Sartorial Boundaries on the Chinese Frontier

Abstract

Despite China’s history of shifting territorial borders and the corresponding changes over time in the country’s ethnic composition, the present territories of the PRC (actual and claimed), along with the residents thereof in all their cultural diversity, are invariably described in textbooks, museums and even in scholarly works as self-evidently, inviolably, and from time immemorial, part of the Chinese nation. These claims are expressed in rather complex ways through vestimentary codes employed in the national arena, with fifty-five neatly packaged “national minorities” regularly being represented in national costume at major national and international spectacles. The ahistoricism of the ..