19TH CENTURY

According to the 1759 Huangchao liqi tushi (Illustrated Regulations for the Ritual Paraphernalia of the Imperial Court), the apricot color, xinghuang, was classified as one of the 'Five Imperial Yellows' that could only be worn by the heir apparent to the emperor, princes and princesses of the first rank, and imperial consorts of the second and third degree (M. Medley, The Illustrated Regulations for Ceremonial Paraphernalia of the Ch'ing Dynasty, London, 1982, and L. Wrigglesworth, Imperial Wardrobe, Berkeley, 2002, pp.14-30). There is an embroidered apricot ‘dragon’ robe dated to the Jiaqing period (1796-1820) in the collection of the Palace Museum, Beijing, illustrated in The Splendors of Imperial Costume: Qing Court Attire from the Palace Museum, Beijing, 2008, p. 122, no. 76, where it is noted that the robe would have been worn by a son of the Jiaqing Emperor, mainly for important celebrations or festivals.

The ground of this robe is finely and intricately embroidered with a lattice-like pattern, which would have been very time-consuming to create. There are several examples of similar ‘dragon robes’ with a similarly-rendered ground, but all on the more common blue, rather than rare apricot ground of the current robe. Three blue-ground examples are in the University of Alberta Museums’ Mactaggart Art Collection: 2005.5.475, 2005.5.328, 2005.5.621.1, and another two blue-ground examples are in The Victoria & Albert Museum, T.196-1948 and 346-1899.