You can stream the 70 episodes of “Story of Yanxi Palace” at your leisure, but you don’t have to go all the way to Beijing to discover the luxe lives of the Qing dynasty’s imperial women. Their gowns, their jewelry, their religious accouterments and the paintings they appreciated can now be found here in Massachusetts, in “Empresses of China’s Forbidden City”: a huge and opulent exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum that excavates the lives of women behind the Forbidden City walls. The objects here date from the late 17th century to the foundation of the republic in 1912, and almost 200 of them are on loan from the Palace Museum, the bulk never before seen in the United States.
For all its splendor, “Empresses” is a gratifyingly rigorous show. Qing-era historians left only bare-bones outlines of women’s lives, and both the exhibition and a hefty catalog use clothing, paintings and the decorative arts to fill in big gaps in the Chinese historical record. It opens with a grand evocation of an imperial wedding in 1889, when the Guangxu emperor married the young Xiaoding in a midnight ceremony. One of Xiaoding’s silk wedding gowns is here, and its awesome detailing, from the roundels of gold dragons and phoenixes on the body to the groovy multicolored waves on its hem, signify her ascent to mother of the nation. In five paintings on paper, which make use of wonky, half-mastered western perspective, we see Xiaoding borne through the Forbidden City on a palanquin adorned with peacock feathers; courtiers and servants have packed the gardens and pavilions, and everyone is preparing for the court’s new calculus of power and prestige.
Each Qing emperor had several wives, only one of whom would be classed as “empress.” She sat atop a hierarchy of eight levels of imperial women, ranging from beloved consorts to concubines to glorified servants; above the empress herself was her mother-in-law, the dowager empress, who effectively picked her son’s brides. One’s place in the imperial harem was signified by exacting differentials in privileges: how many servants you got, what plates you could eat off and what colors you could wear. Only the empress, the empress dowager, and consorts of the second rank could wear the bright yellow gown here from the later 18th century, made of gleaming satin and bedecked with dragons and clouds of metal-wrapped silk.
The empress and top-tier consorts would also express rank through jewelry, whether ornate jade hairpins or tortoiseshell bangles that clinked on the arms. They also got the best shoes — the Qing elite were Manchus, from the northeast of China, and did not bind women’s feet. One extraordinary pair of pearl-festooned platform boots here, to be worn on horseback, would not have been out of place on “Soul Train.”
Though they sat at the heart of Chinese influence, the women at the Qing court were classified as the emperor’s “inalienable possessions.” Your best bet for moving up the ladder was to bear a son — since the imperial succession was merit-based, and any of the emperor’s boys could be his heir. A scroll painting here from around 1844 depicts the Daoguang emperor sitting beside a woman with a pinched faced and calm smile. Her name was Quan, and she entered the Forbidden City at the bottom of the heap, but was elevated in the imperial harem after giving birth to a boy. Check out the dress: she’s wearing yellow, and therefore has made it to the top.
Some empresses had little to no romantic attachment to the emperor, while others formed deep attachments to the monarch. The Qianlong emperor, one of China’s greatest cultural patrons, married the empress Xiaoxian before he ascended to the throne, and when she died young in 1748 he wrote an aching funeral elegy for her in watery, grief-haunted calligraphy. Yet this exhibition — like the hit soap opera “Story of Yanxi Palace” — is ultimately not about love but about power: how to get power, how to wield power, and how to maintain power in circumstances not propitious for your gender.
No one did it better than Cixi, the dowager empress and de facto ruler of China for much of the later 19th century. She too came up from the lower ranks of consorts after giving birth to a boy, and when her husband died she installed herself as her son’s regent, remaking Chinese politics in the process. Almost all the images of other empresses in this show would not have been seen outside the Forbidden City, but Cixi employed the newly arrived technology of photography to burnish her standing; at the dawn of the new century she posed in a resplendent silk robe, towers of plums by her side, the picture of stability. She also cunningly used religious imagery to solidify her status. One bizarre painting here depicts her as a bodhisattva, riding through the sea on a bed of lotus petals.
Cixi also cultivated foreign supporters, and this show closes with a large, Art Nouveau-ish portrait of Cixi by the American painter Katharine A. Carl, which she commissioned to charm American audiences after the anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion. Deathly two-dimensional, the painting shows Cixi in extreme stillness; pearls cascade down her neckline, and on her hands are green press-on fingernails as long as eagles’ talons. As a work of art, it’s ghastly. As a work of political craftsmanship, it is knavishly impressive.
“Empresses” has been organized by Daisy Yiyou Wang, a curator at the Peabody Essex, and Jan Stuart, a curator at the Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington, to which this show will travel next year. It runs through February though the Palace Museum’s loan restrictions will require the curators to rotate new objects at the Peabody Essex in November and to send some of its current prizes back home. Whether you catch this cycle or the next, this is a rare glimpse of collections we rarely see in the United States — and as the world’s two superpowers butt heads, collaborations between Chinese and American museums deserve all the support they can get.
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