Fashion Theory

The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture

ISSN: 1362-704X (Print) 1751-7419 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfft20

Material Girls: Silk and Self-Fashioning in Tang

China (618–907)

BuYun Chen

To cite this article: BuYun Chen (2017) Material Girls: Silk and Self-Fashioning in Tang China
(618–907), Fashion Theory, 21:1, 5-33, DOI: 10.1080/1362704X.2016.1138679

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1362704X.2016.1138679

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Fashion Theory, Volume 21, Issue 1, pp. 5–33
DOI: 10.1080/1362704X.2016.1138679
© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
BuYun Chen
BuYun Chen teaches Chinese
history at Swarthmore College.
She is currently working on her
book, a history of fashion in
Tang dynasty China that brings
innovative weavers and chic
court ladies to the forefront of
history.
bchen5@swarthmore.edu
Material Girls:
Silk and
Self-Fashioning in
Tang China
(618–907)
ABSTRACT 
Tang dynasty China was a fashionable place. Low-cut necklines, kaf-
tans sewn from sumptuously brocaded silks, diaphanous shawls cut
from resist-dyed silk gauze, and striped skirts elaborately patterned with
rosettes abound in the visual and material archive. This article takes
a closer look at the Tang woman’s wardrobe to show how changes in
dress and shifts in the perceptions of dress signified the emergence of a
fashion system. It argues that what manifested in the second half of the
dynasty as hallmarks of a fashion system were produced by ruptures
within the social, economic, and political fabric of society. Such rifts
6 BuYun Chen

included a crisis in representation that stemmed from a loss of faith in

clothing’s ability to accurately represent the status of the wearer, and
spurred on by the expanding commercial society of the eighth and ninth
centuries. But it was the silk industry that was the driving force of the
Tang fashion system, as innovations in silk weaving and design supplied
all the trappings for elite self-fashioning. The article narrates these shifts
in Tang China, and the material processes that underpinned fashion’s
fabrication, through an integrated analysis that brings visual and ar-
chaeological materials into conversation with the textual archive.

KEYWORDS: fashion, China, women, silk, history

Celebrated for their cosmopolitanism, Tang dynasty women and their

décolletage continue to maintain a hold on the popular imagination as
the superlative icons of Chinese fashion. But questions of how changes
in women’s dress and adornment in Tang China constituted fashion, a
cultural practice firmly associated with capitalist modernity, and what
were the motors of change, remain largely unexplored.1 And, further,
what did women wear and how did they wear it at different stages of
the 300-year dynasty? It is the task of this essay to show that the ex-
pressions of Tang cosmopolitanism—low-cut necklines, exotic kaftans,
and masculine riding boots—were merely symptomatic of an emergent
fashion system. What underpinned fashion in Tang China was funda-
mentally material.
Dress and adornment in Tang China served as the key communica-
tive form through which social and gender distinctions were constructed
and challenged. Beginning in the latter half of the eighth century, the
act of dressing acquired new symbolic significance as an act of visual
display as the empire experienced a tectonic shift in the political, social,
and economic realms. In the first half of the dynasty, dress belonged to a
range of stable displays of status that also included carriages and hous-
es, which together reinforced a long-standing connection between social
status and visual display. Aristocratic privilege was meditated by a ma-
terial hierarchy. But in the mid-eighth century this hermetically sealed
universe of aristocratic privilege and imperial power collapsed, ushering
in a new sartorial regime. How people dressed, how they looked, and
how they appeared to each other became a serious concern among old
elites as clothing ceased to be a reliable marker of the body’s status in
society. When the dynasty collapsed in 907, a new sartorial order based
on the value of wealth rather than birth had sprung into existence.
The more general anxiety about personal adornment, however, was
directed at women and their dress behavior. Since women were exclud-
ed from the political ranking system of the court, their clothing tended
to be less an object of government regulation and more the target of
a moralizing discourse. But over the course of the dynasty, women’s
Material Girls: Silk and Self-Fashioning in Tang China (618–907) 7

sartorial impropriety became an even more intense concern among in-

tellectuals and officials, who viewed their dress practices as portents of
social upheaval and as examples of unruly extravagance. This attention
to women and their external trappings is mirrored in eighth-century
pictorial representations—silk paintings and tomb murals—in which
highly coiffed female figures invite the viewer to gaze upon woven mo-
tifs of lozenges and patterns of faintly dyed florets covering their bare
shoulders. Just as the desire for fashionable objects disrupted society,
women as visual spectacles were equally, if not more, troublesome.
The visual representations of dress and the corpus of silk artifacts
illustrate how the visibility, visuality, and tactility of female bodies, gar-
ments, and silk formed the bedrock of fashionable late-Tang society.
This paper argues that fashion in Tang China was driven by innovation
in the technology of silk weaving, rather than the shape and silhouette
of garments. Prohibitions of sumptuary transgressions in the dynastic
annals, tax records, economic treatises, and poetry show us that dress
and appearances were a matter of government concern. Viewed togeth-
er, the textual, visual, and material evidence calls our attention to the
women, both wearers and makers of dress, who stood at the center of
the fashion game. Their conspicuousness was critical to both the rise of
fashion and its representation.

A New Order of Status and Gender Performance

During the seventh and eighth centuries, successful military conquests
expanded the empire to its greatest extent, turning the capital city of
Chang’an (modern-day Xi’an) into a cosmopolitan metropolis where
nearly 10,000 foreigners, including Turks, Uyghurs, Sogdians, and oth-
er Central Asian groups, set up residence. At the height of Tang rule,
Chang’an was the largest city in the medieval world, and home to over
1 million residents. By the end of the dynasty, the geographical unity,
stable social hierarchy based on birth, and centralized administration of
the seventh and eighth centuries had ceased to exist.
Two turbulent events, first in the late seventh century and then in the
mid-eighth century, led to a reshuffling of old power structures. In 690,
Empress Wu Zetian (ca. 625–705) usurped the throne and reigned as
the emperor of the Zhou Dynasty (690–705), the first and last woman
to have done so in Chinese history. In 755, barely five decades after the
restoration of the Tang dynastic line, An Lushan (ca. 703–757), a Tur-
kic-Sogdian general who managed to gain unparalleled imperial favor
and the control of the northeastern commands, rebelled. For nearly a
decade, fighting swept through the country, resulting in mass displace-
ment, the disruption of trade and production, and the collapse of the
aristocratic elite. The central government’s loss of authority led to long-
term institutional and economic consequences that resulted in the final
fall of the Tang empire a century and a half later.
8 BuYun Chen

In the wake of the rebellion, the central government was forced to

abandon longstanding political and economic institutions. By the early
ninth century, the old pillars of government administration and social
organization had nearly crumbled away. The rebellion came to repre-
sent a watershed of change in the empire’s economic and social struc-
tures; the new order that arose effected a fashion system that looked
suspiciously like the modern one: a self-fashioning impulse, a game of
imitation and emulation, and a shift in modes of economic production.
The decline of the old order was precipitated by the breakdown of
long-established hierarchies, as the aristocracy was gradually displaced
by professional elites recruited through an examination system. During
the eighth and ninth centuries, people from marginal lineages without
ties to the central government were able to rise to high rank in the of-
ficial hierarchy or achieved wealth and social prestige through service
in the military commands or through successful commercial ventures.
A weak court, population redistribution, and economic prosperity
promoted the blurring of social distinctions between traditional elites
tied to the imperial court and new professional elites. Increased social
and economic mobility was consonant with the gradual dissolution of
the aristocracy who, by the ninth century, no longer monopolized the
empire’s wealth and power (see Ebrey 1978; Johnson 1977a, 1977b;
Hartwell 1982; Tackett 2006, 2008).
Tension between this new regime and the idealized sartorial order
was articulated through the recurrent efforts of the government to im-
pose restrictions on dress. Tang sumptuary legislation sought to protect
the old sartorial regime by controlling the use and production of mate-
rials and, insofar as it was successful, operated as both social regulation
and economic policy. In 624, during the early reign of the dynasty’s
founding emperor Gaozu (618–626), a statute outlining the official and
ceremonial dress of the emperor and his court was devised as an elab-
oration on the new dynasty’s governing efforts.2 With the exception of
the imperial household’s ceremonial ensembles for state rituals, the fun-
damental components and shapes of men’s and women’s attire remained
uniform across the social hierarchy. Access to patterned silks, precious
stones, and metals was a privilege reserved for the aristocratic court,
emphasizing the symbolic function of luxury goods in maintaining the
idealized regime of appearances. For all male subjects in the Tang em-
pire, rank determined the color and fabric of their garments. Twice a
year, the emperor bestowed official clothing on each subject serving the
court to ensure the correct display of status. Through dress, the court
bound the body of male subjects to the project of governance. Dress that
did not accord with a subject’s social status was considered a criminal
offense—for example, the wearing of a color that did not correspond to
one’s rank was to be punished by 40 blows with a light stick.3
New provisions were promulgated as edicts or decrees that, in addi-
tion to attacking the usurping of status displays by commoners, clarified
Material Girls: Silk and Self-Fashioning in Tang China (618–907) 9

or amended old regulations. Of the 25 major restrictions imposed on

forms of apparel over the course of the Tang dynasty, five were issued
in direct response to the appropriation of colors granted to the higher
ranking court elites by unauthorized persons.4 These regulations over-
lapped with additional efforts to codify the official dress for civil and
military bureaucrats.5 The remaining edicts promulgated by successive
emperors sought to curb the wasteful sartorial practices of court elites
and commoners, such as wearing elaborately woven or embellished
robes and footwear. So, despite the government’s efforts to preserve the
social hierarchy and its status displays, elites failed to comply with the
regulations.
By reinforcing equivalence between rank and material goods, Tang
sumptuary legislation had the unintended effect of making status sym-
bols in themselves as important as, if not more important than, what
the symbols represented. Political privilege was made manifest through
display, which turned the visual markers of status into objects of power
that could be replicated. Writing about late medieval and early modern
Europe, Alan Hunt (1996) has argued that sumptuary laws contain an
inherent contradiction, for rather than maintaining social distinctions,
they actually encourage the usurping of status symbols.6 In the Tang,
as well, the equation of luxury silks with social status and rank turned
these markers into easy targets for appropriation from both above and
below, like the offenders of the court’s regulations on color who sought
recognition through contesting established hierarchies. For them, as for
the imperial court, color symbolized rank and power. As color and fabric
serve to conceal or construct the social status of its wearer, they assume
symbolic power equal to or greater than the economic or social relations
underlying their existence. The distillation of social prestige into a ma-
terial good and a visibly recognizable symbol then adds incentive to the
game of emulation and fosters the image-making impulse of elites who
can afford sumptuous silks, but are unable to attain the state-sanctioned
prestige of aristocratic or bureaucratic rank. This interest in politically
determined displays of status underpinned the act of dressing, particu-
larly for male elites who put on colored robes that did not correspond
to their rank, during the seventh and eighth centuries when the Tang
imperial court was at the height of its power and influence.
Women’s dress displays occupied a different place in the government’s
sumptuary project. Whereas men’s dress codes emphasized the principle
of status, regulations governing elite women’s wardrobes consistently
expressed concern about wasteful expenditure. Women’s dress was
linked to the male household to which they belonged and, as such, was
adapted to adhere to the colors and fabrics assigned to the husband’s
ranking in the nine-grades system. Elite women were entitled to wear
colors of lower ranks, but lower-ranking women were forbidden to
dress above their station. Since the public body was a male official body,
one that was mediated through vestimentary codes, women were able
10 BuYun Chen

to subvert the prescriptions and proscriptions on clothing more easily

than their male counterparts.7 In contrast to their husbands and fathers,
when women failed to dress according to their social rank, they were
reprimanded for their penchant for opulence. Women’s subversion of
prescribed dress codes lacked clear political motivation, in contrast to
men’s transparent competition for power within the court. This explains
why sumptuary restrictions for women tended to target the widths and
lengths of sleeves and skirts, rather than the usurping of court-sanc-
tioned status symbols.
Cases of women transgressing the sartorial hierarchy frequently
called attention to their flagrant wearing of elaborately dyed, embroi-
dered, and decorated silks as signs of excess and social disorder. In the
case of Princess Anle’s feather skirt, this language of extravagance and
waste was the centerpiece of a critique of faddish emulation. Commis-
sioned by Princess Anle (ca. 685–710), the imperial workshop crafted
the “hundred feather skirt” so that “from the front it looked like one
color, from the side another color, in the light one color, and in the
dark another color, one could see the full form of the hundred birds”
(Xin Tang shu 2006 vol. 3, 34.878). Anle’s skirt was so adored by other
elite women that “all of the wealthy aristocrats tried to imitate it, so that
the feathers and furs of the rare and precious birds and animals in Jiang-
nan and Lingwai have all been plucked.” Whether to mark individual
distinction or social belonging, here women’s desire for this feather skirt
is made to bear responsibility for the extinction of exotic birds in the
southern regions of the empire. Novelty has taken the place of court-or-
dained ranking in making a claim to coveted status.
Following the late eighth-century rebellion, the act of dressing for
men and women began to converge as the court ceased to be the seat
of power. In the transition from an aristocratic society to a meritocratic
one, status had to be created—and with new material markers. No longer
a hermetically sealed universe, what one wore played an increasingly
important role in the conveyance of wealth and status among old and
new elites alike. Merchants, made rich by the expansion in commerce
in the post-rebellion era, also entered the fashion game, spending their
wealth on dress and ornaments to outshine aristocratic elites.8 Motivated
by a need to showcase one’s knowledge of and access to novel silks and,
in turn, a desire to “keep up with the times,” in the words of leading poet
Bai Juyi (772–846), these elites openly flouted sumptuary laws. Enabled
by their wealth, new professional and merchant elites were able to lay
claim to an expanding range of displays of status that would previously
have been reserved for the court elites. As Ulinka Rublack has explored
in the context of sixteenth-century Germany, in new consumer societies,
the act of dressing becomes “a much more important signifying practice”
through which people constructed and communicated ideas about
themselves within the larger world (Rublack 2010, 25–26). Similarly, the
brewing tension between dress as constitutive of a person’s identity and
 Material Girls: Silk and Self-Fashioning in Tang China (618–907) 11

Figure 1
Standing female attendant.
The figurine, dated to the late
seventh to early eighth century,
is dressed in the banbi over
a low-cut, long-sleeved robe,
and high-waisted skirt. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Gift of Enid A. Haupt, 1997.
http://www.metmuseum.org.

dress as representative of the elite networks one laid claim to highlights

the shift toward a fashion system, wherein clothing comes to represent
more than social and political rank.
In Tang China, as in sixteenth-century Germany, the act of dressing
was a practice of signification, in which clothing and its fabrication came
to represent how one imagined their place within and how they wished
to be perceived by society. While men and women continued to dress for
different audiences throughout the dynasty, their dress practices began
to align in the post-rebellion era. With the decline of the imperial court’s
authority, visual displays gained greater value as symbols of elite status.
For elite men, a new sense of the clothed self was taking shape by the
late eighth century, one that was tied to a system of values that promot-
ed the accretion of wealth as the path to power and privilege. In late
eighth- and ninth-century sumptuary decrees, the targeted patrons of
novelty referred to all subjects in the empire, suggesting that Tang men
12 BuYun Chen

Figure 2
Horse and female rider.
Excavated in 1973 from the
Tomb 187 (seventh century)
in Astana, Turfan, Xinjiang
Uyghur Autonomous Region,
currently in Xinjiang Uyghur
Autonomous Region Museum.
After James C.Y. Watt et al.,
China: Dawn of a Golden Age,
200–750 AD. The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York,
2004.

had joined their female counterparts in the self-fashioning game. The

expression of status was no longer tied to the imperial court’s ranking
of colors, but to the novel silks produced by an expanding silk indus-
try. For both men and women in the empire, the act of dressing was
increasingly entangled with the vicissitudes of the marketplace. Anxiety
over the collapse of the old society and its sartorial order, however, was
displaced onto the problem of women’s dress and adornment.
 Material Girls: Silk and Self-Fashioning in Tang China (618–907) 13

Figure 3
From left to right: figure (woman) wearing Rainbow Dance costume, Tang dynasty; figure of a woman with a tall headdress, Tang
dynasty; figure of an attendant dressed holding a tray, Sui dynasty (581–618); figure of an attendant dressed in hufu holding a dog,
Tang dynasty. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Clothes Make the (Wo)man

The new relationship forged between one’s body, self, and external trap-
pings was not eagerly embraced by all subjects in the empire. Such a
departure from classical ideals about correct clothing and social order
incited uproar among Tang scholar-officials. For them, the notion that
one’s dress and adornment no longer cohered with the imaginary status
of the body underneath was evidence of chaos in the social realm. The
phenomenon of fashion and, in particular, the disavowal of stable status
displays, provoked the anxieties of male intellectuals, leading them to
rail against the impropriety of court elites. And they clamored against
women’s transgressions with the most fervor, repeatedly citing their sar-
torial misconduct, in particular “cross-dressing,” as harbingers of the
empire’s demise.
In the dynastic dress code, women’s dress was classified under
two general categories of ceremonial and ordinary garb. A complete
14 BuYun Chen

Figure 4
“Ladies Playing a Game of Go.” Excavated in 1972 from Astana tomb No. 187 (dated to mid-eighth century). Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous
Region Museum. After Zhongguo huihua quanji, Vol. 1. Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1997.

­ensemble, for both ceremonial and everyday wear, would have includ-
ed an unlined short robe or a short jacket, a skirt, and a shawl; and
up until the late eighth century, a woman would have also worn the
banbi. Translated literally as “half-arm,” banbi referred to a short-
sleeved, waist-length jacket that could be worn either over the short
robe or underneath (Figure 1).
Supplementing the basic skirt, top, and shawl ensemble was an as-
sortment of kaftan-like robes, cuffed trousers, riding boots, and elab-
orate hats that had filtered into the empire from the west via the Silk
Road. Classified as hufu (commonly translated as “barbarian dress”) to
mark its foreign origins, foreign dress first entered the empire around
the third century and gained widespread popularity during the fifth
century. The term hu was adopted to refer to non-Han Chinese pop-
ulations, including the Eastern Turkic peoples, Uyghurs, Tibetans, and
Khitans, living in the regions to the north and west of the empire. When
attached to attire (hufu), hu functioned to both mark exotic appeal and
critique foreignness. During the seventh and early eighth centuries, the
hu sartorial influence is best described as a pastiche of Turkic, Uyghur,
Sogdian, and by extension Sassanid Persian dress. 9 The styles associated
with this period included the open-fronted jacket with narrow-fitting
Material Girls: Silk and Self-Fashioning in Tang China (618–907) 15

sleeves, striped, tapered trousers, woven boots, and the weimao, a wide-
brimmed hat with an attached gauze veil (Figure 2).
By the ninth century, the long, voluminous robes with slim-fitting
sleeves and turned-down lapels classified as Uyghur dress were added
to the elite woman’s wardrobe. Fascination with hufu was linked to the
popularity of equestrian outings and sports, as well as foreign music,
dance, and goods that were all readily consumed by the Tang court. This
flirtation with foreign novelty also prompted women to borrow styles
from the men’s wardrobe.
In contrast to fancy silks and precious ornaments, sumptuary reg-
ulations did not proscribe the adoption of foreign modes of dress and
adornment. This oversight in the government’s efforts to impose a sar-
torial hierarchy onto a social hierarchy turned hufu into an acceptable
transgression for women. The official annals of the Tang dynasty, com-
piled by later Confucian scholar-officials, record that foreign men’s cloth-
ing was popularized by the emperor’s female attendants, who rode on
horseback while accompanying him on excursions outside of the impe-
rial palace. By tying their hair into topknots and dressing in men’s robes
and boots similar to the nomadic equestrians from the west, the women
were guilty of not one, but two forms of “cross-dressing.” Representa-
tions of women wearing hufu and accompanied by foreigners have been
excavated in large numbers from seventh- and early eighth-century im-
perial tombs, lending evidential support to these claims. They appear
in a myriad of scenes: as hunters on horseback, as entertainers, and as
attendants alongside other female attendants (Figure 3).
The prevalence of Tang female figures attired in foreign dress and
accoutrements has been interpreted as the example par excellence of
both Tang cosmopolitanism and fashion, highlighting the court’s fond-
ness for collecting the exotic during the peak of dynastic power. These
“cross-dressing” figures have likewise been read as signs of a fluid Tang
cultural identity. Hufu indeed provided Tang women with the means
to put on a gender and cultural identity that was distinct from their
own. So pervasive was this desire to cross-dress that “aristocrats and
the common women, the women inside and outside of the palace all
partook without any distinction” (Jiu Tang shu 1995, vol. 6, 45.1958).
These interpretations of Tang exoticism, however, do not go far enough
in illuminating the profound impact of this new self-fashioning impulse
on the post-rebellion fashion system.
I argue that the popularity of such gender- and culture-bending dress
practices had a deeper root: it signaled the rise of a playful conception of
clothing as a technique tied to the visual presentation of the body. That
is to say, “cross-dressing” shared a deep-rooted affinity with the usurpa-
tion of status symbols as image-making. In donning hufu, Tang women,
“aristocratic and common” and “inside and outside of the palace,” ex-
ploited the fact that their clothing did not correspond to any intrinsic
identity.10 By emulating the emperor’s female attendants, cross-dressed
16 BuYun Chen

women were laying claim to status in their social networks, however

remote from court society. During the early half of the dynasty, women’s
participation in the hufu craze communicated a connection, real or de-
sired, to the fashionable court. As copycats, women displayed privileged
knowledge of the latest trends at court and their means to replicate such
trends.
When visual representations of women underwent a significant shift
in the mid-eighth century, depictions of cross-dressing figures also
changed. Although the majority of cross-dressed women are dated to
the first half of the dynasty, figurines and paintings of women attired
in foreign forms of wear exist across the seventh and tenth centuries.11
The unequal distribution of these images speaks to a critical shift in the
rules of representation and also the relationship between hufu and the
court. Whereas seventh-century figurines are staged in a scene as part of
a horse-riding entourage or as entertainers playing foreign instruments,
later depictions of women ceased to emphasize the cultural associations
of their dress. In the former mode of representation, cross-dressed fig-
ures were made intelligible by their surroundings and connection to
court culture. In the latter, hufu is depicted alongside skirts and shawls
as part of elite women’s wardrobes, as seen in the paintings of women
on silk screens found in the western frontier of the empire, entitled “La-
dies Playing a Game of Go” (Figure 4).
Dated to the mid-eighth century, the female figures are positioned
as spectators watching a game of go (weiqi) between two seated wom-
en. The women’s round faces are powdered white and accentuated by
bright splashes of crimson on the cheeks, and they are shown wearing
high-waisted skirts made from patterned silks that curve around their
upper body. Two out of the three skirts reproduced here feature stylized
floral designs on a crimson-red ground that evoke the opulence of poly-
chrome woven silks, while the figure on the far left wears a billowing
blue blouse layered with patterns outlined in a darker hue suggestive
of silk damask. The figure in the center sports a version of the popular
eighth-century hufu ensemble.
Her round-collared tunic of voluminous proportions falls to her
feet, a side slit reveals trousers with a wide, striped cuff. Unlike the
seventh-century representation of the cross-dressing female attendant
(Figure 3), this figure—with her white face, cascading sleeves, and trail-
ing skirt—stands in closer relation to the women-dressed-as-women in
her company.
In this mid-eighth-century painting of female adornment, it is the silk
textiles that link the women and attract the eye. Earlier depictions of
women in hufu situated them within a narrative of the cosmopolitan
court as members of a hunting party or as players in a game of polo.
The kaftans, boots, and foreign headgear were accessories to the scene.
Here, each woman stands alone as a complete image to be taken in
by an implied viewer. What connects these individual portraits in a co-
Material Girls: Silk and Self-Fashioning in Tang China (618–907) 17

hesive scene, beyond the landscape, is the similar surface treatment of

their dress and faces. The polychrome silks and patterned damasks tie
them together within a single temporal and spatial frame. This change in
representation suggests a naturalization of hufu as an ensemble among
other ensembles found in the wardrobes of Tang women.
Hufu or the practice of cross-dressing may have originated with sev-
enth-century court culture, but its long-lasting popularity depended on
its appeal to status-conscious women. As in the case of Princess Anle’s
feather skirt, women’s dress and adornment changed through exchanges
within their social network and in relation to the materials made availa-
ble to them. Both the visual and textual records suggest that elite women
and their attendants were in the vanguard.
Bemoaning the lingering popularity of hufu at the turn of the ninth
century, the Tang poet Bai Juyi implored Tang rulers to remember that,
“Topknots and faces painted ruddy are not Chinese custom!” (Quan
Tang shi 1979, vol. 13, 427.4705). As he saw it, custom, social order,
and political stability were all at stake. Bai began his official career hold-
ing several positions in the imperial and local bureaucracy of a state
that had been weakened by the An Lushan Rebellion. Writing against
the backdrop of an unstable empire struggling to retain its political and
geographical unity in the face of domestic strife and foreign military
threat, he condemned hu fashion to raise awareness of the greater po-
litical implications of such frivolity. Women’s ruddy faces brought to
light a more troubling relationship of dress and adornment to society,
one where appearances no longer objectively represented or produced
a person’s social identity. And he was right—it wasn’t custom women
were after, but rather fashion.

Form, Fabric, and Fashion

The basic components of hufu remained largely unchanged, but what
made it new in the mid-eighth century was its fabrication: off-white
patterned damasks paired with wide-leg trousers, as featured in “Ladies
Playing a Game of Go.” Throughout the dynasty, pictorial and sculp-
tural representations of Tang court women show that modifications in
the shape and silhouette of female dress were driven by innovations in
silk production, which brought not only new patterns but also fabrics
with new dimensions of weight and hand into the marketplace. Just as
changes in sartorial practice were spurred by social and political shifts,
so the vagaries of the market likewise were reflected in the Tang wom-
an’s wardrobe.
In the seventh century, a palace woman of Tang emperor Gaozong’s
(r. 650–683) court would have emerged from her boudoir in a banbi,
worn over a plain top, and paired with a high-waisted, striped or mono-
chrome A-line skirt. This style was depicted on the late seventh-century
figurine excavated from the tomb of Zhang Xiong (d. 633) and his wife,
18 BuYun Chen

Figure 5
Female figure. Excavated in 1973 from the tomb of Zhang Xiong and Lady Qu (dated 688), Astana, Turfan, currently in Xinjiang Uyghur
Autonomous Region Museum. After James C.Y. Watt et al., China: Dawn of a Golden Age, 200–750 AD. The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York, 2004.

Lady Qu (d. 688), located in the frontier region of Turfan (Figure 5).
Dressed in a banbi fastened with a belt made of silk tapestry, with a
shawl, and an A-line skirt assembled from alternating panels of pat-
terned silk, the female figure is attired in the height of seventh-century
luxury silks. The banbi made of jin silk (a general term describing poly-
chrome woven silk that is commonly translated as brocade, but can re-
fer to a gamut of plain or complex weaves with a pattern in two or more
colors) is decorated with a motif of two medallions, in which a pair of
confronted birds is enclosed within a pearl roundel in each medallion.
Jin silks, being of substantial weight, were primarily used to make in-
door decorations such as wall hangings and bedding. In dress, the silks
were used to make shoes, small bags, and trimmings for clothing. The
only garment made entirely of jin was the banbi. The shawl’s repeated
 Material Girls: Silk and Self-Fashioning in Tang China (618–907)

Figure 6
“Court Ladies Adorning their Hair with Flowers.” Attributed to Zhou Fang, date unknown. Liaoning Provincial Museum.
19
20 BuYun Chen

circle pattern is an example of resist-dyeing, a technique that involved

the application of wax, ash, or lime as a resistance on an undyed piece
of fabric to produce repeating patterns.
Beginning in the mid-eighth century, clamp-resist dyeing becomes
one of the most popular forms of textile decoration. Little is known
about the development of clamp-resist dyeing except that it made its
first appearance in the eighth century. An anecdote recorded in the Song
dynasty (960‒1279) anthology of Tang stories, A Forest of Sayings from
the Tang Dynasty, claims that the method of using two symmetrical-
ly carved concave blocks to print patterns on textiles was invented by
the younger sister of an imperial concubine during the reign of emper-
or Xuanzong (r. 712–756). In the story, the innovation was first “kept
secret within the palace,” but then spread throughout the empire and
later “cheapened to make clothing” (Tang yulin 1978, 4.149). Creating
these textiles was a labor-intensive procedure for the artisan, who had
to carve multiple areas for dyeing onto wooden blocks so that the tex-
tile could be dyed in multiple colors in one attempt. This method was
used to produce a myriad of popular eighth-century designs, including
floral medallions, interlocked roundels, and pearl roundels enclosing
confronted animals.
During this same period, women of the court abandoned the slim
silhouettes of their predecessors and opted for cascading sleeves, billowy
skirts, and capacious cloaks woven from gossamer-thin silks. Lean
figures were now rendered obsolete by voluptuous bodies swathed in
voluminous layers of silk, veritable figures of excess, leading the ninth-
century scholar-critic Zhang Yanyuan (fl. ninth century) to remark, “the
palace ladies of past times were dainty of finger and modest of bosom”
(Lidai minghua ji 1985, 52). This was a world inhabited by sensuous
female forms made iconic by the voluptuous femme fatale of the mid-
eighth century, imperial consort Yang Guifei.
One of the most iconic representations of Tang dynasty court wom-
en is found in the handscroll, “Court Ladies Adorning their Hair with
Flowers,” commonly attributed to the late eighth-century painter, Zhou
Fang (Figure 6). Although the painting is likely a much later work ex-
ecuted in the style of Zhou Fang, the figures are consistent with the
aestheticization of female silhouettes found in other paintings attributed
to Zhou, as well as contemporaneous works including “Ladies Playing a
Game of Go.” This aestheticization of the female body is representative
of the process by which women were rendered visible, as individuals and
as a social category, in the empire.
In “Court Ladies Adorning their Hair with Flowers,” five sumptu-
ously attired women and their attendant are depicted idling among
dogs, a crane, and a flowering plant. Each assemblage is composed of
a sleeveless, billowy gown worn under an open robe with wide sleeves,
accessorized with a shawl. Three of the six female figures are fashioned
with two skirts. The ladies to the far right and far left of the painting,
 Material Girls: Silk and Self-Fashioning in Tang China (618–907) 21

Figure 7
Blue gauze robe. Tang dynasty (eighth‒ninth centuries). China National Silk Museum, Hangzhou.

as well as the fan-holding attendant (third figure from right), wear over-
skirts that have a shorter hem allowing the underskirts to peek out from
below.
Only the attendant, situated in the foreground and depicted small-
er than the other figures, is attired differently. Her gossamer cloak is
wrapped around her frame over a red gown and belted around her hips
in a manner that evokes earlier representations of cross-dressing female
figures. Nearly all the garments featured on the women are elaborate-
ly patterned. In painting, and in the official censure of their sartorial
conduct, details of dress marked the boundaries of a woman’s personal
body and situated her in relation to other women in her social group.
Each of the women invites the viewer to gaze upon the woven floral
motifs and the luster of her gauze covering by tugging at a collar, pulling
on a skirt, or grasping a shawl. The court ladies with flower-adorned
coiffures, like their spectators, are enamored with the fine silks that
encase their bodies. Such painstaking treatment of the women’s gar-
ments highlights how the relationship of elite female bodies to their
surroundings and to each other was mediated by sumptuous materials.
Figure painters depended on embellished forms and surfaces to engage
the viewer, and the women’s gestures and gazes serve to support this
device.12 In this way, painters of the mid-eighth century, with their atten-
22 BuYun Chen

tion to light and tactility, paralleled the dress practices of women. The
attire of these elaborately adorned female figures, for example, would
suggest that cloaks and shawls made from light, silk-netted gauze paired
with polychrome silks were de rigueur in the ninth century. Garments
made from airy gauze, like the lined, blue complex gauze robe with
lozenge patterns now in the collection of the China Silk Museum, were
produced in considerable numbers during this period (Figure 7).
Viewed together, the seventh-century figurine and the “Court Ladies
Adorning their Hair with Flowers” illustrate the significant advances
made in the weaving, patterning, and dyeing of silk textiles from the sev-
enth to the ninth century. More importantly, these innovations in design
and technique point to the development of regional textile centers, espe-
cially in the Lower Yangzi area, in this period. Soon after the founding
of the Tang dynasty, an extensive system of imperial manufactures was
established to facilitate the production of luxury silk fabrics for court
use, located in the capital. In the early years of the dynasty, the court’s
investment in silk production, along with increased trade and a growing
demand for novel silks, pushed weaving technology forward. Innova-
tion and technology also moved from court-controlled workshops to
private producers, as hinted at by the story of clamp-resist dyed silks.
By the early ninth century, the silk industry had not only reached record
production levels, but also manufactured fabrics that were unparalleled
in design and complexity. The twill damasks found in “Court Ladies
Adorning their Hair with Flowers” and “Ladies Playing a Game of Go”
are indicative of such advancements in silk weaving and patterning.
Along with weaving and dyeing techniques, there were also innova-
tions in decoration techniques, from printing and painting to embroi-
dery. Excavated silks from Turfan, Dunhuang, and the Famen Monas-
tery to the west of Chang’an exhibit patterns that were painted with
gold and silver appliqués and printed in gold (Han 2006, 129–146).
Significant advances in embroidery can be found on silks that were pro-
duced as imperial gifts to be bestowed on Famen Monastery and on ex-
tant Buddhist sutra wrappers. The broadening of techniques for stitch-
ing that allowed for more detailed and finely embroidered images and
scriptures paralleled the rising number of Buddhist patrons both within
the imperial court and in the empire at large (Zhao 2012, 247–253). In
this way, Tang dynasty silks reflected the context of their production.
The relationship between Buddhism and embroidered silks brings to
light the link between innovation and adaptation. Innovations in silk
production were developed in response to specific demands, which I will
explore in the next section.
Standard narratives of fashion tend to equate fashion with conspic-
uous variations in dress, such as dramatic alterations to cut and silhou-
ette. In Fernand Braudel’s grand narrative of structural change, fashion
in Europe was launched by the “sudden shortening” of the tunic around
1350 (Braudel 1981, 317). Over the course of the Tang dynasty, the line
Material Girls: Silk and Self-Fashioning in Tang China (618–907) 23

and shape of garments did change quite dramatically as sleeves expand-

ed to epic proportions and the skirts of gowns ballooned out into long,
trailing expanses of fabric. But silk remained the primary catalyst—and
the most vivid manifestation—of sartorial change.
For Tang elites, advancements in silk production expanded the stock
of materials and accessories made available to them to fabricate into ex-
pressions of social status as well as gender and cultural identity. The rise
of private weaving households in the latter half of the dynasty, which no
longer operated under the strict supervision of the central government,
paved the way for the increased production and consumption of silk.
It was within this expanding commercial context of the late eighth and
ninth centuries that the act of dressing took on greater significance as
the signifying tool through which elite men and women communicated
claims to status. Silk was fashion’s innovative force and the key medium
through which one’s place in society was made manifest.

Keeping Up with the Times: Silk and the Empire of

Fashion
Silk was not just a material product with significant economic value.
It was also a symbol that communicated cultural identity, conferred
prestige, and naturalized social hierarchies. As revenue and currency,
silk was indispensable to the Tang court’s political and economic power.
As clothing for the court, silk had functioned to distinguish the emper-
or from his subjects and elites from non-elites. Accordingly, the state
was eager to protect and develop silk weaving skills, but the court was
also dedicated to restricting access to the precious material. When the
new post-rebellion era of silk production made luxury silks more wide-
ly available to those who desired “new styles,” the official discourse
against excess and waste gained traction and spurred new regulations
on textile production. However futile, the Tang government remained
committed to maintaining its monopoly over silk production and, by
extension, its imperial power to the very end of the dynasty.
The expansion of economic productivity outside of the state’s pur-
view further accelerated the reshuffling of power and wealth follow-
ing the rebellion of 755. Devolution of power to the various provincial
capitals coincided with the proliferation of regional cities and rapid
development of local economies. The rebellion had devastated and de-
populated areas that were the central government’s main sources of rev-
enue, which led to a redistribution of the empire’s population in favor
of the southeastern region. Large-scale migration to the Yangzi Delta
region shifted agricultural and commercial activity away from the polit-
ical center, thereby diminishing the state’s ability to regulate commerce.
Economic freedom from the capital allowed for provincial revenues to
be distributed locally, permitting regional trade and industry to flourish.
Expansion of commercial productivity in the lands to the south of the
24 BuYun Chen

lower reaches of the Yangzi River reshaped the cultural geography of the
eighth and ninth centuries, turning the region into the fiscal and cultural
center of the empire (see Chen 2006; Li 1990; Twitchett 1965).
Nowhere was this more apparent than in the diffusion of silk produc-
tion from north to south, and from government-controlled workshops
to private weaving households. Before the rebellion of 755, Hebei and
Henan in the northeast of the empire formed the chief silk-producing
region for both tax and luxury silks for the court. Sichuan, in the south-
west, was the court’s supplier of the coveted jin silks and delicate silk
gauzes. Following the rebellion, the Yangzi Delta region became the ag-
ricultural and manufacturing center of the dynasty, exceeding the north-
east’s output of silk tabbies and surpassing Sichuan in its production of
novel and sumptuous silks. Beginning in the ninth century, the region
sent more silk to the capital than any other in the empire.
As production migrated south, luxury silk weaving gradually shift-
ed from a court-centered industry composed of imperial workshops to
a dispersed network of private weaving households that catered to a
growing population of non-court elites. The largest privately owned
workshop recorded in historical sources was run by He Mingyuan in
Dingzhou (in modern Hebei). According to the Extensive Records of the
Taiping Era, He owned 500 looms for the weaving of twill silks (ling),
operated by an estimated 1600 weavers (an average of three to four
weavers per loom).13 Textile historian Angela Sheng has argued that
the invention of shafts on looms (used to mechanically raise the warp
threads for patterning) in both imperial and private workshops further
contributed to the spread of twill weaving technology and, perhaps, also
accounts for the abundant references to twill silks in both poetry and in
tribute records (Sheng 2013, 187).
By the early ninth century, twill damasks were incorporated into the
revised Tang dress code for officials. The myriad of damasks mentioned
in literary sources suggests that a staggering volume was produced, and
in an eclectic array of colors (scarlet, crimson, ochre, and azure), weave
variations (single thread, double thread, crossed shuttle), and motifs
(flowers, round medallion, single medallion). A sumptuary decree issued
by the emperor Daizong (r. 763–779) in 771 testifies to the widespread
popularity of twill damasks:

Vermillion silk ribbons and embroidery certainly harm women’s

work. At present, the troops have yet to return from battle, the
people have nothing. How can we allow extravagant customs to
wreak havoc on our abiding traditions? The patterns embroidered
on twill damasks and jin silks including coiled dragons, paired
phoenixes, qilin, lions, heavenly horses, bixie, peacocks, immortal
cranes, auspicious lingzhi [fungus] patterns, wanzi [卍], interlock-
ing shapes, double-sided designs [“translucent blacks”], as well
as jin patterned with alternate hatching lines, jiezao silk with six
Material Girls: Silk and Self-Fashioning in Tang China (618–907) 25

sections and above are all prohibited. The manufacture of lofty,

Koryŏ white jin silk, and twill damasks and jin silks with small
and large patterns may continue according to old regulations. Ad-
ministrative offices in charge of such matters must clearly imple-
ment these instructions (Jiu Tang shu 1995, vol. 2, 11.298).

Notably this sumptuary decree does not position silk as a privilege at-
tached to official rank, nor does it directly target the women of the court.
More importantly, the court as arbiter of fine silks has been displaced by
another status-generating mechanism—the market in silk. This shift in
the official regulations on dress—from a desire to maintain the sartorial
hierarchy to an anxiety about wasteful expenditure—in the late eighth
century indicates a change in the court’s relationship to these displays
of social status. Implicit in this edict is the recognition of the futility of
attempts to reinforce stable status displays in the post-rebellion society.
The market, not the court, determined the value of silks. In turn, the
government turned its attention to the source of the problem, the silk
industry.
The inventory of designs mentioned as examples of excess, such as
coiled dragons, paired phoenixes, heavenly horses, peacocks, and im-
mortal cranes, that impinge on women’s work and “wreak havoc on
abiding traditions” are remarkably elaborate, unlike the plainer twill
damasks and jin silks with floral patterns permitted by the edict. This
distinction evinces a critique of extravagance, conceived of as the wast-
ing of resources that could be more usefully employed. The targeting of
embroidery, work that consumes substantial labor, suggests that the gov-
ernment’s efforts to curb excess were tied to a concern about the squan-
dering of valuable labor on ostentatious silks. By invoking the  suffering
of women weavers as the grounds for suppressing extravagant customs,
the emperor Daizong perhaps hoped to redirect the expenditure of la-
bor-time and raw materials away from fancy silks towards the produc-
tion of plain silks for state revenue.
More significantly, the decree’s attention to women weavers high-
lights the invaluable position that skilled weavers occupied in both the
empire’s economic well-being and the fashion system. Following the
rebellion, the movement of skilled labor, specifically female labor, to
the south also accounted, in part, for the dissemination of silk-weaving
skills and technology necessary for the industry’s commercial growth.
One of the leading silk manufacturing centers to emerge during the
ninth century was Yuezhou, situated in modern Zhejiang province,
known for originating the famous liao twill. Yuezhou, which according
to the official records did not have an advanced handicraft industry
until the mid-eighth century, quickly developed into one of the leading
silk production centers of the empire before it was gradually overtaken
by Hangzhou and Suzhou towards the end of the dynasty. Xue Jianxun,
military commissioner of the eastern Jiangnan circuit under the reign
of emperor Daizong, is recorded as having bribed his troops to marry
26 BuYun Chen

skilled weavers from the north to cultivate the region’s handicraft in-
dustry, leading the poet Shi Jianwu (780–861) to lament, “Pity the girls
from north of the Yangzi, only singing songs of the south Yangzi” (Quan
Tang shi 1979, vol. 15, 494.5588). The capture of weavers instead of
the looting of weaving technology suggests that these women carried
specialized technical knowledge that could not be disembodied or, at
least, that the voluntary and involuntary movement of skilled bodies
was crucial to the transmission of technical knowledge.
In a manner that recalls modern critiques of the fashion industry,
the poor weaving girl became an icon of the physical and psychologi-
cal damage engendered by the frivolous consumption of novelty in the
latter half of the dynasty. No one could escape the world of fashionable
appearances, especially the weaving women who exhausted their bodies
to complete intricate patterns on finely woven silk.
The figure of the toiling woman weaver recurs in the textual record,
but women were not the only weavers whose lives were shaken by the
post-rebellion economy. In another anecdote collected in the Extensive
Records of the Taiping Era, the son of the prominent Lu clan, overhears
a man reciting a Bai Juyi poem on weaving:

I learned to weave liao twills, a lot of work for nothing,

I recklessly threw the shuttle of the loom back and forth,
I did not want the government weavers to see,
For they would surely mock my patterns,
These days, nobody cares about patterns on silk,
Boasting of one’s weaving skills is meaningless.

Stunned, young Lu initiates a conversation with the man, who tells him:

My family name is Li. For my entire life, I have been a twill dam-
ask and jin weaver. Before the rebellion, I was an artisan in the
official workshop weaving jin for the palace in the Eastern capital.
After the fall, I came with my modest skills seeking to return to
my trade. But they all say: “The patterns of today are different
from the ones before.” They no longer talk about skill; those who
court buyers with intricate colors and patterns are no longer val-
ued in this world, and so I will return east (Taiping guangji 1959,
vol. 3, 257.2005).

Li’s lament is a tale of the changing tides and fashions of post-rebellion

life. Although trained in the production of jin silks and twill damasks,
his weaving skills are now obsolete. The increased flow of goods and
labor in and out of the market further promoted the renewal and obso-
lescence of things and people alike. His life’s account describes the ex-
Material Girls: Silk and Self-Fashioning in Tang China (618–907) 27

perience of being passed over by a society in flux that parallels the basic
mechanism of fashion, which continually discards outmoded patterns in
favor of the new and more colorful ones. In 829, the prudent emperor
Wenzong (r. 826–840) issued a sumptuary statute that directly targeted
the production of “new styles.” He proclaimed:

Throughout the empire, it is forbidden to use the new styles to

weave unique goods for tribute, and to use the looms for weaving
fine and exquisite silks like patterned silk-hemp cloth and liao
twills. I order that in the first month of the New Year, all of the
looms shall be burned down and discarded (Jiu Tang shu 1995,
vol. 2, 17.545).

Wenzong was not the first Tang emperor to resort to such coercive meas-
ures in order to ban the fabrication, circulation, and use of opulent silks,
but he was the first to single out novelty as an object of regulation.
The poet Zheng Gu summed up this new relationship between self,
society, and the material world in his observation that, “When the cloth
is plain, grand families will certainly not even look it/Without deco-
rative patterns, it is hard to keep up with the times” (Quan Tang shi
1979, vol. 20, 675.7738). For intellectuals like Zheng and his contem-
porary Bai Juyi, the desire to be up-to-date represented a new capacity
for change that brought into existence a value system predicated on
the accumulation of wealth and the frittering-away of things. Changing
forms of adornment became both representative and symbolic of an
elite obsession with the ever-new, fueled by the greater availability of
materials and patterns. By the ninth century, the act of dressing was no
longer governed by the court, but by the market in silk textiles. Indeed,
the market had supplanted the court as the arbiter of fashion.

Conclusion
In China, as elsewhere, there is always more to fashion than meets
the eye. For the ninth-century critics, an interest in the elite’s desire to
“keep up with the times” was more than a fascination with appearances.
With their deep concern about the unstable world of appearances, Tang
dynasty intellectuals had much in common with their modern coun-
terparts. To these observers, what people wore and how they wore it
reflected the nature of the society writ large. This remained true for
the celebrated twentieth-century writer Eileen Chang, who sought to
understand the relationship between clothing and historical change in
modern China. When her essay “Chinese Life and Fashions” appeared
in the English-language journal XXth Century, it was preceded by a
brief introductory note to engage and turn the supposed male reader-
ship on to what would otherwise strike them as an entirely frivolous
text (Chang 1943, 54–61). Written by the journal’s founder and edi-
28 BuYun Chen

tor-in-chief, Klaus Mehnert (1906–1984), the prefatory note promoted

Chang’s essay “as more than just an essay on fashions.” The article need-
ed no recommendation for the female readers of XXth Century, “for
them, the word ‘fashions’ speaks for itself.” As for the men, they needed
to be told that the following pages would offer them “an amusing psy-
choanalysis of modern China.”
In just a few lines, Klaus Mehnert captured what were, and continue
to be, the three essential features of fashion—feminine, modern, and
an index to the social psychology of any given culture. Underpinning
this enduring interpretation of fashion is a longstanding discourse that
perceives clothing as the surface trappings of the psyche and not the
body first pioneered by turn-of-the-twentieth-century social psycholo-
gists and sociologists, and later rearticulated by cultural studies theorists
in the 1990s. Just as a garment serves as the outermost layer between
the individual body and the external world, the act of dressing is a ne-
gotiation between individual psychology and social performance. For
these critics of fashion, personal choices in fabric, color, and cut, all
conditioned by gender norms, class, and a desire for group belonging,
are signifiers of a self-conscious modern subject. What is at stake in
fashion and what makes fashion a promising subject, as pointed out by
Mehnert, is the potential of clothes to represent that which otherwise
cannot be seen by the eye.
And Eileen Chang indeed delivered on that promise. Expounding on
the relationship between “Chinese Life” and “Fashions” during the tu-
multuous 1920s, she maintained that:

In an age of political disorder, people were powerless to modify

existing conditions closer to their ideal. All they could do was to
create their own atmosphere, with clothes, which constitute for
most men and all women their immediate environments. We live
in our clothes. (Chang 1943, 60)

Anything but frivolous, rapid alterations in style and form bespoke disrup-
tions in the political and social realms. In providing a roadmap (and with
illustrations, no less) to the psychic landscape of modern China for her
foreign audience in Shanghai, Chang also put forth a theory of a fashion
system that would have delighted even Roland Barthes (2006, 430–431).
We make clothes and they make us, or at least they do in modern China.
At the heart of Chang’s claim, and this essay’s, is the conviction that
fashion’s significance lies not in its role as modernity’s handmaiden, but
in the word’s root sense—fashion as the act of making or forming a
thing.14 As I have shown in this essay, fashion in Tang China depended
on three shifts: first, in how men and women dressed; second, in how
they negotiated the relationship between their appearance and society;
and finally, the shifting regimes of textile production. What emerged as
fashion in Tang dynasty China was a new space for claims to power and
Material Girls: Silk and Self-Fashioning in Tang China (618–907) 29

status, and the articulation of gender, all of which found expression in

the material world.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This work was supported by the Social Science Research Council and
the Fulbright Institute of International Education.

Notes
 1. In addition to Suzanne Cahill’s groundbreaking essay, scholars in
the US and China have argued that the Tang dynasty was “fashion-
able” (shishang). This scholarship, however, does not provide a crit-
ical look into how Tang dress and adornment amounted to fashion
beyond the paradigm of changing clothes (see Cahill 1999); Schafer
1963; Huang 1998).
  2. The statute, known as the Wude ling, was modeled after Sui Yangdi’s
clothing code (Harada 1970, 18).
  3. As stated by Article 449, “Violation of Statues” of “Miscellaneous
Articles” in the Tang Code, “all cases of violation are to be punished
by 50 blows, and the violation of ‘special regulations’ is reduced by
one degree.” According to the subcommentary, transgressing dress
regulations (such as wearing colors that do not correspond to one’s
rank) is considered a violation of the “special regulations” and is
punished by 40 blows (Tang lü shuyi 1983, 521–522).
 4. Under emperor Taizong (r. 626–649) two edicts were passed, the
first in 630 and again in 631. Gaozong (r. 650–683) followed with
an edict in 674, Xuanzong (r. 712–756) in 716, and Wenzong
(r. 826–840) in 832 (part of the official Wang Ya’s recommended
reforms to the entire dress code).
 5. Major reforms to regulations governing court dress took place in
684 under emperor Ruizong (r. 684–690, 710–712), in 729 under
Xuanzong, and in 791 under Dezong. The Tang huiyao records 15
edicts, passed between 630 and 889, pertaining to the dress of court
officials (Tang huiyao 1991, vol. 1, 31-31.659-688).
  6. Hunt claims that, “Far from clarifying social differences, sumptuary
law actually provokes increasing competition and imitation since it
is ‘cheaper’ (economically and politically) for all parties to compete
over the symbols than over what those symbols represent” (Hunt
1996, 105).
 7. Catherine K. Killerby has argued that, “Men, by contrast, gained
public recognition from their civil, professional, and military roles,
30 BuYun Chen

and their elaborate clothing was easily justified by appeal to these

same public roles” (2002, 114). Excessive ornamentation of wom-
en’s dress, however, was equated with the unstable balance of the
economy, decline in marriages, and fall in birth rates.
 8. Two known examples include Yang Chongyi of the Kaiyuan era
(713–741), who spent his wealth on “things such as dress and or-
naments, he exceeded the [distinctions of] princes and nobles”; and
Wang Yuanbao of the Tianbao era (742–756), who “devoted his ef-
forts to splendor and extravagance and in his ornaments and dress,
he surpassed the princes and nobles” (Kaiyuan Tianbao yishi 2006,
17, 37).
  9. Rong Xinjiang has argued that during the early Tang dynasty “hu”
was mainly used to refer to peoples belonging to the Sassanid Per-
sian empire, who had settled along the trade route in Central Asia—
namely Sogdians (Rong 2003, 740).
10. On the popularity of hufu, the official history records that, “The
aristocrats and the common women, the women inside and outside
of the palace all partook without any distinction” (Jiu Tang shu
1995, vol. 6, 45.1958).
11. Rong Xinjiang has cataloged the murals and figures of cross-dress-
ing women in Tang dynasty tombs, showing that the majority of
these images are distributed between the years 643 and 745 (Rong
2003, 729–730).
12. Jonathan Hay has argued that a shift in the viewer’s empirical expe-
rience of a painting corresponded to the increased attention paid to
corporeality and surfaces by the artists, such that representation was
brought closer to the viewer’s optical experiences of space, form,
and texture (Hay 2013, 285–318).
13. Weaving complex silks like twill damasks (ling) required considera-
ble labor-time as well. According to Angela Sheng, it took a skilled
artisan working in an imperial manufacturer at Runzhou (mod-
ern-day Zhenjiang, Jiangsu province) 12 days to weave one bolt of
complex gauze (12 m), or 1 m of gauze per day, one-ninth of what
the skilled tabby-weaver could produce in a day. She estimates that
1600 weavers would be necessary to operate He’s 500 looms (Sheng
1990, 61).
14. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass have made a similar claim
in the context of Renaissance Europe (Jones and Stallybrass 2000,
1–14).

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