Fashionable Figures: Narrative Roundels and Narrative Borders in Nineteenth-Century Han Chinese Women’s Dress
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Figural motifs have received little attention in Chinese dress and textile history; typically interpreted as generic ‘figures in gardens’, they have long been overshadowed by auspicious symbols. Yet embroiderers, like other craftsmen and women in Qing dynasty China (1644–1911), sought inspiration from the vast array of narratives that circulated in print and performance. This paper explores the trend for the figural through the close study of two embroidered jackets from the Royal Ontario Museum collection featuring dramatic scenery embroidered upon ‘narrative roundels’ and ‘narrative borders’. I argue that three primary factors explain the appearance and popularity of narrative imagery in mid- to late Qing dress and textiles: the importance of theatrical performance and narratives in nineteenth-century life; the dissemination of narrative imagery in printed anthologies and popular prints; and the commercialization of embroidery. By placing the fashion for these jackets firmly within the socio-economic context of nineteenth-century China, the paper provides a novel way of understanding the phenomena of narrative figures on women’s dress through the close relationship between popular culture and fashion in nineteenth-century Chinese women’s dress.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".