Cixi’s famous pearl cape
Empress Dowager and Gao Guifei wearing the same style of shoulder cape in the serie Story of Yanxi Palace even though Cixi was born more than a century later
She has an immense number of pearls for the pearl is her favorite precious stone, besides being the jewel of the Dynasty... [Cf, p 273]
There is no way that you can miss Cixi’s pearl cape when looking at the painting. According to Princess Der Ling, her cape was made of roughly three thousand five hundred pearls the size of a canary bird's egg, all exactly alike in color and perfectly round. It was made on the fishnet pattern and had a fringe of jade pendants and was joined with two pure jade clasps..[Cf, p 19] Marcia Menter has made a rough calculation of how much the cape would have weighed; she concludes that it may have been 7,5 kg, which is very heavy considering what Cixi wore besides the cape.[Cf]
Why was Cixi so obsessed with pearls? If there’s one thing we have learned, it’s that if there are objects that you see repeatedly, there’s a high chance that they carry symbolic meaning in China. Pearls (寶珠) are traditionally seen as one of the Eight Precious Things (八寶). They are therefore considered to be auspicious and have been implemented in clothing and accessories. Pearls symbolize good fortune in terms of wealth, stand for purity and preciousness and also embody the yin essence of the moon. [Cf, p 282] By now it is obvious that the reason Cixi wears all those auspicious things is because it was common belief that surrounding oneself with auspicious objects will attract the symbolic meaning. And of course because it looked fabulous. [Cf, p 204]
Sadly, we won’t be able to admire Cixi’s pearl cape in real life as it was looted by warlord Sun Dianying and his army. But television shows do hint to her pearl cape. For example Gao Guifei from “Story of Yanxi Palace” wears the same pearl cape style even though she and Cixi lived in different eras. This gives us an idea of how it would have looked in real life.