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 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.
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
