Hello. My name's Jessica Harrison-Hall, and I'm the curator of
Chinese ceramics and decorative arts at the British Museum.
And welcome to my corner.
Today, I'm going to talk to you about late-Qing fashion in China
and how it changed as a result of interacting with
foreign communities in the treaty ports along the east coast of China.
So we're looking at a beautiful woman's outfit with a jacket and skirt
that was made about 140 years ago, probably in a treaty port,
possibly Shanghai or Ningbo or Guangzhou.
The outfit’s made up of a long robe made in red silk damask.
And then underneath is a rather beautiful paneled skirt, made in cream silk edged with
blue ribbon and embroidered with phoenix and other birds.
And this is very much a garment for a Han Chinese woman.
In the 19th century, China was really a multicultural society with many different people
living side-by-side, using many different languages, beliefs, foods and so on.
But the main one is the Han people and they’re still the majority in China today.
But the Han were ruled by the Manchu who formed the Qing Court in the 19th century.
So this garment would have been worn by somebody who would have had quite a lot of money.
Maybe a businessman's wife.
At the time, a man could have more than one wife, and they would all live together in
a single household.
Some women made their own garments in the 19th century and did all of the embroidery themselves.
Others bought pre-embroidered fabrics and had them made up into clothing.
This garment would have been incredibly labor intensive to make.
Around the top you have this extraordinary cloud-shaped collar.
On other garments, these cloud collars are separate, but here it's actually stitched
on in a series of different bands: white, blue, black and gold into these cloud shape scrolls.
And the cloud shape scrolls themselves are called ruyi,
which means ‘may everything go as you wish’.
So it's a kind of auspicious emblem.
And then around the edges you've got these beautiful sleeve bands which are hand embroidered
with little boys in celadon-coloured silks, with blue trousers and this black design around
them of sort of key frets and gardens and S-shaped clouds.
And then around the edge of the garment you have silk woven in cream and black,
which shows a series of different waterscapes.
At the very top you can see this small stand-up collar, and these were introduced really
towards the end of the 19th century, and it's fastened with metal ball buttons and loops,
and the skirt underneath has a beautiful panel with phoenix and other birds in a landscape.
And the panel appears on the front and the back.
And then round the sides you have pleats.
So it enables you to have quite a sort of wide skirt.
What's interesting is it's really a combination of homemade home embroidery and bought-in embroidery.
This is the moment when you get a kind of commercialization of handicrafts.
And so these ribbons that are sewn on here in different shades of brown or these
threads that make up the ruyi cloud collar would all have been bought at a shop, having
been made on small-scale looms rather than handmade by the owner, as would have been
the case in the past.
So you're really seeing a bridge to modernity, a sort of step between the ancient craft-only
tradition and a more modern commercial world.
But to create a garment like this requires an enormous amount of patience.
Each of these stitches here are applying this beautiful gold band and around the edge,
all of the ribbons are edged in different colored silks.
And for all those fellow embroidery nerds out there, these are couch stitched -
each little S-shape here - which means that you lay down the thread and then you cover it
with a small thread to lock it into place.
So something like this, it's got about 100 different stitches on a single S-shaped swirl,
and I think we can see it actually if we turn back the corner of the garment here,
you can see very small stitches that have come through from the back,
not just the gold that you're seeing from the corner pieces, but you can see these tiny, very, very regular stitches
in pale blue, which are fixing the applique on the other side.
You know, this is an immense amount of work, absolutely staggering.
So some of you might be wondering where these designs come from.
Sometimes designs are copied from popular prints or from storybooks, either novels which
have illustrations or from opera stories, but they also had pattern books which circulated
so that women could look at different kinds of design and adapt them for their own garments.
So this one really is rather beautiful and an unusual color scheme for the time.
It's got these pagodas and bridges and temple bells and these tiny boats, as well as the
paddle steamers and three- masted ships.
And every now and again you get a boat that's manned by two sailors, a steamboat.
It's really a sort of bringing together of almost a Western-style design with traditional Chinese designs.
So it is really a beautiful garment, but it is showing you that you're on the
cusp of change because you've got this sort of modern foreign fashion coming in to traditional robes
and all this lovely detail.
And when we're looking at the back, you've got much more of this silk damask on show.
Overall, you've got this fantastic pattern within the silk of plum blossoms.
You can see the five-petal flowers and the branches and leaves.
They're auspicious in China because they're the first flower that you see in spring and
they hold their colour when there is no other colour around.
And then in between, all over, you've got this auspicious lozenge pattern which looks like
a kind of diamond on its side with lots of sort of mini diamonds within it.
And then the lozenge is kind of echoed on the shoulders and other parts of the garment.
And you've just got this very nice b order at the bottom.
Very beautiful.
Women in the late 19th century were just emerging, being seen more.
Previously, they were really confined to their homes.
And this is the period in which courtesans flourish and other women are being seen more
in the workplace and at other kinds of entertainment.
Wealthy women would have had assistance from tailors, but this kind of stitching would
have been a social activity in the home.
And, you know, at a time when most women couldn't work, this is their lives.
They’re sitting at home in a fairly confined compound, very rarely leaving their houses.
They're looking after their children, getting on with the other wives and producing incredible
garments like this.
Most women, you know out of this population of 400 million in the late 19th century,
half of whom would have been women, very few are recorded.
And those generally are through the actions of their husbands or sons rather than through
their own actions.
And in a way, these material remains help us construct the lives of these forgotten people
who are hidden from history books.
But what's extraordinary is in the 19th century, we have so much more than in earlier periods
that we are able to put together a sort of whole picture of some of these unknown people
who are emerging from the shadows, through their things rather than through texts.
Thank you very much for listening.
And if you want to see these garments and lots of other wonderful Qing fashion,
please come and see China's Hidden Century at the British Museum.
And details are below.