here explain not only how collections of Chinese dress entered Western museums, but also the positioning of Chinese women’s dress outside fashion theory and scholarship. The collecting and exhibition of Chinese dress and its construction by curators and collectors as a shorthand for imperial and official dress has obscured our understanding of the impact of commercial production and fashionable consumption on late Qing society. The museum collector’s frameworks of value—art, antique, imperial, auspicious—determined the boundaries of Western scholarship on Chinese dress, and it was with great difficulty that they accommodated the fashionable garments at the center of this book, defined instead by values like contemporary, commercial, and fashionable. Neither official nor regulated, late Qing rather than High Qing, determined by the desires of the market rather than the traditions of political symbolism, these jackets, skirts, and accessories have until now received little attention.
TERMS, ABBREVIATIONS, AND CHRONOLOGY
Measurements
Fabrics were measured in pi (bolts), zhang (lengths or yards), chi (feet), and cun (inches):
1 pi = 4 zhang (11.11 m)
1 zhang = 10 chi (3.3 m)
1 chi = 10 cun (0.33 m)
1 cun = 3.55 cm
Shi (stone) is a unit of measurement equal to 10 dou (100 liters).
Currency
Qing China had a bimetallic currency of silver and copper:
Silver ingots (liang or tael, approximately 37.68 grams of silver) were used for large and wholesale transactions.
1 tael = 10 qian = 100 fen = 1,000 li
Copper coins or cash (qian wen) came in strings of 1,000 coins (chuan, diao) and were used for small retail transactions.
1 silver tael = 1,000 copper wen (official exchange rate; actual market rate fluctuated from 1:800 to 1:2000 throughout the Qing).
During the nineteenth century, foreign silver dollars (yang yuan) also circulated.
The Chinese yuan was introduced in 1889, when it was equivalent to 0.72 tael.
Museum Abbreviations
| AIC | Art Institute of Chicago |
| CMA | Cleveland Museum of Art |
| DAM | Denver Art Museum |
| Met | Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
| MFA | Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
| MIA | Minneapolis Institute of Art |
| PEM | Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts |
| PMA | Philadelphia Museum of Art |
| RISD | Rhode Island School of Design, Providence |
| ROM | Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto |
| V&A | Victoria and Albert Museum, London |
Qing Dynasty Reign Periods
Shunzhi (1643–1661)
Kangxi (1661–1722)
Yongzheng (1723–1735)
Qianlong (1736–1795)
Jiaqing (1796–1820)
Daoguang (1820–1850)
Xianfeng (1850–1861)
Tongzhi (1861–1875)
Guangxu (1875–1908)
Xuantong (1908–1911)
A FASHIONABLE CENTURY
Introduction
FASHION AND CHINESE HISTORY
GIVEN THE COUNTLESS English-language catalogs of Chinese dress filled with page after page of dragon robes and rank badges, it is unsurprising that the denial of fashion in Chinese history has proved persistent. Witness French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky: “In China, women’s dress underwent no real transformation between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.”1 Or British historian Neil McKendrick: “In China . . . in 1793 a traveller confirmed the lack of change when he wrote ‘. . . the form of clothing is rarely changed by fashion or whim. . . . Even the women have scarcely new fashions.’”2 Even historian Kenneth Pomeranz posited a decline of fashion during the mid-Qing, arguing that women were more likely to engage in social competition and personal expression through poetry than fashionable clothes.3 Studies of Chinese historical fashion remain isolated from studies of European fashion, whose historians rarely acknowledge the existence of fashion in China or Asia, or consider what comparisons between China and Europe might bring to our understanding of fashion.4
This impasse is, to some degree, a more general problem: many scholars view claims of fashion in non-Western cultures as an invalid application of a Western framework.5 Western cultural specificity is not necessarily inherent to basic definitions of fashion: “It is a system of dress found in societies where social mobility is possible; it has its own particular relations of production and consumption, again found in a particular society; it is characterised by logic of regular and systematic change.”6 But for this definition’s author, sociologist Joanne Entwhistle, and others, fashion is geographically and historically specific to early modern Europe; accordingly, other types of fashion occurring in other types of societies and cultures must be excluded. Countries and cultures positioned outside this time and place have been left with two alternative terms, folk costume and anti-fashion, neither of which can be coherently applied to Qing China.
Folk costume is defined as that in which any change is so slow as to be barely perceptible even to the wearers themselves. As the semiotic ethnographer Petr Bogatyrev (1893–1971) put it: “Folk costume is in many ways the antithesis of clothing which is subject to fashion changes.”7 That Qing China does not fit the folk-costume
