In his excellent new book Staging Personhood,Wang Guojun explores theatrical costuming not just for what it can tell us about performance history,but as a way of examining attitudes toward changes in ethnic and gender relations in the Qing dynasty.As Wang himself puts it in his epilogue,"Since hairstyle and clothing were at the center of ethnic conflicts,theatrical costuming served as an effective一if not the only一avenue for theatrical producers to respond to changing ethnic and gender relations。"