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.
FIGURE 1.15. Detail of notation from figure 1.14, listing color, number of embroidered flowers and intended usage.
Whether fashion-seekers sought to imitate the style of the Manchu mansions or the Suzhou boudoirs, this dress-historical reconstruction demonstrates how ethnicity and place were critical to determining women’s engagement with fashion. As a microcosm of the Beijing fashion system, the Mactaggart painting suggests the ways in which both Manchu and Han women contributed to the fashion trends of the period. Styles like the chenyi and changyi enabled Manchu women to re-create their traditional narrow-sleeved robes, applying the broader sleeves, ribbon-embellished sleeve-bands, and ruyi-lobing found in Han women’s ao and shan styles. The detailed depiction in visual sources like popular prints and professional painting may be read alongside bamboo ballads and novels to reconstruct this consumption as an arena of creative autonomy for women. The images studied here suggest that, by the nineteenth century, both Han gentlewoman and Manchu nobility had evolved a valid mode for depicting themselves in fashionable dress. And yet, curiously, texts throughout the Qing continue to assert the courtesan’s power as fashion leader. To understand this, it is necessary to investigate the moral discourse of fashion. For many male critics, fashionable accessories, in fundamentally confusing social distinction, threatened a sartorial assimilation that denied more normative attempts to order. As an 1817 bamboo ballad inquired, “The young ladies of the famous brothels have faces like flowers, they sit alone in the scented chariot loving the bright yarn shades. Their paired sleeves are wider than one chi, neither Manchu nor Han style, from which family do they come?”107 Such critiques present a discursive force quite different from that of popular prints and urban rhymes, but they too shaped the Qing fashion system.
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