Ancient Chinese clothing
People in China generally wore tunics (like long t-shirts). Women wore long tunics down to the ground, with belts, and men wore shorter ones down to their knees. Sometimes they wore jackets over their tunics. In the winter, when it was cold, people wore padded jackets over their tunics, and sometimes pants under them. In early China, poor people made their clothes of hemp or ramie. Rich people wore silk.
Most people in China, both men and women, wore their hair long. People
said that you got your hair from your parents
and so it was disrespectful to cut it.
During the Sui Dynasty, in the 500's AD,
the emperor decided that all poor people had to wear blue or black clothes,
and only rich people could wear colors.
X-ray pictures of someone with bound feet and a diagram
A shoe for someone with bound feet
In the Sung Dynasty, about 1100 AD, a
fashion started at the emperor's court for women to bind their feet. Women
thought that to be beautiful they needed little tiny feet, only about three
inches long. They got these tiny feet by wrapping tight bandages around
the feet of little girls, about five or six years old. The bandages were
so tight they broke the girls’ toes and bent them underneath their
feet and then they had to walk on them like that. The girls spent most of
their time crying for two or three years and then the feet stopped hurting
so much. Women with bound feet couldn’t walk very well at all, and
when they had to work in the fields often they would crawl. Some of the earliest
versions of the story of Cinderella come from Sung Dynasty China. In these
versions, the point of the story is that the Prince loves Cinderella because
she has the smallest feet of any girl in the kingdom, so the slipper will
only fit her.
Soon everyone liked cotton better than ramie or hemp. Cotton was warmer, and softer, and stronger, and cheaper. You could make it thin for summer, or you could make thick padded clothes out of it that were warm for winter.
China and Japan (Cultures and Costumes), by Paula Hammond (2003). For middle schoolers.
Moonbeams, Dumplings & Dragon Boats: A Treasury of Chinese Holiday Tales, Activities & Recipes, by Nina Simonds and others (Children's Museum of Boston, 2002).
Chinese Clothing: An Illustrated Guide, by Valery Garrett (1994). Expensive, but there's a lot of pictures. Some of it deals with a time period later than this site.
5000 Years of Chinese Costumes, by Zhou Xun and Gao Chunming (1987). This is for theater costumers and historians, and really goes into detail, with great pictures - but it's not cheap. Get it through your library.
Bound, by Donna Jo Napoli (2004). A novel for young adults about footbinding in medieval China.
More on how to make
Chinese costumes for kids, Chinese food, and some ideas for activities?
Click here.
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