Nankeen

Nankeen is the buff-yellow cotton of the China trade, and its color was its marvel: it was not dyed at all, but woven from a naturally yellow-tinged cotton grown around Nanjing. The cloth sailed west by the shipload in the eighteenth century and clothed Regency men in the pale trousers every Austen adaptation reaches for. European mills eventually imitated the shade with dye, the true yellow cotton faded from trade, and nankeen survives mostly as a word in costume histories and the name of a porcelain blue it once traveled with.