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.
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.
“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 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 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
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 x 54.4 cm. Reprinted from Feng Jicai, Zhongguo muban nianhua jicheng, Riben cangpin juan, 87, with permission from the Zhonghua Book Company.
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