Manchu Man's Semiformal Court Robe (chi-fu)

By the late eighteenth century, dragons on court robes had become smaller, and a variety of auspicious symbols, such as bats, peaches, flowers, and attributes of the eight immortals (seen on this robe), had begun to appear among the intricate cloud and wave patterns. The striped water designs at the bottom of the robes became increasingly prominent and eventually dominated the hemlines of nineteenth-century robes. This is one of the few solid gold-ground dragon robes known.