1.10).86
FIGURE 1.10. An anonymous family portrait of the Daoguang emperor and his third wife, Empress Xiaoquancheng, alongside consorts and children. Autumn’s Overflowing Happiness Courtyard (Xiyi qiuting tuzhou), nineteenth century. Ink and color on paper, L 181 cm, W 202.5 cm. Palace Museum. Photograph by Hu Chui.
Xiaoquancheng was raised in Suzhou, apparently with artistic talents, and she had been swiftly promoted to first-rank concubine and then empress in 1834 after giving birth to the Daoguang emperor’s first prince, Yizhu (later the Xianfeng emperor). But intrigue blighted her rise, and she died suddenly at thirty-three after plotting to kill Prince Yixin, who was competing with Yizhu to become emperor.87 In images of Xiaoquancheng and female contemporaries, the vision of Manchu dress promoted by the regulations, and which circulated through imperially sponsored media like court painting, contrasts sharply with the Han-style dress seen in the earlier Yongzheng period beauties. These images present a new mode of informal beauty: a more confident assertion of Manchu style and a quite different bodily aesthetic—their heads larger in proportion than before, with sharply pointed chins and widened foreheads. This development is especially significant given the lack of Manchu female figures in popular prints.88 And yet, likely influenced by the Yangliuqing print workshops and probably professional workshops in Beijing (compare, for example, the women in the Mactaggart painting in fig. 1.2), similar facial shapes and figural proportions are found in another painting of Empress Xiaoquancheng in informal dress, Portrait of Empress Xiaoquancheng in Informal Dress (Xiaoquancheng huanghou bianzhuang xiang), unusual in presenting a woman and girl pairing (fig. 1.11). The empress wears a floral silk chenyi embroidered with plum and cherry blossoms, accessorized with embellished sleeve-bands, an elaborate, three-layer, willow-leaf-shaped cloud collar, and the Manchu headdress (liang ba tou) of stiffened black satin adorned with artificial flowers and precious stones. She stands, wrist exposed, leaning in behind the corner of the wooden table topped with a bowl of peaches, while the girl, likely her daughter, adopts a similar posture, playfully positioned by the stool. Both composition and fashionable dress visually connect this depiction with the Yangliuqing and Taohuawu beauties, a comparison particularly striking next to this Taohuawu print of a Suzhou gentlewoman (fig. 1.12).89 One wears a Manchu robe, the other a Han jacket and skirt, but the comparison hints at the convergence of each group in their confident presentations of fashionable dress.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the chenyi, previously close-fitting around the chest and sleeves as in figure 1.4, had evolved into a loose, embellished garment, generally worn underneath outer garments, unless in private.90 In his anecdotes on the Daoguang and Xianfeng courts, Mongolian scholar-official Chongyi (1885–1945) described the social mores that dictated how Manchu women wore these garments: “[When] inside [women] don’t wear [formal] pao robes but instead wear chenyi robes in green, yellow, peach, or moon white, but not crimson.”91 In the Mactaggart painting (see fig. 1.2), the women wear chenyi with long sleeveless vests (da kanjian) on top.92 But the chenyi was often combined with another less formal garment, the changyi outer gown. This had developed around the same time as the chenyi and was similar in style—straight-cut, round-necked, ankle-length—but it could not be worn alone and was even more decorative in style, particularly in the ruyi-headed slits on each side extending up to the armpit (kaixi).93 Chongyi described both styles in some detail: “The next most formal dress styles are the changyi and the chenyi, both have wanxiu sleeves (large cuffs turned back and bordered with patterned trimmings). 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”
