Sensing Nankeen: Skilled Perception as an Alternative to Centralized Production

Join us for talk with Professor Jacob Eyferth (University of Chicago) on the embodied craft of cotton textile production. 

The Jiangnan cotton industry, centered on Songjiang (today part of Shanghai), was one of the largest industries of the eighteenth century in terms of volume and employment. Jiangnan cotton cloth, known in Europe as nankeen, was produced in millions of small household workshops and collected by traveling merchants who toured the countryside by boat and bought cloth in small batches, for further processing in urban workshops. Buying cloth required sensory skills: as Qianlong-periond training manuals explain, a skilled “cloth viewer” had to be able to assess the quality—the weight, density, color, etc.—of a bolt of cloth at first sight; moreover, he would know, by viewing and touching it, where, when, and how it was produced, with what tools, and from what raw materials. Most importantly, he could predict how the cloth would change under the dyers’ hands: cloth that looked smooth and clean might turn into stiff like felt in the vat, while cloth that looked less impressive would gain luster. Rather than seeking to standardize production, Songjiang cloth merchants embraced variety: all cloth, good or bad, had its use; even the coarsest cloth would find a market. The merchant’s task was to match product to market, using his body as scale and yardstick. 

The talk reconstructs cloth viewers’ embodied techniques as described in the Bu Jing 布经 training manual, asks to which extend skilled vision was, or could have been, an alternative to standardization and mass production, and looks at sensory training in Mao-era textile factories.