Though the topic of commercialization in the Qing cotton industry has been subject to extensive scholarly attention, little consideration has been given to the improvement of finishing and dyeing of Jiangnan cottons over this period. Using The Cloth Classic, a late eighteenth-century cloth merchants’ compendium, this paper investigates the material basis and technical causes of the so-called “72 kinds” of cloth. It demonstrates the expansion of dye colors in cotton cloth and argues that three primary factors enabled this expansion: intensified use of certain dyestuffs and mordants; growing deployment of the “set dyeing” technique; and dyeshop specialization. All three factors would have contributed to economic growth and improved living standards for those who could afford the dyed cloth’s higher cost. But in being enabled largely by the embodied expertise of the dyer and the “cloth-examining friend” responsible for managing the cotton cloth as it moved from household to workshop to market, all three factors also provide an alternative model for understanding how textile industries created new product varieties in the early modern period.

Rachel Silberstein is a historian of Chinese dress and textiles. She earned a DPhil in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford in 2015, and is currently Senior Teaching Fellow and Co-Convenor of the Arts of China module on the SOAS-Alphawood Postgraduate Diploma in Asian Art. 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 86th, 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 Chinese Foreign Textiles Trade for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the China Trade.

Introduction by Yutong Li, Postdoctoral Fellow of Center for Global Asia, NYU Shanghai.