How to look at a Dragon Robe

The 2026 John Dinkel Memorial Lecture is presented by Rachel Silberstein.

Rachel explores the history of the dragon robe, the most important regulated garment of the Qing Chinese government, and considers several examples worn by those outside that government, including women, actors, deities, and foreigners.Before the lecture you can view the exhibition in the Prince Regent Gallery.

Fire and Water: Dreaming of Dragons takes you on a journey around the world, revealing how dragons have captured people’s imagination in European and Asian cultures.Rachel Silberstein is a historian of Chinese dress and textiles, and currently Senior Teaching Fellow on the SOAS-Alphawood Postgraduate Programme in Asian Art.

She earned a DPhil in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford in 2015.

Her monograph, A Fashionable Century: Textile Artistry and Commerce in the Late Qing (University of Washington Press, 2020) – a study of fashion and textile handicrafts in early modern China – won the Costume Society of America’s Millia Davenport Publication Award 2021.

Rachel has published widely on Qing fashion and textiles in the journals West 86th, Fashion Theory, Costume, Late Imperial China, and the Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient.