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 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
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 x 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 x 55 cm. Reprinted from Feng Jicai, Zhongguo muban nianhua jicheng, Taohuawu juan, shang, 87, with permission from the Zhonghua Book Company.
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 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
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.
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 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
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.