evolved through these decades of modernity and Western intervention.33 But objects of late Qing fashion also have much to tell us about how the Qing fashion system functioned in a context largely absent of Western presence or industrial modernizations.
Thriving production and marketing systems, developed from internal processes of commercialization and urbanization, complicate established characterizations of the nineteenth-century as economically backward and in cultural decline. Part of the appeal of dragon robes was as dynastic embodiment: “Foreigners came to localize in dragon robes all the potentialities of a civilization they perceived to be as far removed from their own as was possible and to project onto the costumes all their personal aspirations of what a society should be. They took home these robes as tangible evidence of a myth.”34 Curators interpreted nineteenth-century dragon robe forms as reflecting the waning that followed the heights of the Kangxi and Qianlong periods. Late Qing designs were described as of “crowded or pinched composition”; once “secure vitality and energetic movement” now “settled down into a mere crust of dull stodgy forms.”35 How might we view this history differently if we turned not to the products of institutional workshops designed through state-controlled processes, but instead to objects produced in private workshops, designed by pattern draftsmen connected with other urban handicraft producers and influenced by local print and performance?
The museum collections from which I have gathered these examples of Qing dynasty fashion offer great potential, but they also possess limiting factors delineating this book’s reach. First, despite its claims of universal representation (“Chinese dress”), it informs only upon the consumption of the minority who could afford embellished and fashionable silk garments. Ordinary people wore mostly cotton and ramie, primarily dyed blue, much of it woven locally, sometimes by the wearers themselves. In winter they wore cotton padding and sheep skins while the wealthy wore furs and wools.36 They probably owned no more than two sets of garments for winter and summer apiece, and of course the truly poor would have struggled to achieve even this. Though even poor women might have had a piece of jewelry or bright garment for weddings and festivals, in general, this group experienced little stylistic change over the course of the dynasty.37
However, for a substantial minority, living conditions improved during the Qing dynasty.38 Commercialization expanded the numbers of those who could access fashionable silk objects, particularly accessories. Thus, what the museum collection actually evidences are the consumer tastes of two main groups: upper class elites and the middle class. Elites, also called gentry or literati (shenshi, jinshen), refers to the minority of the population who were educated and engaged in political or bureaucratic professions. Broadly defined to include wealthy nobility and merchants, as well as scholars and officials of all ranks, this group comprised an estimated 1.9 percent of the Chinese population (approximately seven million) in the late Qing, receiving about 24 percent of the national income (probably at least four hundred taels a year).39 The second of these groups was the mostly urban and often commercial middle class, which was more heterogeneous in income and identity. At upper levels it included teachers, head clerks, merchants, shop-owners, artisans; at lower levels, it included clerks and runners. But all these groups could supplement salary through family investments in land or business.40 More fundamentally, economic advances, expanded education, and limited official positions meant Qing society was characterised by social mobility, substratification, and social anxiety: there were downwardly mobile members of gentry families (lower degree holders, specialists and secretaries) who couldn’t access an official position, as well as upwardly mobile educated gentry-merchants (shenshang), scholar-craftsmen, successful shopkeepers, and artists.41 The mid-late Qing period is filled with officials and scholars bewailing the increasing silk consumption by lower-status groups like actors, courtesans, and servants, a discourse oriented around concepts of fashion, luxury, and fuyao (outrageous dress), positioned in opposition to Confucian virtues of frugality and simplicity.
Given that fashion served as a means of negotiating social divisions, simplistically dividing Chinese society into the cotton-wearing commoner and the silk-wearing elite belies the complexity of what lay between. Commercial weavers sought to meet middle-class demand with cheaper versions of expensive weaves and diffuse ranges of silk, cotton, and ramie qualities.42 Those living in proximity to silk-producing districts around Suzhou, Huzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and elsewhere would have been able to buy lower-quality silk garments and silk accessories. Hence, English botanist-traveler Robert Fortune’s (1813–1880) well-known comment about Huzhou: “Every person I met above the common working coolie was dressed in silks or crape, and even the coolies have at least one silk dress for holyday.” Still more pertinently, Fortune was struck by “all kinds of articles in common use amongst the people. Embroidered shoes, hats, caps, umbrellas . . . every conceivable article.”43 These low-cost objects fit historian Cissie Fairchild’s definition of populuxe, the fans, umbrellas, and stockings that became central components in allowing the expanding consumption of lower-middle classes in eighteenth-century Paris.44 Despite the European dress historian’s insistence that fashion means changes in silhouettes (contributing to an inability to detect such changes in Chinese dress), these humble objects were central to nineteenth-century fashion change and key enablers in the spread of fashionable consumption beyond elite groups. Yet, the growth in commercial workshops’ economic clout correlates to the growth in moral outcry seeking to control this consumption: how far did this tension—between the didacticism of gazetteers and family instruction books, and the valorization of fashion of urban rhymes and vernacular novels—shape the Qing fashion system?
Rather than the monolithic “Chinese dress” established in the museum, nineteenth-century fashions existed both within and between social groups, requiring work on “constructions of fashionability across social divides.”45 Doubtless this shift from an “honorific vestimentary system,” centered upon courtly consumption and sumptuary regulations, to a “fashion system,” enabling more personal choice and individual taste, still omitted vast sections of Qing society, but equally it allowed many more the possibilities of “self-enhancement through cloth and clothing.”46 The museum collection does not allow for the definition of regional variations of these consumption practices in material terms. One of the corollaries of Western collecting of Chinese dress was a confounding of regional dress histories: objects were rarely cataloged with any information regarding purchase or production location. Indeed, the processes outlined in the preface mean that information regarding collecting circumstances was often omitted from accession records. Whether purchased in Shanghai, Beijing, or Guangzhou, Chinese dress was simply Chinese dress, and collectors rarely recorded how they acquired their purchases. Accordingly, this book is a study of the Chinese fashion system as a whole rather than the fashion system of Shanghai or Beijing. The focus is the cities of Jiangnan, the area south of the Yangzi River that was China’s wealthiest and most commercialized region, but I also make comparisons and connections to the political center, Beijing, and two other heavily commercialized regions, Guangzhou and Sichuan. This broad approach has its limitations—particularly in providing a material counterpart to the regionality that texts suggest was integral to the fashion system—but it enables investigation of the ways in which fashionable consumption in diverse regions was integrated through interprovincial trade and print culture.
Despite the importance of handicraft to understanding the progression of the Qing economy and the integration of Chinese culture, historians of China have tended to disdain objects as valid historical enquiry. The following assertion from historian David Johnson gives a sense of their presumed limitation: “Values can be embodied in nonverbal symbols, and exemplified in behavior, but to be communicated with any precision, or to be explained, they must find expression in words.”47 But by grounding these typically unprovenanced objects within written and visual descriptions and associations, I seek to recover an experience that has been largely written out of the formal textual canon. In bringing together the material archive of dress, textiles, and embroideries, the visual archive of prints, paintings, and pattern books, and the textual archive of local gazetteers, contemporary diaries, advertisements, urban rhymes, and pawnshop texts, I aim to reconstruct
