earnest Words of Household Instruction” (Li Lüyuan jia xun zhun yan), written in 1777 and an appendix to his novel Qi lu deng. The text is reproduced in Luan, ed., Qi lu deng yanjiu ziliao, 141–52, no. 20. 19 Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 55. 20 On gentility, see Berg and Starr, eds., The Quest for Gentility in China. 21 Ruitenbeek, ed., Faces of China, 176. 22 Hay, Sensuous Surfaces, 21. 23 Yuan, Wu jun suihua ji li, Wusu fengtou shi (preface, 1849), 386. “Toothache smiles” (quchi xiao) and “bowed waist gaits” (zhe yao bu) references the Hou Han shu, juan 103, “Wu xing zhi

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yi,” which narrates how, during the Yuanjia reign of Emperor Huan (151–153), women in the capital Luoyang had a series of strange styles: “knitted brows,” “falling off the horse coiffures,” “bowed waist gaits” (walking as though one’s feet could not bear their bodily weight), and “toothache smiles” (laughing as if one had toothache, and one’s pleasure was not heartfelt). These styles were attributed to the famous beauty, Sun Shou (d. 159), the wife of Generalin-Chief Liang Ji, and the process by which they were copied was viewed as fuyao. “Thin white silks and dark gray headcloths” is from the Classic of Poetry (Shi jing), Odes of Zheng, “Coming out of the Eastern Gate”: “Dressed in thin white silk and dark gray headcloths, she is my joy.” 24 Zhang Fa, Suzhou zhuzhici, in GSZZC, 38. 25 Xixi Shanren, Wumen hua fang lu (1803), 548. 26 On solitude increasing a courtesan’s reputation, see Mann, Precious Records, 130. 27 Puyuan suo zhi (1820), 6.482. 28 Dauncey, “Illusions of Grandeur,” 64. 29 Furth, “The Patriarch’s Legacy,” 198. 30 Shi, Chuan jia bao, chu ji (preface 1739), 5.221. 31 For a critique on heavy expenditure on marriages, see Yu Qian, Mianyizhai xu cun gao (1840), 16.35a-b. On consumption for rituals, see Huang Jingben, Minsheng yu jiaji, esp. chap. 4. Guilds for Suzhou producers of burial clothing were established in 1822 and 1899 (see appendix 4): “Burial clothing became more affluent and gorgeous, whether for auspicious or inauspicious events, feast or ceremony, providing appropriate clothing for the convenience of the people” (SZGSY, 226). 32 Huang Jingben, Minsheng yu jiaji, chap. 7; Chao, “Ming Qing ren de shemi guannian ji qi yanbian.” 33 Her trousseau also contained forty-two pieces of bed linen, nine daily-use objects, thirty-four pieces of head ornaments, fifteen hats, nine pieces of silver, nineteen pieces of copper, twentyfive pieces of tin, thirty-four pieces of porcelain, fifty-five pieces of wood, eight paintings and calligraphy, and 174 pieces of embroidery. Bai fu qian xiang zonglu (1888), 250–57. On Yu Yue and his family, see Bao, “Qu Yuan jiashi yu xinshi.” For other trousseau listings see Mao, Qing dai jiazhuang yanjiu, for clothing, esp. 15–21. Qingceng was well educated and privileged, but ultimately her marriage brought her little happiness and she hanged herself. 34 Zheng Zhiqiao, Nong sang yi zhi lu (1760), 3.409, “Jian fushi.” 35 Zuo Zhuan, 14.427, cited in Li Jianguo and Meng Lin, “Jianlun Tang qian ‘fuyao’ xianxiang.” 36 Shang shu, Dazhuan, 2.63–4, Hongfan, Wu xing Chuan, cited in Li and Meng, “Jianlun Tang qian ‘fuyao’ xianxiang.” 37 Han Shu, Wu xing zhi, 27.1352–3, cited in Li and Meng, “Jianlun Tang qian ‘fuyao’ xianxiang.” 38 Li and Meng analyze texts from the Wu xing zhi, Yu fu zhi, and Li fu zhi sections of standard histories between the Han and Sui dynasties (“Jianlun Tang qian ‘fuyao’ xianxiang,” 427); for Ming understandings of fuyao, see Lin Liyue, “Yishang yu fengjiao”; for late Qing usage, see Sun and Huang, “Wan Qing ‘fuyao’ xianxiang de tantao yu fansi.” 39 Zhang Yingchang, Qing shi duo (1869), 23.834. “The pelicans on the roof ” is an allusion from the Classic of Poetry referencing bad people: “The pelicans on the roof / catch fish without wetting their wings” (Cao feng, Hou ren). 40 On women wearing male dress during the late Qing, see Sun, Qing dai nüxing fushi wenhua yanjiu, 122–29. 41 Zhang Yingchang, Qing shi duo (1869), 23.834. 42 Ibid., 23.834. 43 On women threatening men’s masculinity, see Huang, Negotiating Masculinities, chap. 9; Furth, “The Patriarch’s Legacy,” 196. 44 Ye, Yue shi bian (17th c.), 8.181, “Nei zhuang”; Puyuan suo zhi (1820), 6.482: Qijiang xian zhi (1822), 9.616. 45 Shen, Han ye cong tan (preface 1805), 3.2, “Tan suo.”

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46 The ethno-nationalist Hanfu movement seeks to reinstate shenyi as a Han Chinese garment worn on formal occasions. For shenyi measurements, see Yang Tianyu, ed., Liji yizhu, 2:781–83; also Kuhn, ed., Chinese Silks, 23. 47 Da Ming hudian, juan 61, cited in Yuan Zujie, “Dressing for Power,” 186. 48 Jin Anqing, Shui chuang chun yi (1877), 79, “Suzhou tou.” 49 Hu, Dou cun (1841). These two historical cases are from the Sui shu, Wu xing zhishang and the Jin shu, Wu xing zhishang respectively. 50 Ribeiro, Dress and Morality, 12. 51 Guo, “Lun Min sheng wuben jieyong shu” (1820), 929–30. 52 Gong, Chaolin bi tan (1765), 5.113.non. 53 Hu, Dou cun (1841), 3.61. 54 See for example, the plain gauze unlined robe with a narrow border around the lapel and cuffs, Mawangdui tomb no. 1 (ca.168 bce). In Hunan Sheng Bowuguan, Changsha Mawangdui yi hao Han mu, 1.63, fig. 18. 55 Fujian Sheng Bowuguan, ed., Fuzhou nan song Huang Sheng mu. 56 Kongzi Shandong Bowuguan, ed., Siwen zaizi, Kongfu jiucang fushi tezhan. 57 Zhang Ailing, “A Chronicle of Changing Clothes” (1943), 432. 58 Bao, Jindai Zhongguo nüzhuang shilu, 192. 59 Lemire, “Developing Consumerism,” 242. 60 For a garment cut from a late eighteenth-century floral satin but updated with late nineteenthcentury trims, see Vollmer, ed., Clothed to Rule the Universe, 75. 61 On the court perspective of Suzhou as embodying the southern urban mingling of commerce, extravagance, and corruption, see Ma Ya-chen, Picturing Suzhou, 165. 62 “Xianfeng di yu houfei chuandai zhi” (1852), in Zhu Chengru, ed., Qing shi tu dian, 276. 63 Wenkang, Ernü yingxiong zhuan (1878), 20.247. 64 Fairchilds, “The Production and Marketing of Populuxe Goods,” 228–48. 65 Shen, Han ye cong tan (1805), 3.2, “Tan suo.” 66 Li Guangting, Xiang yan jie yi (1850), 3.42, “Yigong.” 67 Yu, Bai fu qian xiang zonglu (1888), 250–57. 68 Chen Lianhen, Jing hua chun meng lu, in BPFSLZ, 242. 69 A technique using gold thread to weave headwear and ornaments, also known as leisi. 70 A technique using thin sections of silver and tin, applied to lacquer surface, carved into patterned decoration, and then lacquered and polished. 71 Yu, Mianyizhai xu cun gao (1840), 16.35a-b. 72 Late Qing scholar Xie Jiehu, cited in Lufrano, Honorable Merchants, 42. 73 Ye Tiaoyuan, Hankou zhuzhici (1850), in Xu Mingting, ed., Wuhan zhuzhici, 70, no. 133. 74 A reference from Lie nü zhuan to “Liang Hong’s wife Meng Guang [who wore] thistle hairslides and cloth skirts.” See Zhai, Tong su bian (1751/1937), 25.4, “Fushi, jing cha bu qun.” 75 Yu, Mianyizhai xu cun gao (1840), 16.35b, “Xunsu tiaoyue.” “Outlandish costumes and strange hats” is from the Nan shi (51.1265) and refers to Xiao Yu, a cousin of Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty (r. 502–49), who “did not follow the rules of decorum in his youth”; his untoward habits included odd outfits and butchering oxen. 76 Guan, “Jin yong yanghuo” (1833), 819. 77 Breen, “The Meaning of Things,” 256. 78 Ribeiro, Dress and Morality, 15. 79 McShane and Backhouse, “Top Knots and Lower Sorts,” 342–43. 80 Ibid., 345. 81 Dumen zhuzhici (1814), “Fuyong,” in QDBJZZC, 40. 82 Zhao Shanlin, Zhongguo xiqu guanzhong xue, chap. 7; Chow, The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China, 5. 83 Shi Chengjin makes a similar warning in Chuan jia bao, chu ji (preface 1739), 5.174. See, e.g., Hanshang Mengren, Feng yue meng, 16.114. Romanticized rhymes describing female visitors to

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mountain temples are a common theme in bamboo ballads; see, e.g., Xu Zhi (YongzhengQianlong period), “Hankou zhuzhici,” in WHZZC, 7, no. 1; Zhang Fa, “Gusu zhuzhici,” in GSZZC, 46.  84 While Roger Chartier viewed representations as chiefly textual (Cultural History, introduction), anthropologist Clifford Geertz argued that aesthetic “sign elements,” including visual and material culture, should also be classified as “primary documents” (“Art as a Cultural System”).  85 Also known as Shengshi zisheng tu, the picture, measuring 1241 × 39cm, was commissioned in 1756 and completed in 1759, two years after Qianlong’s second southern tour of 1757. See Liaoning Bowuguan, ed., Qing Xu Yang Gusu Fanhua Tu (1989).  86 Sixth in a twelve-scroll set of the Qianlong Southern Inspection Tour Paintings (Qianlong nanxun tu), also by Xu Yang, produced between 1764–68, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  87 The list is one half of a text “Qianlong di Jiangnan sheng Suzhou fu youxing jiedao tu,” recording information on the Qianlong southern tours, and classified in the genre of Tang chuan fengshuo shu, which were based on Japanese interviews with Chinese merchants recorded in Nagasaki. See Gong Qi Cheng Shen, ed., Shi ting cao, juan 11, part 7, 202–8.  88 Gu, Wumen biaoyin (1843), fuji, 351–52.  89 For a close study of Gusu fanhua and Nanxun tu, see Ma, Picturing Suzhou, 48.  90 Approximately 20 percent of the shops sell objects in the category of dress, accessories, and embroidery, see Fan Jinmin, “Qing dai Suzhou chengshi wenhua fanrong de xiezhao.”   91 The ROM has a set of professionally embroidered rank badges with the label “fourth rank military official man’s tiger” (978.60.2).  92 Zhang Dechang, Qing ji yi ge jingguan de shenghuo, 105–218, 134.  93 Lai Huimin cites examples of officials who opened shops in Suzhou, including one Wang Qi who opened a Jixiang hao yidian (Auspicious clothing shop) with 4,354 items of dress. “Guaren hao huo,” 212–13.   94 On the positioning of official dress outside fashion systems, see Breward, The Culture of Fashion, 5.  95 Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” 25.  96 Forbes, Shopping in China, no. 14.   97 Gray, Walks in the City of Canton (1875), 468, 266, 153.  98 Foster, In the Valley of the Yangtze (1899), 39.  99 Tiffany, Canton Chinese (1849), 59. 100 Weikun Cheng, “In Search of Festivities,” 16. 101 Scidmore, “The Streets of Peking” (1899), 859. 102 Pujie, “Huiyi Chunqin wangfu de shenghuo,” 237. 103 Dauncey, “Sartorial Modesty and Genteel Ideals.” 104 Wilson, Chinese Dress, 47; Clunas, Pictures and Visuality, 160; Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 172–76. 105 Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, esp. 12–14. 106 Chang Jianhua, “Ming dai fangzhi suojian suishijieri zhong de nuxing huodong.” 107 Silberstein, “Eight Scenes of Suzhou.” 108 du Bose, Beautiful Soo (1899), 13. 109 Li Mian, “Huqiu zhuzhici” (n.d.), in GSZZC, 336–37. 110 Gu Wenshi, “Huqiu zhuzhici” (n.d.), in GSZZC, 344–48, 346. 111 For a positive account, see Mann, “Engendering the Histories of Asian Civilisation.” For a fictional description: when Yuan You’s racketeering lands him in trouble and he is stripped of his purchased rank, he and his wife “decided to pawn some of her clothes and jewelry and with the proceeds he would set himself up again in the loan-sharking business” (Hanshang Mengren, Courtesans and Opium, trans. Hanan, 2.12); for a real-life account, see Ida Pruitt and Ning Lao T’ai-T’ai (b. 1867), A Daughter of Han, 47. 112 Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone (ca. 1750), trans. Hawkes, 27.35–36. 113 Kemp, The Face of China (1909), 155.

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114 Mann, “Engendering the Histories of Asian Civilization.” 115 On the three aunts (Buddhist nuns, Taoist nuns, and fortune-tellers) and six grannies (go-betweens, matchmakers, instructors, witches, healers, and midwives), see Yi, San gu liu po, esp. 142–45, especially on their role in dress culture; also Furth, “The Patriarch’s Legacy,” 197, on stock warnings against them in family instructions. 116 Shi, Chuan jia bao, chu ji (preface 1739), 1.40. 117 Zeng, Testimony, 37. 118 Gu Zhentao, Wumen biaoyin (1843), fuji, 351–52. 119 For further analysis of this jacket, see the catalog entry in Zeitlin and Li, Performing Images, 162–63. 120 Ding, Xiu pu (preface 1821), 2.797, “Dianzhui.” 121 Silberstein, “Other People’s Clothes.” Note that Gray mentions buying secondhand robes from a shop called Yong’an’s Clothes-Making Shop (Yong’an Zuoyi Pu), Walks in the City of Canton, 468.

CHAPTER 3. WORKSHOP, BOUDOIR, VILLAGE

 1 Barrow, Travels in China (1804), 550.   2 A 1759 pawnshop listed a woman’s embroidered robe-and-jacket set for forty taels, and an embroidered collar-and-sleeve set for three taels; Dang pu ji (1759), 64.   3 McKendrick, ed., “The Commercialisation of Fashion”; Sewell, “The Empire of Fashion.”   4 Wong and Szan, eds., Power Dressing, 168–69.  5 Gray, Fourteen Months in Canton (1875), 385.   6 Ibid., 289–90.   7 Mailey, “Ancestors and Tomb Robes,” 101–15.  8 Gray, China (1878), 2.230.   9 Bray, Technology and Gender, 255–57. 10 Mann, “Women’s Work in the Ningbo Area,” 258; Bray, Technology and Gender, 259, 267. 11 Fan Jinmin and Jin Wen, Jiangnan sichou shi yanjiu, 236–37, for estimates of domestic and foreign silk market volumes. On export silks, see Jorg, “Chinese Export Silks for the Dutch in the Eighteenth Century”; Lee-Whitman, “The Silk Trade, Chinese Silks, and the British EIC Company.” 12 Chaozhou fu zhi (Qianlong, 1762), 12.10. 13 Xu Dixin and Wu Chengmin, eds., Chinese Capitalism, 1522–1840. 14 Fan Shuzhi, Ming Qing Jiangnan shi zhen tan wei, 199–207; Fan Jinmin, Ming Qing Jiangnan shangye de fazhan. 15 von Glahn, An Economic History of China, 352; Li Bozhong, “Agricultural Development in Jiangnan,” 141–55. 16 On protoindustrialization and China, see R. Bin Wong, China Transformed, chap. 2. 17 In Nüjie (Instructions for women), Ban Zhao defined women’s work as weaving, spinning, and food preparation. 18 Hinsch, Women in Early Imperial China, 72. 19 Mann, Precious Records, 165–66; also “Household Handicrafts and State Policy in Qing Times.” 20 Li Bozhong and Kenneth Pomeranz argued that women’s move into cotton and silk handicrafts reflected economic growth, rising incomes, and increased living standards; see Li, Agricultural Development in Jiangnan, 141–55, and Pomeranz, The Great Divergence. Philip Huang instead viewed the dependence on women’s poorly paid textile work as “growth without development, or involutionary growth”—land and population pressures requiring families to work harder for subsistence; The Peasant Family and Rural Development, chap. 5. Marxist-Feminist scholar Hill Gates argued “petty capitalist modes of production” commoditized women (“The Commoditization of Chinese Women”). More recently, with Bossen, she posits a correlation between the increased importance of young girls as handicraft producers and the rise in foot binding; see

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Bound Feet, Young Hands. Given that girls in other early modern societies were required to do sedentary and repetitive forms of labor, this thought-provoking argument does not entirely explain foot binding as an economic strategy; von Glahn, An Economic History of China, 352; Mann, Precious Records, 174. 21 Bray, Technology and Gender, 226–36. Mann, Precious Records, chap. 6. 22 Wang Jia (d. 390), Shiyi ji; Su E, Duyang za bian, both anthologized in Wang Shutong (1729–1821), ed., Lian shi (1797), 41.1, 41.3, “Zhen xian men.” 23 Gates, “The Commoditization of Chinese Women,” 799. 24 Ko, The Social Life of Inkstones, 88. 25 Bray, Technology and Gender, 257. 26 Ye Mengzhu, Yue shi bian (17th c.), 8.180. 27 Songjiang fu zhi (Chongzhen, 1631), 7.185b, “Customs,” “Changes in Embroidery.” 28 Ye, Yue shi bian, 8.181. 29 Huang Yifen, “Gu xiu xin kao”; I-Fen Huang, “Gender, Technical Innovation, and Gu Family Embroidery.” 30 Songjiang fu zhi (Chongzhen, 1631), 7.185b, “Fengsu.” 31 Silberstein, “Eight Scenes of Suzhou.” 32 Kuhn, ed., Chinese Silks, 410. 33 Adapted from Cao, The Story of the Stone, trans. Hawkes, 2.53.578; Cao, Hong Lou Meng, 53.749. 34 Huang Yifen traces this to the luxurious lifestyles of Gu Mingshi’s sons Gu Jiying and Gu Douying (“Gu xiu xinkao,” 34). 35 For example, the late seventeenth-century novel Marital Destinies to Awaken the World relates merchant Zhang Maoshi’s trip to Nanjing to purchase embroidery from a Mr. Gu’s shop whose “fine needlework was far better than other families” (Xi, Xing shi yin yuan chuan [ca. 1628–61], 63.806). 36 Shanghai xian zhi (Qianlong, 1750), 1.282, “Fengsu.” 37 Ibid., 5.481, “Tuchan,” “Fuyong zhi shu.” 38 Lou xian zhi (Qianlong, 1788), juan 11, “Fu yong.” Xiasha, Songjiang was also renowned for its embroidery, “Xiasha xiu,” Songjiang fu zhi (Chongzhen, 1631), 6.61. 39 “Wuchang Qianjiang huiguan paiji” (1772), in SZGSY, 19, no. 15. On the relationship between Su xiu and Gu xiu, see Gu, “Gu xiu yu Su xiu.” 40 Gusu zhi (Zhengde, 1506), 14.18. Early Qing regional embroideries included Shandong’s Lu xiu, Dongbei’s Juanxian xiu, and Beijing’s Saxian xiu. Zhu Feng, “Su xiu fazhan jianshi,” 165–66. 41 See Zhang Han quote in Silberstein, “Eight Scenes of Suzhou,” 3. 42 For the commercialization of dress handicrafts more generally, see Li Bozhong, Jiangnan de zaoqi gongyehua, 110–18, and Huang Jingben, Minsheng yu jiaji, 122–24. 43 Suzhou costume makers sold across the country and established a theatrical dress producers’ guild (Nishang Gongsuo) in the mid-Qing; see Lin Xidan, Suzhou cixiu, 132–41. 44 For Buddhist clothing shops (ceng yi pu) and celebratory clothing shops (jia yi pu), see Chi Zehui et al., eds., Beiping shi gongshangye gai kuang (1932), 217. 45 Moll-Murata’s analysis of six hundred dated and 130 undated guilds in Peng Zeyi’s “short table” also shows that Yangzi region guild formation soared after the Opium Wars (1839–41, 1856–58); “Chinese Guilds from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries.” See also Rowe, “Ming-Qing Guilds.” 46 “Changzhou xian jinzhi wuye yimin zai chengyi gongsuo xunzin zirao bei” (1898), in SZGSY, 225. Bradstock, Craft Guilds in the Ch’ing Dynasty, 1–2. 47 Defining features included “owned or rented place of assembly, written regulations, and recognition by the local administration,” see Rowe, “Ming-Qing Guilds”; Moll-Murata, “Chinese Guilds,” 217. 48 Golas, “Early Ch’ing Guilds,” 560–61. 49 On accessories in European history, see Lemire, “Developing Consumerism,” 242. 50 Thomson, Through China (1899), 71.

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51 Zhao Ruzhen, Guwan zhinan xubian (1942–43), 9. 52 For a table of commercialized handicrafts compiled from Suzhou local gazetteers, see Duan and Zhang, Suzhou shougongye shi, 103–7. 53 Lillian M. Li, China’s Silk Trade, 68–69. Fan and Jin, Jiangnan sichou yanjiu shi, 204–9. 54 “Jinwen gongsuo Gu Gongci beiji” in JSMQ, 135–40. The stele was found at the guild hall on 124 Xiatang Street. There are two other Jinwen guild steles from this address (JSMQ, 141–42). 55 A 1956 article in local newspaper, Xin Suzhuo bao (July 26, 1956), recorded the steles’ discovery and included a painting of Gu Mingshi from the Yunhua Guild. “Benshi faxian Su xiu laiyuan de wenwu.” On the Yunhua guild, see Suzhou Shi Gongshang Ye Lianhehui, eds., Suzhou gongshang ye jingji shiliao, 231; Wu xian zhi (Republic, 1933), 34.26. 56 “Jinwen gongsuo Gu Gongci beiji” in JSMQ, 136. On Huang Lao see Bray, Technology and Gender, 215–16. 57 “The weavers are all in the east of town; all the households there weave, and those specializing in this trade number no less than ten thousand” (Changzhou xian zhi [Qianlong, 1753], 16.8). 58 Gu Zhentao, Wumen biaoyin (1843), 3.36. Lin Xidan, “Suzhou cixiu ye shiyi.” 59 Zhang Xiafang, Hong lan yi chen (1822), 1.5b; Gu Zhentao, Wumen biaoyin (1843), 6.70. 60 “Benshi faxian Su xiu laiyuan de wenwu.” 61 Gu Zhangsi (act. 1790), Tu feng lu, 6.278–79, “Gu xiu.” 62 von Glahn, Economic History of China, 329. 63 Chengdu zhuzhici (1805), also Wu Haoshan, Chengdu zhuzhici (1855), both in Lin Kong, ed., Chengdu zhuzhici, 60, 66. 64 “Yuyu nangong Gu xiu laoban shiyou gongyi tiaogui” (1842), “Yuyu nangong Gu xiu laoban shiyou gongyi tiaogui” (1849), in BXDA, 234–36. 65 Ibid., 236. 66 Rowe, “Ming-Qing Guilds,” 54–56, citing Mann, “Women’s Work in the Ningbo Area.” 67 Mann explained the lack of guild protectionist measures against cheap, home-based female labor by recourse to the state’s moral construction of women’s work in “Household Handicrafts and State Policy in Qing Times,” 89; see also Mann, Precious Records, 148–65; Moll-Murata, “Chinese Guilds,” 225n56. 68 BXDA, 236. 69 On Guangzhou merchants in Chongqing, see Xu Tan, “Qing dai Qianlong zhi Daoguang nianjian de Chongqing shangye,” 31, 33. 70 See Gong Bohong, Wan lou jin si, 24. 71 Guangdong tong zhi (Daoguang, 1822), 97, “Yudi lue,” 15, “Wu chan,” 4, “Qiyong lei.” Citing Jiang Fan (1761–1831), Zhouche wenjian lu. 72 The lack of textual records on Guangzhou embroidery hinders research, making the oral interviews with Xu Zhiguang of particular value. See Huang Yan, “Zuihou de ‘xielao.’” Western observers often mention Guangzhou embroidery shops; for example, Gray, Walks in the City of Canton (1875), 289–90, 263; Kerr, A Guide to the City and Suburbs of Canton (1888), 18–19, 23, 26; Dennys, Treaty Ports of China and Japan (1867), 184, 195. 73 The Gu embroidery guild is listed as one of Guangzhou’s seventy-two trade guilds in Panyu xian xu zhi (Xuantong, 1911), 12.32. 74 Gray, Fourteen Months in Canton (1880), 385. 75 At least by the 1900s, if not earlier, a subdivided production system developed where women did satin stitch areas, before handing it over to the male guild workers who worked figures, hands, and other harder components. See Guangzhou Bowuguan, ed., Haimao yizhen, 67, 70. 76 Shunde xian zhi (1853), 3.264, “Fengsu”; Hedde, “A Passage along the Broadway River.” 77 On embroidered renditions of this drama, see Silberstein, “Fashionable Figures.” 78 Silk (1881), 75. 79 Ma, “Ningbo funü zhiye tan” (1913), 53–54. 80 On embroidery frames (bengdeng, lijia), see Shen, Xue Huan xiu pu (1919), 807; Sirr, China and the Chinese (1849), 385. 81 Bray, Technology and Gender, 226–36.

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 82 Huangdi-worshipping clothing guilds spanned Dongbei, Foshan, Dazhu, Neijiang, Beijing, Changsha, Shanghai, and Jinhua. The source is the Yi jing (Book of Changes), “Dazhuan.” See Li Qiao, Zhongguo hangye shen chongbai, 480, 187–88; Bradstock, Craft Guilds in the Ch’ing Dynasty, 210.  83 Crane, China in Sign and Symbol, 56.  84 Li Guangting, Xiang yan jie yi (1850), 3.42.  85 An allusion to Qin Taoyu’s (fl. late 9th c.) Tang dynasty poem, “Poor Girl” (Pin nü): “Through the bitter years, she presses the golden thread, making wedding robes for other girls.”  86 A reference to Bai Juyi’s (772–846) poem “Buying Flowers” (Mai hua): “A bunch of deeply colored flowers, [equals] the tax of ten households.”   87 Zhang Yingchang, Qing shi duo (1869), 23.833. The poem is by Sun Yuanxiang (1760–1829?), “Nan gong xiu.”  88 Tong, Longjiang zhuzhici (1887), 2.8.   89 Ibid., 2.8  90 Changshu zhaowen hezhi (Qianlong), juan 1, “Fengsu,” cited in Li Bozhong, Jiangnan de zaoqi gongyehua, 145.  91 Ren Herui and six other houses contributed 13,600 wen; Gao Qinji and Jin Xiji contributed two hundred wen. JSMQ, 135–40.  92 Foshan zhongyi xiangzhi (Republic, 1926), juan 6, “Shiye zhi” (based on the 1907 record, “Chengbao nonggong shangbu shiye pin huice”), in HHSL, 149.  93 Sun Peilan, Wudi cixiu wenhua, 24–25. Lin Xidan, Suzhou cixiu, 18, 66–68. Lin estimates there were around 150 Suzhou embroidery houses, including sixty-odd theatrical costumers and sixty-odd lingjian Gu xiu houses (“Suzhou cixiu ye shiyi”).  94 Schäfer, “Inscribing the Artifact”; Wu Jen-shu, “Advertising Forms”; Hamilton and Lai, “Consumerism without Capitalism.”  95 Gu Zhentao, Wumen biaoyin (1843), 351–52; Wu Jen-shu, “Advertising Forms,” 83–85.  96 Fan Jinmen and Jin Wen, Jiangnan sichou shi yanjiu, 249.  97 Huangxi zhi (Daoguang, 1831), 1.4, “Fengsu.”   98 Ibid., 1.6, “Wu chan.”  99 Silberstein, “Eight Scenes of Suzhou.” 100 On embroidered dragon robes, see “Discussing Primary Types of Embroidered Dragon Robes” (Lun xiu mangpao chaoyuan lei) in Dang pu ji (1759), 64–66. On the distinction between Jiangning and Suzhou dragon-robe gold thread, see Cheng jia bao shu (19th c.), 412–13. 101 Cheng jia bao shu, 411–12. 102 Dang pu ji (1759), 70. This section lists numerous other workshop marks. 103 For this and further examples of loom marks, see Donghua University Textile and Clothing Museum Exhibition Catalogue, Li Xiaojun, Qi luo jin xiu, 2–13. 104 Another example of a silk with original paper wrapping from the Gao Sheng shop in Foshan, dating to 1862, was sold at Sotheby’s, Asian Art, March 18, 2017. 105 For other examples of Guangdong floss wrappings, all ca. 1840–50, see Royal Ontario Museum 981.45.1; PEM E25388, E25389, E18.317; V&A FE.67:3–2009. 106 Other than Su xiu, these regional terms were rarely used during the Qing and there is little evidence to suggest they were conceptualized as comparable until the mid-twentieth century. Their conflation also masks disparate histories in terms of development and dependency upon foreign and domestic markets: Xiang xiu only gained reputation in the late nineteenth century and Yue xiu merges two very different styles—Guang xiu and Chao xiu. The grouping also omits other significant local styles, like Beijing’s Jing xiu or Wenzhou’s Ou xiu. On regional embroidery styles, see Sun Peilan, Zhongguo cixiu shi, 83–105. On Guang xiu, see Shen, “Tan Guang xiu,” in Huahua duoduo, 106–9. Ko discusses the Su embroidery tradition with reference to seminal late Qing guige xiu embroiderer Shen Shou in “Between the Boudoir and the Global Market.” On Xiang xiu, see Yang, Xiang xiu shi gao (1956). 107 For example, the “Suzhou embroidered scented purse” that Deng brings his concubine from his travels; Wenkang, Ernü yingxiong zhuan (1878), 15.174.

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108 von Glahn, Economic History of China, 334. 109 Penghuasheng, Hua fang yu tan (1818), 28a-b. 110 von Glahn, Economic History of China, 334–36. 111 Guangdong tong zhi (Daoguang, 1822), juan 97, citing Yuedong biji. On Cantonese craftsmen and Suzhou manufacturing (Su zuo), also Ko, The Social Life of Inkstones, 124. 112 Foshan’s Gu xiu trade guild is detailed in Foshan zhongyi xiangzhi, reproduced in HHSL, 149; for the Chongqing Gu xiu trade, see BXDA, 234–36. 113 Gray, Walks in the City of Canton (1875), 289–90, 263. 114 Wu Hung, “Inventing a ‘Chinese’ Portrait Style.” 115 Hunan Diaocha Ju, ed., Hunan minqing fengsu baogaoshu: Hunan shangshi xiguan baogaoshu, 213, “Choubu zhuang houding tiao guize shi tiao,” no. 3. 116 Ye, Yue shi bian (17th c.), 7.163. 117 Suzhou fu zhi (Qianlong, 1748), 12.15, “Wu chan.” 118 Suzhou thread was renowned for smoothness, polish, and color range. Duan and Zhang, Suzhou shougongye shi, 81. On silk thread guilds, see Li Qiao, Zhongguo hangye shen chongbai, 204–5. 119 Metallic thread, produced by twisting narrow strips of gold or silver foil around cotton or silk yarn, was a Suzhou specialty and trade secret (imitation gold thread was made of silver foil “cured” to a yellow color). Suzhou’s gold thread guild (jiani gongsuo) was established in 1834; Wu xian zhi (Republic, 1933), 30.3; Li Qiao, Zhongguo hangye shen chongbai, 203–4. Guangzhou also had a gold thread guild; Panyu xian xu zhi (Xuantong, 1911), 12.32; Gray, Walks in the City of Canton, 290. 120 Wu xian zhi (Republic), 51.22 notes that Changzhou needles were “firm not brittle.” Shen Shou praised the quality of Su needles for having sharp points but dull “noses” that prevented injury, and derided her contemporaries who adopted European needles which had begun filling the market (Xue Huan xiu pu [1919], 763). On the needle trade, see Li Qiao, Zhongguo hangye shen chongbai, 159–60. For descriptions and images of Chinese needles and scissors, see Hommel, China at Work (1937), 199–201. 121 On brand-name scissors, see Duan and Zhang, Suzhou shougongye shi, 117–18. 122 Gray, Fourteen Months in Canton (1880), 385. Other terms include huahua zuo and hua gong. 123 Dukes, Everyday Life in China (1885), 12–13. 124 Ko, “Between the Boudoir,” 43. 125 Paper designs were transferred to textile by tracing, pouncing, or pasting onto the fabric and stitching over; Wilson, Chinese Dress, 101–7. 126 Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters, 219. 127 Suzhou Shi Gongshang Ye Lianhehui, eds., Suzhou gongshang ye jingji shiliao, 231. 128 Sirr, China and the Chinese, 386. 129 On the silk industry, see Fan Jinmen and Jin Wen, Jiangnan sichou yanjiu shi; Lillian Li, China’s Silk Trade; Duan and Zhang, Suzhou shougongye shi, 16–42. 130 Zhu Feng, “Su xiu fazhan jianshi,” 122; Kuhn, ed., Chinese Silks, 435–36; Sun Pei, Suzhou zhizao ju zhi, 10.92–94. 131 The Weaving and Dyeing Service contained six workshops employing 1,170 artisans. The Principal Weaving Service had three workshops and 1,160 workers. See Ye, Chuantong jiyi yu wenhua zaisheng, 65, on the decline of numbers employed in the imperial workshops. The embroidery workshop (xiu zuo) of the needlework bureau (zhengong ju) in the Beijing Weaving and Dyeing Service (Zhi Ran Ju) also did some work on assembled robes when they arrived from the south. See Zong, Qing dai gongting fushi, 207; Zhu Feng, “Su xiu fazhan jianshi,” 135. 132 Silk (1881), 75. 133 Zhu Feng, “Su xiu fazhan jianshi,” 134. 134 Ibid., 134–35. Wang Xiujuan, “Suzhou xiuniang yu Suzhou shehui,” 169. 135 Wu xian zhi (Kangxi, 1691), 15.1b, “Fengsu.” 136 “The embroidering lady, licentiously [?] inserting flowers” is one figure in an ensemble of Suzhou types in the print “Rao hua tu,” from a set of sixteen prints, “Satirical Images of Suzhou

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137 138

139 140 141 142 143

144 145 146 147 148 149 150

151 152 153

Customs” (Suzhou fengsu fengci hua), 1751, Zhang Wenju print, Japanese collection, in Bijutsu kenkyūjo, ed., Shina kohanga zuroku (1932), no. 218. Silk, 5; du Bose, Beautiful Soo (1899), 58. Zhu Feng, “Su xiu fazhan jianshi,” 134–35. Zhu Feng spent most of her life studying, teaching, and practicing embroidery in Suzhou. See Sun Peilan, Wudi cixiu wenhua, 122–25. By the twentieth century, production constellated around the Hushuguan, Mudu, Guangfu, and the Xiangshan areas; Wang Xiujuan, “Suzhou xiuniang yu Suzhou shehui,” table 1. Today Zhenhu (previously Xihua) is the center of embroidery production. See Ye Jihong, Chuantong jiyi yu wenhua zaisheng. Wang Xiujuan, “Suzhou xiuniang yu Suzhou shehui,” 170. Shiye Bu Guoji Maoyi Ju, ed., Zhongguo shiye zhi, Jiangsu juan (1933), 74. For example, Guangfu was well connected to Suzhou and had developed other handicrafts. See Hong, Ming Qing Suzhou nongcun jingji ziliao, 259–68. Li Dou, Yangzhou hua fang lu (preface 1793), 9.195. “Women’s shan robes have a length of two chi and eight cun, their sleeves are one chi and two cun wide, the outer sleeve facings [waihu xiu] are bordered with embroidery and brocade.” On intermediary brokers, see also Chiu, “Shiba shiji Su-Song mianbu ye de guanli jiagou yu falu wenhua”; Eyferth, “Skilled Vision as a Management Technique”; Lufrano, Honorable Merchants, 117. “Silk Weaving in Jiangsu and Zhejiang,” in Xu and Wu, eds., Chinese Capitalism, 211–12. On middlemen in the Jiangnan silk industry, see Fan Jinmen and Jin Wen, Jiangnan sichou shi yanjiu, 249–50. As Shih observes, the middleman contributed to production efficiency but also increased production costs (Chinese Rural Society in Transition, 125). Zhu Feng cites Tao Youting, a late Qing embroidery manager (xiu tou) employed by the Guangyuan Fenzhuang, who was responsible for managing stitch, color, and timely completion (“Su xiu fazhan jianshi,” 134). Simcox and Galloway, The Art of Textiles 57, no. 79. Zhenze zhen zhi (Daoguang, 1844), 2.1–2, cited in James Shih, Chinese Rural Society in Transition, 123. Lillian M Li, China’s Silk Trade, 51–53. For distinctions between Chinese and European putting-out systems, see Tanaka Masatoshi’s two-part articles, “The Putting-Out System of Production in the Ming and Qing Periods.” Duan and Zhang, Suzhou shougongye shi, 279; Ye Jihong, Chuantong jiyi yu wenhua zaisheng, 43–44. du Bose, Beautiful Soo (1899), 33. Shiye Bu Guoji Maoyi Ju, ed., Zhongguo shiye zhi, Jiangsu juan (1933), 74. It is detailed earlier in Guangzhou for export: Gray described a shop called “Yongsheng xiujin pu,” whose crepe shawls were woven and sold at Sai-Chu, then bought to Guangzhou where their patterns were applied and then taken to Pakkow and Lum-T’au for embroidering by men and women (Walks in the City of Canton [1875], 282–83). Ma, “Ningbo funü zhiye tan” (1913), 53–54. Ye Jihong, Chuantong jiyi yu wenhua zaisheng, 66, citing Tōa Dōbunkai, ed., Zhongguo jingji quanshu, originally published as Shina keizai zensho (1908). In 1685, the pattern drafter was listed as an employee receiving a monthly salary of two taels, plus forty liters of rice; Sun, ed., Suzhou zhizao ju zhi, 5.29; Duan and Zhang, Suzhou shougongye shi, 31–2; Ye Jihong, Chuantong jiyi yu wenhua zaisheng, 64–65. For pay in the late seventeenth-century imperial workshops, see Peng Zeyi, ed., Zhongguo jindai shougong ye shi shiliao, 87. For breakdowns of embroidery and pattern drafting work per specific items, see the imperial household records, “Xiu zuo gong zeli,” in Zhu Qiqian, Si xiu biji (1930), juan shang, 57–58. Lai Huimin, “Guaren hua hao,” 206, cites a 1778 case when the Qianlong emperor ordered a cost comparison of Beijing and Suzhou embroidery. The cost of silk was the same for both the Guang Chu Si (Department of the Privy Purse) and the Suzhou Zhizao Ju (Imperial Weaving Workshop), but silk floss cost approximately twice as much in Beijing, while embroi-

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dery labor was over three times more expensive in Suzhou (twenty-six people each paid 0.126 taels). Paul A. Van Dyke’s work on the East India company archives suggests embroidery was a high-cost activity in Canton, from 1750 to 1800 (Merchants of Canton and Macao, chap. 10, esp. 201–3, appendix 10c). 154 du Bose, Beautiful Soo (1899), 11. 155 Thomson, Through China (1899), 71. 156 Changsha xian zhi (Jiaqing, 1810), juan 14, “Fengsu.” 157 Yuanhe xian zhi (Qianlong, 1761), 10.4, “Fengsu.” 158 Pingwang xu zhi (Guangxu, 1887), 12.5, “Shengye.” 159 Guangfu zhi (Daoguang, 1844), 4.6a, “Tuchan.” 160 Wang Xiujuan, “Suzhou xiuniang yu Suzhou shehui,” 160. 161 Wood, Fankwei (1859), 396. 162 Mann, Precious Records, 159. 163 Thomson, Through China, 70. Also Dennys, Treaty Ports of China and Japan, 195. 164 Zengpu dumen zayong in QDBJZZC, 89. 165 Zhu Qiqian (1872–1964), minister and scholar of architecture and embroidery, who catalogued the imperial collection (Qing neifu cang kesi shuhua lu [1930]) and his own collection (Cunsu tang su xiu liu [1928], now in Liaoning Provincial Museum), and anthologized writings on embroidery and kesi (Si xiu biji [1930], Nühong zhuan zheng lüe [1900]). 166 Zhu Qiqian, Nühong zhuan zheng lüe (1900), 2.16, citing Ling man shu zhuan. 167 Lay, The Chinese as They Are (1841), 276–77. 168 Mann, Precious Records, 175. On sequestering, see Pomeranz, “Womenswork and the Economics of Respectability,” 242. 169 Mann, Precious Records, 159. 170 Bray, Technology and Gender, 267–69; Mann, “Women’s Work in the Ningbo Area,” 260. 171 Li Lüyuan, Li Lüyuan jia xun zhun yan (1777), no. 67; Lu Yiting, Jiating jianghua (1895), 2.14–15, “Xun nü.” 172 Shi, Chuan jia bao (preface 1739), 36. 173 Barrow, Travels in China (1804), 143. 174 Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), “Dress as an Expression of Pecuniary Culture,” 116. 175 Zhu Qiqian, Nühong zhuan zheng lüe (1900), 2.20, citing Guixiu zhengshi ji. Also Qian Dingyi, ed., Zhongguo minjian meishu yiren zhi, 98. 176 Zhu Qiqian, Nühong zhuan zheng lüe (1900), 3.33, citing Jie Zhang Huiyan zhuan benzhuan. 177 Zhu Qiqian, Nühong zhuan zheng lüe (1900), 2.21. 178 Fuzhou fu zhi (Qianlong, 1751), 66.291, “Lienü, part 2.” 179 Zhu Feng, “Suzhou fazhan jianshi,” 126–27. 180 Ibid., 127. 181 Ibid. 182 Ma, “Ningbo funü zhiye tan” (1913), 52. 183 Zhu Qiqian, Nühong zhuan zheng lüe (1900), 2.29, citing Wu zhenqi jueyi jianwen lu. 184 Ibid., 3.33, citing Ye Liang fen juan ben zhuan. 185 Ibid., 2.22, citing Gudong suoji. 186 Wang Jia, Shiyi ji, anthologized in Wang Shutong, ed., Lian shi (1797), 41.5. 187 Qian Dingyi, ed., Zhongguo minjian meishu yiren zhi, 93, citing Deng Zhicheng, Guodong suoji. 188 Sun, Zhongguo cixiu shi, 89. 189 Zhu Feng, “Su xiu fazhan jianshi,” 134–35. 190 Gu, Xiaoxia xianji zhaichao, juan shang (1785), 40.

CHAPTER 4. PERFORMANCE, PRINT, AND PATTERN

  1 Zhang Shuying, Cixiu tu (1628–44), 2.1, “Tu.” Prince Teng or Li Yuanying (?–684) built the Pavilion of Prince Teng in Nanchang, Jiangxi, in 653 and excelled at painting butterflies. He

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became a reference for women who skillfully painted butterflies (Sun Ta, Zhongguo huajia renming dacidian, 183); “The seventy purple mandarin ducks frolic in pairs in the quiet pavilion” is from a Li Bai poem, “Gu feng wushijiu shou.” Gu Kaizhi (ca. 344–406) painted The Nymph of the Luo River, illustrating a poem by Cao Zhi (192–232). Both Crimson Tree and Blue Zither were renowned immortal beauties. The Dragon Girl is a figure from the Lotus Sutra. Spring Morning in the Han Palace is a painting by Qiu Ying (1494–1552).   2 For approaches to popular culture in late imperial China, see Johnson et al., eds., Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, x; Wang Di, Street Culture in Chengdu, esp. 6–11. I use the term to refer to media like nianhua prints, commercial embroidery, and theatrical performance that I assume to have been produced (though not exclusively consumed) by social groups outside educated, exam-sitting gentry and official classes. On the problems of identifying popular culture, see Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular.’”   3 McCauseland and Ling, Telling Images of China, 61; Zeitlin and Li, eds., Performing Images.   4 For example, a narrative hanging in the Chinese Room at Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Fenway Court; see Guth, “Asia by Design,” 52–72.   5 See Jacobsen, Imperial Silks, 526, no. 222, labeled “figures in garden setting,” but actually Western Chamber scenes.   6 My study of eighteen jackets in American museums identified the following dramas: Story of the Western Chamber, Twenty-Four Classics of Filial Piety, The Pearl Pagoda, Tale of the Jade Hairpin, The Insignia-Laden Bed, The Legend of the White Snake, The Story of the Hairpin and the Bracelet, The Story of the Stone. For further analysis, see Silberstein, “Embroidered Figures,” appendix.   7 For dramatic imagery in tombs, see Liao, Song Yuan xiqu wenwu yu minsu, 102–10; McLaren, Chinese Popular Culture and Ming Chantefables, 27–29.   8 Wright, “Chinese Decorated Letter Papers”; Ni Yibin, Kan tu shuo ci.   9 See Tianjin Shi Yishu Bowuguan, ed., Yangliuqing nianhua, no. 108, for a set of Guangxu period (1875–1907) nianhua prints, with play scenes to decorate a brick bed. 10 Dong, Ming Qing minjian mudiao. 11 Knapp, China’s Living Houses, 133. 12 Zhao Feng, Sichou yishu shi, 186–87. 13 Li Yuhang, “Representing Theatricality,” 74, in Zeitlin and Li, Performing Images. 14 For example, “Su Wu Bids Farewell to Li Ling,” in miscellaneous album (Zhushi renwu huaniao hece). See Shanghai Bowuguan, ed., Haishang jinxiu, 38. 15 Shanghai xian zhi (Qianlong, 1750), 5.481, “Tuchan,” “Fuyong zhi shu.” 16 For analysis of a robe with The Insignia-Laden Bed roundels, see Silberstein, “Fashionable Figures.” 17 Zhang Fa, “Zhuzhici, Yan Suzhou” (preface 1722), 38, no. 7, in GSZZC. 18 QBLC, 13.6166. 19 Wang Tao, Hai zou ye you lu (preface 1860), 2.9. 20 Yeh, Shanghai Love, esp. chap. 3, 136–43. 21 Silberstein, “Fashioning the Foreign”; Yeh, Shanghai Love, 52n63; Sun Yanzhen, Qing dai nüxing fushi wenhua yanjiu, 129–32. 22 On the two wives, see Sun Wenliang, Manzu dacidian, 364, 473. Their dress was regulated as wives of a first-degree prince (Qinwang fujin); see Zhao Erxun, ed., Qing shi gao, 103.3050. Four painted fans included with the robes: three decorated by Qian Tai (b. 1708), the fourth painted by Li Shizhuo (act. 1705–1740), dates them to around 1738. However, the two consorts were possibly buried later than the prince, hence the robe likely dates between the Yongzheng and early Qianlong period, ca. 1735–50. 23 On these artists, see Yu Hui, “Shiba shiji fuwu yu jingcheng Wangfu huandi de renwu huajia”; also Cahill, Pictures for Use, 78, 84; Wen-chien Cheng, “Idealized Portraits of Women for the Qing Imperial Court.” 24 QBLC, 13.6177, “Si tuan long bugua.”

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25 Chongyi, Dao Xian yilai chaoye zaji (19th c.), 33. Different dragons detailed various ranks: at the top was the emperor’s slate-blue court surcoat (gunfu), embroidered with four roundels of five-clawed, forward-facing golden dragons (zhengmian). See Zhao Erxun, ed., Qing shi gao, 103.3042–45. 26 Yan Yong, “Dui Qing dai ba tuan caiyun jinlong wen jifu de zairenshi,” esp. table 1, 92. Ji fu, a matching ensemble of gua and pao, was a semi-formal style worn upon festivals and celebrations. 27 Gong Wei, Chaolin bi tan (1765), 5.113. 28 Xu Ke describes a dragon roundel being changed for a more auspicious design for the Empress Dowager Cixi’s (1835–1908) sixtieth birthday (QBLC, 13.6178, “Liu he tong chun”). 29 I thank Yan Yong of the Palace Museum for telling me about this early example of the nondragon roundel. Zhao Erxun, ed., Qing shi gao, 103.3052, 103.3054. 30 Chongyi, Dao Xian yilai chaoye zaji, 33. Chongyi also observed women’s rank badge gowns followed their husband’s ranking but were round, while Han palace women all wore square badges like their menfolk. Xu Ke records Han titled ladies (mingfu) changing to the round badges during the mid-Guangxu period (QBLC, 13.6199, “Nü bu fu”). 31 Zhenjun, Tian zhi ou wen (1903), 10.723. 32 Li Dou, Yangzhou hua fang lu (preface 1763), 9.194. 33 Puyuan suo zhi (1820), 6.482, “Xishang.” 34 Zhang Shuxian argues these narrative-adorned jackets were a form of theatrical costume called dapoyi worn by female clown roles in the Kunqu Suzhou-style opera (Qing gong xiqu wenwu, no. 81–82). However, descriptions of this garment do not specify narrative roundels and the quality and scale of the jackets’ embroidery is far finer than most theatrical costumes. 35 Bender, Plum and Bamboo, 12, 207–9. 36 For a table comparing jacket and print scenes, see Silberstein, “Embroidered Figures.” 37 For the prints, see Zheng Zhenduo, Zhongguo gudai muke hua xuanji, no. 8; Shanghai Tushuguan, ed., Qing mo nianhua, nos. 61–62; Jin et al., Suzhou Taohuawu muban nianhua, 112–13, nos. 84–85, Zhou Xinyue, Suzhou Taohuawu nianhua, 42–44, also 105–7 on the Wang Rongxing workshop (act. ca. 1850–75). 38 The term lianhuan tuhua was not used until 1927, but A Ying argued that the format originated in the Yuan and matured during the Ming, as evidenced by the 1498 completely illustrated Western Chamber edition (Zhongguo lianhua tuhua shi hua, 1–6, 83). Single-sheet lianhuan narrative nianhua appear in the mid-eighteenth century (169–70), see also Riftin, “Chinese Performing Arts and Popular Prints,” 219. 39 For a table comparing jacket and print scenes, see Silberstein, “Embroidered Figures.” 40 Vollmer argued that the Qing revision of the imperial dragon robe deployed imperial symbolism to center the emperor within the cosmos (Silks for Thrones and Alters). 41 Even an iconic scene like “Daiyu Buries the Flowers,” commonly depicted as a single portrait, is given a companion (Baoyu) in embroidered dress format. The predilection for the auspicious couple is also seen in the related design of roundels depicting paired animals in an auspicious setting (e.g., Met, 46.133.7). 42 Wang Lixia, “Yangliuqing nianhua de youlai,” 17. For examples, see Silberstein, Fashionable Figures. 43 Yao Dajuin, “The Pleasure of Reading Drama,” 462. 44 Tanci audiences could discriminate between speaking (shuobiao) and singing (chang) registers, as well as paralinguistic gestures for communicating yes and no; compass points or directions; up and down, size and shape, volume, distance, and speed; numbers of things; and actions like bowing or appraising things. Bender, Plum and Bamboo, 52–60. 45 Riftin argues oral storytelling shaped the plots of popular novels (“Chinese Performing Arts and Popular Prints,” 220). 46 See Alekseev’s interviews with nianhua artists on this topic, cited in ibid., 189, 205. 47 On theater as a “cultural mediator” disseminating elite literate culture, see Tanaka, “The Social and Historical Context of Ming-Ch’ing Local Drama,” 9.

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48 Ibid., 141–46. 49 Chuanqi refers to musical plays of the Ming in the southern tradition (with more than two singing roles and an unlimited number of acts), as distinct from zaju, with a single singing role and four-act structure in the northern tradition, popular during the Yuan. On the trend toward zhezixi, see Qi Senhua, “Shilun Ming Qing zhezixi,” 60. 50 Ibid; Wang Ning, “Ming Qing minsu.” 51 Qinhuai Moke (Ji Zhenlun), ed., Jingke xiuxiang Yuefu hongshanqingke (preface 1602, repr. 1800); Hanan, “The Nature and Contents of the Yuefu Hongshan,” esp. 348–50. Tanaka, “The Social and Historical Context,” 151–52. 52 This scene also features in Hanshang Mengren, Courtesans and Opium, trans. Hanan, 13.137. 53 Wu Jingzi, Rulin waishi (1750), 10.77. 54 Wang Ning, “Ming Qing minsu,” 69. 55 The names were shaken from a pot in front of the altar, allowing the gods to communicate their choice of program; see Cao, The Story of the Stone, trans. Hawkes, 1.29.79–80. 56 Shen Fu, Fo sheng liu ji (1808), 1.28–29. 57 For additional examples, see Zeitlin and Li, eds., Performing Images, 76; Field Museum (653.33154, 4010.269179). 58 See Qinhuai Moke (Ji Zhenlun), comp. and ed., Jingke xiuxiang Yuefu hongshanqingke (preface 1602; repr. 1800), juan 6, 8, 12, 13; Qian Decang, Gailiang quantu Zhui bai qiu quan zhuan (1781), 2.4, 7.3, 9.2. 59 AMNH 70/2284A-L, see also a jacket in the PEM collection (E79506). 60 Lay, The Chinese as They Are (1841), 275. 61 Cohn purchased the pattern books in China between 1986 and 2010. 62 For overviews of illustrated fiction and pattern books, see Brokaw, “On the History of the Book”; Zhou Xinhui, Zhongguo gu banhua tongshi, 300–310; Yao Dajuin, “The Pleasures of Reading Drama,” 437. 63 Hay, “Painters and Publishing in Late Nineteenth-Century Shanghai,” 140, 134–41, 188n108; Yue, Jindai Shanghai ren shehui xintai, 132–48. 64 Gailiang quantu Zhui bai qiu quan zhuan was edited first by Wan Hua Zhuren and later continued by drama critic Qian Decang; it was originally published between 1763 and 1774. 65 On the relationship between dian gu and figural imagery, see Clunas, Pictures and Visuality, 169. 66 See Gao Chunming, Jinxiu wenzhang, 414. 67 Cited in Li Kanghua, Manhua lao Shanghai zhishi jie ceng, 141. 68 For a table comparing the scene and animal choice, see Silberstein, “Embroidered Figures.” In the prints, the zodiac animals are not always shown but can be inferred from the dramatic characters and the two-character titles. 69 On calendar posters, see Wang Shucun, “Yuefenpai nianhua shi hua,” 66. 70 The legend comes from Zhang Hua (232–300), Bo wu zhi (Notes on miscellaneous things). Zhang Qian was sent west by Han Emperor Wudi (r. 140–88 bce) to ally the people of Yue against the northern Xiongnu, but was ultimately captured and imprisoned for eleven years. 71 For example, a nephrite Zhang Qian snuff bottle (est. 1740–1850); “Snuff Bottles from the Mary and George Bloch Collection, Part II,” Bonhams, Hong Kong, Nov. 23, 2010, no. 151; from Suzhou (1740–1850) and inscribed, “On his return [Zhang Qian] brought back only the stone that supported the loom [of Zhi Nü, the Weaving Maiden].” 72 Jin Guliang, Wu shuang pu (preface 1690). 73 Zhang Yongmei suggests Peerless Figures first appears on porcelain during the Jiaqing period (1796–1820) in “Qing ‘Wu shuang pu’ huachuan yu ‘Wu shuang pu’ ciqi,” 68. 74 Weishaupt, Das Grosse Gluck, 167. 75 For further analysis of this play in dress, see Silberstein, “Fashionable Figures.” 76 There are twelve couplets but thirteen couples present, possibly because the extra couple is included to cover the leap month (gui yue). 77 For a “White Snake Twelve Month Counting Song” (Baishe shan ge), see Fu Xihua, Baishe zhuan ji, 139–40, based on a Guangxu (1875–1908) Hangzhou edition.

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 78 Zhang Geng and Guo Hancheng, Zhongguo xiqu tongshi, 259–60. Xu Mengjiang’s tears (Meng Jiangnü) for her dead husband bought down the Great Wall; Su Liuniang is a Chaozhou play in which Su Yuanwai defied her family’s dictates to marry the cousin she loves, aided by her maid; Zhu Yingtai famously dressed as a male scholar but her love for fellow scholar Liang Shanbo ended in tragedy; Chen San and Wu Niang are from the Chaozhou play, Tale of the Lychee Mirror (Li jing ji).  79 On framing in Chinese material culture, see Hay, Sensuous Surfaces, 68, 173–74; also Wu Hung, The Double Screen, 237.  80 Hanshang Mengren, Feng yue meng (1848), 5.4; translation adapted from Hanan, trans., Courtesans and Opium, 5.39.  81 Yeh, Shanghai Love, esp. chap. 3, 136–43.  82 Wang Shucun, Minjian zhenpin tushuo Hong lou meng, nos. 89, 94; Zeitlin and Li, eds., Performing Images, 162–66.  83 Clunas, Pictures and Visuality, 113.  84 Compare the oblique identification of letter-paper designs featuring motifs referencing historical anecdotes (Wright, “Chinese Decorated Letter Papers,” 116).  85 Parker, The Subversive Stitch, 89–91, 96.   86 Frye, “Sewing Connections,” 274.  87 Hanshang, Feng yue meng, 13.90; Hanshang, Courtesans and Opium, trans. Hanan, 13.125.   88 Bartholomew, Hidden Meanings in Chinese Art.  89 Kuang Yanghua, “Cong minjian cixiu xiqu ticai jian chuantong yu nüxing de guanxi,” 136.  90 Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology,” 5.  91 For shared stitch conventions in two Legend of the White Snake jackets, see Silberstein, “Fashionable Figures.”  92 Lu Yiting, Jiating Jianghua (1895), zhong juan, 15a/b–16a/b, “Xun nü.”   93 Zhao Shanlin, Zhongguo xiqu guanzhong xue, 98–99n1, 7.  94 Ibid., 100–101.  95 Li Lüyuan’s Family Instructions forbade family members from attending temple fairs because of “layabouts and ne’er do goods” (“Li Lüyuan jia xun zhun yan,” 144).  96 Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 12–14.  97 Mrs. Nie Zeng fondly recalled the dramatic troupes that came to her home for birthdays and the Lantern Festival (Testimony of a Confucian Women, 77–78).  98 Zhao Shanlin, Zhongguo xiqu guanzhong xue, chap. 7.  99 My italics. (Zeng ding) Yuan ti ji (n.d.), 1:20b, cited in McLaren, Chinese Popular Culture and Ming Chantefables, 72. 100 Zhao Shanlin, Zhongguo xiqu guanzhong xue, 105. 101 Also called Chen San Wu Niang, see Zhang and Guo, Zhongguo xiqu tongshi, 262. 102 Xiamen zhi (Daoguang, 1839), 15.13. 103 Liang Gongchen, Quan jie lü wu pian, juan 6, cited in Zhao Shanlin, Zhongguo xiqu guanzhong xue, 105n23. 104 For example, a Republican-period Liaoning gauze pillowcase embroidered with two Western Chamber scenes and chosen lines; Xu Yiyi, Zhongguo minsu yishupin jianshang, no. 174. 105 Yang Shijuan, Xiang xiu shigao (1956), 23. 106 Zhang Ailing, “A Chronicle of Changing Clothes,” 431. 107 Dang pu ji (1759), 80, “Guangdong textiles” (Guang huo lei), “Cowherd silk” (niulang chou) and “Maiden silk” (nü’er chou). 108 Shu Chen, Qian An Sutai zhuzhici baishou cao (1860), no. 93.

CHAPTER 5. “THE LUXURY OF WORDS”

   1 Chu-Tsing Li, “Looking at Late Qing Painting with New Eyes,” 34.   2 Meng Yue, The Edges of Empire, xv.

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  3 Wu Jen-shu, “Advertising Forms.”  4 Yeh, Shanghai Love, 4   5 Chu-tsing Li, “Looking at Late Qing Painting,” 34. The term Haipai was also used to describe opera, see Meng Yue, Shanghai and the Edges of Empire.   6 Hay, “Painters and Publishing.”  7 Yeh, Shanghai Love, 34.   8 For examples, see Silberstein, “Fashioning the Foreign.”   9 Peabody Essex Museum, E302694; see Connor, “Western Themes in Chinese Design”; also Vollmer, Ruling from the Dragon Throne, 131. 10 Zamperini, “Clothes That Matter”; Yeh, Shanghai Love, 143–56. 11 Rawski, “Economic and Social Foundations,” 29. 12 Breen, “The Meaning of Things,” 252. 13 For a similar example of this silk, with a brand-mark “Treasury gold (Cloud Brocade) genuinely woven by Fang Yongtai’s Looms” (Fang Yongtai benji zhen kujin), see Huang Nengfu et al., Zhongguo Nanjing yun jin. 14 The sexagenary cycle used to mark years in historical China means the other possibility would be 1906 (Guangxu), but stylistically the jacket fits the Daoguang era. 15 Other examples include sleeve-bands with lengthy calligraphic section (Jordan Schnitzer, MWCH44–136); sleeve-bands with landscapes and poetic couplets, with the shop name “Yi chang gongji” on the back (AMNH, 70/2281); sleeve-bands with poetry and auspicious motifs (ROM, 930x50.3b); and sleeve-bands embroidered with ladies in boats playing musical instruments and poetic couplets signed by Yu Quan (RISD, 34.672ab). 16 Shanghai Fangzhi Fushi Bowuguan, ed., Zhenchen shang de shuhua, 18. 17 Zhu Qiqian, Nühong zhuan zheng lüe (1900), 25a, citing Gu dong suoji. 18 Li Baokai, Piling huazheng lu (1933), juan xia.23. 19 Hanshang Mengren, Feng yue meng, 5.5, adapted from Hanan, trans., Courtesans and Opium, 5.40. The Huizhen ji story by Yuan Zhen (779–831) was the original story behind The Story of the Western Chamber. Drunken Shi Xiangyun sleeping in a bed of peonies refers to an incident from The Story of the Stone (chap. 62). 20 Yeh, Shanghai Love, 156. 21 Wang Shixing (1546–98), Guang zhi yi, cited in Wei Minghua, The Thin Horses of Yangzhou, 53. 22 Starr, “The Aspirant Genteel.” 23 Mann, Precious Records, 122–23; Cahill, Pictures for Use, 157–58. 24 Xiaorong Li, “Gender and Textual Politics.” 25 Rawski, Education and Popular Literacy in Ch’ing China, 6–8. 26 Hanshang, Feng yue meng, 25.8; Hanshang, Courtesans and Opium, trans. Hanan, 25.244. The golden needle reference is likely sexual. 27 Barthes, The Fashion System, 240–44. 28 Qin, “Chifeng bowuguan cang san jian Qing gongzhu paofu,” 43–45. 29 Clunas, Superfluous Things, 167; Wright, “Chinese Decorated Letter Papers,” 111. 30 Poet Su Hui (ca. 380–440) wove a brocade measuring one square foot with eight hundred palindromic (hui wen) words that could be read from any angle, to express her love for her husband who was away in battle (Jin shu, “Dou tao Qi Sushi”). The poem “Song of Resentment” (Yuan gexing), conventionally attributed to Consort Ban (Ban Jieyu, c. 48–6 bce) of the Han Emperor Chengdi court (r. 33–7 bce), uses a fan, cut from new white silk and discarded in autumn, as a metaphor for the court beauty’s fate. 31 Silberstein, “A Collection of Snipped Rosy Clouds.” 32 Von Spee, ed., Printed Image in China, 91. 33 Pagani, “From Woodblock to Textile.” 34 Zhu Qiqian, Nühong zhuan zheng lüe (1900), 21b–22a, citing Yan Heng nu shi shuo. 35 Li Fang, Zhongguo yishu jiazheng lue, 1.26, citing Luo chuang xiao du. 36 Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular,’” 448–49.

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37 Cao, Hong lou meng, 74.1048–49; adapted from Cao, The Story of the Stone, trans. Hawkes, 3.74.459. 38 Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, 34. 39 Silk, 106; Shen, Xue Huan xiu pu (1919), 813–16. 40 Zhu Feng, “Su xiu fazhan jianshi,” 125. For example, Lian Ying’s wife was famed for the lifelike realism of her embroidered Buddhist figure, no matter what angle the work was viewed; Zhu Qiqian, Nühong zhuan zheng lüe (1900), 24. 41 The 1911 Hunan embroidery price list in appendix 3 listed and priced products at three levels: top, medium, and ordinary quality, suggesting that social distinction through materiality was a matter of degree rather than sharply separated dichotomies. 42 Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 123–24. This resulted in what he obliquely termed “a refinement of methods, a resort to subtler contrivances.” 43 Simmel, “Fashion” (1904). 44 Songjiang fu zhi (Chongzhen, 1631), 7.186a, “Ranse zhi bian.” 45 Pin referred to aniline colors, e.g., pin lan (also pin yue) and pin lü. Aniline red was called gui zi and cai se. See Silk (1881), 92, 96. On the dyeing industry, see Fan, Jiangnan sichou shi yanjiu, 381–88. 46 Li Dou, Yangzhou hua fang lu (preface 1793), 9.194. 47 Zhaolian, Xiaoting xulu, in BPFSLZ, 236, “Fushi yange.” 48 His posthumous name was Fu Wenxiang, the name that Zhaolian uses. 49 Tong Qianmeng (Daoguang period), Longjiang zhuzhici, juan xia.7; Wenkang, Ernü yingxiong zhuan (1878), 15.169. 50 QBLC, 13.6191. Gao Chunming, Zhongguo fushi mingwu kao, 567. 51 Schneider, “Cloth and Clothing,” 208; also Sewell, “The Empire of Fashion.” 52 McMahon, “Cultural Destiny and Polygynous Love in Zou Tao’s Shanghai Dust”; on the relationship to Hong lou meng, see also Yeh, Shanghai Love, 170. 53 Zou Tao, Haishang chentian ying (preface 1896), 7.77. On Zou Tao, see Yeh, Shanghai Love, 162–65, 190–94. 54 On long descriptions as the norm in the late Qing novel, see Zamperini, “Clothes That Matter,” 196. 55 Hanshang, Feng yue meng; for example, 5.4–5. 56 Wenkang, Ernü yingxiong zhuan, for example 15.174. 57 Xi, Xingshi yinyuan zhuan (ca. 1628–61), 7.98. 58 Cao, Hong lou meng, for example, 1.3.91. 59 On clothing consumption in the late Qing novel as expression of modernity, see Zamperini, “Clothes That Matter.” 60 For further discussion of the novel in dress history, see Roche, The Culture of Clothing, 18–20. For a general overview of dress in Chinese novels, see Yan, Zhongguo gudai xiaoshuo fushi miaoxie yanjiu. 61 Li Lüyuan, Qi lu deng (1748–77), 31.289. 62 Barthes, The Fashion System, 15–16. 63 Hanan, “Fengyue meng and the Courtesan Novel,” 358. 64 Barthes, The Fashion System, 15. 65 Ibid., 13–14. 66 The fashion system centered upon a study of two French women’s magazines from June 1958–59—Elle (popular weekly) and Le Jardin des Modes (upmarket monthly). For critiques of the study’s methodological shortcomings and oversights, see Jobling, “Roland Barthes,” 11. 67 Barthes, The Fashion System, 215. 68 des Forges, Mediasphere Shanghai, 108. Wang Tao’s preface describes the novel’s origins in 1896; the earliest known edition dates to 1904. 69 Ibid., 11. 70 Ibid., 25.

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71 QBLC, 13.6186. 72 Barthes, The Fashion System, 239–43. 73 Ibid., xi–xii. 74 Wu Jen-shu, “Advertising Forms,” esp. 83–85, 88–91. 75 The 1881 customs report, Silk, describes ribbon production in numerous locations: Hankou (p. 38), Kiukiang (Jiujiang) (pp. 40, 42); Chinkiang (Zhenjiang): 50–60 looms, 100 men (pp. 60–61); Nanjing: 3,000 looms, 4,000 men (p. 64); Suzhou: 2,000 looms (p. 74); Shanghai: 120 families (p. 83); Ningbo (p. 118); Canton (p. 151). Though Vollmer suggests the increase in production of silk ribbons was helped by the introduction of Jacquard mechanical looms in the 1840s (Clothed to Rule the Universe, 51), I have not found any evidence to prove this, and ribbon loom (jiu jiang) descriptions leave little reason to suppose that Western technology was necessary; e.g., Smith, Chinese Characteristics (1890), 200; Hommel, China at Work (1937), 186–88. 76 Silk, 64. 77 Ibid., 83. 78 Ibid., 40–41. In Suzhou, three-fourths of the silk used on their two thousand silk ribbon looms was imported from Huzhou, the rest was made locally (74). In Shanghai the silk came from Huzhou and Haining (83). 79 Ibid., 40–42, 60, 99, 101–5. 80 Foshan zhonggyi xiangzhi, 6.149, “Langan hang,” in HHSL. 81 Silk, 151 (Canton), 60 (Zhenjiang). 82 Catalogue of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Collection at the United States International Exhibition Philadelphia (1876), Class 242, “Ribbons, Plain, Fancy and Velvet.” 83 Caulfield and Saward, The Dictionary of Needlework (1882). 84 Hedde, Description méthodique (1848), 238–42. His collection is now in the Musée des Tissus de Lyon, see Privat-Savigny et al., Les prémices de la mondialisation. 85 Hedde, Description méthodique, 241, no. 742; also 240, no. 737. 86 Lunefoong’s shop is mentioned in Newmarch, Five Years in the East (1847), 1.312–13, “a collection of all sizes, sorts, and prices,” “well adapted to tempt purchasers.” Hedde’s writings also reference Lin-Hing, the most renowned manufacturer in Canton (Description méthodique, 238–39), whose shop stamp appears on numerous packets of embroidery threads in New England museum collections. 87 Silk, 100. 88 Dang hang zaji, 96. 89 Ibid., 101–11. 90 Ibid., 144. 91 Vuilleumier, The Art of Silk Weaving in China, 14. 92 Jacobsen, Imperial Silks, 480.

CONCLUSION

  1 Shenbao (March 30, 1880), cited in Yue Zheng, Jindai Shanghai ren shehui xintai, 106–7.   2 Zhu Qianfu, Haishang guangfu zhuzhici (1913), 26.   3 The ROM also has a Manchu lady’s robe with imported American trimming, ca. 1890 (952 × 107 cm).   4 QBLC, 13.6201, “Kuo xiu.”   5 QBLC, 13.6148, “Jiang Zhe ren zhi fushi.”   6 QBLC, 5.2395, “Hua xiu.”  7 Foshan zhongyi xiangzhi (1926), “Gu xiu hang,” in HHSL, 49.   8 Schneider, “Cloth and Clothing,” 209.   9 Yi’an Zhuren, “Hujiang shangye shi jingci,” in Gu Bingquan, ed., Shanghai yangchang zhuzhici, 167.

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10 Palmer and Clark, Old Clothes, New Looks, 99–100. 11 Finnane, Changing Clothes, chap. 5. 12 See Zhongguo Minzhu Jianguo Hui Shanghai Shiweiyuanhui, “Shanghai huabian chouxiu chanpin chukou shiliao”; Finnane, Changing Clothes, 110. 13 “Industrial School, Soochow, China,” 18–19. 14 Priest, Costumes from the Forbidden City. 15 Taylor, “Doing the Laundry,” 352. 16 Sewell, “The Empire of Fashion,” 118.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABBREVIATIONS

BJGSHG

Li Hua 李華. Ming Qing yilai Beijing gongshang huiguan beike xuanbian 明清以 來北京工商會館碑刻選編. Beijing: Wenwu Chubanshe, 1980.

BPFSLZ

Li Jiarui 李家瑞. Beiping fengsu leizheng 北平風俗類徵. Orig. pub. 1937; Shanghai: Shanghai Shudian, 1996.

BXDA

Sichuan Daxue Lishi Xi 四川大學歷史系, Sichuan Sheng Dang’an Guanzhu 四川 省档案馆主. Qing dai Qian Jia Dao Baxian dang’an xuanpian 清代乾嘉道巴縣 檔案選編. Chengdu: Sichuan Daxue Chubanshe, 1989.

GSZZC

Suzhou Wenhuaju 蘇州市文化局, ed. Gusu zhuzhici 姑蘇竹枝詞. Shanghai: Suzhou Shi Wenhua Ju; Baijia Chubanshe, 2002.

HHSL

Peng Zeyi 彭澤益. Zhongguo gongshang hanghui shiliao ji 中國工商行會史料集. Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1995.

HYDCD

Luo Zhufeng 羅竹風 et al., eds. Hanyu dacidian 漢語大詞典. Shanghai: Shanghai Cishu Chubanshe, 1986–94.

JSMQ

Jiangsu Sheng Bowuguan 江蘇省博物館, ed., Jiangsu Sheng Ming Qing yilai beike ziliao xuanji 江蘇省明清以來碑刻資料選集. Beijing: Shenghuo Dushu Xinzhi Sanlian Shudian, 1959.

LYC

Liu Yongcheng 劉永成. “Shilun Qing dai Suzhou shougongye hanghui” 試論清代 蘇州手工業行會. Lishi yanjiu 25 (1959): 21–46.

QBLC

Xu Ke 徐珂. Qing bai lei chao 清稗類鈔. Shanghai: Shang Wuyin Shuguan, 1917.

QDBJZZC Yang Miren 楊米人, ed. Qing dai Beijing zhuzhici, shisan zhong 清代北京竹枝詞: 十三種. Beijing: Beijing Guji Chubanshe, 1982. SHBK

Shanghai Bowuguan 上海博物館, ed. Shanghai beike ziliao xuanji 上海碑刻資料 選集. Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin Chubanshe, 1980.

SZGSY

Suzhou Lishi Bowuguan 蘇州歷史博物館, ed. Ming Qing Suzhou gongshangye beike ji 明淸蘇州工商業碑刻集. Nanjing: Jiangsu Renmin Chubanshe, 1981.

WHZZC

Xu Mingting 徐明庭, ed. Wuhan zhuzhici 武漢竹枝詞. Wuhan: Hubei Renmin Chubanshe, 1999.

|   2 4 3  |

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Zhu Chengru 朱誠如, ed. Qing shi tu dian: Qing chao tongshi tulu 淸史圖典 : 淸朝通史圖錄. Vol. 9. Beijing: Zijincheng Chubanshe, 2002. Zhu Feng 朱鳳. “Su xiu fazhan jianshi” 蘇繡發展簡史. Wenshi ziliao xuanji (Suzhou), no. 8 (1982): 121–36. Zhu Qianfu 朱謙甫. Haishang guangfu zhuzhici 海上光復竹枝詞. Shanghai: Minguo Diyi Tushuju, 1913. Zhu Qiqian 朱啓鈐. Cunsu tang si xiu lu 存素堂絲繡錄. Cunsu Tang, 1928. ———. Nühong zhuan zheng lüe 女紅傳徵略. Cunsu Tang, 1928. ———. Qing neifu cang kesi shuhua lu 清內府藏刻絲書畫錄. 1930. Reprint, Taipei: Shijie Shuju, 1960. ———. Si xiu biji 絲繡筆記. Cunsu Tang, 1930. Zong Fengying 宗鳳英. Qing dai gongting fushi 清代宮廷服飾. Beijing: Zijincheng Chubanshe, 2004. Zou Tao 鄒弢. Haishang chentian ying 海上塵天影. Guangxu edition. Reprint, Beijing: Beijing Airusheng Shuzihua Jishu Yanjiu Zhongxin, 2011.

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INDEX

accessories, 84, 92, 95, 97, 173; belts, 27, 48, 60, 62, 99; collars, 57, 62, 69, 81, 101, 183, 185, 222n67; hats, 65, 66, 84, 97, 123, 155, 198, 199, 201; producers of, 67, 83, 92, 95, 97; purses, 59, 62, 83, 91, 95, 97, 101, 150, 156, 167, 230n107. See also cloud collars; embroidery advertisements, 81, 97, 98fig., 100, 174, 175fig., 176, 185. See also marketing American Museum of Natural History, 135 antique motifs (bogu), 23–24, 163–66, 177, 180 antiques dealers, xi, xiii, xiv, xv, 69 ao jacket, 10, 35, 44, 53, 59, 172 applique motifs, paper sheets of, 57, 59, 66, 74, 75fig., 105–6, 135–36, 164, 165fig. audiences, for drama, 132, 134, 138, 145, 147, 149, 180, 235n44 auspicious meaning, 130, 160–62, 163, 167, 171, 177–79. See also motifs bamboo ballads (zhuzhici), 6, 62, 64, 86, 91, 110, 122, 151, 170, 181, 225n83; “Bamboo Ballads from Old Suzhou,” 77; as fashion source, 6, 15–16, 19, 30, 44, 61, 170, 181; “Fashions of the Times” (Shishi Zhuang), 49, 52; “New Words on the Fashions,” 42; Barthes, Roland, 153, 163, 173–74, 239n66 Baxandall, Michael, 167, 169 beauties, paintings of (shinü hua, meiren hua), 30–33, 35, 37, 124. See also under popular prints

beauties, popular prints of: education as theme in, 36fig., 37, 160–61fig.; and fashion, 16, 112–13fig.; of Suzhou women, 30, 31fig. 40fig., 108, 109fig.; of Yangliuqing women, 32fig., 33fig., 65fig. 181–82fig. Beijing: embroidery, 230n106, 232n153; shops in, xiv, 67, 89; fashions in, 15, 19–21, 25, 44 Beijing School (Jingpai), 154 beixin vest, 70, 72, 170 beizi jacket, 22, 57 belts, 27, 48, 60, 62, 99 bijia jackets, 22, 27 biography, 149; Brief Records of Needleworker Biographies, 110, 112, 113–14, 158, 166 boots. See shoes boudoir, 44, 61, 79, 91, 160, 170. See also embroiderers; gentlewomen; women boudoir embroidery (guige xiu), 108–9, 162, 164; idealization of, 78–79, 82, 110, 112, 158; and marketing, 100, 114; visuality of, 167–68. See also embroiderers; embroidery “bowed waist gaits,” 52 Boxer Rebellion, xiii, 182 brands, 64, 91–93, 96, 170, 201. See also marketing Bray, Francesca, 88 Cai Wenji, 143, 144fig., 180 calendars (yuefenpai), 139, 140fig.

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Cammann, Schuyler, xv Canton. See Guangzhou celebrations, 19, 34, 52–53, 88, 120, 122, 134 Changsha, embroidery of, 88, 96, 150 changyi robes, 39, 41, 44, 58 Chaozhou, 48, 142, 149; embroidery of, 87 Chen, BuYun, 5 chenyi robes, 25, 37, 38, 41, 42, 43, 44, 58 Chinese dress: as art, xii–xv, 7–9, 11, 180, 183–84, 187; as unchanging, xii, 3–4, 78, 179–80 Chongqing, embroidery of, 86–87, 88, 96 Chongyi, 39, 126 Cixi, Empress Dowager, 40 Cleveland Museum of Art, 154, 155 cloth. See cotton; silk(s); wool clothing: burial, 83, 91, 104; for celebration, 34, 52–53, 122, 126; colors in, 39, 40, 44, 46, 49, 53, 70, 123, 154, 167, 172; cost of, 66, 77; cotton, 7, 8, 47, 48, 56, 62, 123, 154; hufu (“Barbarian” or foreign dress), 54, 55; imperial, 78, 132; naming of, 151, 156, 169–71; of officials, xii, xiv, 23, 30, 55, 65, 113, 125; of poor people, 7, 83, 218n37; producers of, 11, 60, 64, 66, 69, 71, 78, 83, 91, 102–3, 123; regulations, 8, 21, 22–25, 26, 27, 58, 68, 220n32; of Republic period, 183–84; secondhand clothing (gu yi), xiii, xiv, 34, 71, 83, 184; shops, 34, 64–66, 67fig., 71, 83, 89, 174; simplicity in, 45, 47–49, 52, 183; specific styles of, 53, 57. See also other clothing entries clothing, articles of: “Ladies in the Garden” or “Water Garden” robe, xi–xii clothing, styles of: auspicious court dress (ji fu), 22, 24, 74, 125, 126; dragon robes (long pao), 7, 23–25, 65–66, 78, 88, 92, 97, 125, 183, 199–201; formal dress (li fu), 21, 25, 39; informal court dress (chang fu), 22, 37, 39, 40fig.; leisure dress (bian fu), 21, 22, 27. See also individual clothing types

cloud brocade (yun jin), 93, 156, 157fig., 238n13 cloud collars (yunjian), 26, 30–35, 39, 53, 70, 156, 170, 180, 185, 222n67 Clunas, Craig, 163 collars, 57, 62, 69, 81, 101, 183, 185, 222n67 collection(s): of Alex Bass, 70, 71; of Don J. Cohn, 137–38; of Isidore Hedde, 101, 177, 179, 240n84–86; Mactaggart Art (University of Alberta Museums), 20, 39, 42, 43, 44, 105, 106; museum, xii–xv, 7–8, 114, 120, 180, 184, 187; Murray Warner (Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art), 69–70. See also individual museums collectors of Chinese dress, xi, xii, 8, 9, 69, 79, 114, 120, 179–80, 183–84. See also museums, collections of Chinese dress in; and individual museums color(s): of clothing, 39, 40, 44, 46, 49, 53, 70, 123, 154, 167, 172; of embroidery, 81, 93, 105, 106, 107, 123, 167, 168; names of, xii–xiii, 169–70, 239n45; in painting, 17, 19; in prints, 37, 163, 164 commercialization, xv, 5–7, 8, 10, 60, 79, 86; and women, 78–79, 81, 88, 187; of textile handicrafts, 10, 58, 60, 65, 78, 88, 90, 91, 106, 114, 119, 120 concubines, 26, 29, 46, 61 confinement, domestic, 45, 62–69, 110–11 Confucian ideals, 8, 17, 45, 47–48, 49, 52–53, 62, 64 consorts. Seewomen: concubines; women: courtesans consumption, 5, 7, 8, 34, 21, 125, 156, 167, 170; of courtesans, 95; of gentlewomen, 62–63, 69, 79, 166; in Jiangnan region, 56, 125; of officials, 55–66, 83, 97, 113, 176; of princes, 15, 29, 125 cost: of clothing, 66, 77; of embroidery, 77, 88, 108, 113, 232n153; of silk, 60–61; of trimming, 60–61, 173, 181 costumes, theatrical, 78, 83, 88, 91, 126, 132, 235n34

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cotton: clothing, 7, 8, 47, 48, 56, 62, 123, 154, 200; industry, 56, 79–80, 92, 106, 108, 185, 227n20 court painting, 17, 21, 26–27, 28fig., 29, 37, 38fig., 39, 40fig., 42, 103, 124, 222n86 courtesan(s), 35, 160; consumption of, 95; fashion and, 29, 44, 146, 158–59, 171–72; of Jiangnan, 29–30, 35, 46, 64, 122–23, 154–55, 171–72; literature, 52, 146, 158–59, 171–72, 174; of Shanghai, 122–23, 135, 171; of Yangzhou, 35, 171–72 Craik, Jennifer, 4 curators, xi–xii, xv; scholarship of, xv, 5, 7, 78, 80, 180, 184 customs reports, 88, 103, 168, 240n75 da kanjian (sleeveless vest), 39, 222n92 Daoguang Emperor, 44, 158; court painting of, 17, 37, 38fig., 42, 222n86 Dauncey, Sarah, 5 Denver Art Museum, 144 dowry, 53, 46, 59, 108, 172; of Yu Qingceng, 53, 59, 79, 92, 170, 172, 193–96, 224n33 dragon robes. See under clothing, styles of drama: costumes for, 78, 83, 88, 91, 126, 132, 235n34; illustrations, 138, 143–45; The Fiery Stallion, 150, 151fig.; Gold Thread Pond, 124, 125fig.; The Insignia-Laden Bed, 88, 89fig., 122, 135, 147, 234n16; The Legend of the White Snake, 69, 70fig., 127, 135, 138, 139, 142, 147; The Pearl Pagoda, 127–28, 129fig., 130, 131fig., 132, 138, 148; The Story of the Hairpin and the Bracelet, 147, 148; The Story of the Jade Hairpin, 134, 142; The Story of the Western Chamber, 69, 71fig., 122, 132–37, 142, 145, 147, 178; The Tale of the Lychee Mirror, 142, 149–50, 237n78; Weaving Maiden and Cowherd, 142, 151; and zhezixi, 134, 137. See also audiences, for drama

dramatic anthologies, 123, 134; The Patched White Fur Robe, 138; The Red Coral Ballads, 134, 142 dramatic performance, 121, 123, 134 Dream of Red Chamber, The. See The Story of the Stone Dreams of Wind and Moon, 18fig., 19, 145–47, 158, 160, 161–62, 171–72, 177 dress. See clothing drinking games, 160 du Bose, Reverend Hampden C., 68 ecological disaster, 8, 47, 53, 55–56, 57, 61 economy, Qing, 6, 60, 62, 79–81, 84, 106–7 edicts. See regulations elite culture, 7, 17, 29, 154, 180 embroidered scenes: Cai Wenji and Wang Zhaojun, 143, 144fig., 180; The Fiery Stallion, 150, 151fig.; The Insignia-Laden Bed, 88, 89fig., 122, 135, 147, 234n16; The Legend of the White Snake, 69, 70fig., 138–39, 140fig.; meaning, 146–48; narrative, 120, 122–25, 126, 127–32, 133, 135–37, 138, 139–42, 143; palace women, 122, 123, 124fig.; The Pearl Pagoda, 127–32, 138; Peerless Figures, 139–42, 142fig.; poetry, calligraphy, and landscape, 156–58, 159fig., 160, 162–63, 180; steamships and foreigners, 154–55fig., 180; The Story of the Stone, 70fig., 146; The Story of the Western Chamber, 69, 71fig., 133fig., 135, 136fig.; “Su Wu bids farewell to Li Ling”, 120, 132, 135–37; Twenty-Four Scenes of Filial Classics, 106; Zhang Qian and the Weaving Maiden, 139, 141fig., 236n70–71 embroiderers: boudoir, 82, 114, 162, 168; commercial, 162, 168; female, 91, 103, 107, 108, 110, 112–13, 161, 184; images of, 101, 102fig., 103; Han Ximeng, 80, 82, 103, 107, 122; male, 80, 82, 86–88, 90–91, 100, 107–8; pay, 87, 107–8; rural, 100, 150–51, 168; Shen Shou, 168;

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embroiderers (continued) of Suzhou, 84–86, 102–6, 187; Xu Zhiguang, 87, 90; Zhang Shuying, 120 embroidery: of accessories, 59–60, 74, 77, 88, 91, 97, 113; of banners, 78, 97; color in, 81, 93, 105, 106, 107, 123, 167, 168; commercial, 80, 82, 84, 91, 95, 107, 114, 167; cost of, 77, 88, 108, 113, 232n153; European, 146–47, 185, 187; for export, 78, 87, 99; of furnishings, 78, 82, 97–99, 162; Gu-style (Gu xiu), 60, 74, 81–82, 85–86, 96–97, 100, 108, 122, 126, 172, 174–75, 180; guilds, 80–81, 84–88, 91, 100–101, 103, 107, 168; of longevity hangings, 88, 97; manuals, 71, 120, 168; middlemen, 100, 103, 106–7, 232n144; of the Ming dynasty, 81–82, 86, 120; needles, 78, 100, 168, 231n120; palace, 167; patterns for, 95, 100–101, 107, 136–37, 161–63, 164, 166; of pictures (hua xiu), 81, 113, 158; of purses, 59, 62, 83, 91, 95, 97, 101, 150, 156, 167, 230n107; rural, 99–100, 107; scissors, 91, 100, 101, 109fig.; of shoes, xiii, 8, 66, 83, 88, 107–8; shops, 70, 77, 91, 93, 96, 97, 98, 107, 114; of Song dynasty, 82, 168; status of, 111; stitches, 74, 84, 122, 168; stories about, 80; thread, 81, 93, 94fig., 100, 106, 107, 231n118–19; workshops, 87–88, 90, 91, 97, 102, 103, 107, 114, 168. See also boudoir embroidery; embroidered scenes; embroiderers; embroidery, regional styles of; European embroidery; lace embroidery, regional styles of: Beijing, 230n106, 232n153; Changsha, 88, 96, 150; Chaozhou, 87; Chongqing, 86, 88, 96, 229n69; Guangdong, 95, 97, 98fig., 108, 168; Guangzhou, 87–88, 90, 96, 97, 99–100; Hunan, 77, 88, 93, 95, 108, 183; Ningbo, 88, 101, 102fig., 107; Sichuan, 86, 95, 166. See also Suzhou embroidery embroidery pattern(s): books, 95, 161–62, 163, 164, 166; “A Collection of Snipped Rosy Clouds,” 163, 164fig.; “Figural Pat-

terns from the Green Window,” 95, 101, 136, 161–62fig., 164; “Gu Embroidery Patterns from Old Suzhou,” 95, 101, 136; producers of, 100–101, 107 emperors. See individual emperors encyclopedias, 101 Enjoying Pleasures (Xingle tu), 26–27, 29, 37, 42, 221n47,48, 222n86,89 Entwhistle, Joanne, 3 ethnicity as sartorial differentiation, 10, 41 European dress, xii–xiii, 58, 111 European embroidery, 146–47, 185, 187. See also lace European imports, 46, 61, 78, 177, 181, 185 exhibitions of Chinese dress, xi–xii, 47–48, 63, 149. See also museums, collections of Chinese dress in family instructions (jia xun), 47, 48, 63, 64, 149 Fan Jinmin, 30 fashion(s): in Beijing, 15, 19–21, 25, 44; in Chinese history, 3–10; courtesans and, 29, 44, 146, 158–59, 171–72; dynamic of, 4, 15, 66, 166–69, 170–71; Han style, 26–27, 38, 41–44, 126; Manchu style, 21, 25, 37–39, 39–44, 58, 67; media, 15, 173–76, 185, 219n3, 239n66; of the Ming dynasty, 9–10, 22, 29, 57, 77, 119, 169; modern, 173, 185; moral discourse and, 45, 47–48, 55, 62, 63, 64; naming of, 4, 34, 42, 172, 178; Qing, 11, 15–16, 19, 22, 25, 30, 32, 35; of the Republican period, 181–84; of Shanghai, 49, 51, 122, 185; status of, 11; of south versus north, 26, 27, 32–33, 42; in Suzhou, 15, 16, 29–30, 83; of the Tang dynasty, 4, 90, 119; and Western dress, 3, 55, 57, 62, 111, 170; of Yangzhou, 105, 170, 171–72. See also nineteenth-century fashion Fiery Stallion, The, 150, 151fig. figural imagery: in material culture, 64, 120, 122–23, 126, 132, 137–38, 147–48, 168 Finnane, Antonia, 5, 30

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folk costume, 4 folk embroidery. See embroiderers: rural; embroidery: rural folk songs, 132, 134, 142 foot-binding, 26, 110, 227n20 foreign dress (hufu, “Barbarian”), 54, 55 foreign fabrics, 19, 56, 58, 60, 61, 95, 174, 175, 181, 183, 185 Foreign Settlements, 154 foreign visitors, records of, 5, 7, 78, 101, 103, 108, 110, 111. See also trade, foreign foreign-manufactured trimmings, 58, 181, 183fig. Fortune, Robert, 8 Foshan, 87, 96, 176, 177, 183 frugality, 47–48, 49, 61, 63. See also moral discourse Fu Kang’an, 170 fur, 21, 47, 53, 62, 200 Furth, Charlotte, 52 fuyao (outrageous dress), 8, 47, 53–57, 61 Fuzhou, 57, 112, 136, 154 gauze, 10, 69, 92, 104, 170, 174–75, 193–96 gazetteer(s), 81, 82, 84, 87, 92, 103, 108, 112, 126, 150, 183 gender, 68, 78, 80, 86–91, 108, 112. See also men; women gentlewomen (guixiu), 108, 112, 155, 160–61; confinement of, 45, 62–69, 111; consumption of, 62–63, 69, 79, 166. See also embroiderers: boudoir; women gods, guild, 84, 88 gold: thread, 60, 92, 100, 113, 230n100, 231n119 Gold Thread Pond, 124, 125fig. Gong Wei, 56, 125 gown. See clothing Grand Canal, 37, 42, 153 Gray, Reverend John Henry, 66, 96 Gu family, embroiderers, 81–82, 85, 86, 100 Gu Lu, 181, 184, 187 Gu Mingshi, 81, 84–86, 88 Gu Zhentao, 65, 69, 92, 201, 176 Guan Tong, 61

Guangdong, province, 69, 78, 89; embroidery of, 95, 97, 98fig., 108, 168 Guangfu, 104, 108, 232n138,140 Guangxu Emperor, 42, 182 Guangzhou (Canton), xiii, 9, 80, 154, 177; embroidery of, 87–88, 90, 96, 97, 99–100; He Shunyang Silk Shop, 93, 94fig.; Lunefoong, 177–78; shops of, 66, 92, 93, 94, 96; manufacture and Suzhou design, 95–96; silk production of, 95, 136–37, 176–77; trade, xiii, 78, 93, 99, 154 Guo, Prince, xi, 11, 123–24, 126 Guo Qiyuan, 56 guild(s): in Chongqing, 86–87, 88; embroidery, 80–81, 84–88, 91, 100–101, 103, 107, 168; gender and, 86, 87, 88; gods, 84, 88; in Guangzhou, 87; of handicraft producers, 83, 88; regulations of, 84, 86–87, 88, 100; in Suzhou, 84–86, 91, 101–3, 107, 229n54; tailor, 83, 88, 115 Gu-style embroidery, 81–82, 126, 172, 180; and marketing, 74, 96–97, 100, 108, 122, 174–75; and Wu region, 60, 85–86 Gusu prints, 30–32 Haipai (Shanghai School), 44, 153–54, 238n5 hairstyles, 26, 30, 32, 38, 41, 42, 68 Han Chinese: dress styles, 21, 26–27, 38, 41–44, 54, 55, 126; and Manchu culture, 21–27, 42. See fashion(s): Han style Han Ximeng, 80, 82, 103, 107, 122 Hanan, Patrick, 173 handicrafts: guilds, 83, 88; production, 6, 60, 92, 104, 107, 119, 145; workers, pay of, 87, 107–8 Hangzhou, 6, 15, 102, 177; silks of, 6, 92, 93 hats, 65, 66, 84, 97, 123, 155, 198, 199, 201 Hay, Jonathan, 49 Hedde, Isidore, 101, 177, 179, 240n84–86 Henan, 34 Hinsch, Bret, 80 horseshoe cuffs (matixiu), 21. See under sleeves

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Hu Shiyu, 15, 42, 55, 56 Huang Ang, 47 Huang Jingben, 53 Huang Lao, 84 Huang Sheng, 57 Huang Yifen (Ifen Huang), 82 hufu (“Barbarian” or foreign dress), 54, 55 Hunan, 30, 100; embroidery of, 77, 88, 93, 95, 108, 183 Huzhou, silks of, 8, 53, 92, 93, 94fig., 172, 193–96, 197 imperial consorts (xiu nü), 25–27, 37, 40, 58 imperial design, 103, 125, 222n86 imperial dress, 21, 22, 24, 25, 37, 39, 40fig., 74, 125, 126 imperial histories, 53, 54 imperial painting, 17, 21, 26–27, 28fig., 29, 37, 38fig., 39, 40fig., 42, 103, 124, 222n86 imperial weaving workshops (zhi zao ju), 10, 56, 65, 66, 231n131; loom-marks from, 25; of Nanjing, 25, 198n7; and production of embroidered dress, 102–3, 107, 113, 232n153; of Suzhou, 25, 167 inner household, style of (nei zao yang), 15, 29 Inner Mongolia, 23, 25 Insignia-Laden Bed, The, 88, 89fig., 122, 135, 147, 234n16 Items of Instruction (Xunsu tiaoyue), 60–61 jackets. See specific types jackets, embroidered, 60; antique motifs, 164–65, 166, 167, 180; “narrative medley” scenes, 139, 141fig., 142; poetry, calligraphy, and landscape, 156–59, 159fig., 163; scenes from The Pearl Pagoda, 127–32, 138; scenes from The Story of the Western Chamber, 69, 71fig., 132, 133fig., 135–37, 178–79 Japanese collections, 30, 108 jewelry, 7, 42, 49 Jia Yi, 124

Jiangnan region, 9, 153; consumption of, 55–56, 125; courtesan culture of, 29–30, 35, 46, 64, 122–23, 154–55, 171–72; textile handicrafts, 60, 79, 86, 92, 100, 104, 185. See also Nanjing, Suzhou, Yangzhou Jin Anqing, 15, 46, 55 Johnson, David, 9 Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, xiv, 69, 70fig., 71fig., 141 Kangxi Emperor, xi, 7, 23, 27 kesi tapestry, 60, 69, 81, 95 Ko, Dorothy, 81, 219n47 lace, 181, 183fig., 185 Lantern at the Crossroads, A, 48, 172 Lay, Tradescent, 110, 136 Legend of the White Snake, The, 69, 70fig., 127, 135, 138, 139, 142, 147 Li Ciming, 66 Li Dou, 105, 126, 170, 232n141 Li Guangting, 59, 89–90 Li Lüyuan, 48 Li Yu, 34, 35 Li Yuhang, 122 Lin Liyue, 5 Lin Sumen, 34 Lipovetsky, Gilles, 3, 19 literacy, 11–12, 145, 156, 160–61; motifs of, 35, 36fig., 119, 123, 156–62 literati culture, 17, 49, 156, 161 literature. See novels “local products” (wu chan, te chan), 84, 92, 93 Lu Meiniang, 80 luxury, 5, 8, 47–48, 61, 125 magazines, 173, 185, 239n66 Manchu: craftsmen, 67; culture, 21, 22; fashions, 21, 25, 37–39, 39–44, 58, 67. See also changyi robes; chenyi robes Mann, Susan, 86, 108, 229n67 manuals. See embroidery

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marketing, 92, 96, 99–100, 176. See also brands markets: in China, 5, 6, 78, 79–80, 92, 93, 95, 176–77; export, 66, 78, 84, 93 Marriage Destinies to Awaken the World, 22, 172 material culture, 6, 79, 81, 180; decorated with narrative scenes, 119–22, 123–24, 127–37, 138–46; methodologies of, 5–6, 9, 173; and women, 11, 29, 47–48, 53, 61, 62, 69, 150, 147–51 McKendrick, Neil, 3 men: as embroiderers, 80, 82, 86–88, 90–91, 100, 107–8; as peddlers, 68–69, 99, 100; as textile workers, 88–91 merchants, 8, 66, 115, 153–54, 176. See also trade, foreign Metropolitan Museum of Art, xi–xii, xiv Miller, Milton, 99 Ming dynasty, 134; embroidery of, 81–82, 86, 120; fashions of, 9–10, 22, 29, 57, 77, 119, 169; printing and publishing, 138 Minneapolis Institute of Art, xii, xiv, 133, 135, 136 missionaries, 68, 78, 96, 100, 185, 187 modularity, 68–69, 74, 105 moral discourse, 8; of clothing, 47–48, 49, 61, 63; and fashion, 44, 45, 47–48, 55, 62–64; and women, 29, 45, 47, 69, 74, 91 motifs: antique (bogu), 23–24, 163–66, 177, 180; auspicious, 130, 160–62, 167, 171, 177–79; erotic, 29, 167; of fertility, 112, 160; of literacy, 35, 36fig., 123, 156–62; longevity, 39, 70, 108, 171, 177, 179fig. See also figural imagery Mukerji, Chandra, 16 Musée de Tissus, 177 Museum of Fine Arts, xiv, 141 museums, collections of Chinese dress in, xii–xv, 7–8, 114, 120, 180, 184, 187. See also collection(s); exhibitions of Chinese dress; and individual museums

names: of clothing, 151, 156, 169–71; color, xii–xiii, 169–70, 239n45; for fashion, 4, 34, 42, 172, 178; for silks, 4, 71–72, 92–93, 172, 178; of trimmings, 56, 59, 156, 174, 176–79 Nanjing, 30, 35, 46; cloud brocade (yun jin), 93, 156, 157fig., 238n13; imperial workshop production, 25, 102; silks of, 6, 8, 84, 92, 93, 156, 157, 171, 176, 238n13 narrative: as decoration on material culture, 119–22, 123–24, 127–37, 138–46; embroidered scenes of, 120, 122–25, 126, 127–32, 133, 135–37, 138, 139–42, 143; oral, 120, 127, 132, 235n45 National Silk Museum (Hangzhou), 70–71, 72 needle(s), 78, 100, 168, 231n120 needlework, Western styles of, 146–47, 185, 187 “Needlework Goddess”, 114 Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, xi, 124 Neo-Confucianism, values of. See Confucian ideals newspapers, 46, 85, 155, 174–76, 185 nianhua. See popular prints nineteenth century, 6–7, 60, 66, 127, 138, 139; art, 7, 17, 153, 219n14; and notions of decline, 7, 79, 138, 143, 147, 180 nineteenth-century fashion, 8, 105, 154, 171; dynamic of, 15, 44, 49; images of, 33, 39; trends of, 11, 35, 42, 57–58, 170, 180 Ningbo, 154, 177; embroidery of, 88, 101, 102fig., 107 novels, 22, 171–72; courtesan literature, 52, 146, 158–59, 171–72, 174; Dreams of Wind and Moon, 18fig., 19, 145–47, 158, 160, 161–62, 171–72, 177; illustrations of, 18–19; A Lantern at the Crossroads, 48, 172; Marriage Destinies to Awaken the World, 22, 172; The Plum in the Golden Vase, 5, 10, 22, 29; The Scholars, 134; Shanghai Dust, 10,

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novels (continued) 171–72, 174, 176, 177; The Story of the Stone, 57, 68, 69, 70, 82, 135, 146, 167, 172; Tales of Heroic Lovers, 33, 58, 171–72 nügong. See women’s work object inscriptions, 81, 106, 157–58 officials, 65–66, 83, 138, 151, 154, 176; clothing of, xii, xiv, 23, 30, 55, 65, 113, 125; consumption of, 55–66, 83, 97, 113, 176 opera. See drama Opium Wars, xiii, 79, 184 painting(s): of beauties (shinü hua, meiren hua), 30–33, 35, 37, 124; colors in, 17, 19; court, 17, 21, 26–27, 28fig., 29, 37, 38fig., 39, 40fig., 42, 124, 103, 124, 222n86; erotic, 29–30, 35; jiaqing tu (family auspicious pictures), 19, 20fig., 21; literati, 17, 82, 138, 154, 158; needlework (hua xiu), 81, 113, 158; professional, 17, 19, 39, 70, 115; of shops, 66–67fig., 70, 74fig., 92; urban scrolls, 64–66, 89; vernacular, 17, 35; watercolor, 66, 67, 74, 92; Xingle tu (Enjoying Pleasures), 26–27, 29, 37, 42, 221n47,48, 222n86,89 Palace Museum, 42, 74, 125 paper-cut, patterns, 88, 107, 110, 120, 135, 136fig., 177–78 Parker, Roszika, 146 patterns, embroidery. See embroidery pattern(s) pawnshop texts, 6, 92, 93, 156, 178–80, 227n2 Peabody Essex Museum, xv; clothing of, 127–28, 130–31, 155, 236n59, 238n9; paintings of, 66–67, 74; photography of, 51; textiles of, 177, 230n105 Pearl Pagoda, The, 127–28, 129fig., 130, 131fig., 132, 138, 148 peddlers, 68–69, 99, 100 Peerless Figures (Wu shuang pu), 139, 141–2fig., 236n73

Petterson Museum, 151 Philadelphia Museum of Art, 140 photographers: Milton Miller, 99; John Thomson, 41, 83, 107, 121 photography, 41fig., 51fig., 57, 62, 63fig., 99fig., 121fig., 127 pifeng, 33, 126 The Plum in the Golden Vase, 5, 10, 22, 29 poetry: The Bell of Qing Poetry (Qing shi duo), 54, 89; Classic of Poetry (Shi jing), 89, 223n23; embroidered on dress, 156–58, 159fig., 160, 162–63, 180; “Encountering Sorrow,” 166; “Male Embroiderers,” 54; Song and Tang classic, 90, 156, 158, 160. See also bamboo ballads Polhemus, Ted, 4 Pomeranz, Kenneth, 3 popular culture, 10, 11, 115, 151, 166, 234n2 popular prints (nianhua), 93, 103, 187, 130, 166; color in, 37, 163, 164; depicting narrative, 127, 129fig., 130, 131fig., 142, 143fig., 143–44fig.; as fashion source, 16, 17, 30–33, 35–40, 64–65, 160–61, 181– 82; Gusu, 30–32, 103; Shanghai, 127, 139; Taohuawu (Suzhou), 17, 30, 35, 37–38, 64, 85, 108, 115, 123, 127, 143; women’s labor in, 37; workshops, 33, 36, 37, 84, 127, 140, 143, 144; Yangliuqing, 17, 32, 33, 35, 37, 38, 142, 160–61, 181; Yangjiabu (Weixian). See also beauties, popular prints of populuxe, 8, 59 porcelain, 44, 79, 120, 123, 124–25, 132, 138–42, 145fig. portraits: of Daoguang Emperor and family, 37–38fig., 222n86; of Empress Xiaoquancheng, 38, 39, 40fig.; of Prince Yinzhen (Yongzheng Emperor), 26, 27, 28fig., 29, 221n48; of Wang Yuyan, 49–50fig. Priest, Alan, xii, 187 prince(s): consumption of, 15, 29, 125; Guo, xi, 11, 123–24, 126; Pujie, 67;

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Yinzhen (Yongzheng Emperor), 26, 27, 28fig., 29, 221n48 Princess Rongxian, 23–25, 126, 163 prints. See popular prints; publishers printshops, 33, 36, 37, 84, 127, 140, 143, 144 producer(s): of accessories, 67, 83, 92, 95, 97; of clothing, 11, 60, 64, 66, 69, 71, 78, 83, 91, 102–3, 123; handicraft, 86, 87, 88, 91, 100–107; marks, 81, 91–93, 230n105; systems, 78, 81, 87, 95, 100, 114–15 product, wrappings (fangdan), 81, 93, 94fig. prostitutes. See courtesans protoindustrialization, 80, 106 publishers, 11, 96, 138, 154 Pujie, Prince, 67 Purdy, Daniel, 16 purses. See under accessories putting-out systems, 106–7 Puyuan, 126, 197, 199, 200 Qian Yong, 47 Qianlong Emperor, 7, 22, 25, 27, 64, 75, 220n22; paintings depicting, 27, 221n47–48 Qing dress. See clothing; fashion Qing empire, collapse of, xiii, xiv, 181–82, 183, 184 qipao, 185–86fig. rank badges, 21, 65, 74, 104, 112, 125, 183, 200 Rawski, Evelyn, 160 Record of Carriages and Dress, The (Yu fu zhi), 6, 220n32 regional styles: of embroidery, 82–83, 95, 96, 228n40, 230n106; of material culture, 8–9, 92–93, 178. See also embroidery, regional styles of regulations: dress, 8, 21, 22–25, 26, 27, 58, 68, 220n32; guild, 84, 86–87, 88, 100 Republican period, 181–84 Rhode Island School of Design Museum, xiv, xv, 94, 136 ribbons. See trimmings

ritual(s), 52–53, 54, 83 robes. See clothing; fashion Roche, Daniel, 16 Rong, Imperial Consort (Rong Fei), 25 Rongxian, Princess, 23–25, 163 roundels, 125, 126; auspicious meaning of, 125, 132; of dragons, 23, 125; of The Fiery Stallion, 150, 151fig.; of floral motifs, 74, 75fig., 125, 126; of military romance scenes, 72fig.; “narrative medley”, 137, 139; of palace lady scenes, xi, 123–25; of The Story of the Stone, 69, 70fig.; of The Story of the Western Chamber, 69, 71fig., 122, 133fig., 135 Rowe, William, 86–87 Royal Ontario Museum, xii, xiv, 75, 93, 94, 156, 157, 230n105 Ruyi guan. See imperial painting Scholars, The, 134 scissors, 91, 100, 101, 109fig. secondhand clothes (gu yi), xiii, xiv, 34, 71, 83, 184 Shan Guoqiang, 27 shan jackets, 22, 35, 41, 44, 59, 72, 172 Shandong, 37, 150, 172, 185 Shanghai, 42, 96, 138, 153–56; courtesans of, 122–23, 135, 171; fashion of, 49, 51, 122, 185; printing industry, 127, 138, 139, 153; style (Haipai), 44, 153–54, 238n5 Shanghai Donghua University Museum, 158, 186–87, 220n103 Shanghai Dust, 10, 171–72, 174, 176, 177 Shen Chiran, 54, 59 Shen Shou, 168 shenyi, 54, 56 Shi Chengjin, 48, 69 shoes: court, 65, 66; embroidered, xiii, 8, 66, 83, 88, 107–8; producers of, 91, 107, 200 shopping, 62–69 shops, 68, 93; in Beijing, xiv, 67, 89; Caiyuan Embroidery Shop, 97–98fig.; clothing, 34, 64–66, 67fig., 71, 83, 89, 174; embroidery, 70, 77, 91, 93, 96,

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shops (continued) 107, 114; in Guangzhou, 66, 92, 93, 94, 96; He Shunyang Silk Shop, 93, 94fig.; paintings of, 66–67fig., 70, 74fig., 92; silk, 64–65, 67, 70, 71, 74fig., 93, 106, 174–76; in Suzhou, 64, 92, 95; tailor, 34, 64–66, 67fig., 71, 83, 89, 174, 198, 200 Shunde, 87 Shunzhi Emperor, 27 Sichuan, province, 9, 92: embroidery of, 86, 95, 166; silks of, 92, 193–96 silk(s): account houses, 106, 198n6; cost of, 60–61; designs, 22, 25, 57, 92, 156, 178, 180; districts producing, 8, 77, 84; for domestic markets, 92; for export, 78, 84; Guangzhou, 95, 136–37, 176–77; Hangzhou, 6, 92, 93; Huzhou, 8, 53, 92, 93, 94fig., 172, 193–96, 197; names of, 4, 71–72, 92–93, 172, 178; Nanjing, 6, 8, 84, 92, 93, 156, 157fig., 171, 176, 238n13; Ningchou, 53, 92, 151, 172, 193–96, 197; producer branding of, 91, 93, 175, 238n13; Sichuan, 92, 193–96; shops, 64–65, 67, 70, 71, 74fig., 93, 106, 174– 76; Suzhou production of, 6, 65, 84, 92, 93, 100, 106; thread, 81, 93, 94fig., 100, 106, 107, 231n118–19. See also cloud brocade; gauze; kesi tapestry Simmel, George, 29, 169 Sirr, Henry Charles, Sir, 101 Six Records of a Floating Life, 135 skirts, pleated, 27, 112 sleeve-bands, embroidered, 54–55, 58, 69, 81, 95, 97, 105, 177, 178, 180, 183, 232n141; with scenes of Cai Wenji and Wang Zhaojun, 143, 144fig., 180; with poetry, 156, 158, 238n15; with zodiac animals and dramatic scenes, 139, 140fig. sleeves, 23, 44, 52, 69, 182, 183; embellishment of, 25, 39, 57–58; folded sleeve band (huan xiu), 105; horsehoe cuffs (matixiu), 21; significance of, 26, 54–55 Song dynasty, 82, 168

Songjiang, 81, 82, 86, 106 stitches, embroidery, 74, 84, 122, 168 Story of the Hairpin and the Bracelet, The, 147, 148 Story of the Jade Hairpin, The, 134, 142 Story of the Stone, The, 57, 68, 69, 70, 82, 135, 146, 167, 172 Story of the Western Chamber, The, 69, 71fig., 122, 132–37, 142, 145, 147, 178 “Su Wu bids farewell to Li Ling,” 120, 132, 135–37 sumptuary regulations. See regulations: dress Suzhou, 82, 85fig., 95, 177; courtesans of, 15; design and Guangzhou manufacture, 95–96; fashions of, 15, 16, 29–30, 83; guilds, 84–86, 91, 101–3, 107, 229n54; handicraft shops, 64, 92, 95; handicraft workshops, 60, 95; imperial workshops, 25, 102, 167; silk industry of, 6, 65, 84, 92, 93, 100, 106, 197; and Wu region, 60, 61, 79–80, 103, 108, 125. See also Gusu prints; Suzhou embroidery; Taohuawu prints Suzhou embroidery: extant objects of, xi, 163, 167; and Gu embroidery, 82; and imperial workshops, 102–3; and missionary workshops, 187; production of, 84–86, 104, 106–7; reputation of, 95–96, 183 symbolism. See motifs tailors, 66, 69, 88, 123; guilds, 83, 115; shops, 34, 64–66, 67fig., 71, 83, 89, 174; status of, 88–89, 91, 185 Taiping Rebellion, xiii, xiv, 84, 103, 127, 138, 154, 176, 184 tanci narratives, 123, 127, 132, 149 Taohuawu prints, 17, 30, 35, 37–38, 64, 85, 108, 115, 123, 127, 143. See also popular prints Tale of the Lychee Mirror, The, 142, 149–50, 237n78 Tales of Heroic Lovers, 33, 58, 171–72

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Tang dynasty, 5, 90, 122 temples, 64, 67, 68, 84–85 textile handicrafts, commercialization of, 87–88, 103–4, 114, 119; and moral discourse, 60; and official dress, 65; and Qing fashion, 10, 58; and women’s work, 78, 90–91 textile industry: and fashion, 5; and Qing economy, 79–80, 83–84, 92–93, 100, 106–8. See also cotton; silk(s); wool Textile Museum, 165 Thomson, John, 41, 83, 107, 121 thread: embroidery, 81, 93, 94fig., 100, 106, 107, 231n118–19; gold, 60, 92, 100, 113, 230n100, 231n119 Tianjin, xiv, 17, 42, 59, 158 tomb, 56, 120; of Consort Rong, 25; epitaphs, 108; of Huang Sheng, 57; of Prince Guo, xi, 11, 123–24, 126; of Princess Rongxian, 23–25, 163 Tong Qianmeng, 91 “toothache smiles”, 52 tourism, xiii, xiv, 92, 181 trade, foreign, xiii, 78–79, 87, 93, 99, 101, 154, 177 Treaty of Nanjing, xiii, 154 treaty ports, xiv, 78, 99, 185 trimmings, 40–41, 42, 56–59, 173; “banner borders,” 42, 56, 60; cost of, 60–61, 173, 181; “devil borders” (guizi langan), 42, 56, 60; embroidered, 69, 70fig., 138, 146, 180; in European dress, 58; of foreign manufacture, 58, 181, 183fig.; naming of, 56, 59, 156, 174, 176–79; producers of, 83, 176–79; samples, 177–78fig.; sets of, 105, 151. See also applique motifs; cloud collar trousers, 181–83 trousseau, 46, 53, 78, 79, 92, 108, 170, 172. See also dowry Twenty-Four Scenes of Filial Classics, 106, 121 University of Alberta Museums (Mactaggart Art Collection), 20fig., 39, 42

urban culture, 7, 42; and bamboo ballads, 19; and fashion, 10, 49, 184; and Shanghai, 153–54, 173–74; and workshops, 17, 30; urban scrolls, 64–66, 89 Veblen, Thorstein, 29, 111–12, 169, 239n42 vernacular prints. See popular prints vests, 22, 39, 166, 170. See also beixin vest; da kanjian Victorian, society, 111, 187 vintage styles, 4 Vuilleumier, Bernard, 180, 217n7 Wang Xiujuan, 108 Wang Yuyan, 49, 50fig. Wang Zhaojun, 143, 144, 151, 180 Warner, Gertrude Bass, 69 weaving, 108 Weaving Maiden and Cowherd, 142, 151 weddings, 34 West Lake, crepe, 92 Western dress as fashion, xii–xiii, 111. See also European dress women, 11, 68; agency of, 62, 147, 148; biographical accounts of, 45–46, 62, 64, 69, 81, 87, 110, 113, 146, 158; concubines, 26, 29, 46, 61; courtesans, 46, 68, 158, 160, 162, 171–72; and culture, 184, 187; and domestic confinement, 45, 62–69, 110–11; and drama, 35, 46, 63, 108, 110; and economy, 187; education of, 35, 48, 79; embroiderers, 91, 103, 107, 108, 110, 112–13, 161, 184; gentlewomen (guixiu), 108, 112, 149, 155, 160–61; imperial consorts (xiu nü), 25–27, 37, 40, 58; and leisure, 110, 111, 112, 166, 174; and literacy, 160–62; and material culture, 11, 29, 47–48, 53, 61, 62, 69, 150, 147–51; and narrative, 120; san gu liu po (three aunts and six grannies), 69, 227n115; and shopping, 62–74, 185. See also gender

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women’s work, 78, 80, 108, 111, 112, 185; in embroidery industry, 103, 107, 108, 110–13, 161; and men’s work, 86–88, 89–91; in print industry, 37 woodblock printing, 120, 163–64, 166 wood-carvings, 120–21 wool, 46, 61, 123 workshop(s), 66, 78, 79, 100, 103, 105, 115, 168; branding, 92–93, 96; embroidery, 87–88, 90, 91, 97, 102, 103, 107, 114, 168; in Guangzhou, 168; handicraft, 60; male workers in, 79, 88. See also imperial weaving workshops Wu Hung, 99 Wu Jen-shu, 5, 154, 176, 221n59 Wu region, 60, 61, 79–80, 103, 108, 125 Xiamen (Amoy), 100, 150, 154 Xianfeng Emperor, 38, 39, 44, 58; court painting of, 17, 37 Xiaoquancheng, Empress, 37, 38, 39, 40fig. Xu Ke, 33–34, 122, 182–83 Xu Yang, 64 Xu Zhiguang, 87, 90 Yangliuqing Prints, 17, 32, 33, 35, 37, 38, 142, 160–61, 181. See also Popular Prints

Yangzi delta region. See Jiangnan region; Nanjing; Suzhou; Yangzhou Yangzhou: courtesans of, 35, 171–72; fashions of, 105, 170, 171–72; novels set in, 171–72 Ye Mengzhu, 29, 81, 222n67 Yeh, Catherine, 154 Yellow Emperor, 22, 88–89, 230n82 Yinzhen, Prince. See Yongzheng Emperor Yongzheng Emperor, xi, 38; paintings depicting, 26–27, 28fig. Yu Qian, 60–61 Yu Qingceng, 53, 59, 79, 92, 170, 172, 193–96, 224n33 Zamperini, Paola, 239n59 Zeng Jifen, Madame, 45–46, 62, 64, 69; images of, 62, 63fig. Zhang Ailing, vii, 16, 57, 151 Zhang Qian, 139, 141fig., 236n70–71 Zhang Shuying, 120 Zhao, Lady, 80 Zhaolian, 170 Zheng Zhiqiao, 48, 53 Zhenjun, 21, 126 zhezixi, 134–37 Zhu Feng, 103, 113, 232n138 Zhu Qiqian, 110, 223n165

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