A Fashionable Century. Rachel Silberstein

       In the Museum

      IN THE 1930s, railway diggers in China unearthed the tomb of Prince Guo (Yunli; 1697–1738), seventeenth son of the Kangxi emperor (1662–1723) and half-brother of the Yongzheng emperor (1678–1735), in the Western Imperial Tombs eighty miles from the capital, in Yi County, Hebei.¹ The tomb contents—silk robes, porcelain, Buddhist texts—quickly passed from local officials and small-time dealers to the Beijing art shops supplying museums and private collectors in Europe and North America. By 1934, when Beijing-based American curator Laurence Sickman (1907–1988) saw the textiles, many had been deconstructed and repurposed as mats and runners, one even serving as “a throw for some Westerner’s Steinway.”² For Sickman, the numerous dragon robes, however altered, were a treasure, and he “rescued” the robes, purchasing the group on behalf of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas.³ Among the textiles was a satin woman’s robe, once worn by one of the prince’s two wives, that survived in three pieces (see figs. P.1 and 4.2). Likely produced in Suzhou, then the center of embroidery production, its roundel scenes of palace ladies in leisurely activities were finely embroidered in an array of stitches and a somber palette of browns, greens, and golds. In contrast to the tones of power and majesty conferred upon the dragon robes, this robe was given a different emphasis; named by curators the “Ladies in the Garden” or “Water Garden” robe, it was lauded as “delicacy and refinement . . . a melody of grace and charm.”⁴

      Following the arrival of the robes in America, the Metropolitan Museum of Art included them in the 1945 exhibition Costumes from the Forbidden City, an “exotic display of imperial robes from the old Manchu court of China.” With more than two-hundred objects, it was the mid-twentieth-century equivalent of a blockbuster, with an opening party that attracted countless celebrities.⁵ Due to the show’s “unqualified and continually mounting success,” the museum decided to extend the exhibition period, a decision the show’s curator, Alan Priest, an eccentric showman figure, attributed to the wonders of Chinese dress: “In design, in color, in texture, in execution and conception, they are beyond anything else that human beings have ever devised to clothe themselves in.”⁶

      Costumes from the Forbidden City was just one show in a decade crowded with exhibitions of Chinese dress, both in Europe and America.⁷ These exhibitions—including the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s 1943 Imperial Robes and Textiles of the Chinese Court and the Royal Ontario Museum’s 1946 Chinese Court Costumes—presented a strikingly consistent account: dominated by imperially associated dragon robes and hierarchized rank badges, they told a tale of male imperial power and official status that was constructed like most articles of Asian dress—essentialized, unchanging, and far from the fashion impulse that distinguished early modern European history. As one collector put it: “Neither the implements nor the decorative motives have varied appreciably since remote times.”⁸ Objects that did not fit within the defining limits of dragon adornment and state robes were classified as “others,” “strange,” and “curious.”⁹ What the Western viewer desired was dragon-festooned robes, ideally with their emperor identified, that evoked the “China of the Dragon Throne, whose emperors had ruled the world and

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