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 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 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), 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