Revising women’s work: Representing the Production of Cotton in 18th-century China

Abstract

In 1765 the governor of Bei Zhili, Fang Guancheng (1696/1698-1768), presented the Qianlong emperor (r. 1735-96) with sixteen album leaves entitled Mianhua tu, the Pictures of Cotton. These paintings detail in sequential arrangement the procedures undertaken in the production of cotton fabric. Each step was accompanied by a poem and an explanation of the depicted activity. Qianlong happily responded with his own suite of poems. The Pictures of Cotton continue an established tradition of representing procedures involved in the production of commodities. The Song-dynasty Pictures of Tilling and Weaving were revitalized by Qianlong’s grandfather and had become an established subject matter for subsequent imperial commissions. The Pictures of Weaving, in particular, inspired Fang as they represent the manufacturing of silk fabric by women weavers. This paper argues that while Fang Guancheng drew upon earlier precedents, his Pictures of Cotton constitute an important rupture. Given the relatively late introduction of cotton into China, this material was regarded as external to the Classics. For Fang, cotton and its representation became a novel site to recast labor roles, erasing gender boundaries in the production of fabric. Not only did the Pictures of Cotton revise feminine labor, it incorporated technological information to explain the depictions. The inclusion of such didactic texts, informed by Evidential Studies (Kaozheng xue), marks an early formulation of a “modernist” objectifying gaze that was deployed to survey the production of commodities and those who produce them.