Feather Satins and Orangutan Felts: A Material History of English Woolens in Qing China

Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, merchants from Europe, Russia, and America imported hundreds and thousands of lengths of European woolens to China. These fabrics were bought in through Canton and Kiakhta, and from there transported to textile markets in cities like Suzhou, Hankou, and Beijing. They also reached court and elite consumers through acts of diplomatic gifting, official presentations, and imperial procurement. Thus, contrary to the cliché that Chinese didn’t want woolen fabrics – a cliché conforming to a nineteenth-century notion of the conservative Qing consumer fundamentally uninterested in foreign materials – evidence suggests that eventually those able to afford these expensive foreign imports did come to appreciate Western woolens as a textile medium. But how were these textiles understood in terms of their material qualities, technical foundations, or cultural associations? This talk explores the dynamics of reception through the Chinese names given to imported woolen fabrics and what they tell us about shifting understandings and valuations of this fibre in Chinese textile history. Some of these terms, for example “Feather Satins” 羽緞(camlets) or “Orangutan Felts” 猩猩氊 (scarlet broadcloths), expose limited understanding of their materiality: attributed to the bird feathers and orangutan blood of the natural world rather than the actual causes of weaving and finishing techniques, as well as newly imported dyestuffs like lac dye and cochineal. But there is also a striking distinction between how woolens were understood in the educated elite spheres of court and literati accounts, and those of the marketplace. By using merchant guidebooks, pawnbroker manuals, local gazetteers, Rachel Silberstein positions woolen fabric names as “virtual artifacts” that inform upon the process of translation through which consumers, merchants, and retailers together developed mechanisms to make this new textile legible, both to Chinese capital and culture.

Rachel Silberstein is an independent scholar specializing in the history of Chinese textiles and dress, affiliated with the China Studies program of the University of Washington, and currently a fellow in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton. She earned a DPhil in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford in 2015. Her monograph, A Fashionable Century: Textile Artistry and Commerce in the Late Qing (University of Washington Press, 2020) – a study of fashion and textile handicrafts in early modern China – won the Costume Society of America’s Millia Davenport Publication Award 2021 and an honorable mention from the 2023 Bei Shan Tang Monograph Prize. Rachel has published widely on Qing fashion in the journals West 86^th, Fashion Theory, Costume, and Late Imperial China. Recent publications include an essay on Ming-Qing Fashion in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Global Fashion, and an essay on the Qing Foreign Trade in Textiles in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the China Trade.