Introduction

In the 1879 edition of the local gazetteer of Chuansha, a county in Songjiang prefecture, the “Local Products” section described the range of cotton fabrics produced: “there are so many different kinds they are popularly referred to as the ‘72 kinds’”.¹ These words are frequently quoted by historians, for they suggest extensive quality variations, which are argued to have derived from commercialization in the Qing cotton industry.² But surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the variations themselves: What exactly were the material basis and technical causes enabling the “72 kinds” of cottons?

The appearance of colored, fashionable cottons might seem akin to the Qing silk industry’s turn to cheaper silk products to meet the demands of merchant classes and other urbanites, and thus a question for material culture history, but art and textile historians have largely ignored its development, partly because so little cotton fabric survives compared to silk.³ Instead, questions around cotton textile consumption has been considered primarily by economic historians in the context of standard of living debates: for example, Kenneth Pomeranz’s claim, in his influential book, The Great Divergence, that “Chinese textile consumption stacked up quite well against Europe’s in the mid to late eighteenth century,”⁴ was based on the per capita quantity of fiber (produced and consumed) per person in Jiangnan, the wealthiest part of China. However, basing the comparison of Chinese and European textile consumption upon fiber quantities, rather than cloth qualities, leaves important issues outstanding: most critically for the question of the “72 kinds,” it omits the contribution of the finishing sector, a key contributor to the growth of global textile markets from the sixteenth century onwards.⁵ In early modern England, it was the dyeing, calendaring, pressing, and packing stages—which unlike weaving, were often sited in London—that helped adapt products to the demands of overseas customers. These stages contributed substantial value (around 20–40%) to the woolen cloth made in regional centers and they were central to expanding product variety in textiles, something recent scholarship has underlined as being just as important to improving early modern living standards as classic Industrial Revolution innovations like the spinning jenny.⁶ The importance of product variety suggests parallels between Jiangnan and early Industrial Revolution Britain, yet little study has been undertaken into the expansion of volume and variety of cotton products in Qing China.

To what extent was the Qing cotton industry adding extra value to cotton cloths? The finishing sector has been claimed as key to allowing Jiangnan, the most developed cotton-producing region, to maintain its success in long- distance trade markets after other provinces developed their own weaving industry for basic cloths by the mid-Qing.⁷ And several textual sources suggest that cotton dyeing in the Qing period did indeed expand. In a section entitled “Changes in dye colors,” one 1631 gazetteer text from Songjiang, the center of Jiangnan’s cotton industry, identified more than twenty new colors.⁸ It followed discussion of new types of cotton cloth that were now available, suggesting that these shades became more accessible, an intriguing idea in relation to debates about both the extent of commercialization in the cotton industry and standards of living in mid-Qing China.

Though the spread of cotton, and its displacing and supplementing of earlier clothing fibers like hemp (麻), ramie (苧), and puereria (葛), brought cheaper, comfortable, and durable fabrics to ordinary people, most people in China consumed cotton on a subsistence basis: basic weaves, produced at home in small quantities.⁹ An estimated 600 million bolts of cotton were produced each year. Assuming a population of around 400 million in the early nineteenth century, this would allow for about 1.5 bolts per person, a figure conforming to estimated minimum consumption, enough to make a jacket and pant set.¹⁰ About half of those 600 million bolts were produced by rural households for their own use, but the other half, 300 million bolts of cotton, are thought to have come onto the market each year.¹¹ Most would have circulated in local markets; but Jiangnan, the most renowned cotton producing region, comprising the eight prefectures of Suzhou, Songjiang, Changshu, Zhenjiang, and Jiangning (all Jiangsu province); Hangzhou, Jiaxing, and Huzhou (all Zhejiang province), was different. Its annual production has been estimated at 45 million bolts, the bulk of which would have entered long-distance trade.¹² This cloth represents a non-elite market that appears to expand over the Qing period, yet, given how little of this dyed and finished cotton cloth survives, how can we write its material history? As Chen and Peng’s recent review of Qing consumption history observes, the absence of quantitative consumption data obstructs answers to the question of whether economic growth led to improved living standards: their conclusion that “ordinary people’s consumption bundles expanded in quality, quantity, and diversity” has hardly been matched by material culture histories evidencing this expansion for consumer items like ceramics, books, or clothing.¹³ Histories of Qing consumption remain undeveloped, especially in regard to the textile consumption of urban, market-oriented populations.

In this paper, I investigate the nature and causes of the development of cotton finishing, and its impact on consumption through the material insights offered in The Cloth Classic (布經), an undated manuscript written in the late eighteenth century / early nineteenth century by a cloth merchant, likely from the Songjiang region.¹⁴ A manual filled with advice for those in the cotton industry, written by those responsible for guiding cotton fabrics through their various marketing paths, it is one of three similar works that have drawn the interest of several scholars.¹⁵ Yu Tongyuan and Huang Kangjian have used it to evidence the development of systematic understanding of weaving structures and techniques.¹⁶ Chiu Pengsheng has explored the legal and economic structures through which Suzhou’s cotton merchants organized and marketed their products.¹⁷ Finally, Jacob Eyferth has argued that The Cloth Classic’s “mercantile epistemologies” used the “merchant-manager’s” “sensory skills” to control and coordinate handicraft production processes, an idea we will return to.¹⁸ However, in addition to these issues of technology, marketing, and management, The Cloth Classic also has much to tell us about material and commercial changes to the finishing processes. In particular, its 68 recipes for different cotton dye colors—many more than earlier compilations of dye recipes—undermine claims that societies with indigenous cotton production like China could only dye indigo blues or tannin browns due to the difficulties of dyeing cellulosic cottons and ramies, unlike proteinaceous silks and woolens.¹⁹ Here, by positioning The Cloth Classic within the development of the Jiangnan cotton industry and by highlighting the material basis of these developments, I establish the extent of the finishing sector and the causes of its expansion. We begin with an overview of the finishing sector, the range of different cloth types, and the role of merchants, before examining how the cotton dyers widened the range of colors so dramatically. I argue that three primary factors enabled this growth: intensified use of certain dyestuffs and mordants, growing deployment of the “set dyeing” technique, and color specialization amongst the dyeworks. Though these three factors would have contributed to economic growth and improved living standards for those who could afford dyed cloth’s higher cost, in being enabled largely by dyers and middlemen expertise, rather than cost-cutting innovations or new materials, all three reveal inherent restrictions to the Jiangnan cotton sector’s competitiveness.

Gender and the Development of the Cotton Finishing Sector

Though it is often used to speak for the entire Qing period, the Chuansha gazetteer text with which we began was actually written in 1876 and some of the cloth types it mentions are specific to a post-Treaty Port market, one in which aniline dyes and foreign machine-woven yarn had entered.²⁰ However, much of the cotton sector remained unchanged from earlier in the Qing. Most steps of cotton production were still rural household activities and the vast majority of Jiangnan’s estimated 45 million bolts were woven by women and girls in villages and market towns and sold to brokers and middlemen. These tasks of ginning, bowing, spinning, sizing the warp, warping the loom, and weaving are visually represented in a woodblock print genre known as the “Ten Tasks of Women” (Fig. 1).²¹ Perhaps produced for motivational or valorizing purposes, images like this highlight gender as a crucial determinant of labor and productivity in the cotton sector, something well demonstrated in the Chuansha text:²²

Regarding cloth made from cotton: that which is densely woven and narrow is called “small cloth” (小布), also known as “reed cloth” (扣布), or “middle loom cloth” (中機布). Cloth which is slightly wider is known as “large cloth” (大布), or “standard cloth” (標布). Cloth with a length of 16 chi is called “pingshao” (平梢), that of 20 chi is called “set piece” (套叚).²³ A kind of thin cloth (希布) that is slightly wider comes in two kinds: “single knot” (單扣) and “double knot” (雙扣). That which is woven from purple flower (cotton) is called “purple flower cloth” (紫花布), those woven from blue and white yarn are called “snowy inside blue cloth” (雪裏 青布), “willow branch cloth” (柳條布), “reed mat patterned cloth” (蘆席紋布), “spiral patterned cloth” (斗紋布), and “twill patterned cloth” (斜紋布). That woven from the warp and weft of many colors is called “bean patterned cloth” (豆子花布).

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“Images of Spinning and Weaving” (Fangzhi tu 纺织图), Fengxiang county, Shaanxi 凤翔县(陕西), Qing dynasty, woodblock print, 23 × 31cm, after Wang Shucun王树村, Zhongguo minjian nianhua shi tulu, shang 中国民间年画史 图录 (A Catalogue of Chinese Folk Woodblock Prints) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe, 1991), Vol. 1, p. 161, no. 160

Citation: Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 69, 1-2 (2026) ; 10.1163/15685209-12341666

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It is following this list that the “72 kinds” line is used to summarize the range, though it is of course hyperbolic: only fourteen kinds are actually listed.²⁴ But more interesting than the numerical exaggeration is the following qualification, stating: “All of these kinds come from women’s work.” And it continues by describing three more varieties of cotton cloth not made by women:

If made by dying and scraping with a knife to make a napped cloth like a (Tibetan) pulu (woolen fabric), it is known as “scraped nap cloth” (刮絨布). That which uses a great stone to press it is known as “calendered cloth” (踏光布). That which uses paper piled in layers like a printing block with the pattern on top and uses lime mortar to print the design is called “printed cloth” (印花布), and it was originally called “medicine spot cloth” (藥斑布). These three kinds are all made by the dyeworks and are transported to markets by merchants: they are not women’s work.²⁵

The text’s distinction between those cloths produced by women in the home and those produced by professional workshops revolves around the finishing tools—knife, stone, block—used in the only stage of cotton production neither done by women, nor done in the home. Instead, these steps took place in sometimes quite large-scale urban workshops, many located in Suzhou.

Finishing workshops for dyeing and calendering first began during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) in the Songjiang area, especially Jijing 機泾 and Zhujing 洙泾 around Wuhu 蕪湖 which became known for its starching and dyeing expertise.²⁶ But during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries a time of rapid expansion for Jiangnan textiles, Suzhou gained a reputation for finishing: producers of silk fabrics and threads in Huzhou, Chengze, and Puyuan, and producers of cotton fabrics and yarn in Songjiang, Taicang, and Changshu alike sent their products to Suzhou for processing.²⁷ As the larger Songjiang cloth merchants (布號) moved there to access a center for textile sales, the finishing sector grew to considerable scale.²⁸

Exactly what scale is hard to pin down, and we lack reliable numbers for labor numbers which would allow us to extrapolate the output of the finishing shops relative to total cloth output.²⁹ A Wanli period (1572–1620) memorial described Suzhou dyeworks as having more than several thousand dyers, but we do not know what proportion dyed cotton and what proportion silk.³⁰ Workshops were likely fiber-specialized and cotton cloth was dyed in the cloth, rather than in the yarn. This differed from silk fabrics, whose dyers either worked with the “raw goods” (生货) lighter-weight silks which were woven and then dyed, or the “cooked goods” (熟货) silks whose yarn was first dyed and then woven.³¹

The numbers of Suzhou calenderers also grew apace, totalling “no less than 10,000” according to a 1720 guild stele.³² Calendering (踹布) involved repeatedly pounding the fabric with a heavy stone to give it a smooth and glossy sheen. It required a set of three tools: a heavy stone (元寶石, 踹布石), which was positioned on a wooden roller (木滾) that the calenderer’s pedipulating tread rolled back and forth upon the cloth, which was set upon the trough-like hollow of a stone base plate (石板).³³ When this finishing technique began is debated and early methods of using stone to impart a sheen may have existed.³⁴ But use of the three-part set does not seem to emerge until the Ming—the earliest written account is Song Yingxing in the mid-seventeenth century—and it provided an important technology, not just for adding shine, but also for making the material smooth and tight.³⁵ Unlike dyeing and printing where, as shall be seen, innovations did occur, no major modifications were made to calendering technology between the late Ming and late Qing.³⁶ The records of calenderer numbers combined with evidenced productivity of calenderers allow for approximate estimates for the quantity of cloth being processed by these workers. If we suppose a 270-day work-year and productivity of 11 bolts per day, 10,000 workers could calender 29,700,000 bolts. Supposing a 210-day work-year would result in 23,100,000 bolts.³⁷ Given that not all cloth was calendered, these conjectured productivity figures of 23–30 million bolts per year seem realistic for Jiangnan’s estimated annual production of 45 million bolts.³⁸

Originally the finishing shops combined dyeing and calendering, as visualized in an image of a dyework (染坊) from Qiu Ying’s (1494–1552) version of the Song dynasty urban scroll, Along the River at Shangming, updated to depict Ming-period Suzhou (Fig. 2). A calenderer treads away, steadied by the wooden frame, while another worker hangs out the dyed cotton on high scaffolds in front of the shop. But during the early eighteenth century, the dyers and the calenderers gradually separated.³⁹ The dyeworks moved away from the western Chang Gate’s Shang and Xiatang streets, where the silk and cotton shops were located, to the Suzhou suburbs around Tiger Hill.⁴⁰ Natural dyers required a lot of water and the move was likely to gain access to the waterway: mid-Qing sources describe how their presence caused environmental degradation, filling the Shangtang to Tiger Hill riverway with “blue, red, black, purple.” In 1737, local residents petitioned against the dyeworks on the grounds that they were polluting the water supply and harming both crops and the Tiger Hill scenic spot, leading the authorities to ban the dyeworks from the area; thereafter the dyeworks moved to Lou Gate (northeast), with the calenderers still sited in Shangtang.⁴¹ Despite this separation, later visualisations of cloth finishing continued to place the two together, whether elite prints like Fang Guancheng’s (1698–1768) Imperially Inscribed Illustrated Guide to Cotton, prepared for submission to the emperor in the mid-eighteenth century (Fig. 3), or vernacular prints like “The Gods Mei and Ge” (Fig. 4) depicting a busy dyework watched over by the dyer’s guild gods, Mei Fu 梅福 and Ge Hong 葛洪.⁴² The continued framing of calendering and dyeing together reflected understandings of cloth finishing as men’s work, unlike the preceding steps of cloth-making.

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Qiu Ying 仇英, “Along the River at Shangming” (Qingming shanghe tu 清明上河圖), Detail showing Dyeshop (Ran fang 染坊), after Shan Guolin 单国霖 ed., Zhang Zeduan, Qiu Ying “Qing ming shang he tu” shi huo jie du 張擇端, 仇英“清明上河图”釋惑解讀 (An Explanation and Interpretation of Zhang Zeduan and Qiu Ying’s Along the River at Shangming) (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 2020), p. 7

Citation: Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 69, 1-2 (2026) ; 10.1163/15685209-12341666

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Fang Guancheng 方觀承, “An Imperially Inscribed Illustrated Guide to Cotton” (Yiti mianhua tu 御题棉花圖), woodblock print, ca. 1765, no. 16. “Dyeing cloth” (Lianran 練染)

Citation: Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 69, 1-2 (2026) ; 10.1163/15685209-12341666

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Anon, “The Gods Mei and Ge” (Mei Ge xianweng 梅葛仙翁), National Library of China 中国国家图书馆. http://catalog.digitalarchives.tw/item/00/12/50/d8.html (downloaded 2025/10/16)

Citation: Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 69, 1-2 (2026) ; 10.1163/15685209-12341666

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Types of Cotton Fabric

Though the Chuangsha gazetteer text is hyperbolic, there were certainly many kinds of cotton cloth, and sorting the multitude of names and types is challenging.⁴³ One sympathizes with the seventeenth-century editor of the Songjiang Gazetteer who threw up his hands: “the list is inexhaustible.”⁴⁴ Still, the work of Nishijima Sadao and Fan Jinmin has enabled detailed analysis and, when read alongside other local gazetteer “local products” listings, it becomes apparent that the Chuansha text’s cloths were categorised by both kind and market.⁴⁵

There were three basic criteria by which cotton fabrics were distinguished: dimension, quality, and patterning. Cotton cloth dimensions had initially been a matter of state control, but after the mid-Ming single-whip tax reforms, the cloth collected by the government was converted to silver and measurements stopped being a concern for tax purposes.⁴⁶ However, as long-distance markets for cloth expanded, cloth dimensions began to be standardized in order to satisfy different marketing region’s specifications. Thus, “standard cloth” (also known as “large cloth”), a Jiangnan cloth that the early Qing Songjiang writer Ye Menghzu describes being sold to the north (Shanxi, Shaanxi, and Beijing) in considerable quantities, measured 20 chi in length, 1.2 chi in width, and weighed 18–20 liang.⁴⁷

However, it is evident that there were many variations of dimension. This description, from a late Qing local gazetteer of Jiangsu’s Wujin and Yanghu counties, is typical:

“Wide cloth” has a width of 1 chi, 8–9 cun, and it comes from the villages around Wujin. “Shop cloth” has a width of 1 chi, 3 cun, and a length of 3 zhang, 6 chi; that called “Western shop” is fine, and it comes from the villages around Yanghu. “Menzhuang” cloth has a width of 9 cun, and a lengthy of 2 zhang, 2 chi, it comes from the villages around north Wujin⁴⁸

The diversity of dimensions suggests local markets serving smaller marketing radiuses. Consider Zhang Chunhua’s distinction between different cloths in his Seasonal Folk Songs of Shanghai: “Fine cloths are known as “pointed” and have names like “Dragon Glory point” and “Seven Treasures point”. “Dragon Glory” is the name of my town. Seven Treasures is now under the jurisdiction of Qingpu.” But he noted, “That cloth which travels far is known as ‘Standard cloth’: in Shaanxi and Shanxi provinces, branches have been set up in Yiguang to collect them, and they are called ‘sitting branches’.”⁴⁹ Zhang’s identification of commercial cloth that “travels far” highlights the need to distinguish between different markets, something obscured by the “72 kinds” nomer. Many cloth types did not get traded beyond local or provincial borders, hence the great number of localized names which did not achieve more widespread repute, and hence the lack of standardization: widespread circulation served to standardize dimensions. Liu Xiusheng’s study of local products listings in local gazetteers showed that in the eight provinces where cotton weaving was common, 423 out of 529 counties produced cotton cloth (70.6%), and therefore were self-sufficient without need to import cloth from outside. Of those 423 counties, 332 (78.5%) produced “commercial cloth” (商品布), and 122 (37.9%) of those exported their cloth. As he observed, the fact that such a large proportion of the population did not need to turn to the market for their cloth must have limited the growth of the Qing cotton industry.⁵⁰

One of the best illustrations of which cotton fabrics did achieve national circulation are the signs found in the sixth Qianlong Southern Inspection Tour scroll, produced by Xu Yang (ca. 1712–after 1779), between 1764 and 1768 (Fig. 5). The cotton shops use marketing language like “true-blue” (真青) and “extra-long” (放长) to promote their wares: “(Our store) buys and sells cotton fabric, and dyes fabrics in true-blue, crimson, and sand-green, weaving extra-long textiles and selling homespun cloth from Chongming,” “We dye cloth in all kinds of bright colors for customers,” “Our cloth store dyes cloth in true-blue, extra-long bolts of standard cloth, reed cloth and shuttle cloth”.⁵¹ Though not a documentary record, the signs highlight those types of cloth which did achieve national repute, allowing them to be marketed to different regions: the aforementioned wide “standard cloth”; the narrower “reed cloth” (also known as “small cloth”); and “shuttle cloth” (梭布).⁵²

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Xu Yang, “The Qianlong Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour” (Qianlong Nanxun tu 乾隆南巡圖), Scroll Six: Entering Suzhou along the Grand Canal. dated 1770. Handscroll; ink and color on silk, 27 1/8 × 784 1/2 in. (68.8 × 1994 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, The Dillon Fund Gift, 1988 (1988.350a-d). Detail showing “Our cloth store dyes cloth in true-blue, extra-long bolts of biaobu, koubu and suobu cloth” (本號加染真青，加長標扣梭布，布行)

Citation: Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 69, 1-2 (2026) ; 10.1163/15685209-12341666

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All three of these were higher-quality cloths, with quality determined by both weave and quality of yarn. The signs do not mention lower-quality cloths like “middle loom” (中機), a thinner cloth that became an important product for Songjiang manufacturers selling to the south, following the decline of “standard cloth” sales to the north.⁵³ Nor do they mention the cloths sold to overseas markets: nankeens (紫花布), a high-quality cloth sold to European and American consumers through Canton; or Kitaika, a more costly calendered cloth, and Daba, a cheaper, coarser cloth, sold to Russian markets through Kiakhta.⁵⁴

In general, cotton fabrics like “three-shuttle cloth” (also known as “three yarn cloth” 三紗布, “flying flower cloth” 飛花布, “Maiden Ding cloth” 丁娘 子布) or “eyebrow knit cloth” (眉織布) that gained a reputation for higher quality appear to have done so on the grounds of finer yarn and weaving rather than color or pattern. The patterned cloth types included in the Chuansha text were achieved through weaving—either with single color or dyed yarn—and printing. Cotton weavers used the single person-operated horizontal treadle looms, rather than the two person-operated drawlooms that patterned silks, so patterned weaves were created by adding more treadles and harnesses.⁵⁵ In his early nineteenth-century treatise on cotton-making, Mumian pu 木棉譜, Chu Hua (fl.1784) described the finest cloth, “Flying flower cloth” (飛花布, also called “Maiden Ding cloth” 丁娘子布), which was produced in Sanlintang 三林塘. He highlighted three woven variations: diagonal patterns known as “twill weave” (斜紋); overlapping-rhombus pattern (方勝紋) known as “square pattern” (整文); and raised rib patterns known as “Goryeo cloth” (高麗布).⁵⁶

Cloth was also patterned by weaving with dyed yarn to create colored checks and stripes. The “snowy inside blue cloth” (雪裏青布) and “bean patterned cloth” (豆子花布) listed in the Chuansha text as being produced in the home are both examples of this. It is possible that they were using imported Western machine-spun yarns, the large influx of which contributed to this period’s expansion of cloth types: neither cloth type features in gazetteers or literary descriptions prior to the turn of the nineteenth century, suggesting they might represent a late Qing-early Republic aesthetic.⁵⁷

Finally, printing (印花布) was also used to pattern cotton cloth, providing an important route to pattern and color for those who couldn’t afford the more expensive silk fabrics. The lack of records and surviving objects has impeded fuller investigation of cotton-printing traditions during the Ming and Qing dynasties but they included tie-dye (绞缬), wax-resist (蜡缬), clamp-resist (夹缬) and ash-resist (灰缬) techniques.⁵⁸ The Chuansha text specifies printing as a workshop activity, and during the early Qing, Suzhou cotton cloth printers (苏印) became renowned for their printing. Jiangsu and Zhejiang rural workshops specialized in the technique of resist-paste stencil-printed cloth (绞花布), also known as “medicine spot cloth” (药斑布), where resist pastes of plant ashes or lime, glue, and alum were applied to the cloth through a wooden stencil, before submerging the cloth in an indigo vat to create a blue and white printed design. Also, though very few examples survive, it is evident that woodblocks were also used to print designs of multiple colors on cloth, something also described by Chu Hua.⁵⁹

Notably, though the Chuansha gazetteer text lists “printed cloth”, along with “scraped nap cloth” and “calendered cloth” as marketed by merchants, the Cloth Classic largely focuses on dyed cloth, rather than patterned cloth, perhaps because higher volume could be achieved there. The innumerable local names highlight the difference between local, national, and international markets. Naming was concerned with recognition: Jiangnan’s textile producers could only sell throughout China if they could achieve product repute. Some products—“standard cloth” or nankeens did achieve this through reliable quality, consistent coloring, and standardized measurements. But the wide range of measurements points to the importance of understanding some of these styles in terms of local products produced for local markets. Of course, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it is suggestive, especially in contrast with silk fabrics where more sources reveal marketing of color, weave, or producer across long-distance marketing regions.⁶⁰ For cotton, it is much harder to argue that those cloths that did achieve national or international circulation gained their reach through pattern or fashion. To understand why this should be, we turn to the merchant and their branding strategies.

The Zihao Merchant and the Finishing Workshops

The cotton industry featured various types of merchants, including “guest merchants” (客商) from outside the Jiangnan region, and local brokers (牙行) who purchased the cloth produced in villages and market towns.⁶¹ The wealthiest and most dominant merchant groups were from Shanxi and Huizhou, and during the early seventeenth century, some were reputed to possess capital of 10,000 taels of silver, which purchased 50,000 bolts per year, meaning average prices of 0.2 taels.⁶² Jiangnan’s cotton cloth output roughly doubled between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, from around 20 million to 45 million bolts, and we lack reliable information on the level of capitalization in the latter period, but this output does indicate the potential numbers involved: if purchasing at this highest level of 50,000 bolts a year (and obviously most would not have done), Jiangnan’s output would have supported 900 merchants.⁶³ In order to compete, some merchants opened stores in Suzhou, outside Chang Gate, as described in a mid-eighteenth-century text that emphasizes their associations with finishing stages: “The cotton brands are commonly called zihao (字號). Their shops are situated around Chang Gate; their bleaching and dyeing is excellent.”⁶⁴ To distinguish their cloth in national markets, the zihao sent the cloth to dyeworks who returned the cloth with the brand name printed upon each bolt’s loomhead (機頭). Unlike silk where we have several extant branded silk lengths, as well as examples of branded packaging paper or advertisements, to my knowledge, none of these branded cotton lengths survive.⁶⁵ The main textual evidence comes from a tale by Xu Zhongyuan, describing how Wang Yimei, one of the renowned Xinan merchants (新安 汪氏) from Huizhou and Anhui, paid the tailors (衣工) to use his Yimei branded cotton cloth (益美字號). The tailors, being greedy for small profits, praised the cloth’s beauty, and soon the market was crowded with those purchasing Yimei cloth. The calculated sales were one million bolts, with a profit of 100 wen per bolt. In ten years, Wang became rich and prosperous, and his cloth was sold “throughout the world”.⁶⁶ Though it is often described as a novel, the text is a collection of anecdotes, and Wang Yimei’s Cloth (汪益美布匹) clearly existed: it is included in guild steles as well as in Suzhou scholar Gu Zhentao’s list of branded products. Still, his case merited inclusion in a book entitled Jottings about Unusual Events primarily as a tale of savvy marketing, and though it may be argued that names like Wang Yimei’s cloth functioned as brand names, their usage is inconsistent.⁶⁷ The lack of surviving branded cotton cloth makes it difficult to know how or whether they used motifs or color, or whether the brands were more of a guarantee of quality for a particular grade of cloth. The legislative evidence for zihao brand names suggests only names were used, rather than signs or symbols: “Da Yuan Brand’s cloth” or “Yong Sheng Brand’s cloth”.⁶⁸ From the late seventeenth century onwards, several stone stele inscriptions evidence efforts by Songjiang and Suzhou textile guilds to prohibit fraudulent brand names.⁶⁹ Such inscriptions served as a primary medium for recording and disseminating guild activities, and regulations sought to prevent names that infringed upon another zihao’s name by duplicating a character from the name. This endeavor resulted in Songjiang’s Hall of Elegant Weavings Guild (綺藻堂布业公所) establishing a systematic list of cotton brand names (牌譜) to control their use in 1825.⁷⁰

Zihao numbers seem to have peaked around the late Kangxi-Yongzheng period when 76 were recorded in 1697.⁷¹ But a later gazetteer of 1761 described the Zihao as follows:

Su cotton is famous throughout the land, those engaged in this business are based around Chang Gate on Upper and Lower Tang streets and they are called zihao: each (production stage) has a specialist: bleaching (漂布), dyeing (染布), inspection (看布), and sales (布行). Often several tens of families depend upon a single zihao for their livelihoods, so only those with money can engage in this trade.⁷²

This is an important passage, for it outlines the different production stages involved, though unfortunately not with much precision. The zihao financed the dyehouse’s capital requirements of cloth, dyestuffs, and workers by providing the cloth and paying a per-piece “wine fee”, to be divided among the workers after the master dyer or boss had taken 20–30%. Late Qing Shanghai dyers interviewed by historian Du Li in the 1950s described how zihao representative calculated the processing fee in terms of dyestuff and labor per piece with the dyework. A middleman figure known as Baotou was responsible for preparing the equipment, tools, laborers, and location, providing firewood and rice, and controlling the laborers, mostly single men, who came into Suzhou from poorer regions in Northern Jiangsu or Anhui to sell their labor and had a reputation for unruliness.⁷³ The Cloth Classic also attests to this system: it provides the information required to calculate processing fees and negotiate the dyeing contract (“General Principles of the Dye Workshop” 染坊總決), price lists for dyeing different lengths of cotton, broken down into dyestuff and labor costs, as well as “Market Prices for Dyes and Bleaches” and “Amounts of dye materials needed for dyeing all kinds of assorted colors per one hundred bolts of cloth”.

This last section provides a breakdown of the dyeing costs for “extra-long Beijing blue cloth” showing that dyeing this basic indigo cloth cost 0.08 taels per bolt, including labor, dyestuffs, and water.⁷⁴ Though this information is helpful in indicating how much value dyeing added, it is of course a single observation and the changing price of cotton fabrics over the course of the Qing dynasty is a larger question beyond the remit of this paper.⁷⁵ Evidently there were sizable differences depending on the cloth quality: one 1631 Songjiang gazetteer listed a cotton cloth tax quota for fine cloth at 0.61 taels per bolt and coarse cloth rate at 0.3 taels per bolt.⁷⁶ However it is hard to find examples where one can compare the price of white and dyed cotton cloth at a specific time and place. Thus far, I have found only three examples: In late Qianlong (ca. 1790) Shandong, fish white cloth (鱼白布) cost 44 wen per chi, while deep blue cloth (深兰布) cost 58 wen per chi, a 1.3 markup for indigo-dyeing.⁷⁷ In 1812 Jiangsu, the approved purchase price for cotton cloth required by the Qing government was set at 0.14 taels per zhang for white shuttle cloth (白梭布), and 0.16 taels per zhang (10 chi) for shuttle cloth (梭布) of various colors, a 1.14 markup for colored cloth.⁷⁸ In Daoguang period (1820–50) Shandong, white bleached cloth (白漂布) cost 1200 wen per bolt and indigo-dyed cloth (青布) cost 1800 wen per bolt, a 1.5 mark-up for indigo-dyeing.⁷⁹ Moreover, nearly all the prices for dyed cloth are for indigo-dyed cloth, and there are few instances of a non-indigo cloth prices: red cloth cost 60 wen per chi in 1840, which would make it 1200 wen per bolt (assuming 20 chi per bolt), around 0.83 taels, over twice the cost of standard cloth, though this Daoguang-period price may be unrepresentative.⁸⁰ Still, if we assume a retail price of indigo-dyed cloth as 0.6 taels, then the dyeing costs of 0.08 taels represented 13%.

It might have been supposed that those cotton merchants who could invest in dyeworks and thus assert more control over these costs could create added value and so raise prices, an idea expressed concisely in The Cloth Classic: “Of all those hopeful of running a cotton brand business (zihao), only in the dyeshop can unlimited profit be extracted.”⁸¹ However the extent to which zihao directly invested in dyeworks is much debated. As one of the few places in the Qing textile industry where labor was concentrated in larger centralized production units, the finishing sector was of considerable interest to “Sprouts of Capitalism” historians who viewed the cloth-processing industry as the location of “embryonic capitalism”. But there is little evidence of zihao merchants using capital to control raw materials or regulate the production pace: rather merchants made their profits outside the production process by circulating goods in markets.⁸²

Even if the zihao did not directly manage dyeworks, their capital provisions still exerted control: for large orders, the dyeworks owner borrowed funds from the zihao to purchase the dyestuffs and pay the workers, to be repaid after the cloth finishing was completed.⁸³ Unlike spinning and weaving tools (spinning wheels, spools, looms) which were simple, inexpensive, and widely accessible to weaving households; finishing equipment, which included dye vats, bamboo drying racks, stoves, and calendering sets, as well as space to dry the cloth, would have required some investment.⁸⁴ Du Li’s interview with the wife of the owner of Wang Xiangxing Dyeing Workshop (王祥興染坊), which began in late Jiaqing period Songjiang, described a medium size shop with 17 craftsmen, 30 dyeing and bleaching vats, and 3 sets of calendering tools.⁸⁵ The main capital outlay were the calendaring stones, dye vats, craftsmens’ pay, and the dyestuffs.⁸⁶ A small indigo dyehouse might have needed just one or two employees, but larger workshops employed several dozen workers. But there appears to have been little long-term contracting or formal ties between artisan and merchant: when business was booming, the workshop would hire dyers or calenderers; when business was slow, the craftsmen did not work. Hence the “wine-fee” style contracts where the merchant provided the funds for specific contracts using contingent, short-term labor.

Regulatory steles also suggest that many zihao did not invest in finishing workshops. Of the 63 signed dyeing businesses who signed a 1720 stele, only 18 (29%) were operated by zihao cloth merchants.⁸⁷ Instead it seems that most zihao preferred to subcontract work out to the cloth dyers and calenderers, rather than directly invest in their business. Xu Xinwu’s investigations found that by the late Qing, most of the large zihao had set up their own dyeworks and some certainly did earlier: Fan Jinmin gives the example of one Wanfu zihao (萬孚字号), who appears twice on the steles, and operated the Golden Mansion Dyework (金宅染坊). Initially he sent the cloth out for dyeing, but poor-quality colors hampered sales, and so he opened his own dyework.⁸⁸ But equally, as the number of dyeworks expanded, sending one’s cloth outside to dye perhaps became easier and cheaper than running a dyework yourself. To understand why this should be, note the follow-up line from The Cloth Classic, that the reason why the dyehouse was the most profitable stage: “Of all those hopeful of running a cotton brand business (zihao), only in the dyeshop can unlimited profit be extracted. And the source of this lies entirely in examining the cloth.” The skill to examine the cloth and thus determine the most appropriate finishing path for that cloth was the expertise of the so-called “cloth-examining friend” (看布朋友), the middlemen employed by the zihao to go to market towns to inspect, purchase, and transport cloth to the workshops to be dyed and calendered.⁸⁹ It is the cloth-examining friend’s knowledge that is represented in The Cloth Classic, and as will be shown, the expansion of dye colors was predicated upon this knowledge. Or, as The Cloth Classic put it, “The person who inspects the white cloth is the backbone of the zihao.”⁹⁰

Expanding the Color Options

As visualized in Fig. 4, the dyers’ guild gods were Mei Fu and Ge Hong, both historical figures associated with alchemy who were also worshipped by the papermakers, medicine, and pharmacy guilds. The sectors shared the use of pigments and vats, and a reliance on unpredictable substances for which it was desirable to appeal to gods to control; and all grew, in part, due to increased understanding of materials and the expansion of dyestuff trade.⁹¹

These dyestuff materials were originally, and to some degree continued to be, rooted in local ecosystems. The “sand green” color mentioned in Suzhou’s shop signs was derived from the bark and leaves of a green wood produced in south Wujin and Yanghu.⁹² Similarly Li Dou’s investigation of Jiangnan dyers in The Pleasure Boats of Yangzhou listed numerous examples of dyes that derived their name from producer place name or locally-grown dyestuffs: “Huai’an red” (淮安紅), “Mianyang blue” (沔陽青), “Chao blue” (潮藍), or “Sui blue” (睢藍).⁹³ Thus, the kind of specialist techniques evidenced in The Cloth Classic are best understood as emerging from what Alka Raman in a study of Indian indigo-dyeing describes as a “synergy between the local environment, raw materials, and artisanal skills”.⁹⁴ However The Cloth Classic also shows how Jiangnan dyers were also being supplied with dyestuffs from further off places, demonstrating the impact of expanded trade on Qing cotton dyers.

This is certainly the case for indigo. The huge amounts of indigo needed by Jiangnan dyers meant that local supply was insufficient, nor was it as good quality as that of Fujian. The Cloth Classic describes several different indigos, including Jianning 建宁, the most renowned of the Fujian indigos, as well as Jiangxi, Hubei, Hunan, and Zhejiang, “rural indigo,” and “foreign blue”.⁹⁵ However, The Cloth Classic suggests more widespread increased usage of certain dyestuffs through expanded trade. Figure 6 shows a detail from a rare early eighteenth-century Suzhou woodblock print, depicting the commercial heart of Suzhou just at the point where the finishing sector was starting to take off. The detail shows a dye material shop, “Sappanwood, Alum, Gallnut, and Cork Tree Trade” (蘇木，礬，培，黃柏行). It is interesting that the sign singles out these dyestuffs, for three of them also appear in a section on key dyestuffs in The Cloth Classic. This section, entitled “Various Locations for Sourcing Dyestuffs” (各樣顏色道路地名), outlines the best locations for sappanwood, pagoda bud, Chinese cork tree, and safflower (also the mordant, green alum) with different qualities listed and local names specified. Along with (Sichuan) gallnut (川棓, Melaphis chinensis), these dyestuffs were the most commonly used in The Cloth Classic.⁹⁶ Indeed, although 21 substances are mentioned in total, these five dyestuffs are by far the most commonly used, as shown by Table 1 which lists the dyestuffs used for the 68 colors listed in The Cloth Classic.⁹⁷ Gallnut, pagoda bud, sappanwood, Chinese cork tree, and safflower were used in 24, 18, 17, 9, and 7 of the recipes respectively.

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Baohuixuan zhuren, “Chang Gate of Gusu” (Gusu Changmen tu 姑蘇閶門圖), 1734, Woodblock print with hand colouring, Umi-Mori Art Museum, Hiroshima, Japan. Detail showing “Sappanwood, Alum, Gallnut, and Yellow Cypress Shop” (Sumu, Fan, Bei, Huangbo hang 蘇木，礬，培，黃柏行)

Citation: Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 69, 1-2 (2026) ; 10.1163/15685209-12341666

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Recipe lists of Dyestuffs, Mordants, and Additives listed in the Bu Jing (ca.1780–1850)

Citation: Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 69, 1-2 (2026) ; 10.1163/15685209-12341666

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The intensified use of certain dyestuffs is interesting for considering to what extent the Qing textile sector was sourcing raw materials from outside China, for example through the Nanyang trade with Southeast Asia or the Canton trade with Europe. In fact, most of the six dominant dyestuffs highlighted in The Cloth Classic came from within China.⁹⁸ The alum mordant, Ferrous sulphate (青礬), came from Shandong and Henan. Gallnut came from Zhejiang, Henan, Shanxi, Sichuan, and Shandong. Chinese cork tree (黄柏, Phellodendrum), used to dye yellows, beiges, and browns, was sourced from Sichuan. Pagoda bud (槐米, Sophora japonicus), used to dye yellows, was sourced from Jiangxi. Safflower (紅花, Carthamus tinctorius), a red dye, was sourced from Zhejiang, Henan, Shaanxi, Shandong, and Sichuan, with the latter province being especially renowned. The only exception was sappanwood (蘇木, Ceasalpinia sappan), an important source for red and yellow shades, which had long been a trade good in the inter-Asian maritime trade: The Cloth Classic specified supplies from Zhejiang, but also Luzon (Manila) in the Philippines, and Siam.⁹⁹

Moreover, though certainly some dyestuffs became obsolete, and others became more popular, in general, when one compares the dyestuffs, mordants, and additives listed in the earlier Exploitation of the Works of Nature of 1637 and late eighteenth-century The Cloth Classic (Table 2), the absence of new substances is quite striking.¹⁰⁰ This comparison is not a perfect one. Exploitation covers both silk and cotton, whereas The Cloth Classic only contains recipes for cotton. Exploitation also includes several different kinds of indigo, whereas indigo is not listed as an ingredient in The Cloth Classic’s recipes, for reasons we shall see shortly. All the same, it is apparent that there is no dramatic expansion of the numbers of different types of dyestuffs in the later work. Instead, it seems that the greater number of colors in The Cloth Classic, 68 against 25 in the earlier work, is being achieved through an intensified use of the above dyestuffs, and most especially, an intensified use of mordants.

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Dyestuffs, Mordants, and Additives listed in the Tiangong kaiwu (1637) and the Bu Jing (ca. 1780–1850)

Citation: Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 69, 1-2 (2026) ; 10.1163/15685209-12341666

Sources: Anon, Bu jing (n.d.) Anhui Provincial Library ms; Song Yingxing, Tiangong kaiwu, juan shang, zhang shi, part 7, “zhuse zhiliao”; Jing Han and Anita Quye, “Dyes and Dyeing in the Ming and Qing Dynasties”; Zhao Feng, “Tiangong kaiwu Zhangshi pianzhong de ranliao he ranse”; Ernest Watson, The Principal Articles of Chinese Commerce; online writings of Huang Songhua 黄荣华.

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Alum mordants were used to fix the dye to the fiber to form an insoluble colored compound, and they were vital for cotton dyeing.¹⁰¹ In addition to mordanting, alums were used together with sappanwood and pagoda bud to brighten the color; or with tannin dyes like gallnut, lotus-seed shell, and chestnut bud to darken.¹⁰² The Cloth Classic used both “white or clear alum” (明礬, 白礬, Potassium aluminium sulphate) and “green alum” (青礬, Ferrous sulphate) extensively. 30 recipes (44%) use clear alum and 26 (38%) use green alum. Moreover, 12 (18%) use the two alums together, something not done in Exploitation.¹⁰³ For example, “Lychee color” (荔枝) required 7 jin of gallnut (川棓) and 20 jin of sappanwood (蘇木), together with 3 jin of clear alum and 3.5 jin of green alum.

Aside from dyeing, alum had numerous industrial uses in this period: it was used in clarifying water, as an astringent, as an emetic, to make baking powders, and to size and whiten paper. Found in many provinces, it became a substantial trade good in the Country trade—a “proto-industrial raw material” shipped from Canton to Indian port cities near textile centers.¹⁰⁴ Its low price made for good profit margins, at least earlier on, and its weight made it good ballast. But by the late eighteenth century, higher purchase prices in China and lower sales prices in India led to squeezed profit margins. Theoretically this would have led to higher prices for the Jiangnan dyers too, though one account commented that “the supply is literally inexhaustible” and it remains unclear how far Canton prices impacted Jiangnan markets.¹⁰⁵

So while the dyestuff trade is an important factor in explaining the expansion of colors, there is no dramatic increase in new dyes, especially not when compared to the far more impactful influx of new dyestuffs like cochineal or indigo within the European dye industry. Neither cochineal nor Prussian blue are mentioned in these recipes, though by this point the European traders had been attempting to sell both for some time in Canton. A superficial reading would see this as indicating resistance to new products, which after all required learning new techniques, and perhaps this was a factor. However, evidence elsewhere shows that Chinese manufacturers were quick to copy viable trade products, for example in the late 1820s, a Canton manufacturer developed a substitute dye for Prussian blue (which was popular in painting), terminating European imports and following an import substitution dynamic seen elsewhere in the China trade.¹⁰⁶ And a more likely explanation for the lack of adoption of foreign dyestuffs was the higher cost of imported dyestuffs like cochineal.¹⁰⁷ But there is also a more interesting observation here: The Cloth Classic evidences expanded product variety, not through the European model of innovation which dominates early modern histories of consumption, in which new processes to achieve color variety are motivated by exposure to new products, but rather through using existing dyestuffs and mordants more intensively.

Indeed, the new colors were being created largely through the expanded use of the “set dyeing” (套染) technique. This practice of combining different dyes and mordants in varying quantities to create colors of varying tones was not new but it does seem to have developed particularly in the eighteenth century.¹⁰⁸ Thus as seen in Table 1, many of the new shades were created from recipes combining one, two, three or even four dyestuffs, but modulating the qualities to create different shades. For example, pale rose, bright pink, and shiny red were all made from the same combination of safflower, smoked plum, and Guangdong ash-lye: all three shades were effectively the same recipe, but by adjusting the quantities, dyers could create the three different shades of red. This technique is also seen in Exploitation but to a lesser degree: like The Cloth Classic, Exploitation lists “Crimson” (大紅), “Lotus red” (蓮紅), “Peach red” (桃紅), “Silver red” (銀紅) and Water Red as requiring safflower, smoked plum, and alkali water or rice-straw ash-lye. (The Cloth Classic also incorporates turmeric for the “Crimson” and “Peach Red”.) And Exploitation creates “Moon White” (月白) and “Grass White” (草白) from a combination of indigo (靛) and amaranth (莧藍), which is not done in The Cloth Classic. But The Cloth Classic uses set dyeing to create a set of purples (brown, purple sandalwood, sauce color, iron color, and autumn color using varying quantities of clear alum, green alum, gallnut, and sappanwood); a set of greens (medium shine, round eyes, and tea-leaf green using varying quantities of clear alum, green alum, gallnut and pagoda bud), and many other examples shown in Table 1. Thus, the cotton dyers’ increased usage of the “set dyeing” technique effectively doubled the number of variations.¹⁰⁹

Equally important here however was the increasing specialization of the dyeworks.¹¹⁰ While both Qiu Ying and Xu Yang depict an array of colors (Fig. 2, Fig. 4) as a means of representing Suzhou’s flourishing dyeworks, several sources record workshops specializing in certain colors due to specific dyestuff requirements. Chu Hua divided the dyeworks into blue, red, bleaching, and miscellaneous.¹¹¹ For example, the inset workshop scene of Figure 4 specifies it is a red workshop, like one described in a Shanghai bamboo ballad poem: “Crimson dyestuffs have specialist dyers, they are called the red workshops, and their colors make bright stuffs. (Whether) silk or cotton thread, yarn, and fabric, all will become as splendidly colored as the rosy clouds.”¹¹² This color specialization on the part of dyeworks meant merchants could subcontract out different dyeing stages, especially to the indigo workshops.

As noted earlier, The Cloth Classic lists 68 dye recipes. Though the term is conventional amongst dye historians, “recipe” is something of a misnomer here: it is less a recipe and more a shopping list, for there are no instructions, nor, more importantly, is sequencing provided. Instead, the recipe simply lists the quantities of materials required. So for example, “bright green” (明祿), was made by combining moon white fabric with 25 jin of pagoda bud, 3 jin of gallnut, 3 jin of clear alum and Guangdong ash-lye.¹¹³ But this recipe, along with 15 others, a quarter of the recipes, calls for the use of pre-dyed cloth (lit. “on the foot of” 脚地), all of which are variations of indigo-dyed cloth: “moon white” (月白), “treasure blue” (寶藍), “true blue” (真青), “kingfisher blue” (翠藍), “double blue” (双藍), “fish belly white” (魚肚白). The recipes for these colors are not provided in The Cloth Classic and indeed there would be no need to do so, because they are all variations of indigo-dyed cotton.

This development of using indigo-dyed cloth as the basis for dyeing other colors is one of the key features distinguishing The Cloth Classic from earlier dyeing texts. Alongside the more intensive use of key dyestuffs and mordants and the expansion of set dyeing, it is the main factor enabling the new cotton colors. Indigo is unique among cotton dyestuffs in being a “substantive color”, able to permanently fix onto the cloth without a mordant and instead relying on multiple immersions in the dye vat to build up layers. Indigo workshops (青布, 蓝布) dominated the dye sector, producing the blue-dyed cloth that clothed many Chinese during this period, some of which was taken to larger dyeworks for further processing to turn into shades of green and purple. For example, one Qianlong period (1735–96) gazetteer records how, “Cloth from outside Waigang (a market town in Songjiang) is called “Gang chen”, and it is dyed in pale colors; these are vivid and popular, and other places cannot achieve such (shades), therefore the Suzhou merchants all open shops in the town to buy this cloth.”¹¹⁴ Suzhou had a thriving business in indigo-dyed cloth, another trade said to partially compensate for its loss of northern markets.¹¹⁵

The reliance on indigo explains The Cloth Classic’s careful attention to differences between different indigo, as well as the “cloth-examining friend’s” skills in examining these shades of blue dyed cloth. It includes sections such as: “Methods for examining blue cloth,” “Secret words on examining green-blue and moon white (cloth).” As one section puts it: “The dyed cloth (lit. the darkness/ lightness) of each cotton brand is not the same.” “Each is distinctive: whether (called) sun and moon, moon white, moon blue; whether called kingfisher blue, precious blue, pale kingfisher; or capital blue, capital kingfisher; or light treasure, light blue, buddha blue, capital blue; or duck blue and light blue. All these colors are different, and so the person examining the cloth must have their own appropriate method for examining each color.”¹¹⁶ The focus on the merchant’s skills in evaluating these different shades of blue reflects both their dominant position in clothing color and dyers’ use of them to create other colors.

This text corroborates Eyferth’s attention to “mercantile epistemologies”, which he defines as the development of a commercial discourse that deployed sensory analysis to establish quality measures.¹¹⁷ He quotes an example from the two-chapter Bu Jing Yaolan on how to assess dyed cloth: “Bring along a true color sample to compare. The quality of the daylight is important; an overcast sky is best. White clouds in the sky make the cloth appear brighter; red clouds give it a reddish hue. Always rely on your sample.”¹¹⁸ Many such instructions can be found, often seeking to manage sensory bias in one’s evaluations: “The cloth-examining friend needs to adjust to the circumstances, and cannot maintain his own ideas, or listen intimately to other people’s words.” Only then could an objective basis for quality judgements be established; otherwise, “If you only look partially at the color of cloth and insist on talking about it, how is it different from peeping at a leopard through a tube or looking at the sky from the bottom of a well?”¹¹⁹ In this pre-industrial age in which large trading networks were conducted on the basis of amassing hundreds of thousands of bolts produced in dispersed locations by disparate weavers, this discourse speaks to the importance of the cloth-examining friend in standardizing the inherently individual. Perhaps most significantly, in the absence of mercantile capital seeking to more closely control household production and in the absence of innovation at the household level, this middleman’s skill facilitated the Qing cotton industry’s distinctive production structure in which all woven products could be matched to a suitable market outcome: liaising between product and demand to avoid waste.¹²⁰

Conclusion

The Cloth Classic attests to the expansion of clothing colors that began in the early Qing, providing an important example of what improved living standards of the Qing period looked like to a non-elite consumer. It demonstrates three main factors enabled greater number of cotton colors: intensive use of key dyestuffs and mordants, the use of set dyeing, and the reliance on pre-dyed fabrics supplied by specialist dyers within the sector. All three represent improvements in the dye sector that potentially produced economic growth and improved living standards for those who could afford their higher costs, but equally, all three came from within the production system, effectively achieved by people doing more with what they had, rather than being stimulated by new products or techniques, and were thus akin to the intensified use of agricultural techniques that increased yield allowing per-capita consumption to be maintained despite increased population.

The Cloth Classic’s account of developing dye techniques in the Qing cotton sector is instructive in three main respects. First, it presents an alternative model of expanded product variety to the European model, in which new products are created through the encounter with global trade, stimulated by new manufacturing techniques, raw materials, or markets.¹²¹ Instead of technological innovation or centralized production, the creation of added value and manufacturing growth seen in The Cloth Classic was achieved largely on the basis of embodied expertise of the dyer and the “cloth-watching friend” responsible for moving the cloth from household to workshop to market. Yet, as Bertucci shows so neatly in regard to the failed transfer of a silk reeler from Piedmont, Italy to Georgia, Colonial America, an individual artisan’s embodied skill was worthless without the legal and sociotechnical systems that validated it.¹²² These systems—what Bertucci terms the “social fabric” that grounded the artisan’s embodied expertise—were just as critical as craft skill in enabling the Jiangnan cotton sector to find ways to satisfy consumer demand for better, more colorful cloth. Indeed, this case study of cotton dyeing highlights the importance of organizational change and specialization in understanding how the textile industry developed over the Qing period. Both the separation of the dyers and the calenderers and the division of dyeworks into certain colors resulted from commercial complexification that increased the number of participants in the finishing sector, at both the higher processing levels of the Suzhou workshops and the lower-level indigo dye workshops, with the cloth-examining friend’s expertise mediating to find new possibilities for color.

Second, and relatedly, this model of creating product variety suggests future research avenues for resolving the conundrum implicit in the history covered in this paper: If, as shown China’s cotton textile consumption complexified through the Qing period, how do we explain its backward position relative to global producers in the early nineteenth century?¹²³ After all, theoretically, valued-added improvements would have allowed those producers who focused upon “styles, colors and fashion trends” to earn greater profits than those who worked with middle-grade cloth.¹²⁴ Yet this would suggest expanding market demand, which is not well-evidenced. Instead, Songjiang appears to undergo decline from the mid-Qing, even before the Opium Wars and the incursion of industrially produced cloth from Britain, America, and Russia.¹²⁵ We know that much of this was due to shifts within the domestic cotton market, whereby Jiangnan lost its earlier markets for standard cloth as new provinces produced their own. To some degree Jiangnan could move up the chain to higher-end cloth, but when read with other evidence on pricing, The Cloth Classic suggests that markets for higher-value cloth were limited, and may well have become harder to reach by the late eighteenth century, when real buying power fell, and “prospects for profitable diversification” lessened.¹²⁶ Jiangnan’s cotton finishing sector was circumscribed by these limitations, but it was also hampered by the lack of technical innovation that might have provided its producers the ability to compete on grounds other than its array of colors. In this respect, more work needs to be done to understand how far the socioeconomic and cultural systems of craft knowledge revealed in The Cloth Classic fostered gatekeepers who potentially obstructed the absorption of new knowledge that did not align with existing local paradigms.¹²⁷

Nonetheless and finally, The Cloth Classic highlights the importance of material culture scholarship in reconstructing accounts of developments in craft technologies and their impact on the living standards of ordinary people. The material lives of non-elites are often overlooked in Chinese material culture history which remains particularly enthralled to art historical paradigms of elite and imperial consumption. But The Cloth Classic reminds us that material culture can be studied even in the absence of the historical object, and it calls for more attention to the many Qing mercantile texts which offer informative, materially attuned insights into little-known developments in consumption history. The new systems of coloring cotton cloth that emerged in the mid-Qing depended on the development of this commercial discourse, but so too does our ability to reconstruct a material culture regime whose objects often did not survive.