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, 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 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 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