In one hand, she holds a small plate of polished, white glass.
This is just an excuse to talk history: glasswares are actually one of the fields where China never had an advantage over the West. They discovered glass later than the West (probably only discovering it in the first place when glass was imported from the West), it was only prominent from the Warring States to the Han Dynasty (about the 5th century BC to the 3rd century AD), and even then domestic glass was used almost exclusively to make cheaper, fake jade that was used as a cheaper alternative to a lot of the expensive jade grave goods that were typical of the period. Imported glass was a status symbol, and Western glass "eye beads" were also a common sight in the tombs of the wealthy and powerful.
After that period, domestic glass-making all but disappeared, and glassware was one of the few trade goods Western polities like Rome and its self-proclaimed successors had that China was willing to trade things like silk for (though there wasn't enough demands to make that trade equal, so Rome repeatedly nearly bankrupted itself importing Chinese silk, and the British eventually turned to becoming outright drug dealers and fighting the Opium Wars to protect their rights to push drugs on the Chinese people to maintain a favorable balance of trade for Chinese goods).
So while
@Kolarthecool might not have intended it, but the fact that Lady Huang here is using glass instead of ceramics for her tea set would be a subtle display of wealth in works that took place in Imperial China. And also a bit of a fun irony, since we in the West usually use Chinese ceramics (i.e. "fine china") when we want to show off how rich we are at teatime.
Such as the clan's genius beauty, Zhang Mei
Another bit of trivia: traditionally, it was taboo to marry someone who shared the same surname as you (because the Chinese adopted universal surnames to distinguish descent very early on; there aren't a bunch of totally unrelated dudes named "Smith" just because they had a blacksmith somewhere in the family tree like you have in the West, so the general assumption is that anyone with the same surname is related to you, however distantly); this is a way to encourage marriage outside of one's immediate kin group (since in Imperial China there were a lot of villages where everyone was related and had the same surname, hence you have a lot of references to "Lu Family Village" and "Zhuge Family Village" and such in historical works).
The degree to which this taboo was actually enforced varied greatly on the time period and the wealth/power of the people/family involved, of course, and it became less strictly enforced over time to the point that it's more or less not really a thing anymore, which is probably why you have so many stories nowadays set in Imperial Chinese-esque settings where it's never even brought up; most people without a grounding in history probably aren't even aware that it was ever really a thing that was enforced.
Fully unrolled, the scroll is roughly three Chi long
Kind of odd that we're using
chi when before we were describing peoples' height in feet.
Just in case it hasn't been explained in a post somewhere: the
chi is a unit of measurement that has fluctuated throughout time, but is generally roughly equal to a foot (these days in China, it's been standardized as exactly 1/3 of a meter, making it just a bit longer than a foot); in fact, it's often called a "Chinese foot" in English, and the Chinese sometimes refer to a foot using
chi. Taiwan, on the other hand, has standardized it as being the same length as the "Japanese foot," the
shaku, which is even closer to a foot in length.
The
chi is subdivided into 10
cun, and 10
chi make up 1
zhang. Honestly, I think something similar to that would probably make for a better universal system to adopt than the metric or imperial systems, since it combines the ease of transitioning from one unit to another that metric has with the imperial system's advantage of having units that are more intuitive and practical for everyday use, but what can you do?
