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 as waistcoats and jackets, divides their bodies in thirds, each portion emphasized by the patterns: large floral medallions against geometric backgrounds, and narrow monochrome patterned trimmings.66
FIGURE 1.7. This rare Yangliuqing print, Ladies Enjoying Spring (Youchun shinü tu), is symmetrically divided across the two separate prints (duiping). The ladies’ clothing, in particular the waist-length layering, reflects the transitions from late Ming to mid-Qing styles. Qianlong period (1736–95). New print from historical print-blocks, 63 x 110 cm. Tianjin Yangliuqing Museum, reprinted from Feng Jicai, Zhongguo muban nianhua jicheng, Yangliuqing juan, with permission from the Zhonghua Book Company.
FIGURE 1.8. This Yangliuqing print awards the viewer access to a lavishly furnished niched-off room, where two young beauties play happily with two plump boys. Soothing the Infants (Fu ying tu), later Qianlong period (1736–95). Qi Jianlong printshop, 61 x 109 cm. Tianjin Museum. Reprinted from Feng Jicai, Zhongguo muban nianhua jicheng, Yangliuqing juan, 68–69, with permission from the Zhonghua Book Company.
The cloud collar was absent in this Qianlong Yangliuqing print, suggesting the fashion had not yet reached the north (other than in the palace; see fig. 1.5). But by the nineteenth century, the cloud collar was central to Han women’s celebratory dress, and it became an integral component of Yangliuqing print beauties, though styled rather differently than the versions shown in the earlier Suzhou prints.67 The example in figure 1.8 has a print-shop brand mark, the “Qi Jianlong old print-shop,” suggesting a late eighteenth-century dating.68 Though both women—shown inside a well-furnished alcove, playing with two plump male children, and accompanied by various auspicious accoutrements—wear decorative collars, the central woman’s four ruyi-lobed (sihe ruyi) style would become most popular.
By the nineteenth century, countless Yangliuqing prints, in particular those produced by the Daoguang period Aizhu Studio, would depict this style with its heavier, bordered outlines, worn over much embellished jackets and finely pleated skirts.69 It is this style that is described in the novel Tales of Heroic Lovers (Ernü yingxiong zhuan; ca. 1850), by Manchu bannerman Wenkang (ca. 1798–after 1865). The knight-errant heroine, Thirteenth Sister (He Yufeng), is wed dressed in “a crimson pifeng jacket embroidered with the ‘hundred flowers blossoming simultaneously’ pattern, and a sand-green gauze skirt embroidered with the ‘hundred butterflies meeting happily in spring’ pattern, matched with a ‘four joined ruyi’ cloud collar.”70
By the late Qing, the cloud collar jacket was integral to celebratory dress. In his description, Xu Ke quoted a poem that describes the cloud collar as metonym for fairy maidens—to secure one was to gain a night spent with such a maiden: “Women cover their shoulders with the cloud collar as adornment. Its use began in the Yuan dynasty with dancing girls. In the Ming it became ceremonial wear for women, and in this [Qing] dynasty Han women also wear it as wedding dress.”71 The Yangliuqing and Taohuawu popular prints enable us to understand how the cloud collar might have been visually spread across China, and how it became associated with Han women’s wedding attire; these beauty prints reference the values of beauty, fertility, wealth, cultural attainment, and happiness that women wished to evoke on celebratory occasions.
The wedding day was one of the few days in a woman’s lifetime that she could wear such gorgeous dress, and the preparation process would have taken months, indeed years in the case of a childhood engagement. Critically, weddings involved not only the labor of the girl herself, as accounts of dress production have typically emphasized, but increasingly over the early modern period, also the labor of strangers, employed both in and outside the home. The Qing period saw an increasing expectation of (and thus pressure to achieve) a rich material consumption to adorn ceremonial occasions—births, marriages, festivals—yet most women would have struggled to afford the embellished formal wear so expensive in tailoring, fabrics, and decoration. Small accessories like the cloud collar or decorative borders succeeded precisely because of their ability to allow a wider range of women to participate in celebratory consumption.
