Feminine needlework by Pan Honghai, a modern Chinese artist, shows that the traditional ideal of a Chinese woman was that she should be proficient in domestic needlework and household chores. Many traditional Chinese literary works regard these women as symbols of virtue.

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Needlework had a key role in the daily lives of ancient Chinese women, and classical literary works thus have many references to this art form.

As early as at the Warring States period, Mo-tse recorded that women added rich and bright colors to clothes and men added ornamental engravings.

“Domestic needlework” has become a specific term, referring to women’s weaving, sewing and embroidery activities and work. The opening sentence “Tsiek tsiek and again tsiek tsiek, Mulan weaves, facing the door” in The Ballad of Mulan highlights Hua Mulan’s feminine identity through the act of spinning thread and weaving cotton cloth. In the text of Kunqu Opera The Story of the Western Wing, the 19-year-old heroine Yingying, a noble lady of the Cui family, seemed to be good at everything, including needlework, poetry and calligraphy, but needlework was her primary talent.

In the classical literary work Dream of the Red Chamber, the maids in the noble families not only had to learn all kinds of needlework, but also needed to be proficient in it to make extra money to improve their living conditions. In contrast, noble ladies showed a preference for domestic needlework as a hobby. For similar reasons, they also became proficient at musical instruments, chess, calligraphy and painting.

In many literary works and poems, domestic needlework symbolized intelligence. The literary descriptions not only made works more interesting, but also revealed various artistic styles of needlework. In some cases, the nature of the needlework could even reveal the distinctive personalities of characters. In the Chapter 53 of Dream of the Red Chamber, there is a detailed description of the colors, inscription and function of a piece of embroidery from Suzhou. The refined colors and styles of this work reflected the romantic characteristics of female embroiderers in the regions south of the Yangtze River.

In the past, women endowed needlework with profound sentiments, and the needlework has gradually developed as a token to convey women’s love.

Young ladies utilized simple but convenient tools, such as needles, thread and scissors, and expressed their inner feeling toward lovers through their embroidery. There are several descriptions about how needlework is used as a token to convey protagonists’ tender feelings in Dream of the Red Chamber. For example, the male character Jia Baoyu carries the embroidery pouch sent by his lover Lin Daiyu every day to express his genuine love for her.

This can also be seen in other literary works. In the Han Dynasty Yuefu poem Peacock Flies to the Southeast, the sentimental character Liu Lanzhi made her husband Jiao Zhongqin an embroidered short gown to remind him to keep her in his heart.

Needlework represented feminine virtues in ancient times, so women who were good at embroidery were regarded as virtuous role models. Even Xue Baochai, an extremely talented noble young lady in Dream of the Red Chamber, still regarded needlework and virtue as equally important. In contrast to men’s Confucian education background, traditional Chinese women were confined to their chambers to carry out monotonous activities. They were often only able to communicate with female relatives or maids in the family, so these young women could only gain knowledge from figures, stories and moral codes shown in embroidery works.

 
Huang Min and Sun Haijing are from the School of Urban Design at Wuhan University.