The body unadorned may have been meaningless, but things that covered and decorated the body were crucial markers of civilization and social hierarchy in late imperial times. Clothing, hairstyle, shoes, and badges – these gave the physical body its significance. The absence of proper adornment signaled savagery, barbarism, and backwardness. As Dorothy Ko (1997a:12) observed, commenting on late imperial culture: “Correct attire – headdress, dress, and shoes – was the quintessential expression of civility, culture, and humanity.” Every dynasty issued new regulations to stipulate how officials should display their status through costume, and which colors were reserved for the exclusive use of the imrperial family. Medallions on official gowns blazed the status of the wearer down to his level in the nine-rank bureaucratic system, and the number of claws on a gown's embroidered dragons signaled the wearer's degree of distance from the emperor himself (see Figure 21).

The “modern girl” of the twentieth century, sauntering along the street in Shanghai, proclaimed her distance from her backward country cousins and her membership in the modern world with her “natural” feet, her bobbed hair, and her tight-fitting, high-slit skirts (Figure 22). And women in post-1949 China dressed, up or down, in fashion constrained by the current political line.