Nankeen.—The original Nankeen fabric was produced in China and was a plain-weave cotton fabric woven on a hand loom from a cotton yarn which had a natural yellow-coloured tinge. The name is now given to a cotton cloth produced in Lancashire, woven as a three-shaft twill and dyed a yellowish drab and other colours, often used for corset-making.
There is a mass of evidence to show that true Nankeen is a class of cloth having as a salient characteristic an inherent peculiar colour which is natural and due to its being woven from cotton of a yellow-brownish tint. The following extracts bear on this point.
"The statement that this stuff was made from a cotton of brownish yellow tint was for a long time discredited, but it is now certain that the yellow preserves the colour of the cotton composing it rather than acquires it by any process of dyeing" (S. William Beck: "Textile Fabrics: Their History and Applications").
Sir George Staunton, who travelled with Lord Macartney's Embassy through the province of Kiangnan, to which province the Nankeen cotton is peculiar, distinctly states that the cotton is naturally "of the same yellow tinge which it preserves when spun and woven into cloth" ("Embassy to China," by Sir George Staunton).
Sir George Thomas Staunton (son of the above) has translated an extract from a Chinese herbal on the character, culture, and uses of the annual herbaceous cotton plant, in which the plant producing "dusky yellow cotton" of a very fine quality is mentioned as one of the varieties ("Narratives of the Chinese Embassy to the Khan of the Tartars").
Van Braam, who travelled in China with a Dutch Embassy and who had been commissioned by European merchants to request that the Nankeens for their markets might be dyed a deeper colour than those last received, says: "La toile de Nanking, qu'on fabrique fort loin du lieu du même nom, est faite d'un coton roussâtre: la couleur de la toile de Nanking est donc naturelle, et point sujette à pâlir" ("Voyage de l'Ambassade de la Compagnie des Indes Orientales Hollandaises vers l'Empereur de la Chine").
"Each family (at Woosung) appears to cultivate a small portion of ground with cotton, which I here saw of a light yellow colour. The Nankeen cloth made from that requires no dye" ("Voyage of the Ship Amherst to the North-east Coast of China, 1832," published by order of the House of Commons).
Other authors refer to a Nankeen-coloured cotton grown in India and state that the original Nankeen fabric was produced in Nanking, in China, and was woven from a natural-coloured yellow cotton. As produced in Lancashire the cloth is a closely woven three-shaft twill, dyed yellowish drab and other colours and used for stay and corset making and for pocketing.
An American Government publication (House of Representatives Document No. 643: Report of the Tariff Board on Schedule 1 of the Tariff Law) gives the general description of Nankeens as known in the distributing trade as: "Distinguished by their peculiar yellowish brown colour, natural to the colour of the cotton of which made."