In China in the first half of the twentieth century, official and unofficial efforts were made to regulate or influence women's dress, despite the fact that for urban, sophisticated, independent, middle-class urbanites, fashions were largely determined by the women who wore them. The first official mandate for women's dress, promulgated by the new Republican government in 1912, had little lasting effect. Unofficial efforts in 1915 and 1920 to influence women's garb, stemming from the antiforeign National Goods Movement, which the textile industry had originated much earlier and which urged patriotic Chinese to "buy Chinese," was also largely inconsequential. Only the Nationalist official designation in 1927 of a "national" feminine dress was effective. Using dated visual evidence from the print media, this paper assesses the failures and successes of these two official and one unofficial attempt to define proper attire for Chinese women.
The Chinese have long used images of plants, flowers, animals, birds and objects to convey auspicious wishes. This convention is based on the tonal nature of the Chinese spoken language where one sound may have a variety of meanings, resulting in visual puns and rebuses. Fish, for example, express hopes for wealth because the pronunciation of the character for “fish” is identical to that for “abundance.” In this context, carp and goldfish, despite their distinctly different physical appearance, were especially favoured because the carp’s jumping ability was associated with the idea of leaping through the Dragon Gate, an emblem of success in the civil service examinations leading to prestige and wealth. In contrast, the very name of the domestic goldfish, implied money (gold) and expressed wishes for the wealth for the family. This article focuses on identifying and explaining some of the ways in which the carp and the goldfish were represented in the Chinese popular print medium and how they embodied the pursuit of wealth in imperial China.
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