That some people transgressed the regulations and authorities felt required to update them repeatedly, does not mean they had no effect. After all, transgressors oriented themselves by the clothing order and, by aspiring to the silk ribbon or gold buckles of the rank above, indirectly acknowledged it as a point of reference. By ranking goods and fashions, such laws could reinforce a social pyramid of taste. This was why, in France, the royal court played ‘the motor role in sartorial distinctions’, in the words of the historian Daniel Roche.59 All eyes were fixed on king and queen.
And defiance could be costly and painful. The Justices of the Peace might have looked the other way in Elizabethan England, but in central Europe the authorities were far less forgiving. In Germany’s Black Forest in 1708, the pastor of Ebhausen delivered a sermon against ‘over-dressed women’ and had the church court impose an 11-kreuzer fine on one of them for wearing a neckerchief too large for her station. This was one month’s pay for the average maidservant. Five years later, in the nearby small town of Wildberg, one in ten inhabitants were fined for clothing offences in the course of the year. The average fine was a week’s wages. Almost all those punished were women. Public shaming was widespread and risked long family feuds, if not complete ostracization. In communities like these ones in Württemberg, sumptuary legislation was powerful because it was part of a wider regime of social control by guilds and churches which used simultaneous checks on work and spending to keep women subordinate and labour cheap. Single and young women and widows were not allowed to earn their living independently by weaving or selling other products in the marketplace. Instead they had to live in and work as servants for artificially low, fixed wages. Masters ensured, too, that their apprentices were kept in place and their guilds did not have to face competition; the guilds excluded migrants and Jews as well as women. It was a double screw. Husbands tightened one end to limit what their womenfolk could earn and then turned the other to restrict what they could spend it on. The local courts gave a husband the power to take his wife’s earnings, and if he wanted to, to forbid her to make purchases altogether. Husbands thus monopolized both production and consumption, and this explains why in some towns their wardrobes continued to be fuller than those of their wives.60
This was a rural area, but it was not cut off from the world or locked into some timeless agrarian self-sufficiency. These small towns and villages were tied into markets, weaving and spinning for export. They lent and borrowed money. The women there clearly had desires for novelties, like the unfortunate miller’s maidservant who spent a day in jail in 1736 because she had been spotted buying ribbons at a fair. What distinguished such communities was not an absence of desire but a social and institutional straitjacket which kept desire and spending in check. It was difficult for consumption to flourish in such an environment.
PHOENIX HAIRPINS AND REFINED ANTIQUES
In the second half of the nineteenth century, after the Opium Wars, a picture of China as static and closed began to take root in the Western mind. This was, we now know, the distorted result of seeing the recent success of the Industrial Revolution in Europe as proof of a unique Western talent for modernity, and of China’s backwardness. In 1582, when the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci set foot in China, a more positive view prevailed. Ricci was impressed by the dynamism in Nanjing – ‘they say there are two hundred thousand weavers here’ – and by how, elsewhere, the Chinese ‘now weave a cloth made entirely of silk’, ‘in imitation of European products’. The long, loose sleeves worn by Chinese men and women reminded him of the Venetian style. He, too, noted the ‘exceedingly large number of books in circulation . . . and the ridiculously low prices at which they are sold’. Ricci was struck less by difference than by the ‘similarity of customs’: ‘Their use of tables, chairs, and beds is wholly unknown to any of the peoples of the states that border on China . . . there are numerous points of advantageous contact between ourselves and the Chinese people.’61
Ricci had an interest in emphasizing parallels, but his observations – like those of the Portuguese Jesuit Álvaro Semedo, who admired the ‘traffic and commodities’ in China in the 1620s–’30s – do record how commercialization was sweeping across Ming China, releasing a torrent of goods, fashions and desires; and with it anxieties about social disorder and moral decay.62 One channel was via smuggling and the tribute trade. Another was legal coastal shipping. In 1548, one official counted over a thousand boats in a period of thirty-nine days along the Zhejiang–Fujian coast in the south-east of the empire.63 Such coastal trade connected with a much larger regional trade across this vast land empire. Its major artery was the 1,794km-long Grand Canal, the oldest man-made waterway in the world. Reopened in the 1510s, it ran from Hangzhou on the eastern coast to Yangzhou and the Yangzi, and all the way to Beijing in the north. The primary purpose of this grand piece of infrastructure was military, allowing army barges to carry grain to Beijing, the Ming’s new capital from 1421. But while government boats had priority, the Grand Canal inevitably facilitated the movement of food and goods in general. Grain from Guangzi in the south-east was ferried north to the cities along the Yangzi. From farmers in the central interior, rice travelled down the Yangzi to reach consumers in Jiangnan, the area around Shanghai. From the north, raw cotton was shipped to Sung-Chiang prefecture, south of Shanghai, where it was turned into cotton cloth and then sold on to the rest of China. Cups and bowls from Jingdezhen, the porcelain capital in the north-east, a few hundred miles inland from Canton, were traded by merchants from Huizhou in the south (see Plate 3). In reverse, tea and sugar from the south travelled north. Soybean cakes were transported down the coast from Manchuria. Books printed in Sichuan ended up in the hands of readers in Nanjing and the Yangzi delta.
The Jesuit Semedo felt the Chinese were ‘naturally inclined to be merchants’ and found the ‘traffic’ they made ‘incredible’, not only between provinces but within cities: ‘for almost whatsoever is found in the shops, is sold in the streets in a lesser quantity.’64 In the sixteenth century, this web of commerce was growing rapidly, and as it did, producers became connected to more distant consumers, enabling farmers and artisans to specialize and earn their living by selling in the market and buying a growing portion of their food and clothing. In Shandong, in northern China, for example, it became so profitable to cultivate cotton that many farms stopped growing their own grain. Increasingly, barter was being complemented by getting and spending.
The sprouts of consumption were nowhere stronger than in the Yangzi delta, the commercial heart of China, and home to around 30 million peasants who made and sold cotton cloth in exchange for rice, raw materials and household goods. Although late Ming China was far less urban than Northern Italy, the Netherlands or England, there was an overall increase in market towns and, by 1700, in the most advanced regions, such as Jiangnan, perhaps as many as one in six people lived in towns. Unfortunately, we lack for China the detailed inventories that would allow us to paint a picture of the material world of the late Ming with the same sharpness as for early modern Europe; it is not possible to itemize tableware, furniture and other possessions. We are much more dependent on surviving reports from social observers who wrote local gazettes, novelists and authors on taste and household management. Inevitably, what we see has been filtered through their own values, which are often nostalgic for an idealized, simpler past and condescending about the new desires of lower-ranking groups. But, if read carefully, they let us at least reconstruct the main characteristics of the material environment in which they lived. The memorialist Zhu Guozhen, for example, offers a short description of a household in Jiangnan around 1600. Here the head of the household wove cotton into cloth, which he then exchanged for silver with which he bought the rice for his family. ‘A family’s rent, food, clothing, utensils, and what it spends for social occasions, for raising children, or for burying the dead all come from cotton.’65 The account is silent on how much is spent on social occasions, what he buys for the childr
en, their clothes and lifestyle, but it leaves no doubt about how specialization was fuelling greater consumption.
Cities sported new fashions and more advertising. The historian Gu Qiyuan (1565–1628) noted how in Nanjing in his youth, women’s fashion had changed once in ten years, but in his ripe old age it changed every two or three years. Hairstyles were reaching unprecedented heights, with so-called ‘peony heads’ held up with the help of false hair.66 In addition to porcelain from Jingdezhen, urban markets sold embroideries from Hangzhou and cloisonné wine cups made by Muslim craftsmen in Beijing. Commercial culture was thriving, with a growing number of shops, more literate consumers, and shopkeepers and artisans battling for their attention with increasingly adventurous advertising and early attempts at trademarks and branding. Print culture and books reached a mass market in the seventeenth century, made possible by simpler fonts, woodblock cutting and a greater division of labour. There were textbooks and plays, erotic handbooks and novellas, some selling for as little as 0.1 taels, an affordable sum for middle-ranking officials, scholars, merchants and their wives. In Jiangnan, perhaps as much as half the population were literate.67 This more textual culture considerably widened the possibilities of advertising. Shops sported trademarks on hanging banners. Butchers in Suzhou, for example, announced that they were the ‘Authentic Lu Gaojian’ or, even better, the ‘Real Authentic Lu Gaojian’, hoping to cash in on the reputation of the famous original Lu. In Beijing, some signs were 10 metres tall; others were illuminated by lanterns at night. Women wore hairpins with the characters ‘Zhu Songlin’, the trademark of the high-quality bamboo craftsman Song Lin. On Nanjing’s bustling Sanshan Street, bamboo-furniture shops traced their craft back to Pu Zhongqian. From Japan came folding fans, lacquered tables and gold-painted screens and cosmetic boxes. The main customers for luxury goods were the gentry and literati-scholars; some penned poems and biographies in praise of artisans, which boosted their name recognition further.68 Yet, in rich, developed regions like Guangdong (Canton) in South China, peasants, too, were increasingly consumers as well as producers, buying sugar, shell jewellery, betel nuts and rain cloaks.
Style was trumping substance everywhere, according to local Chinese gazettes. ‘A family without as much as an old broom,’ one gazetteer wrote in 1591, ‘go about in carriages . . . and dress themselves up in the hats and clothing of the rich and eminent.’ In villages, rustic frugality was giving way to a bewildering obsession with fashion. The scholar Chen Yao noted in the 1570s how ‘young dandies in the villages say that even silk gauze isn’t good enough and lust for Suzhou embroideries . . . Long skirts and wide collars, broad belts and narrow pleats – they change without warning.’ It was all about shiyang; literally, ‘the look of the moment’.69 A new genre of almanacs appeared, offering ‘the Complete and Categorized Essentials for the Householder’ (undated but in circulation by 1600), a kind of guidebook on household management that also gave tips on interior decoration. Such books mainly targeted the gentry and urban merchants. That one surviving copy has also been found in the grave of a small rural landowner, however, suggests that porcelain and other goods found their way into the hands of at least some aspiring farmers in the countryside, too. Advice on decorative objects would have been of little value without objects to begin with.70
Growing abundance was most visible among merchants. The Confucian novel of manners, Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase), completed in 1618, paints a vivid picture of it. The book is about the social climber Ximen Qing, who is about to take a third wife, Meng Yulou, the widow of a textile merchant. The matchmaker introduces her by listing her possessions: ‘She owns two Nanking beds, with retractable steps; four or five trunks full of clothing for all four seasons, figure gowns and so forth . . .; pearl headbands and earrings, gold jewelry set with precious stones and gold and silver bracelets and bangles . . . And she has two or three hundred bales of fine cotton drill as well.’ When Ximen finally meets her, she wears ‘a kingfisher blue surcoat of figured silk, emblazoned with a mandarin square . . . On her head: Pearls and trinkets rose in piles; a phoenix hairpin was half askew.’ A manservant brings tea ‘flavored with candied kumquats in carved lacquer cups inlaid with silver and provided with silver teaspoons in the shape of apricot leaves.’71
A merchant’s wife wearing a phoenix hairpin may not sound much but it signalled how things were challenging the social order in the late Ming. Phoenixes and dragons were the Chinese equivalent of pearls and marten. They were meant to be reserved for empresses and princely consorts. In 1593, the scholar-official Zhang Han complained that they were now worn by wives of the Fourth and Fifth Rank. Since the first Ming emperor, Hongwu (1368–98), customs had become more ‘lavish’ and ‘people all set their resolve on venerating riches and excess’. ‘Nowadays men dress in brocaded and embroidered silks, and women ornament themselves with gold and pearls, in a case of boundless extravagance which flouts the regulations of the state.’72
Excess knew no limits, and there are some striking parallels between extravagance in late Ming and early Qing China and that recorded in Europe. Just as the Venetian senate worried about excessive spending on ceremonies, a Beijing magistrate in the 1590s noted how the cost of funerals was reaching astronomical proportions.73 The great salt merchants of Yangzhou were notorious for their intense competition for status, trying to outspend each other on horses, weddings and funerals. ‘There was one,’ one writer recalled in 1795, ‘who erected wooden nude female statues in front of his inner halls, all mechanically controlled, so as to tease and surprise his guests.’ Another ‘wished to spend ten thousand taels in a single day. One of his guests suggested that he buy gold foils. From the tower on top the Golden Hill he threw down the gold foils which, carried by the wind, soon scattered amidst trees and grass and could not be gathered again.’74 Giacomo da Sant’Andrea, a spendthrift from Padua, had already perfected this art in 1300, throwing silver and golden objects into the river Brenta.75
The salt merchants’ original source of wealth was their exclusive right to sell salt at monopoly prices, which they had acquired in exchange for delivering grain and fodder to the empire’s armies in border regions. In the 1490s, the exchange of grain for salt was relaxed, and traders now branched out into silk and tea as well as money-lending. In Yangzhou in the eighteenth century, the new Qing emperors elevated the salt merchants to official positions, exempting them from the rigorous civil-service examination. Merchant houses announced their new status with palatial halls and exotic gardens, with pavilions and bridges. Some merchants added verandas. Red sandalwood came from Arabia, jade from Burma and marble from Sichuan. In 1795, the Yangzhou writer Li Dou noted nine types of coloured glaze roof decorations. Four gardens, he wrote, were built in a Western style. Many merchants decorated their homes with clocks and mirrors from Guangdong and Europe.76
As in Italy, then, so in China: the rising tide of goods reached merchants and peasants as well as the landed elite. The royal court was far less important for the diffusion of new goods and manners than has been assumed. The main source was in market towns and in an increasingly commercialized countryside. The opulence of merchant houses challenges the standard view, handed down by nineteenth-century Western visitors, that the Chinese were a frugal people. All this does not, however, mean that fashion, novelty and conspicuous consumption were embraced with open arms. Quite the contrary, they were condemned for upsetting established social hierarchies and morals. Like Renaissance Europeans, the Ming ranked land above trade. The state, an ancient proverb said, was like a tree: its roots were agriculture; traders and artisans were mere branches. Prosperous merchants were challenging this natural order. A chronicler in Jianning (Fujian province), in 1543, was horrified that some people actually chose to become merchants.77
The Ming gentry and the scholar-official elite viewed novelty with suspicion. Affluent merchants and plebeian consumers were disorderly elements in society. A barrier was erected against uppity consumers and their unwant
ed things: taste. Wen Zhenheng was a powerful landholder whose challenge to the Ming court landed him in prison. In 1645, he starved himself to death when the Manchu conquered Suzhou. In his prime, however, he had also been a new type of style counsellor, the author of the Treatise on Superfluous Things (1615–20). The title was deliberately ironic, for his real subject was the things ‘essential’ to a cultured life. ‘Bed curtains for the winter months should be of pongee silk or of thick cotton with purple patterns. Curtains of paper or of plain-weave, spun-silk cloth are both vulgar.’ For the art historian Craig Clunas the Treatise signalled how China was developing its own ‘proto-consumer culture’. In one sense this is right. Style, too, could now be learned from a manual. In Wen’s world, status was no longer just the result of birth but of refined consumption, that is, the aesthetic skill of discriminating between the elegant (wu) and the vulgar (su). Taste created cultural capital. What mattered was not the number of possessions: rather, the aesthete showed his sensibility by creating a ‘harmonious’ (yun) relationship between an object and its surroundings. A vase had to be the right size for a room. It ought to be of bronze in winter and spring, porcelain in summer. And it certainly should never hold more than two varieties of flowers, ‘since too many gives the appearance of a wine shop’.78
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