Elaine Du - Women's Fashion Trends in Qing Dynasty China

Women's Fashion Trends in Qing Dynasty China 

Section 15 of the Qingming Shanghe tu handscroll features elegant women leisurely walking a courtyard in spring. Here, we can see life away from the bustling market and town center, where elite women can relax and enjoy their lives in a higher status. One noteworthy difference about these women is how they’re dressed and how they compose themselves versus the other figures we see in this painting. During this time in Chinese history, women had long been the subjects of many paintings and poems, which gave us a new perspective on Chinese culture and trends. The idea of female beauty as an art form really took off during this era, when artists strived to capture the delicate and fleeting beauty of court women in their art. This was important because art before this time was meant to serve a purpose, such as teaching moral lessons or contemplating the vastness of nature. The shift to depicting beautiful women gives historians the chance to learn how they were dressed during these eras. There were many fashion and aesthetic trends particularly for women that were popular between the Ming and Qing dynasties, when this scroll was painted. The upper class women in this painting seem to adhere to some of those trends, which can be seen in how they wear certain styles of clothing. 

Women had a different standard of beauty in the Qing dynasties. In section 15 of the Qingming Shanghe tu scroll, we can see a group of women leisurely strolling through a beautiful garden. Their bright and colorful robes were a symbol of their wealth, as the silk making process was quite tedious and laborious. According to popular Qing dynasty fashion, they’re wearing skirts that wrap around their bodies and trailing ribbons on their arms and waists. Following the standards of beauty during this time, the women were “slim, with fair skin”, unlike in earlier eras when being curvy and voluminous were the ideal. Their body shape is enhanced by their long, flowing robes, making them seem extra delicate and small (Wang, 2018, p.65). At this time of the Qing dynasty, women’s garments had begun to lose their fitted shape and had become more loose, until the “ outline of the garment was basically flat and straight” (Mei, 2011, p. 47). This flat, straight, pattern gives the women a gentle and ethereal aura, as it flows and drapes easily. Because of the nature of the way these women were painted, it is difficult to see the fine details of their clothing, but other elite women of this time would’ve had elaborate patterns and embroideries sewn onto their silk robes (as we can see through other various works of women). Beauty prints of women during this time typically showed them in this style of dress which radiated an regal quality. Hair was extremely valued and important in Chinese culture, and so elite women took extra lengths to make sure that their hair was neat and tidy. Fashionable hairstyles during this time were “the round hair buns at the back of the head.”, which is how all the women in Section 15 styled their hair (Mei, 2011, p. 50-51). 

One other motif is that all the women were painted in a delicate and refined manner, as another way for the audience to tell that they are elite. All the women are calmly posed, walking at a leisurely pace and carrying fans. As social orders were firm and clear in this era and strictly imposed upon women especially, these women made sure that they were respecting that by wearing the correct clothing for their rank as a signal to their “civility, culture, and humanity” (Dorothy, 1997). They are all conservatively dressed, not even showing their hands, in order to maintain the belief that concealing the body will promote “virtue and guide people to goodness” (Dorothy, 1997). All of these characteristics and trends of women’s clothing in the Ming and Qing dynasties were beautifully and accurately executed in the Qingming Shanghe tu scroll. 

Works Cited

Ko, Dorothy. "The body as attire: the shifting meanings of footbinding in seventeenth-century China." Journal of Women's History 8, no. 4 (1997): 8+. Gale Academic OneFile (accessed November 15, 2021). https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A19291654/AONE?u=nysl_ca_unionc&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=471e00db. 

Wang, Anita Xiaoming. “The Idealised Lives of Women: Visions of Beauty in Chinese Popular Prints of the Qing Dynasty.” Arts Asiatiques 73 (2018): 61–80. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26585538. 

Mei, Hua. Chinese Clothing. Cambridge University Press, 2011.