Economic historians have asserted that Jiangnan cotton fabrics improved in quality through the Qing period, allowing those producers who focused upon styles, colors, and fashion to earn better profits and leading to numerous different options – the “seventy-two kinds”. But what techniques were used to create those styles, colors, and fashions, and to what extent did the finishing sector of the cotton industry – the dyers and the calenderers - rather than the weavers, enable this purported expansion of styles and increase in profits? The notion that coloring and finishing options expanded for the ordinary people who wore cotton cloth is an intriguing proposition in relation to several historical debates, including comparative living standards, commercialization of the cotton industry, and the history of Asian dye technologies. However, though the vast majority of Qing Chinese would have worn cotton or ramie, these claims cannot be substantiated through material culture history: the biases of collecting and material survival mean that extant cotton garments are rare and studies of Qing dress are dominated by silk. Accordingly, The Cloth Classic (布经), an late eighteenth-century compendium of advice and experience written by a cloth merchant for cloth merchants, possesses considerable value for understanding the causes and impact of advances in cotton finishing. It contains a long and detailed section on cloth dyeing, including 68 recipes for different colors, a surprisingly large number given the assumption that societies with indigenous cotton production like China could only dye indigo blue or tannin brown due to the difficulties of dyeing cellulosic cottons, unlike proteinaceous silks and woolens. This paper analyzes the dyeing and calendering content of The Cloth Classic within the context of developments in the Qing period Jiangnan cotton industry. By evaluating four factors that potentially drove the expansion of the finishing sector: technical innovations, dyestuff trade, commercial organization, and consumer demand, I use this commercial text to redress the unrepresentative material archive, to verify the existence of the “seventy-two kinds,” and to provide insights into the economic and cultural significance of the Jiangnan dyeing and calendering workshops.

Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient (2026), Vol.69, Issue 1-2

Seven printed cottons and a printing block

Rare evidence illuminates the textile trade in Canton.

HALI; the international journal of Oriental carpets and textiles. Issue 224, Summer 2025. p. 74-77

One of the largest obstacles to studying the clothing of Qing people is the huge gulf between historical experience – what people in the Qing dynasty actually wore, and material survival – what people in the late Qing and early Republic collected. This gulf is especially problematic when it comes to understanding the clothing consumption of ordinary people, because so few artefacts survived. Though most of China’s 400-odd million population of the 19th century would have worn cotton, hemp or ramie, silk dominates museum collections. This issue has also obstructed our understanding of fabric colors and dyes. Museum collections lead us to imagine who got to wear colorful dress in nineteenth-century China as two extremes: at one end, the colorful silks worn by the imperial family, the nobility, and elites and at the other, the millions of ordinary Chinese who wore varieties of indigo-dyed cotton. But the mid-Qing period witnessed a expansion in the dyeing of both cotton and silk, creating the possibility of a middle ground – a group of consumers who were able to purchase cotton in a range of colors. This expansion of cotton dyes and its impact on consumers is an important issue that has the potential to illuminate upon living standards, and how they developed through the course of the Qing dynasty. Given the absence of surviving objects, this paper uses dye and fabric names as alternative approach to reconstructing this material culture history. By comparing the list of cotton dye terms included in The Cloth Classic, a late eighteenth-century, early nineteenth-century cotton merchant’s manual, with other lists of dye colors, and literary representations, I explore the clothing cultures of different consumers, and how the expansion of dyes impacted on ordinary people’s consumption.

This chapter provides a broad overview of fashion in Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) China, through four key stages of change: the early Ming transition away from the Mongolian influence of the preceding Yuan dynasty; the rise of fashion through the silver century period (1550-1650); the re-introduction of ethnicity as a source of sartorial tension with the ascent of the ethnic Manchu Qing rulers; and the commercialization of fashion in the mid-late Qing period. Each section is structured around a key image: a fifteenth-century handscroll of the Ming court at leisure; a seventeenth-century painting of a Nanjing literati surrounded by three fashionable musicians; an eighteenth-century album of Jiangnan amorous elites; and a late Qing beauty print. Through this visual grounding, the chapter identifies both the stylistic shifts and the systemic features of fashion in Chinese history: the key players (court, literati, courtesans, entertainers); the importance of urban centers as production hubs, and providing the stimulus of popular culture; the impact of developments in the textile industry, in particular the shift away from imperially controlled workshops to private producers that permitted wider access to textile and tailor-made handicrafts; and finally the impetus of global trade in the last decades of the period.

Brief biography of Zhang Jian (張謇 1853-1926) – Cotton industrialist and Philanthropist

An object study of an embroidered hanging in the Smarthistory teaching series.

This study introduces the rare late Ming embroidery pattern-book, Collection of Snipped Rosy Clouds (Jian xia ji 剪霞集). Placing the album’s wide range of imagery in the context of the expansion of woodblock printed design and the growing commercial value of embroidery, the paper reveals the interactions between embroidery and other late Ming handicraft design, and the opportunities the pattern book offered embroiderers to apply literary value to their embroidered work.

Western museum collections of Chinese dress were framed by a specific historical context of Qing dynastic collapse, and the ensuing rise of imperialism and tourism. This paper reconstructs the process through which Chinese dress objects transferred from wear to display, and the collectors, curators, and dealers responsible. In revealing the key role of the second-hand clothes dealer and probing collectors’ motives and scholars’ priorities, the paper seeks to take a fresh look at the process of creating meaning in the museum collection. Through a close analysis of pawnshop texts, it reconstructs the parameters of materiality, workmanship, and geography through which dealers assessed garments, and compares this with the collector’s connoisseurship framework. Thus, the paper explores how foreign buyers changed understandings of second-hand Chinese dress, and more fundamentally, what this history tells us about how objects transition different modalities of worth within the “Art-Culture System”.

There have been few studies of the reception given to foreign, imported fabrics in China. Drawing on primary sources, including novels and bamboo ballads, Rachel Silberstein constructs a multi-dimensional account of the introduction and dissemination of woolens in nineteenth-century China. She analyzes the different categories of wool which were traded during this period, and how these fabrics were incorporated into objects like purses and hangings and made into rain clothes and outer jackets. Wool was available, in China as in Japan, in a broad range of hues: red, black, yellow, blue, green, and purple. Initially, it was trendsetters like Manchu elites and courtesans who wore wool the most, but the warmth and bright colors that this fabric afforded made it appealing to the middling social group, something that challenged existing social hierarchies. For example, merchants and servants, who had previously been prohibited from wearing sky-blue, suddenly donned widely available woolens in this color. Woolen cloths entered China through urban centers, first Canton, Beijing and Suzhou as trade items and diplomatic gifts from foreigners. After the Treaty of Nanjing opened up other trade ports, Western fabrics, including wool, spread quickly throughout the country and expanded the Chinese clothing repertoire—for both men and women—that had previously been confined to silk and plant fabrics. It should not be assumed, as Silberstein points out, that woolens were received with reservation because of their foreign origins; in some cases, they were worn boldly as fashion statements that included embroidered embellishments.

This paper explores how the growth of commercialized textile production entwined with fashionable consumption to stimulate new styles in Chinese women’s dress during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Focusing on the development of Suzhou’s embroidery industry, I discuss how production systems delineated the possibilities of fashionable dress and demonstrate the shift towards the embroidered accessory during this period. Combining analysis of embroidered objects with vernacular and commercial texts detailing the growth of this industry, I consider the impact of commercialization not only upon styles of dress, but also the ways in which women engaged with fashion, showing how the fashionable accessory allowed women, as both producers and consumers of fashion, to connect to contemporary cultural trends.

Figural motifs have received little attention in Chinese dress and textile history; typically interpreted as generic ‘figures in gardens’, they have long been overshadowed by auspicious symbols. Yet embroiderers, like other craftsmen and women in Qing dynasty China (1644-1911), sought inspiration from the vast array of narratives that circulated in print and performance. This paper explores the trend for the figural through the close study of two embroidered jackets from the Royal Ontario Museum collection featuring dramatic scenery embroidered upon ‘narrative roundels’ and ‘narrative borders’. I argue that three primary factors explain the appearance and popularity of narrative imagery in mid-late Qing dress and textiles: the importance of theatrical performance and narratives in nineteenth-century life; the dissemination of narrative imagery in printed anthologies and popular prints; and the commercialization of embroidery. By placing the fashion for these jackets firmly within the socio-economic context of nineteenth-century China, the paper provides a novel way of understanding the phenomena of narrative figures on women’s dress through the close relationship between popular culture and fashion in nineteenth-century Chinese women’s dress.

A review for CAA Reviews of the exhibition, China: through the Looking Glass, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May 7–September 7, 2015

This article examines a late Qing woman’s jacket embroidered with eight well-known Suzhou garden and temple sites. Such an object makes little sense within the conventional historiography of Chinese dress, long dominated by regulated garments like dragon robes and rank badges, and consequently, concerned with themes of imperial status and official rank. I argue that the jacket is best understood, instead, at the juncture of three wider historical processes: the popularisation of tourism, the commercialisation of embroidery, and the role of urban courtesans in nineteenth-century Suzhou. Combining close analysis of material culture with a wide range of textual sources, in particular folkloric records and urban “bamboo ballads”, the article demonstrates the impact of handicraft commercialization and widening material consumption upon late Qing women’s fashions, and explores the degree to which these developments enabled women to connect with and contribute to popular urban culture. The jacket thus highlights not only the economic salience of commercialized handicrafts, but also the growing visibility of women in the early modern Chinese cityscape.