南京

Nankeen (also nankin or nanking) takes its name from the city of Nanjing (南京), the ancient capital of China whose name means 'southern capital.' The fabric is a type of cotton cloth with a distinctive natural yellowish-buff color, originally produced in the Nanjing region from a variety of cotton (Gossypium arboreum) whose fibers were naturally tinted a warm tan or pale yellow, a characteristic that set it apart from the bleached white cottons of European manufacture. This natural coloring — not dyed but inherent in the fiber itself — was nankeen's defining characteristic and its principal commercial appeal in international markets. European traders encountering this cloth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were fascinated by a cotton that was born colored, that did not require the expense and effort of dyeing, and that maintained its warm, distinctive tone through repeated washing without fading. The city's name attached to the cloth with the certainty that follows any product whose origin is its most remarkable and distinguishing quality.

The trade in nankeen cloth between China and Europe became substantial in the eighteenth century, driven by the East India Companies of Britain, the Netherlands, and France, whose ships carried it alongside the other great Chinese exports of the period. Ships returned from Canton (Guangzhou) laden with nankeen alongside tea, porcelain, and silk, and the fabric found immediate favor in Europe for trousers, waistcoats, and summer clothing generally. Nankeen trousers became a fashion staple for European and American men from the 1780s through the 1850s, their warm buff color complementing the dark blue or black coats of the period in a combination that defined the well-dressed man of the age. George Washington ordered nankeen breeches from his tailor; Jane Austen's characters wear them in Regency drawing rooms; Charles Dickens describes them on London streets. For nearly a century, nankeen was as familiar a fabric word in English as denim is today, naming the cloth of everyday male respectability in warm weather.

The American market for nankeen was particularly large, and the fabric became one of the most important goods in the early China trade that linked Salem, Boston, and Philadelphia to Canton. American merchants shipped ginseng, furs, and Spanish silver dollars to China and returned with nankeen, tea, and porcelain, building fortunes on the exchange. The fabric was so popular and so profitable that American cotton growers attempted to cultivate the naturally colored cotton varieties that produced nankeen's distinctive buff tone, with some limited success in the southern states. These American-grown nankeens, however, never quite matched the quality or the specific warm color of the Chinese originals, and the fabric's commercial peak was already passing by the mid-nineteenth century as rapid improvements in cotton dyeing technology made it possible to produce buff and tan colors cheaply and reliably from ordinary white cotton, eliminating nankeen's unique selling advantage.

By the late nineteenth century, nankeen had largely disappeared from the textile market, replaced by dyed cottons that could approximate its color at far lower cost and with far greater consistency of supply. The word lingered in English through the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, appearing occasionally in literary and historical contexts, but it ceased entirely to be a living commercial term that anyone would encounter in a shop or a warehouse. Today, nankeen survives primarily as a historical reference — a word encountered in period novels and costume histories, naming a fabric that was once ubiquitous and is now thoroughly obscure. The city of Nanjing, meanwhile, has continued its own dramatic and often tragic history, from Ming dynasty capital to Taiping Heavenly Kingdom to Republic of China capital to the horrors of 1937. The city's name in English textile vocabulary preserves a quieter moment, when Nanjing's most visible export was not silk or porcelain but a humble, naturally yellow cotton cloth.