Personal Possessions

Most of the objects found in a traditional Chinese home were not individual belongings but property shared by the household and passed from generation to generation. One notable exception was the dowry brought into a marriage by a new bride. Among those with limited resources, it was rare for there to be truly personal possessions, yet those with wealth enjoyed more personal effects. While clothing and shoes can vary from simple to elaborate, serving both utilitarian and decorative needs as well as sometimes even being shared, other objects are truly personal, individualized to meet the requirements of the owner. Nothing Chinese is more personal than a seal, which has carved into its base Chinese characters representing the “signature” that serves to certify one’s identity. Like jewelry, snuff bottles, scholars’ rocks, and ruyi scepters are sometimes masterpieces in miniature, with aesthetic and tactile qualities that are appreciated most by those who choose them. Golden lotus shoes and opium pipes, which represent vestiges of personal practices now viewed as loathsome, today are mere collectibles.

Scissors

Whether tiny and used for embroidery or large and employed to make clothing as well as for other purposes, traditional Chinese scissors are distinctive in shape: what defines them is a pair of bulbous loops that leave plenty of room for the fingers and are connected by a hammered iron rivet set between them and their matched blades. Scissors were once hand-forged by a Chinese cutler, who also made metal knives, razors, tweezers, gravers, and carving tools in his blacksmith shop. While associated with the cutting of threads and cloth, scissors of a slightly different form are used in the kitchen to gut fowl, devein shrimp, and trim beans, among other uses. Some scissors used by women have the loops wound with strips of rattan or cane. Today’s scissors, often made of steel rather than iron, are fabricated in larger workshops using a mixture of traditional and modern methods. These workshops produce a range of all-purpose implements said to be able to cut anything from sheet metal to fine silk without ever getting dull. When made of iron, they must be dried after use.

No scissor manufacture in China is more famous than the Zhang Xiaoquan Scissors Factory, founded in 1663 in Hangzhou, and which today produces some 45 million pairs of 120 different styles each year. Production is said originally to have required 72 steps, but these have been reduced to 24 as some 90 percent of the process is now mechanized. One hallmark of the Zhang Xiaoquan brand is that elaborate landscapes and images of birds, flowers, and animals are still carved by hand along the surface of each pair. Factory workers take great pride in the fact that the company’s scissors won international accolades in various expositions such as the San Francisco Expo in 1915 and the Philadelphia Expo in 1926, besides having been designated “Imperial Palace Scissors” by the Qing emperor’s court. In modern times, Zhang Xiaoquan has been designated a laozihao or “heritage brand,” one of numerous centuries-old crafts products identified as worthy of protection.

Although scissors are sometimes packaged in beautiful boxes, they are rarely offered as gifts because of gift-giving taboos. Just as with the taboo about giving a clock because the Chinese word zhong is homophonous with the character for “termination” or “end of life,” scissors recall for many the idea of splitting apart and cutting relationships, an unlucky portent.

Antique hand-forged scissors in various shapes and sizes.

Cloth Shoes

Nineteenth-century Christian missionaries in China remarked that peasants in the countryside and laborers in towns functioned remarkably well with hardened bare feet, without the need for foot-wear. Yet, the Chinese have for millennia been producing shoes that range from the purely utilitarian to those that are remarkably beautiful. Making footgear of woven straw is a craft that used to be practiced in villages throughout the country. If one looks carefully in old residences, it is sometimes possible to spot a typical bench once used for this purpose. (Examples are illustrated in Knapp 2005: 227 and Hommel 1937: 202.) Visitors to some of China’s sacred mountains may find available for purchase old-style straw sandals that are more comfortable than leather shoes or even sneakers when climbing. Leather shoes, which today are worn by men and women throughout the country, have become popular only over the past century.

Cloth shoes of cotton or silk, on the other hand, have a long history as footwear for those who could afford them and whose lives were generally more comfortable than those of the laboring classes. Whether the uppers were plain cotton or embroidered silk, the soles and insoles traditionally were made either of felt, a non-woven cloth produced by compacting woolen fibers and animal hair, or cotton rags, a component arising out of Chinese notions of thrift. To produce the latter, irregular pieces of old rags and fibrous hairs as well as other materials of vegetable origin were first glued together in as many as twenty or more thin layers before being stitched all around, trimmed, and then bound by a custom-cut perimeter welt. Young women sometimes prepared embroidered insoles with auspicious designs that could be slipped into the shoes of their husband on their wedding day.

Among the poorest in China, scavenged strips of paper without writing were used in place of rags for insoles. Some have asserted that “missionaries from the West were startled to find that their shipments of Bibles, so enthusiastically accepted by the local Chinese, had gone straight into saving their soles instead of their souls” (Aero 1980: 213). Even Pearl Buck in her Good Earth wrote that a sheet of paper from a religious tract showing the crucifixion of Jesus Christ was used by Wang Lung’s wife to strengthen a shoe’s sole. Yet, in seeking confirmation of such alleged practices, one can turn to the 1888 Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal for a spirited exchange among missionaries on the topic. While a few missionaries claimed that such practices occurred in various areas of China at that time, many others expressed skepticism, because their experience was that even destitute and illiterate Chinese usually expressed reverence for paper that had written or printed Chinese characters on it.

Common black cloth shoes contrast with richly embroidered women’s silk slippers. the pair of hand-embroidered insoles include the calligraphic dyad shuangxi, meaning “doubled happiness,” a blessing worn in the shoes of a newlywed.

Apart from cotton or paper soles, which were frequently hand-crafted at home as were many of the cotton and silk uppers, the combining of the components was usually accomplished by an itinerant shoemaker. The tools he carried included a wooden shoe last, clamps, awls, needles, thread, and knives, all required to fashion a wearable shoe. Traditionally, there was no differentiation of shoes for the right and left feet, since the fabric was expected to quickly assume the shape of the foot that wore it. In villages and small towns throughout China today, one can still see roadside cobblers who not only repair leather soles and heels but also mend all types of cloth shoes.

Black cloth shoes seen in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs evidence a variety of styles even as they present for the most part rather straightforward and uncomplicated shapes. Most are slip-ons that cover the toe and grasp the heel. Some cotton shoes for women have relatively simple embroidery on their uppers. Silk slippers, on the other hand, provide a medium for elaborate embroidery on the toes as well as the sides and also a varied palette of colors, including basic black. Hand-embroidered portrayals of writhing dragons, floral arrangements, butterflies, and birds, among many other objects, are common patterns still found on silk slippers, many of which also have a cotton lining. Chinese brides even today often wear ornamented silk or satin shoes with auspicious meanings embroidered on them. A special type of cloth shoe was made for babies and young children, and still can be seen worn in villages throughout the country. Some are merely playful and have a shape resembling an animal, like a pig or fish, but most are covered with protective and propitious emblems. For example, the image of a tiger—believed by Chinese to be the king of beasts—on shoes, a cap, or a smock continues to be viewed as capable of protecting a child’s health and of dispelling evil generally.

China today is the world’s leading producer and exporter of both leather shoes and athletic footwear, although market share is shifting toward other Asian countries. Chinese companies, moreover, also market widely in the West the affordable and sturdy Chinese-style cotton or velvet shoes that have either plain black uppers or bright embroidery, a strap, and non-slip rubber soles—advertised as “Mary Jane Chinese shoes”—as well as a variety of Kung Fu shoes with cotton soles. Capitalizing on China’s current preeminence in manufacturing shoes and wishing to promote the fact that “shoe wearing and making in China can be traced back 4,000 years,” a private “shoe culture” museum, said to be “a shoe fetishist’s dream with over 1,000 pairs on display,” opened in Tianjin in May 2010.

In Weishan in Yunnan province, a shoemaker uses a pair of scissors to cut the parts that will comprise a cloth shoe.

Mothers traditionally made children’s shoes in the shape of animals to frighten off dangerous spirits. the generous whiskers on these tigers lend a playful touch.

Ethnic Minority Jewelry

When the arts and crafts of China are written about, the material objects created by artisans and craftsmen of China’s fifty-five ethnic minority groups are all too often either overlooked or disregarded. Sadly, minority nationalities are frequently dismissed as a collection of backward and inferior, even primitive, peoples yearning to be transformed by a civilizing process brought to them by the dominant Han. Yet, as nineteenth-century European explorers and more recent travelers have discovered, many of these supposedly “lesser” cultures have created distinctive jewelry, clothing, musical instruments, and buildings, among other material objects, that are aesthetically sophisticated, technically advanced, and strikingly different from those of the Han. Westerners know many of these objects in variant forms found to the south of China in the northern parts of neighboring Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Burma rather than as forms found in China.

Although one could select the material objects—things—of virtually any national minority for discussion, the images shown in this chapter highlight the silver jewelry produced by the Miao, Blang, and Hani, who are all upland ethnic minorities. The Miao are found principally in Guizhou, Hunan, and Yunnan Provinces, while the Blang and Hani are concentrated only in Yunnan Province. Other ethnic minority groups, such as the Bai, Dai, Dong, , Lahu, Shui, Tibetans, Yao, and Yi in southwestern China and the Kazaks, Kirghiz, Mongols, and Uyghurs in northwestern China also are well-known for their jewelry.

The back of an ornate headdress worn by a hani woman at the Xiding market in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan province.

Women’s silver cuff bracelets, embellished with silver wire, silver granulation, and enamel.

The three most common designs of silver neck rings—solid, torque (twisted), and flat—popular with Miao, hani, and lahu. torques are worn particularly by the Miao, and flat rings particularly by hani women.

Like other ethnic minority groups, the Miao, Blang, and Hani have vibrant traditions involving music and dance that are connected with periodic festivals, and their customs include dowries and engagement presents related to marriage. Together with funerals, these provide occasions for displaying sumptuous ornamentation and festive attire. Moreover, even in daily activities, such as going to market, ethnic minority women often wear eye-catching jewelry. While such jewelry largely adorns women, men traditionally have been the artisans working silver into objects of beauty. Silversmiths rarely practice full-time; rather they are farmers who craft seasonally, especially to meet the demand during the intense period of courting that takes place in April and at the time of weddings, held in November (Star 2006: 10).

While high-grade silver jewelry is notable and possessed by families of some means, it should be recognized nonetheless that most marginalized upland minorities are poor. Thus, it is common also to see cruder, less expensive, and lower quality jewelry made of silver alloys, such as alpaca, which is a copper alloy that includes nickel and often zinc. There are also reports of replica-like flashy jewelry worn by poor village girls that is made of aluminum. In the past, the source of silver was common trade, but for many decades the main source has been government-regulated shops that sell silver sheets to ethnic minorities. The practice of melting down old and new silver coins, often from neighboring countries such as Thailand, in order to create jewelry, also continues.

While some traditional Miao jewelry is cast in lead molds, it can also be handcrafted out of worked wire, producing both filigreed and openwork patterns, linked chains, hoops, spirals, and layered motifs that sometimes involve enameling, the embedding of gemstones and glass, and even the addition of gold. Ornamental silver jewelry includes dimensional and flat metalwork such as earrings, bracelets, neck rings, collars, torques, pendants, hairpins, chaplets, rings, back ornaments, and anklets, among other ornamental and occasionally utilitarian objects, in addition to stacked headdresses and adorned clothing. Many of these ornaments are bright in lustre and jangling in sound. When fully ornamented for celebratory occasions, young Miao girls can be weighted down with jewelry totaling more than twenty pounds.

Dragon-head bracelets are favored by hani men.

Miao women’s silver headdresses, for weddings and other special occasions, are elaborate and varied but are typically constructed of thin plates cut into various shapes, prominently birds and flowers, often with a frieze of horsemen on the headband. A common feature is that many of these shapes are set en tremblant, on protruding wires, for a dynamic effect.

Among the accessible areas to witness and purchase ethnic minority jewelry and clothing is the Xishuangbanna (Sipsongpanna) area of southern Yunnan, especially during the weekly markets in Xiding town, as well as in Kaili in southern Guizhou Province. The markets attract Miao, Hani, and Blang buyers and sellers in addition to other ethnic minorities living in the surrounding hills and valley bottoms. Seen in the market stalls are both simple handicraft ornaments such as buttons and studs and delicate and elaborate jewelry made by skilled artisans. While most traditional ornaments were once handmade only by individual silversmiths, today small workshops or even factories have been set up to meet the demand from both domestic and international tourists.

Taken at the end of the imperial era, these old photographs reveal the diminutive shape of the constricted foot.

The bony structure of a regular and a bound foot are contrasted in this schematic drawing.

An antique pair of golden lotus shoes with low heel.

Soft booties to be worn when relaxing, but not for walking.

Golden Lotus Shoes

Golden lotus shoes are objects that fascinate even as they engender in many a sense of revulsion because they are associated with the tradition of altering the feet of young girls by binding them. Portrayed as one element in the oppression of women in China, the transformation of a normal foot into a grotesquely crippled one has been a common theme in popular treatments of the practice. Binding feet, which began in China in the tenth century during the late Tang dynasty, was primarily a painful activity engaged in by upper-class elite women as a component of the Confucian cult of domesticity. The practice gradually spread to lower classes and by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was shared by common women both in the countryside and in cities. The classic novel Jin Ping Mei (The Golden Lotus) of the late sixteenth century includes depictions of singing girls with bound feet and discussions of elegant golden lotus shoes. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, campaigns were waged against footbinding largely by foreign missionaries and Chinese reformers. Yet, in some areas of China footbinding persisted until the 1950s, even though it was first banned in 1912, until the practice was forbidden and the ban enforced by the new government. The last factory in China making small shoes for bound feet shut down in 1999. Yet, to meet ongoing needs, handcrafted shoes continue to be made in the twenty-first century by elderly women whose own feet were bound more than a half-century earlier.

More than anyone, Dorothy Ko has brought a revisionist perspective to Chinese footbinding, arguing that neither male fetishism nor the pursuit of feminine beauty are sufficient for understanding the practice. Without condemning or defending the practice, Ko argues that “footbinding was an entirely reasonable course of action for a woman who lived in a Confucian culture that placed the highest moral value on domesticity, motherhood, and handwork. The ideal Confucian woman was one who worked diligently with her hands and body, and those who did so were amply rewarded in terms of power in the family, communal respect, and even imperial recognition” (2001: 15). Indeed, “embroidery was more than a skill that daughters learned from mothers; it was a conduit for a female culture that one generation of gentry women passed on to the next along with their emotions and dreams” (87). Between the age of five to eight, a “daughter’s first binding took place in the depths of the women’s quarters under the direction of the mother, sometimes assisted by grandmothers and aunts; no men were privy to the ceremonial purpose. It was a solemn occasion, the first step of her decade-long grooming to become a bride. The pain of footbinding anticipated the pain of childbirth, the blessing and curse for a Chinese woman” (54).

While footbinding is no longer practiced in China, beautiful tiny shoes, some antique but many more new, can be purchased in markets throughout the country and viewed in museum exhibits as well as sumptuously illustrated books. Unlike the repulsive photographs of unwrapped bound feet popularized a century ago by anti-footbinding zealots, one can gaze today on a multiplicity of exquisite examples of shaped textiles, principally made of silk, satin, or cotton embroidered with gold thread and multicolored silk floss. Historical documents now reveal that there was great regional variation in technique, rituals, and styles concerning footbinding and three-inch golden lotus shoes. The earliest known lotus shoes, actually six pairs made of silk with a hemp sole and a decorative motif with silk ribbons, were unearthed in 1975 from the thirteenth-century tomb of Lady Huang Sheng in northern Fujian. Shoe making normally involved at least eight steps, including using a cutting-paper pattern, delicate stitching, and fussy finishing. Girls not only made shoes for themselves; they also created meaningful birthday gifts of shoes for other women. As with ceramics and paintings, golden lotus shoes were adorned with auspicious imagery via symbols and puns, but instead of using a brush, women took up thread. A nineteenth-century textbook on embroidery admonished women to practice with sincerity: “The needle is your writing brush; the length of silk your paper; the silk floss your ink.... No wonder embroidery is the art of writing for women” (88).

Opium Pipes

In the United States, drug paraphernalia brings to mind crude makeshift objects needed to carry out the illicit consumption of drugs such as heroin and marijuana. In China by the end of the nineteenth century, “opium was a luxury for the upper and upper middle classes, an aphrodisiac for courtesans and prostitutes, a livelihood for the lower classes and a ‘pain-killer’ for those who chose to end their pains” (Zheng 2003: 30). As opium use spanned all levels of society, so the accessories associated with it reflected economic status and taste. The poor made do with basic paraphernalia and ordinary venues, often lying on simple bamboo mats in public opium dens to enjoy their escape. For those who had wealth, on the other hand, luxurious private rooms with couchbeds provided the setting for enjoyment. Those with means also employed a set of objects whose forms and ornamentation went far beyond the utilitarian.

An assemblage of objects was necessary because the smoking of opium in China involved much more than placing the raw material in a pipe before lighting and smoking it, although such a method was used by unsophisticated addicts. As can be seen in faded photographs and in rare collections of antique pieces, a basic set of opium accoutrements included three essential items—an opium pipe with a pipe bowl, opium lamp, and opium needle. Additional objects, such as small containers to hold raw opium before it was rolled into pills, small brushes and scrapers to remove opium ash from inside the bowl, were also arrayed on an ornamented tray made of tropical hard-wood—perhaps inlaid with mother-of-pearl—or lacquered wood, that was placed in reach of a reclining smoker. Boxed kits containing the full array of the necessary objects were available to travelers so that it was unnecessary for them to frequent public opium dens.

As glimpsed in a late imperial etching, these men are enjoying opium while reclining with all the necessary accoutrements nearby on the bed.

Although opium pipes vary in materials, size, and complexity, each includes a knob-like bowl in which to vaporize the opium globule.

Each step in preparing opium for consumption had its objects, and each object afforded different opportunities for aesthetic embellishment. A standard opium pipe, which is usually at least sixteen inches long, is made of carefully selected bamboo chosen for its mottled appearance or special tactile quality. Other materials, such as porcelain, jade, cloisonné, horn, and ivory have also been used to create the pipe stem. Set astride the stem is a metal saddle with an attached but removable pipe bowl, which has a knob-like appearance and is often made of ceramic or metal. Both the saddle and the pipe bowl vary in ornamentation and shape. The opium needle, made of thin steel, is employed to skewer a rolled ball of opium, which then can be heated over a lamp before being placed into the pipe bowl. The smoker, who lies on his or her side, then maneuvers the bowl of the pipe over the chimney of a small oil lamp to vaporize the opium. With the pipe stem clasped between the lips, the smoker can inhale the opium fumes. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “the process of heating up a tiny globule of opium paste until it bubbled, scooping it up with a small needle, putting it on the bowl of a long-stemmed pipe and holding it above the oil-burning lamp until it was smoked turned into a craft and became a means of livelihood for lower-ranking prostitutes and female servants in general” (Zheng 2003: 27).

While for many in late imperial China, the smoking of opium was viewed as both a personal scourge and a sign of China’s national weakness, for some it was a practice enjoyed with elegance and style as they pursued bliss. Because of the suppression of opium addiction during the twentieth century, much of the extant authentic paraphernalia was destroyed. While today there is an abundance of opium paraphernalia in markets throughout China, most are not antiques and only rarely are acknowledged as fakes.

Two opium pipes on this tray are accompanied by objects necessary for preparing the globule and cleaning the instrument.

Scholars’ Rocks

Valued for their grotesque shapes, variegated colors, and irregular textures, certain stones have been treasured and collected since at least as early as the Song dynasty. Four criteria—thinness (shou), openness (tou), perforations (lou), and wrinkling (zhou)—came to be used by connoisseurs in judging their aesthetic quality, especially in relationship to how the rocks mimicked shapes found in magical Daoist grottos as well as sometimes in their resemblance to living and mythical creatures. A symbol of longevity because of their supposed indestructibility, fantastic rocks became essential elements in a genre of expressive paintings that included other images with emblematic meaning, especially the evergreen pine tree, in the creation of a suitable gift for a birthday. In addition being called scholars’ rocks (wenrenshi), they are also referred to as spirit stones (gongshi) and grotesque rocks (guaishi). Suiseki or “water stones” is the term the Japanese use to express their own appreciation of stone art, which Koreans refer to as suseok, “longevity stones.”

Large, tall, and craggy stones have prominent positions in Chinese gardens, where they are placed as accent pieces, natural sculptures to be admired, as well as joined together in an assemblage to form jiashan or “artificial mountains” as critical elements of an imagined landscape. Within gardens, large rocks of this type are usually called Taihu rocks, since their source often has been the bottom of Lake Tai, located to the west of Suzhou, where subsurface erosion gave them their idiosyncratic shapes. There is a long history of human intervention in giving shape to these stones. Even today, one can see local artisans quarrying rocks, then chiseling them to achieve a desired shape and dimension, after which the enhanced stones are placed again under water so that wave action and dissolution will complete the shaping and polishing.

Smaller stones have also been praised and valued for indoor enjoyment in the scholar’s studio for centuries. Here they range in size from those that can be placed on the desk to larger, freestanding ones set in a privileged position for contemplation. As miniature, even portable, expressions of nature, scholars’ rocks thus serve as objects of meditation and concentration. Elevated on a polished wooden stand, the rocks provide a focus for a scholar as he approaches writing a poem or creating a painting. The most outstanding diminutive rocks come from the Lingbi area of Anhui Province as well as from nearby Lake Tai. Lingbi stones, which are generally calcareous in composition, black in color, and quite hard, are also known as resonant rocks (bayin shi) since they give off a ringing-like metallic musical sound when tapped. Small Taihu rocks are usually tall and thin with perforations, hollows, and multiple furrows and creases. Stones from Guangdong and Guangxi Province, while also considered limestone, are usually dark, even black in color with sometimes white streaks, with open gaps. Although black stones are most valued, other outstanding specimens include white, yellow, and red colors. Many Western observers remark that scholars’ rocks, whether large or small, are natural sculptures that resemble Modernist abstract art.

Varying in size, color, and stone type, the array of scholars’ rocks shown here evidences the specific criteria used by connoisseurs in selecting objects of timeless beauty.

The marble inset in this hanging panel, while not a scholars’ rock, is similarly evocative of grotesque rockery.

Personal Seals

Seals once were the possessions only of imperial officials who used the impression of the engraved Chinese characters on paper to attest the legitimacy of documents. When personal seals became popular is not known, but over time they came to be used as a “signature” that confirmed correspondence, secured the closure of packages, provided identification in a bank, and authenticated the work of artists and collectors. While the word yin expressly refers to the imprint of the engraved shapes, the addition of jian or zhang refers to the object itself, which is grasped in the hand, as well as the action of imprinting. Chop is usually used in English to describe personal seals both as a noun and as a verb, using a sound adapted from the Malay word cap that was borrowed from Hindi word chap.

Personal seals come in a variety of materials and shapes and sizes that range from purely utilitarian to intricately artful.

Chinese seals take many shapes and are made of a variety of materials, including traditional ones like stone, wood, ivory, and metal as well as common synthetics like plastic. Depending on the purpose, the bottom, top, and sides of the object may be carved. While many seals are simply utilitarian in that the engraved characters on the bottom are just the characters of a person’s name, others are exemplary objects of art with a complex sculpture on the top and an engraved shallow relief scene or calligraphy on one side. Some connoisseurs value the natural grain, texture, and coloring of traditional natural materials and have little interest in other embellishments, but the addition of two- or three-dimensional carvings can give the seal special artistic depth and sophistication that make it worthy of display and appreciation.

The characters carved into the base of a seal are, of course, engraved in reverse so that the impression is correct. Since most Chinese names include three distinct characters, the addition of a fourth, yin, meaning “seal,” creates a sequence that is read from the top down, first from the right and then the left in traditional calligraphic order. For some two thousand years, a special calligraphic style, called seal script in English and zhuanshu in Chinese, has been used as the standard form for engraving names on seals. Even though common people today have difficulty “reading” such characters, the form endures because of its historical associations and presumed difficulty of forging. Of course, many Chinese prefer using easily recognizable calligraphic styles for their names.

In order to use a seal, the engraved bottom must be pressed into a special red paste made of powdered cinnabar, a compound of mercury and castor oil that is bound together either with cut strands of silk or the dried mugwort herb, called moxa. When bound with silk, the thick paste appears smooth and has an oily appearance, while, bound with pulverized mugwort, it appears mottled like a sponge. Different techniques are required with each of these to obtain a clear impression with a distinctive hue and luster. The vermilion seal paste is usually held in a two-part shallow porcelain container, which itself is sometimes kept with the seals in a box lined with padded silk cloth.

Seal engraving stalls are found in towns and cities throughout China, even in Chinatowns abroad, to meet ongoing needs. Increasingly, they are also located in shopping malls as well as in hotel lobbies, since foreign tourists have come to view the specimens on display as novelties or unique souvenirs that can be personalized, with names either engraved in the tourist’s own language or translated into Chinese.

Silk Dresses

Sericulture is the arduous process that eventually results in the creation of a lustrous fiber known as silk. Unlike the production of cotton, linen, flax, or jute—all textiles derived from plant materials— silk, like wool, has its origins in the animal kingdom. The production and processing of wool from the hair of sheep and goats into cloth is rather straightforward when compared to silk, whose fibers originate in the cocoons of the larva of a domesticated moth called a silkworm. More than three thousand silkworms must be painstakingly fed fresh mulberry leaves under prescribed temperature and light conditions to generate two pounds of silk filaments. It is thus not surprising that silk, with its softness, strength, and luminosity, early on became a preferred material for the regal garments of the imperial family as well as for fashioning elegant clothing worn by the less exalted.

Museums may exhibit sumptuously ornamented imperial dragon robes and court attire made of silk from the Qing and earlier dynasties, but it is the fashionable silk dresses of modern women that have come to be viewed as quintessentially Chinese apparel. Before the second decade of the twentieth century, the formal and semiformal attire worn by wealthy women married to noblemen, mandarins, or merchants consisted of a mang’ao over a mangchu, and a matched “dragon” jacket and skirt, with a xiapei or stole and a detachable collar yunjian. On her head was a prominent coronet called a phoenix crown, similar to those worn by empresses. Fabricated from various silks with elaborate embroidery, this sophisticated costume fell out of fashion with the collapse of the Qing imperial system at the beginning of the twentieth century, when it was considered outdated.

A visitor to beijing’s forbidden city has her photograph taken wearing the silken garments of a Qing dynasty courtier.

Three examples of the qipao, also called cheongsam.

While a few Chinese women in large cities adopted Victorian and Edwardian ensembles, a distinctly Chinese style of modern dress continued to evolve for emerging middle-class and upper-class women that was increasingly stylish and trendy. As described by Valery Garrett, “the ao upper garment became slimmer and longer, reaching to below the knee; the sleeves narrowed to the wrists; the side slits were shortened, reaching to the lower hip, and all the edges of the ao were trimmed with narrow braid instead of the wide bands of embroidery popular in the past.... The ao was worn over an ankle-length skirt, usually black, which had now become a one-piece garment with panels at front and back attached to pleats or godets at the side” (2007: 136). Throughout the 1920s, this new style underwent continual modification, which included new silk weaving patterns made possible by the popular mechanical Jacquard loom, an early nineteenth-century French invention still seen in some textile mills in China.

In time, the qipao or “banner gown,” which in southern China is called the cheongsam, literally “long dress,” emerged as the emblematic Chinese dress for chic women. It has endured to the present because of its elegance and versatility. “The cheongsam fell straight from the shoulders to the hem in an A line, stopping just below the knees, corresponding to the shorter dresses worn in the West at the time. The narrow stand-up collar opened on the right to form a diagonal slit to the underarm, which continued to the hip, and was fastened with press-studs, or more usually with loops and ball buttons.” As with Western fashion at the time, hemlines dropped and the fit became tighter, resulting in a styles that were “provocative and accentuated a woman’s sexuality, emphasized by legs clad in silk stockings (a recent innovation) and high heels” (Garrett 2007: 147). A distinctive feature of the silk qipao or cheongsam is the presence of side slits, which sometimes are modest but often are quite daring, even reaching high on a woman’s thigh.

The qipao is usually fitted tightly to the body of a young woman.

An elderly lady in Yunnan province examines an embroidered silk dress she wore as a young woman.

Detailed view of the knotted closures on the front of two of the qipao shown on the previous page.

Snuff Bottles

When tobacco, a crop native to the Americas, found its way to China via Portuguese and Spanish traders in the early seventeenth century, imperial authorities banned its planting, distribution, and use. While smoking, chewing, and snuffing all emerged as ways to enjoy tobacco, the use of snuff and chewing tobacco—smokeless practices—peaked in China in the nineteenth century, then declined by the 1920s. Today, however, China leads the world in both the production and consumption by smoking of what was once called “this terrible weed.”

Snuff, a generic term for pulverized tobacco in the form of a fine dust that can be inhaled into the nostrils, gained currency in China because of perceived medicinal qualities that could dispel sinus problems, stave off colds, and even prevent constipation. Unlike the decorative and functional snuff boxes that became popular in Europe and America, small bottles, like those used for other medicines, were initially used in China to limit the exposure of snuff to air and moisture that would lead to its degradation.

The range of materials used to make Chinese snuff bottles is staggering, including porcelain, precious and semiprecious stones, ivory, tortoise shells, metal, and bone as well as blown and cut glass. While most snuff containers are emblazoned with external ornamentation having auspicious themes, glass bottles with scenes and brushwork calligraphy painted inside them especially amaze even those who are not connoisseurs. To accomplish this feat, the artist uses a fine bent brush that reaches into the neck of the snuff bottle to paint a mirror image of what is visible through the glass. Working in reverse involves not only this skill but also painting a face by starting with the dark pupils of the eyes before sketching in the eyes themselves, eyebrows, and eyelashes before the other features are added that result in a very tiny visage peering out. With scenes or poems less than two inches in size, this is a daunting task for the artist.

Since snuff bottles were made to be held in the palm of the hand, most have a superb tactile quality to them. With their carved exteriors as well as interior miniaturized scenes and poems, small stuff bottles came to be seen by Chinese as objects of adornment that conferred status on those who owned and displayed them. For easy access, snuff bottles usually were carried in the sleeve of a robe. Sometimes they were held in a form-fitted space in an elaborately embroidered box. Like the skilled artisans who crafted these diminutive objects, connoisseurs fulfilled the Chinese aesthetic ideal of “seeing something important in something small” (yi xiio jianda). While this art form reached an apex in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it was only in the last quarter of the twentieth century that collectors of Chinese art began to value snuff bottles as inspired decorative art objects. These objects are more common today than in the past. Visitors to China will see countless artists in hotel arcades and airport corridors producing tourist-grade knockoffs of what until recently were acquired only as cherished antiques.

Each with its own tactile quality, this collection of snuff bottles illustrates some of their varied forms, using porcelain, stone, and glass as materials. shallow carving takes full advantage of the variations in natural coloration in some while other bottles have polychrome paintings of miniature landscapes executed inside.