Other People’s Clothes: The Secondhand Clothes Dealer and the Western Art Collector in Early Twentieth-Century China

Abstract

Western museum collections of Chinese dress were enabled by Qing dynastic collapse and the ensuing rise of imperialism and tourism. This article reconstructs the process through which Chinese dress objects transferred from wearing to display, and the collectors, curators, and dealers responsible. In revealing the key role of the secondhand clothes dealer and probing collectors’ motives and scholars’ priorities, it seeks to take a fresh look at the process of creating meaning in the museum collection. Through a close analysis of pawnshop texts, it reconstructs the parameters of materiality, workmanship, and geography through which dealers assessed garments, and compares this with the collector’s connoisseurship framework. Thus, the article explores how foreign buyers changed understandings of secondhand Chinese dress, and more fundamentally, what this history tells us about how objects transition between different modalities of worth within the “art-culture system.”

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