Portraits of Beauties

Portraits of Beauties is a collection of essays on classical lifestyle aesthetics by Meng Hui, a researcher and writer on traditional Chinese material culture, published by CITIC Press Group in April 2021 and running about 189,000 characters. Having long immersed herself in the study of ancient clothing, cosmetics, objects, and daily life, Meng Hui focuses here on ancient women, starting from the small details of their daily lives to discuss how "beauty" was constructed, perceived, and ritualized. The book is divided into seven sections—Rivalry in Beauty, Tokens of Love, Festivals, Adornment, Dress, Daily Life, and Refined Pleasures—each made up of several short pieces. On one hand, the author mines details from transmitted texts, poetry, notes, and fiction; on the other, she compares excavated artifacts, ancient paintings, and objects to reconstruct the real appearance of ancient women's makeup, hairstyles, clothing, ornaments, incense burning, flower arranging, and seasonal customs. The details range from stories of rivalry in beauty amid wind-scattered flowers and tinkling jade pendants, to the Liuxian skirt, carved high-soled shoes, jade linked rings, rouge tears, embroidered sachets, moth-shaped lanterns, pearl-talisman pouches, plum-blossom makeup, step-shake hairpins, and true-lover's knots, and on to veil hats, mandarin-duck shoes, gold-threaded garments, neck rings, Zhaojun collars, glass screens, and gold-banded pillows—all grounded in concrete, tangible objects and events. Meng Hui's approach does not aim at grand general histories; instead, she starts from a single object, a passage of poetry, or an old anecdote, reading out the ancients' devotion to ritual and how women omitted from official history managed their own spiritual space in daily life. The book includes color photographs of artifacts, text and image illuminating each other, so that the "portraits of beauties" are both images drawn by the ancients and a way of life one can almost touch.