i started the blog ok get off my ass

Things That Were Good

Massive coincidence while we were looking for videographers: a few days before deciding, Rachel (@/qiuqiuchinese) reached out to us looking to collab because she was going to be in Southern Cal (she lives there now but she used to be based in Boston). She mentioned that her husband happens to be a videographer by trade, and it turned out that they were in town and free at the exact right time to shoot this video with us, so it ended up being a collab!

Videography was a 100% new thing for me; I'd never done a project anything like this. To come up with the idea almost a year and a half before doing this project, and step-by-step bring it to life, is a really rewarding process, though it was very rocky and frustrating most of the time. I learned a lot from going through all the grueling parts of the project, and even though a bunch of stuff went wrong and it took SO much of my time and energy over the past year, I'm glad I did it and I'm happy with the results.

Chef's kiss to the models; they were absolutely perfect for their looks. Having modeled myself I really admire their tenacity—I start twitching thirty minutes into being in the makeup chair; these two had to sit for upwards of two hours a look, over and over and over again. Even when they weren't the ones being styled, they were off-stage on steaming and organizing duty, which were a huge help to keeping things running smoothly. My personal favorites were Tiona in the mid-early Ming look and Emily in the Song look.

Yulan's makeup skills keep getting better every time—she was unsure about being able to pull off a more classical makeup look at first, because her makeup work usually leans more modern, but she pulled it off beautifully following the notes I gave her and the end result looks fantastic. Because she was involved in both the styling and the detail shot maneuvering parts of the shoot, she was the only person on set who had practically zero breaks over the course of each ten-hour day, and I'm astonished at how energetic she was able to stay (I got the chill directing job sitting on the side yelling at people for most of the time and I was still dead by the end of each day).

Lizi from Lizi Studio was also a godsend; she sponsored a bunch of stuff for us including the studio and a bunch of props, and her hairstyling skills are unparalleled. We 100% couldn't have pulled this off without her and it was wonderful to get to know someone else in Cali seriously pursuing hanfu.

Kevin (Yulan's bf) did so much driving back and forth for us, I'm super grateful that he was able to come. Everyone was busy on set and we sent him to get food, drinks, forgotten keys, forgotten items, etc. like fifty times over the course of the day; even though he was rarely on set we still managed to keep him busy most of the time.

I think I can add Premiere Pro to my resume skills now, given that I basically learned the program from zero over the course of the editing shenanigans

Things That Were Bad

Design & Manufacturing (Tops)

Switched fabrics halfway through because the lighter teal was too bright and didn't match the outside well enough (had to remake 3-4 garments)

Made the earlier time period tops ~10-20cm too long for the effect that I wanted, had to remake (had to remake 4-5 garments)

One of the garments got messed up and the wrong fabric was used in the wrong place (remade 1 garment)

Changed a bunch of trims on the Song beizi like three times cuz it didn't look right

Buzi was wider than most machines had the capability of weaving without repeats, took forever to get one that could do it

Design & Manufacturing (Skirts)

In the process of trying to figure out how to manufacture woven-on-demand mamianqun fabric, reached out to like 50+ workshops, actually went through and tried 6 different ones, and ended up with 3 viable ones (aka spent SO MUCH money)

Initial teal color was too dark, had to exchange for a different thread color

Typically two kinds of gold filaments can be used for the fabric: round or flat, flat looked better initially on early fabric samples but the machine of the fabric workshop we went with could only handle round so we had to switch to round again

Warehouse that I was storing fabric in was unfamiliar with how mamianqun fabric worked and kept cutting the roll at the wrong place when distributing fabric to the tailors x-x

Last-minute added an extra gold outline to the design of the longma mane and tail to help add a bit of detail in, had to get all three of the patterned skirt digitizations updated, it was a huge hassle and huge cost and I lowkey regret doing it because tbh you can barely see the outline anyway

The damask from one factory was different from another, so the black damask parts of the Late Ming skirt used for the video looks different from the rest because it was woven with a different technique (I had a replacement made but it didn't get here in time)

Shooting (Transportation)

The BART got rerouted on my way to the airport—I think it was something about construction or power outages, but they diverted in a different direction and told people to get out and wait for the next train which was half an hour away. I had to get out in Oakland and call a Lyft, but the traffic was really bad and I still didn’t make it on time and had to reschedule my flight for later in the day. I did get there eventually thankfully

So much airplane trouble on Yulan's end... she was supposed to get here at 5pm, she didn't end up getting to the airbnb until like 2am that night

At the end of the second day, we left the studio and went to drop off Emily at her house first, then went home to our airbnb. Except, instead of the airbnb's address, Kevin accidentally put the address of the studio into the GPS again so we drove all the way back to the studio and didn't realize until we pulled into the parking lot. And then had to drive all the way back again

Shooting (Set & Lighting)

Time mismanagement on two days on set: We had two days for this, 12/21 and 12/22. We originally had three days planned, but it would have required me to go straight from taking my last midterm to the airport, and it would’ve been really really tight with very little wiggle room, and flights get canceled all the time; we decided not to test our luck, but it resulted in things getting really really tight during shooting

Like 3/4 of the first day was spent setting up the set. Partially because I was picky, partially because we hadn’t done this before. We had originally planned to do three looks on day one and three looks on day two, but we had to make it 2+4 instead because we’d been on set for more than ten hours at that point

I hadn’t brought any fishing line and the studio lost theirs, so I resorted to using an elastic cord I usually use for hair. This was an extremely non-ideal material to use: it sagged under weight (duh) and made it nearly impossible to position the scrolls accurately. I spent like two hours on a ladder trying to make it work. We eventually found the fishing line but it was too late by then lol

The power cut out like three times in the middle of filming—the lights were consuming a lot of energy and the circuit breaker must’ve gotten tripped. Unfortunately it was in a big office building and the circuit breaker was elsewhere in the building where we didn’t have access, so we had to call people to come reset it; we ended up connecting the lights to a separate power generator of their own

On the first day we had an iPad that mirrored the camera so that we could see how everything looked while being elsewhere in the room. On the second day we forgot to bring it so we were Blind (we tried with Yulan's phone but it was way too small)

Closeup shots ended up kinda blurry :(

Shooting (Actual Shooting)

Yulan forgot to bring black leggings so she was in a skirt (originally we wanted all non-models in all black so we wouldn't distract) and therefore had a knee cameo in the skirt shots for some of them lol

On the first day we literally didn't know wtf we were doing and didn't get enough detail shots, ended up having to manipulate a lot in editing to make up for it

A lot of the closeup shots ended up out of focus but there wasn't enough time to reshoot

The spinning shots (affectionately termed "rotisserie chicken shots," i shit you not that's just what we called it the whole time while on set like "okay time to do the rotisserie shot") were done on a turntable that could only go really really slowly, so the models had to do the mannequin challenge while spinning

^ they did a good job but their eyeballs could only move in twitches and not completely smoothly (normal ofc) so it can be a little distracting on screen

Tiona accidentally knocked over the screen walking behind it while recording once, had to reposition everything else as closely as possible

Models had never done hanfu bows before, the first few especially on day 1 were really really awkward looking (they got a lot better as time progressed though)

On the second day while we were shooting the Early Ming makeup sequence, Emily suddenly got dizzy and almost passed out. We lowkey still don't know what happened, but she completely recovered after lying down for a few minutes and getting some water, and she was completely fine the rest of the day (we were super worried and constantly asking).

Shooting (Styling)

Emily's hair ended up being too short to do the swallowtail hairstyle on so we had to improvise and finish off the back of her hair in a different way for her looks

Yuan Dynasty ribbon was way too long, should've gotten something like half the length to get the look right

For Song, initially had pants tucked into the socks (bc that's more traditional), but then I decided that was ugly and untucked them for the subsequent ones, which resulted in a really weird inconsistency but it was too late to go back and refilm the Song Dynasty one

Couldn't find a matte highlighter on the first day, everything people had was sparkly (which doesn't look very historical). I ended up bringing my personal palette on the second day and they used that for the later looks

Tiona was lowkey like half sick the whole time (like almost recovered but not quite) (it's ok she still looked beautiful though)

The sponsored hair accessories had to keep their price tags on so we did our best to hide them in the hair but they still showed up in some parts

The beads kept falling off my diy deerskin crown lmaooo (we glued em back on with hot glue though)

Editing

Getting the footage was a Hassle because there was So Much, had to get everything onto a hard drive and wait for it to be shipped over

Editing software mismatch, not everyone was using the same one x-x there were like 4 different programs involved, so much work went down the drain

Lots of communication errors because... isn't there always?

Had to drop a lot of money to bring in a last-minute editor to help smooth a bunch of things out in the span of like 24 hours (she did awesome though and stayed up till like 4/5am with us to get it right)

Still ended up having to do SO much ourselves over Premiere

Music was lowkey not figured out until the last second (thats lowkey on me rip but there was a lot of other stuff going on and it just kind of wasnt a priority. Until it was. Oops) We ended up using free music which... I'll be honest I don't really like it very much but it was the best that we could get that was non-AI

All of this made our post deadline move like 5 times (it was supposed to be release on LNY eve, then LNY, then Lantern Festival, then we gave up on doing it on a holiday and went a day over, and then since it wasn't a holiday anyway we went another day over... etc etc etc)

Took us three days to upload the final video because Yulan was in the middle of the goddamn ocean with shitty wifi

List of things that I was going to include but ended up nixing because there wasn't enough time/it got lost in the rush

Kept forgetting to switch out the scrolls in the background, nixed two of the paintings (I had each one matched up with significance and time period and everything hhh)

Forgot to put the earrings on for mid-late Ming ;-; Switched out the sequence because of that, unfortunately didn't match up quite as well chronologically as we hoped but oh well

Was originally going to put a petticoat under the mid-early Ming skirt for the rotisserie shot to show what the horse-hair skirt might have looked like, but ran out of time

More detail shots, especially for the first two looks

Beauty shots (of the makeup after it was finished) after the first two time periods

Fur stole as accessory on Late Ming to represent the onset of the Little Ice Age

Different shoes for each look (scrapped this one early on because the shoe selection is already so limited)

Different pants from different eras for each look (also scrapped this one early on because almost nobody knows how to make the Jiajing and Qianshi pants that would've represented the other eras, and anyway the structure of the Dingling pants did exist throughout all of Ming anyway so it wasn't worth the extra trouble since the pants weren't the point anyway)

We were gonna try to fit in a music collab but it didn't work out because the timing was too late

(bonus pic of me and my sister hiding behind Tiona's late ming sleeves to finish out the series)

Accessories

Earrings: From 黛組學 DaiStudio on tb (listing photo above left), their 金馬賀歲 earring design. Made of marbled-patterned acrylic with a horse-shaped filled engraving. The big round pendant shapes are similar to some of the popular large drop earrings in women's western fashion style, and the marbled texture mimics the look of shell, a common jewelry material during the Northern Dynasty. We felt it was important to include earrings for both looks, since earrings were so associated with Hu people up until Song.

Nails: From Taghesnail 指尖造物 on tb (listing photo above left), their 蒙古馬 design in white. Tanghesnail is a nail studio based in Inner Mongolia with the mission of preserving and sharing Mongolian cultural elements through art (they're super cool I recommend checking them out!). Unfortunately we weren't able to get super good closeups of the nails (we were kind of on a time crunch racing against the sunset) but we did get a few partial shots.

Pibo: From 初九織造 on tb, their 金背鳥 pattern specifically. Only used a couple times as an accessory tied around one leg, one method of keeping the extra fabric from getting in the way—usually you'd pull up some of the fabric around it, but it ended up kind of falling back down a bit (we were moving around a lot).

Shoes: From 清歡閣 on tb (listing photo above left). Made of a really nice gold-flecked white fabric that worked really well with the lighter color scheme of the Macaron set (though lowkey the nice white fabric ended up getting destroyed after stepping in mud and cow pies all day, cons of having white shoes). Nonetheless a gorgeous pair of white boots that look a little more interesting than the plain white canvas that pretty much every other option is limited to.

Bracelet: Esther's personal zodiac bracelet (year of the horse).

Makeup

Makeup is credited to my sister Yulan (ig: @/chlobaltblue), who usually does most of the makeup for our shoots. The key parts of Esther's look were what we called "sunburnt i've-been-standing-in-the-cold-winds-of-the-steppes-for-too-long-and-my-cheekbones-are-raw blush" and the two-toned pastel blue and pink eyeshadow to match the outfit, plus a muted rosy lip. There was some gold-tone highlight used to really pick up the golden hour sun rays where we wanted it to land.

A moment taken to pay respect to Yulan's spine

Hair

L: me doing Esther's base hair // R: Pile Of Braids

Hair is credited to Me! While brainstorming we initially weren't sure what to do with Esther's hair, especially since it was partially dyed. We went through a few ideas before we landed on braids, partially because of the loose association of braids with Hu people throughout history, and the association of braids with the equestrian world due to the horse girl french braid + the braiding of horse's manes and tails.

During the Yuan Dynasty, Mongolian people wore their hair in these small braided loops next to their ear that distinguished them from the Han people. You can tell a lot of the figurines apart by looking at their hair and how it's styled. This was a more editorial shoot, so I decided against just recreating that hairstyle (plus it would be inaccurate because the Mongolians weren't a thing yet during the Northern Wei Dynasty and I felt that would be confusing).

Instead I got the idea of ridiculously, comically long braids. I'm not sure exactly where I got this idea, probably just browsing random hairstyles and dance photos on XHS and Pinterest, but I felt that it would work well because Tara has such high visual weight and Esther is on the thinner side with a cooler, more muted color palette. Braids would let her take up more space in the camera.

The braids used are 4 meter long braided extensions that I purchased from Taobao (I made shorter 2m long ones myself using kanekalon braiding hair, but when I tested them on myself they weren't long enough for the effect I wanted and I couldn't find material long enough to make them any longer). I attached the ends to round gold carabiners that I had lying around (I use them for my keys/wallet, but I only needed one and they came in a set of eight, so there were extra).

The extensions were pretty heavy, so I used Esther's own hair to create strong attachment points reinforced in multiple places to spread out the pressure on her scalp, so that it wouldn't hurt. This was mostly accomplished through the use of multiple nested layers of french braiding, which widened the base area of the braids, and weaving the ends of the braids together so they were all connected to each other. At the end of the shoot Esther told me that she could feel the extensions pulling on her, but they never hurt and never loosened, so I think I was mostly successful.

I left a loop on both sides as attachment points for the carabiners, which were clipped on right before we started shooting so that we wouldn't have to deal with them in the car—it was a really interesting element to play with during posing; some of the shots we were thinking of didn't work out, while other poses that we didn't think of ended up looking super cool. We kept having to run around the hill to reposition them while dodging cow pies and thorns, which was honestly more cardio than I've done in the past month combined.

It was also a little bit of a safety hazard around the horses, because we didn't want them to step on the braids, so the rule was that we had to have at least one person holding each braid up off the ground before the horses were allowed to move. It worked out fine and the horses were also extremely fascinated with them for some reason (I guess they'd never seen hair this long before), so it was a great way to get their attention and make them look at the camera.

By the end of the shoot these things were biohazards, as they had been dragging through the brush and picking up mud, thorns, hay, and cow pie residue for hours, so unfortunately they had to be trashed :( but at least they are immortalized in the photos! And taking them off was basically instantaneous since they were attached by carabiners.

Styling: Tara

Raw of Tara that didn't make the cut (it's overexposed cuz it's not edited lol)

Casting

Tara was the first mdoel to be cast for this project—we know her because our moms were college friends. She is of Persian-Han Taiwanese heritage.

Even as early as Northern Wei, there is evidence of early contact between China and middle eastern states, including Iran/Persia at the time. Many of the Han-and-after artifacts in Northern China unearthed from locations near the border contain art that contains Parthian, Hellenistic, and Persian elements, including the rhytons appearing in Northern Dynasty linked-bead patterns and imported gemstones and beads appearing on necklaces and bracelets. It's hard to imagine just how far cultural exchange could go along the Silk Road, at a time when even the fastest possible travel modes were so slow; nevertheless, cultural elements from across the continent ended up in China, and vice versa.

While we think of most cultures as distinct, it doesn't and never has existed in a vacuum. Exchange has been happening since the beginning of time, especially in intersectional places closer to the borders between states—everything has always been impacted by everything else. Horses are an incredibly good example of an imported good that made its way into Chinese culture and mythology, despite coming from outside.

Tara was the perfect warm-toned, high-visual-weight model for the Ferghana set—also born in the year of the horse, she had the perfect fierce, confident energy needed to hold up the bright colors of this robe. She also made for an excellent visual foil against Esther.

Accessories

Jeans: From Tara's own closet. Lowkey the jeans ended up mostly invisible because they were tucked into the boots, but I feel the need to mention them anyway. I explained most of the relevant information on Levi Strauss's blue jeans in the previous post, so I won’t get too far into it, but it was very much a multicultural invention: the indigo dye came primarily from India, the fabric innovation happened in Genoa, Italy (the origin of the word “jeans”) and Nimes, France (the origin of “denim” = “de Nimes,” from Nimes); the branding and propagation happened in San Francisco after Russian-American Jacob Davis and Bavarian-American Levi Strauss’s patented riveted blue jeans. Initially made as workwear for hard labor, they gained popularity among gold miners, vaqueros/cowboys, and railroad workers (including Chinese immigrants), and later made their way into popular fashion, where they became the closet staple they are today.

R: me wearing the hat as a test after I made the veil

Hat: Base from Amazon, modified by myself. The famous wide-brimmed felted cowboy hat was popularized by John B. Stetson in 1865. Functional and stylish, it quickly became an icon of the American West. It was particularly functional on horseback. Coincidentally, there was a similar hat popular from the Northern to Tang Dynasties in China called the weimao. It had a similar wide brim and tall dome protecting the wearer’s head from the elements, and is often—in fact, almost exclusively—depicted worn by women on horseback. In addition to the wide brim, many weimao also have a veil attached to the brim, offering additional coverage and modesty. The earliest forms of these veiled hats were called mili, with the veil usually extending to the floor; later these evolved into shorter shoulder-length veils that only covered the face. I may or may not do a short separate post on how I modified the red cowboy hat to include a detachable magnetic veil.

Boots: Also from Amazon. Boots were also choice horse-riding footwear in ancient China; to complete the western look we went with topstitched red cowboy boots. I’m pretty sure topstitching is just for decoration, but I’ve heard that the scalloped top is for better forward/backward mobility when the boot leg comes up to the calf, and the pointed toe makes it easier to find the stirrups without looking, plus of course the slight heel. This seemed fairly relevant given that the Northern Dynasty Xianbei attributed much of their military success to their invention of the stirrup. Chinese riding boots also tend to have pointed toes.

Gloves: Amazon lambskin cashmere-lined gloves. Full disclosure these were 100% just included because, uh, I thought they looked cool. Riding gloves are a thing too, but they tend to look kinda different from these, so... maybe a vague connection there?

Earrings: From 竹編飾品非遺坊 on tb. They’re handmade with curved bamboo strands, which we picked because the way they mirrored braids I put in her hair. I added a pearl and some jump rings as accents because Why Not, and I also replaced the finding (the part that goes into the piercing) with rounder ones that look more similar to historical earring hooks.

Makeup

Makeup is once again credited to my sister Yulan. Tara's features are naturally very strong and well-defined (she showed up with a bare face and we thought she already had makeup on, I'm not kidding), so the makeup didn't need to do a lot of adjusting or defining, just some gold highlighter to emphasize the high points where we wanted the sun to hit, a red lip, and some super sharp eyeliner.

The markings on her face were partially inspired by common facial markings of the time.

Hair

I mostly improvised on this, but the main concept was pretty much just "lots of braids." Many of the ethnic groups considered Hu by ancient Han people traditionally wore braids in some way. Mongolian people, for example, can be easily distinguished from Han people in Yuan Dynasty paintings and sculptures because they wear their hair in three loops next to their ears.

Some Xianbei figurines also show Xianbei people wearing braided ponytails, though these are limited, because most Xianbei people usually wore their hair up underneath a hat or cap of some sort. My guess is that the braid might be what's underneath the cap, and what's depicted might be what it looks like once the cap is removed and the hair is allowed to fall down.

Shoot Background & Influences

BTS shot by Christabel Choi

The captions from the prev posts went over the general gist of the shoot background already—the idea was to do a shoot in the California, where both my sister and I grew up, reimagining the Eurasian Steppes in the golden hills. "Culture clash" was very much the name of the game, the more collaboration the better.

The concept for this shoot combined a number of different aesthetics. While the designs were significantly historically inspired (as is the case with pretty much all the hanfu I’ve designed) this was less of a ‘historical recreation’ type shoot and more of a fashion/editorial exploration into cultural crossing-over, especially in the context of Han Chinese diaspora, the mobility of culture, and the relationships between form and function in fashion.

Californian History & AAPI Month

Source: John Chinaman on the rail road [graphic] : Union Pacific Rail Road. UC Berkeley Library Digital Collections, Chinese in California, 1850-1925. Source caption: Several Chinese workers on a railroad hand car in an arid landscape.

California hosts one of the largest populations of asians in the US—percentage-wise it loses to Hawaii (18% vs 52%), but in sheer numbers, there are approximately 7.1 million asian people in California, more than any other state. About 1.9 million of those are identified as Chinese.

If you grew up in the US (or at least if you grew up in California like me) you’ve probably heard this story before, but the earliest big wave of Chinese immigrants to America was during the 1849 gold rush, when immigrants flocked across the pacific to chase the American dream embedded in the glittering harvest of the San Francisco gold fields. This is when a lot of older Chinese-American culture was established, by the railroad workers of the later 1800’s, and it’s part of the reason why there are so many Han people in California.

Source caption: Ging Cui, Wong Fook, and Lee Shao, three of the eight Chinese workers who put the last rail in place, on a float at the 50th Anniversary celebration of the completion of the transcontinental railroad in Ogden, Utah. Photo by courtesy of Amon Carter Museum of American Art Archives, Fort Worth, TX

One of the US’s biggest accomplishments during the 19th century was the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, running from Iowa to California, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans across the continent of North America. The project was completed by two companies that each started on one coast and expanded towards the other side, meeting in the middle.  Central Pacific Railroad was the company starting from the west coast, and they hired swathes of Chinese immigrants in California for railroad track-laying and construction—it’s estimated that Chinese immigrants made up 80-90% of the workforce.

Src: “Chinamen going to work on the California and Oregon R.R.” Courtesy of the California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento, California. Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project, Stanford University.

Despite these large numbers, Chinese immigrants faced a number of discriminatory acts that, until fairly recently, were mostly ignored when looking at American history. The most famous of these was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred most Chinese laborers from entering the US for over six decades, but a lot of the hostility, resentment, and stereotypes around Chinese immigrants was built way before the law was signed. In addition the insane wage gaps and dehumanizing treatment, the railroad era was where a lot of the racist eye-pulling and yellow-skinned caricatures started, digs at Asian customs and appearances that still persist today.

Src: Donner Pass - "Double Happiness" design base marks. 1865-68. Site #2, Paul Chace Photographs Documenting Chinese Railroad Workers. Stanford University Libraries. Source caption: Slide of a "Double Happiness" bowl. Ektachrome transparency.

I grew up right next to San Francisco—this story has been told to me over and over. While I’m not a descendant of immigrants from that time—there are very few of those left, actually, due to active systematic efforts to prevent the increase of Chinese populations—it remains a critical part of Asian-American culture that shaped how society views and interacts with Asian-Americans, regardless of their origin, today.

The Golden Hills

Photo I took with my phone of the hills when scouting the photoshoot location in January. Literally the greenest I've ever seen them. Me, Yulan, and one of the photographers drove over late January to scout the place and meet the horses.

The gold fields of San Francisco no longer boast the same riches that it used to, but the hillscapes in California are still extremely distinctive natural wonders. California is very dry—we've been going through a drought for years, which is definitely not good, but it does result in distinctively yellow hills that almost seem to glow when golden hour hits. Every relatively long drive in my childhood history is inevitably framed by these golden hills, looming above the road on both sides.

In the recent years the rainfall has been increasing a little bit, which is good news for the wildlife. Some of the hills have been green for the first time, and I kid you not it was a startling sight for me on the way between college and home during breaks. It's definitely a good thing, god knows we do NOT need more wildfires, but I will still remember the dry yellow fields fondly just because of their place in my memories.

(Or if we don't get lucky the rain might dry out again and we might get that hay back anyway, but. That's a different problem.)

Western Cowboy Aesthetic

Truth to be told, I've never been a big fan of the western aesthetic (it does NOT look good on me), but for this shoot it seemed extremely relevant. Not only is California one of the protagonists of the whole Westward Expansion thing, the Gold Rush era was extremely pivotal in the development of the western aesthetic.

Src: Turner, Christopher, "The Story of Levi's Blue Jeans," 29Secrets

I'm talking, of course, about Levi Strauss's blue jeans, patented in San Francisco on May 20th, 1873 (also Jacob Davis, but his name didn't make it onto the brand so I guess nobody remembers him lmao). Strauss himself was Bavarian-American, born in Germany to a Jewish family, but moved to the States in 1853 with his family.

The patent that was filed wasn't exactly just for the jeans—denim pants had already existed, of course, but the main feature that they figured out was that they could reinforce stress points on those pants using metal rivets. That was the key discovery—that they could extend the usefulness and lifetime of these pants during hard labor with this innovation.

Src: The Dodge City Peace Commission in 1883, some wearing a Boss of the Plains, Wikimedia Commons, June 1883

Another example is the cowboy hat—while not specific to California, John Stetson's invention of the hat was rooted in function, because he had experienced being a miner in Colorado prior to his hatmaking business taking off. His design worked because he had personal experience working in those conditions, and because he was able to incorporate multicultural influences: for example, his first Boss of the Plains design was an adaptation of the Mexican sombrero jarano.

The hat was functional: it was wide-brimmed and waterproof, protecting you from the sun and rain. Since it was waterproof, it could be used to scoop up water while outdoors, and it was light enough not to be a burden. The most high-quality hats were made of beaver felt from beavers (this unfortunately devastated their population until people realized that they were going to end up with No Beavers, and eventually were able to get their population back up to least concern by present day). Eventually it developed into the Ultimate Western Men's Fashion Statement.

Src: Land in a new territory is auctioned off in this tent. California. 1904. Rare historical photos.

I want to emphasize that this innovation was made on behalf of hard laborers. It was revolutionary and ended up being such an essential part of America's fashion legacy, but its beginnings were in functional workwear, specifically the kind worn by people who did hard day labor: ranchers, miners, railroad workers, etc, people who went out in the sun and built this state's infrastructure, many of whom died for it.

In terms of ranchers and cowboys, though, we come upon an interesting parallel between eastern & western fashion and function. Symbols like cowboy hats and blue jeans are internationally recognizable as fashion statements now, even though their initial usage was functional. This "function defines fashion" concept is one of the key things I wanted to play with here.

Xianbei People and Horsemanship in Northern Wei

Src: Northern Wei map. Wikimedia Commons. December 2022.

If you've been in the hanfu community for a bit you may have heard of the lump period referred to as the "Wei-Jin-Southern-Northern Dynasty Period," which is referred to as a group because of how short the individual ruling eras were (stuff changed around a lot, and a lot of them also coexisted, so it gets confusing).

One of the more well-known and relatively more long-lasting dynasties in this period is Northern Wei, which lasted from 386 to 535 BCE. It ruled over Northern China at the beginning of what we called the Northern & Southern Dynasties, but more notably, it was ruled over by the Tuoba/Tabgatch clan of the Xianbei nomads, who were Proto-Mongols that dominated the Mongolian Plateau at this time. They unified into the Xianbei Confederation ~second century BCE, often involved in conflicts with the Han and Xiongnu people.

Src: Seattle Asian Art Museum. Figuras de terracota china. Extranjeros a caballo. Dinastía Tang. Wikimedia Commons.

After the Tuoba clan took over as Northern Wei, they gradually became more and more sinicized (on purpose, it seems) as they introduced intermarriages with Han people with the royal family, used Chinese surnames, and adopted a more sedentary lifestyle. By the end of the Tang Dynasty most people had lost track of the distinction, with Xianbei people either assimilating into the Han population or splitting off into the later Proto-Mongols like the Rouran Khaganate etc. etc.

As a nomadic group, the Xianbei people were primarily herders and relied on animal husbandry, also moving around on horseback. One of their greatest inventions that allowed them to triumph over the other groups at the time was the invention of the stirrup, which allowed for greater maneuverability on horseback and during warfare. While they're not as well-known for it as the Mongolians, horses pop up everywhere in their art, possibly (im not sure i didnt check) more than any other animal.

Src: Zhang, Fan, Xianbei Zoomorphic Plaques: Art, Migration, and Human-Environment Entanglement, Arts 2022. Source caption: Plaque of a crouching horse, gold, excavated from Liujiazi, Horqin Left Middle Banner Banner, Inner Mongolia.

Their clothing also seems to be extremely suited to horseback riding—the narrow sleeves, higher collars, and head coverings all helped protect against the harsh winds and intense sunlight of the Mongolian plateau. The high, round collar also allowed for a greater area of overlap than the traditional Han cross collar, making it harder for the robe to be blown open by wind or movement. Fit-and-flare silhouettes gave the lower body room to move while the upper body was more fitted, freed from the obstruction of extra fabric.

Src: Paintings on west wall of Xu Xianxiu's Tomb of Northern Qi Dynasty. Wikimedia Commons. Note: Northern Qi succeeded Northern Wei and had a more mixed Xianbei-Han culture thing going on.

Xianbei and other Hu fashion seemed to have entered Han consciousness en masse following this period—while sinicization ultimately pretty much buried the Tuoba clan, cultural exchange was still a two-way street. Pants as outerwear, more fitted silhouettes, and other trends eventually made way for the vibrant mixing pot that was the Tang Dynasty, incorporating elements from all over and transforming them into new innovations.

Shoot Reflection Shenanigans

Shot from Sylvia that didn't make the cut because Hong's elbow was in the way

(Mostly a record made for myself to remember all the things that went wrong with this, because I want to remember everything that happened, not just the good parts)

Logistics/Coordination Problems:

Group chat planning shenanigans w/ @ktw-shu

Shoot was pushed back like 6 times because of the weather, because California decided to rain ONLY on the days we planned for the shoot (I shit you not, not the day before not the day after, ONLY on the days we planned for the shoot). It went April 12th -> April 21st -> April 22nd -> April 23rd -> April 22nd again -> April 27th -> April 28th, twice because of weather and once because of horse scheduling, and then three more times after we had to cut the third model. This was the bane of my existence for the entire month of April.

The final date we landed on, April 28th, was on the same day as my final presentation—it was originally not up as an option, but because of all the scheduling issues we made it work by handing off most of the props/materials to Yulan ahead of time, having me go straight from the final presentation to the BART station and hightailing it down to Fremont (we had a hotel room there for prep) as fast as possible. The prep timing was tight, and we ended up being about an hour late to the shoot, but all things considered it could've been worse. I was tired as hell by the end of the day though.

BTS shots of Hong and Sylvia, our two talented photographers

Between weapons masters, photographers, models, and horse people I cannot express just how much work it was to coordinate a total of eleven people, plus one that handed off weapons beforehand, many of which were showing up at different times. This was mostly done by my sister, props to her for handling most of the logistics; it was an absolute nightmare, but in the end I'm glad we managed to get everyone together.

Braiding Shenanigans:

My first batch of ultra braids for Esther (which I braided myself) were too short, so I had to re-order them from tb because I didn't have a way to connect hair fibers smoothly by myself (more on that in the styling post)

The braids were lowkey kind of a safety hazard, we did so much cardio running around to reposition them. The main worry was that the horses would step on them, so we made sure to follow the rule that the horses were not to move unless we had at least one person on each braid holding them off of the ground and away from their hooves.

Horsey & Location Shenanigans:

Ruby & Paulo from scouting the shoot in January

Originally we were going to use horses Ruby (black) and Paulo (palomino) from Giddyup Productions; however, due to the scheduling issues, Paulo was not at the ranch on the day of the shoot, because he was being held at a training facility that day. Instead they were able to borrow Lou (also black), Ruby's son, from someone else at the ranch, on the condition that we didn't ride him, only posed with him. The contrast between Paulo and Ruby's coloring would've been great, but it was also kind of nice that we ended up with a mother-son pair.

Ruby & Lou with Lexi (horse handler) on the day of the shoot

The hills behind Arriba Vista where we shot were STEEP. The horses had no problem of course but we were lowkey wheezing climbing up there. I'm glad we ended up rescheduling to a day when there was zero rain rather than trying to shoot through the rain (which was a possibility at the time), I think we all would've slipped and cracked our skulls open if it was still muddy up there.

The yuri shots don't show me thirdwheeling in the back holding up the braids LMAO

Sky was beautiful, sun sank real fast though. We were fighting against time the whole time; there were a few shots I wanted to get but had to cut out because there wouldn't be enough time. By the time we ended it was fully dark and our fingers were so cold that we couldn't type on our phones until we sat in the car for a while warming up.

Hong's camera ran out of memory mid-yuri shots so the last ones were all by Sylvia

I cannot emphasize enough how many cow pies there were on that hill, I stepped in at least 3 and I think so did everyone else

Yuri shots were actually completely unplanned, but boy am I glad they happened

Post-Shoot:

Post-shoot we went to Haidilao Fremont, it was awesome and we ate lots of hot pot (it was so cold)

We thought we lost one of Christabel's thumb rings but it turned out that it was on her hand the whole time

Coming back down the hill after the shoot was over (Sylvia turned around and shot this super cute bts shot at the last second)

～The Fabric Design, Continued ～

(2): Ruyi Pattern 如意紋

The second pattern band is a narrower pattern that features a red and gold ruyi pattern, along with a few other smaller motifs.

如意 / ru2 yi4 literally means "according to meaning," similar to "as desired" or "going as planned." It's a phrase often used in well-wishes and good-luck sigils. It's also a represented by a symbol, usually likened either to a cloud or a lingzhi mushroom head.

L: Ganoderma lingzhi Wu, Cao & Dai 574883, Wikimedia Commons, 2014 // R: Ruyi scepter, Hu Wenyi, 17th century, The Met

Ruyi also refers to a ruyi scepter, the same as the wooden kind held by Tiona in the spinning mid-early Ming shot, matching the design on her skirt. It's not completely agreed on where these came from initially—back-scratcher, weapon, whatever—but they eventually became sort of a status symbol, especially in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Expensive ruyi made of metal, jade, wood, etc. made for respectful gifts, decorations, accessories and meditation devices.

Ruyi patterns can come in many forms, but the most distinctive part is probably the two opposing spirals that meet in the middle. The part below that can be pointed or round, or sometimes continue off to the side. Either way, it's one of the most distinctive shapes in classical Chinese ornamentation.

The red leaf-like pattern you see nearer to the bottom of the band with gold tendrils coming out of it is an abstraction of the calla lily/arum lily, which is called 馬蹄蓮 / ma3 ti2 lian2 / "horse-hoof lotus" in Chinese (more specifically referring to the Zantedeschia genus). Most people think of the white kind when they think of calla lilies, but they also come in other colors like yellow and red. They're called horse-hoof lotuses because of how they look from above.

Source: Calla Lily "Macau," Terrace Garden France

Calla lilies are one of my favorite flowers—they have such a unique shape, and such a variety of colors: beautiful solids, gradients, watercolor-like mixings and more. Their petals look like satin to me, especially the darker colored ones. They're one of my mother's favorites, too.

I used a red calla lily in my design, mostly to match the existing colors. The pointy end represents the tip of the petal. The gold tendrils are an abstract extension of the pistil of the flower, branching out from the middle.

PS: Taiwan's Yangmingshan National Park is home to a valley area that blooms full of hydrangeas and calla lilies in the summer—they even have an annual Calla Lily & Hydrangea Festival for viewing the blossoms around Bamboo Lake; there are tours and everything. It's a fragrant and beautiful sight; if anyone is ever visiting Taipei (which I'm writing this from) in the spring or summer I highly recommend going to see the flowers (but be forewarned you might get heatstroke if you don't hydrate well enough).

You will also see some smaller capital Greek omega shaped horseshoe patterns in there, but I'll expand on this in the next pattern band since that one's got more of them.

(3): Horseshoe & Gourd Pattern

I don't know who looked at a 500kg beast with one massive toe on each leg six thousand years ago and decided to go sit on its back, but as a result of that guy's reckless actions we now have modern domesticated horses, hooray!

Anyway, as long as we have domesticated horses, we have also been concerned with their health, because horses will chip a nail and drop dead if you look at them wrong. Their hooves are not only clippity-cloppity-distinctive but also pretty fragile, given that they have to support the weight of a grand piano on four points, Forever.

In early China, people seem to have used grass, leather, and cloth to protect their horse's hooves—there have been horse-shoes unearthed from tombs from the Han Dynasty, and the Terracotta Army horses also appear to be shoed. Later on, during the Yuan Dynasty, iron horseshoes began to catch on along with the development of advanced metalworking.

On the other side of the contiguous continent, horseshoes are often regarded as a good-luck charm—a symbol of protection and luck, often hung on walls or keychains. Some people say they should be hung concave up so that they can be filled with good fortune and blessings.

Src: Courge encore verte, Kusabana Photo Studio, Wikimedia Commons

I paired the more western horseshoe symbol with the hulu gourd symbol, an extremely common motif in the East. The gourd, or calabash, is associated with good luck, health, prosperity, balance, and longevity. Its rounded shape and use as a bottle is often similarly associated with "filling" and "abundance." Both of these symbols are good luck charms and represent affluence.

L: 礪劍圖, 黃濟, 中国故宫博物館藏, painting of Li Tieguai from the Ming Dynasty // R: 李鐵拐畫像, 葉若舟, 1981, 桃園市立美術館

It's a symbol of multiple folklore characters: 李鐵拐 / Li3 Tie3 guai3, one of the Eight Immortals, whose gourd dispensed medicine that could cure any disease, and also the Old Man of the South Pole aka Megamind Except Old, whose gourd contains the elixir of immortality (these two are where the health and longevity associations come from). Li Tieguai's hulu was said to have ribbons of smoke rising from it, which are represented in my pattern by the red and teal ribbons floating around the whole design.

(B): Background Pattern

The background pattern is a combination of the luoshu pattern (see part 1) and another peony pattern.

Now, full disclosure: I cannot for the life of me find the original artifact I referenced this pattern off of. I can remember that it was some kind of lacquer box from the Ming Dynasty, and the gold pattern i drew was referenced from a pattern on its edges, but I've been looking for a really long time and I still can't find the original reference file, probably because it's been almost a year. So I hope you can forgive me for losing my source on this :( But the idea was to combine a more traditional looking pattern, taken straight off an artifact, with the one I made up myself, and put them together side by side.

The background pattern shows up in two parts: from the top down, it makes up the entire top half of the skirt; the second part is in between 2 (the ruyi pattern) and 3 (the horseshoe pattern). This is in line with the patterns on the gold-ground mamianqun artifacts, with the background pattern reoccurring between some of the pattern bars later down the skirt.

(D): Divider Pattern

This is just a dividing pattern I used between elements as an extra ornamentation. It's a callback to the silkworm association I explained in part 1 and the silk moths in the hem section.

L: Habitat of Silkworms, sofiaworld/iStock/GettyImages, 2022 // R: Silkworm, 3rd century BCE- 3rd century CE, Minneapolis Institute of Art

The design was meant to mimic the body segments of the silkworm (I didn't include the legs, I tried it but it looked kinda creepy lmao). The segments and the little dips between them were outlined, as well as the little dark dots that appear in the middle of each segment (idk what those are I just observed them on a lot of silkwork pictures). The result is what can be seen as either an ornamental border or an eldritch horror of a Supreme Silkworm Snake that is like 1.7 meters long with no legs, since the pattern extends across the entirety of the fabric.

Bonus: Black Damask Pattern

There's a black damask pattern that shows up in all the black parts of the other skirt variations except the mid-early Ming one that i used as an example, so it didn't appear in the initial diagram.

For the skirts that have some patterning on them (so Mid-Late and Late Ming), the pattern is just an array of the luoshu symbol.

For the skirts that are completely black, so Song, Yuan, and Early Ming, the pattern is an array of the luoshu symbol, the Cloud9 Hanfu seal logo, and the recreated peony lacquerware design.

Okay, nearly done with this whole series (finally)! I'm going to do a (hopefully shorter) post next pointing out some of the symbolism/easter eggs we put in the non-clothing parts of the video. After that it'll just be the conclusion (which will probably be pretty long, because it's going to contain the Error Analysis/Things That Went Wrong part of my project reflections and that was a long, LONG list), and then I'll finally be able to get onto the Tang Sancai and Hufuqishe posts!

～The Lore～

The Chinese name for the Metamorphosis set is 龍馬負圖 / long2 ma3 fu4 tu2 / "Dragon-Horse Bearing the Diagram." This is a reference to the story of the 河圖洛書 / he2 tu2 luo4 shu1 / "River Diagram and Luo Book," more commonly known as the Yellow River Map and Luo River Square. These are two visual diagrams that appear in very very early Chinese legends and mythology about the beginning of Dynastic China. They look like this:

Src: 河圖洛書, 2017

I will explain more on what exactly these represent later, but for now, just know that they appear in a number of legends recounted by very famous early writings such as thing 易經 / yi4 jing1 / "I'Ching" text, most of which share similar elements. The one that stuck out to me most was the legend of 大禹治水 / da4 yu2 zhi4 shui3 / "Yu the Great Tames the Waters," which can be considered somewhat of a secondary creation myth.

There's no evidence of this guy's existence, but the story goes that pre-dynastic China often suffered from devastating floods from the Yellow River, which kept them from advancing very far. The worst of these was the Great Flood, a massive flood that extended over at least two generations. The emperor at the time, Yao, had been trying to solve this problem for a long time, but the first person who tried, 鯀 / Gun—Yu the Great's father, also called 白馬 / bai2 ma3 / White Horse—failed to control the waters, so the task was passed down to his son.

L: Standing Portrait of King Yu of Xia, National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, 中畫000257N000000000 // R: Yellow River, whose watershed covers most of northern China and drains to the Yellow Sea, Wikimedia Commons

It's said that Yu dedicated most of his life to solving this problem. A number of stories related to this process have been told, one of which being the legend of the Yellow River Map and Luo River Square. Seeing that Yu was going in the wrong direction, the gods sent a great dragon-horse and a giant tortoise as messengers to the earth, who emerged from the waters bearing these diagrams on their backs, revealing clues about divination and geomancy to Yu the Great.

After consulting the diagrams, he realized that he had been mistaken and changed direction, ultimately succeeding in his goal after many years. Some other variations have different animals or people revealing the diagrams to different people, but for the year of the horse I focused on the version that has the dragon-horse bearing the Yellow River Map on its coat.

Src: ​龍馬負河圖洛書, CADAL06200462 古本小說集成：開闢衍繹通俗志傳,1685, Wikimedia Commons

Eventually Yu tamed the waters through a complex irrigation system and opening an artificial channel out to sea, which made him so popular with the people that the emperor declared him his heir. He allegedly took the throne in his 50s, establishing the Xia Dynasty, the very first dynasty in Chinese historiography.

From a broader level, deluge myths are extremely common in early history across the world (although the nuwa story matches them more closely than this one tbh). I feel like almost everyone has their own version of a massive flood that ended up leading to some sort of new beginning.

I think this legend takes place in a grey area between myth and history, too far back to have much evidence of existence, but recent enough to be relatively acceptable when considered a dramatized version of events. At any rate it's an extremely significant part of Chinese folklore, and while the dragon-horse only plays a small part in it, I latched onto this as the primary inspiration for this set.

-

～The Fabric Design～

Since most of the mamianqun fabrics are just variations of the same central design, I’ll use the most complex one as the visual example since it already contains all of the elements found in the other skirt designs. That would be the mid-early Ming mamianqun. At the end of this section I will talk briefly about how this design was modified for the other time periods' skirts.

We can first separate this into a few distinct repeating horizontal pattern sections. If we regard the pattern covering a majority of the area as the ‘base’ pattern (B), there are four distinct pattern sections (1,2,3,4), plus a divider pattern (D) that appears multiple times between them.

(1): Hem Block 底襴

The lowest pattern block near the hem of the skirt is also the widest and the one that appears in both of the other colored mamianqun designs (mid-late and late Ming). Some of the elements were moved around a bit to compress the block proportions for the other designs, but most of them remain the same. I regard this as the “main” design block, as most of the storytelling elements are concentrated here.

The primary scene depicted is a longma dragon-horse galloping through the waves, but every design element included has a meaning to it. 

The Longma

First the creature itself. This is a somewhat modern interpretation of a dragon-horse, with some modern aesthetics prioritized. The legs, hooves, body shape, and tail are all very horse-like, with some added dragon features like the flaming mane, belly scales, straight-back horns, whiskers, and wrinkled nose. The spiral patterns on the horse’s chest and flank as well as the fire wheels coming off of the hind leg joints were also elements taken from usual depictions of eastern dragons, who often have similar flaming wheels on their ankles. 

Src: Imperial Encyclopaedia - Animal Kingdom - pic210 - 龍馬圖.svg, 《古今圖書集成》, Wikimedia Commons

There are a couple different ways this creature can be interpreted. One is as the longma dragon-horse from the legend of this set’s namesake, as one of the two creatures that surfaced from the Yellow River as witnessed by Yu the Great, as described before. The Classic of the Mountains and Seas describe longma as being able to walk on water without sinking and as a sign of a divine ruler.

Src: 图：武官常服补子纹样, 明代群臣之服：常服 // Sea-Horse ninth rank is the lower right square (武九品）

Another is as the 海馬 / hai3 ma3 / "Sea-Horse" (not the fish), a dragon-like horse which is depicted on the ninth-rank martial officer rank badge in the Ming Dynasty official uniform system, used specifically to contrast against the five-clawed imperial dragon buzi badge on the mid-late Ming set’s round-collar robe, as a representation of the wild disarray and constant flouting of fashion rules during that time period.

Src: JourneytotheWest.jpg, Tang Sanzang riding on the White Dragon Horse, Wikimedia Commons

Last is as the 白龍馬 / bai2 long2 ma3 / white dragon-horse (that's literally his name) from the famous Ming Dynasty novel 西遊記 / xi1 you2 ji4 / "Journey to the West" (you may also know it as the Monkey King), a dragon prince originally living in a river who shapeshifts into the party’s steed (after accidentally eating their horse, as you do). You’ll notice that even though they have slightly different names and contexts, all of these depictions are actually quite consistent with each other: there’s always some sort of very powerful horse-dragon mix that has something to do with a body of water.

The Waves

The top and bottom of this block are lined with a wave pattern, crested with white foam. Waves are often depicted in a very circular, spiraling manner, adding a sort of rolling motion to them. This is helped by the repeated parallel lines giving them dimension, plus the white seafoam that helps partition some of the different wave sections from each other.

Src: 武官九品海馬補子, National Digital Archive Program, Taiwan (Qing Dynasty)

The original haima sea-horse buzi depicts a horse galloping over repeated waves, so I kept that framing in the composition of this piece, though the waves are more organic and less repetitive. They also come down from the top, which is more of an aesthetic decision than a symbolic one, but I did notice that the waves look remarkably similar to clouds if you color them white, which makes sense given the Chinese term 雲海 / yun2 hai3 / “sea of clouds,” which refers to the view you often get on Asian mountaintops where the clouds are so dense and thick that they look like a white ocean sprawling out in front of you. You could say that, with the celestial nature of dragons, this horse could be either galloping over the water or treading over the clouds—you just don’t know!

河圖洛書

Next I want to go over these two repeated symbols, the former of which you’ll see in the base pattern as well. These are a continuation of the 河圖洛書 story: they’re visual representations of the 河圖 and the 洛書.

The traditional depictions of these two ‘maps’ look like this. They’re arrangements of black and white dots in kind of a square array. It’s somewhat debated what they actually represent, and their exact functional role in the legends is vague, but they’re generally considered divination or cosmology maps that have to do with the bagua eight trigrams, the five elements, and five cardinal Chinese directions.

洛書 / The Luoshu Square

Src: Luo Square, Wikipedia (various imaged pieced together by me to fool tumblr's image limit)

Upon a closer look we can see that the Luoshu has nine objects arranged in a 3x3 matrix. Each object is made up of a different number of dots: the ones with an even number of dots are black, and the ones with an odd number of dots are white. If we convert the numbers of dots into numbers, we will get a matrix that looks like this: (4, 9, 2; 3, 5, 7; 8, 1, 6).

An extremely important observation is that this arrangement constitutes what we call a third order normal magic square: if you add up the three numbers in any row, column, or diagonal of the array, you will get the same number (try it yourself—what’s the magic sum?) You might also notice that each of the integers 1 through 9 are used once—this is what we call a normal magic square.

I’d previously only encountered magic squares when playing with AMC problems in middle school, so it was really interesting to see it pop up here. Remarkably, the luoshu is the smallest possible normal magic square (reflections and rotations of the same square are not considered distinct, and squares with repeated number entries don’t count). Every possible 3x3 normal magic square is a transformation of this one.

If you look closely at each shape you will recognize that each one has a number of “lobes” or “sections.” The even-numbered shapes are filled in with red, and the odd-numbered shapes are teal and have negatives corresponding to their number. For example, the shape on the left has three spokes, and the one in the middle contains five compartments. Each of them exhibit some sort of repetition, imagery, or sectioning that has to do with their number, and they’re arranged in the same way as the Luo square, so that any row, column, or diagonal will add up to 15.

河圖 / The Yellow River Map

Src: 河圖與洛書

The Yellow River Map is a little more confusing in what exactly it is—there doesn’t seem to be an agreed-upon mathematical relationship like in its counterpart, and it’s a bit more complex. Some think that the version that we have now may not be the same as the original, and that if we had the original then the relationship would be equally obvious. It does have some established linkages to ideas in Chinese cosmology, but they won’t make much sense unless you’ve got somewhat of a background in that (which is not me).

As in the Luoshu, some of the dots (even arrangements) are filled in and some (odd arrangements) are blank. The integers 1-10 also appear once each, with 10 uniquely wrapping all the way around the central 5.

Culturally, this was the primary map that helped Yu the Great construct his irrigation and drainage system. While the myths vary in the form and identity of the person, deity, or spirit that actually gave him the map, it's generally hinted at that this was some sort of directional mapping of the surrounding land and topology, which helped Yu figure out how to build channels through what he later established as the Nine Provinces.

The visual symbol I came up with for this one is a little less abstract, preserving the dots on the outside and most of the structure, although I neglected to include the lines. The 3 and 4 I turned into a fan shape instead of just dots, and the outer four numbers were arranged in a curved shape to make the footprint of the whole symbol a bit more interesting. The top and bottom halves of the 10 are disconnected but represented by 5 teardrop shapes above and 5 below, as some other depictions have the dots split up in this way but connected by lines.

The Silk Moths

If you thought these were butterflies, you thought wrong—these are silk moths! Specifically bombyx mori, the domesticated silk moth.

Why include them? While it's not super common anymore, silkworms did have a connection to horses in older Chinese folklore, apparently stemming from the fact that the silkworm's head is shaped similarly to a horse's head. The more popular origin story of sericulture stems from Leizu, the Empress of the Yellow Emperor, who discovered silk after a cocoon fell into her hot tea and invented the art of sericulture and weaving.

Src: Silkworms, Invertebrate Welfare

An alternative is the story of 馬頭娘 / ma3 tou2 niang2 / "Horse-Headed Maiden," a girl who promised to marry her family's white horse if he brought her father home from war/kidnapping/going to the store for milk, which he did. Her father, not wanting a horse for a son-in-law, killed the horse, but when he hung its hide up to dry, it flew up, wrapped around the girl, and carried her away into a mulberry tree, where she was transformed into a silk-spitting, horse-headed silkworm. She then eventually ascended to the heavens and was worshipped as the goddess of silkworms. Records of this story appear in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, the Taiping Guangji, the Rites of Zhou, etc.

Beyond that story I'm sure I don't have to elaborate on the whole silk-clothes-hanfu thing :p

L: Domestic silkmoth, Bombyx Mori, Photo 369978040, (c) GD, all rights reserved, uploaded by GD, iNaturalist, April 2024 // R: Wild silkmoth, Photo 517391659, no rights reserved, iNaturalist, June 2025

In terms of design elements, domestic silk moths (bombyx mori) are leucistic, in comparison to wild silk moths (bombyx mandarina), which are brown. I tried to mimic the textured veins of the wings of the silkmoth in my design, as well as the fuzzy antennae, the thicker thorax, and the resting angle/general silhouette of the wings. Overall, I'm not sure how recognizable they are as silk moths, but I like that I was able to include this bit of detail.

Bird / Bat

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a... bat?

Regardless of what it is, it's flying! I kept this shape ambiguous on purpose. Gulls flying over the sea are one option, given the ocean setting—the pointed tail and head would lend themselves to the shape of a beak and narrower tail feathers.

However, another possibility is bats. While they may seem like an odd choice, bats are also good-luck systems often depicted on woven fabrics and embroidery in Chinese clothing in varying levels of simplification.

Src: 乾隆青花粉彩桃蝠纹双耳抱月瓶, 满清文物中的传统吉祥纹样——蝠纹, Prince Kung's Palace Museum

Bats are considered lucky because of their name in Chinese, 蝙蝠 / bian1 fu2, or just 蝠 / fu2 in its bound form, which is pronounced the same as the character for good luck, 福 / fu2. They're incorporated into ceramics, textiles, carvings, paintings etc. in various levels of simplification and abstraction. I find that the most common indicator of a bat being depicted is the forward angled point of the wrist joint on its wing, which is sometimes pointed and sometimes just curved. My design does have a forward curve, but it's not very exaggerated, so it's sort of up to the viewer.

壽字 / The "Shou" Character

Above the longma there's a red circle representing the sun (Chinese depictions of the sun are usually more red than yellow) and the Oracle Bone Script (really old) version of the character 壽 / shou4. Shou is a word that means everlasting, long-lived, etc. It's technically a combination of a phono-semantic character (形聲字 / xing2 sheng1 zi4, aka one part of the character represents its sound, and another part represents its meaning) and a compound ideogram (multiple pictograms combined to create a scene related to the meaning).

Src: 寿字的源字形, 雲美名網

We can divide the character into two pieces: the top part, which is the character 老 / lao3 / "old," and the bottom part, which is an archaic form of the character 疇 / chou2 / "field." The 老 character represents the meaning, and it is a pictogram of an old person with a hunched back. In this ideogram, the person is leaning over the 疇 character like a cane. 疇 in this case functions as a phonetic indicator of the pronunciation of the whole character, shou, which is similar to chou. Later on the 壽 character became more common and culturally significant than 疇, so 疇 was retroactively changed into its own self-referential phonogram: 田 / tian2 / "crops" to denote its meaning and 壽 to denote its sound.

Culturally, the 壽 character is one of the most common good-luck character motifs used in Chinese designs, just like the 福 / fu2 / "luck" character (Chinese people just really wanna get rich, live a long time, and have good luck). The character is often stylized into three types of patterns: 長壽紋 / chang2 shou4 wen2 / "long shou pattern," 花壽紋 / hua1 shou4 wen2 / "flower shou pattern, "and 團壽紋 / tuan2 shou4 wen2 / "round shou pattern." They often appear on embroidery and fabric patterns throughout history as well.

L: 明 缂丝“十二章纹”皇帝衮服（复原件） 十三陵特区办事处藏, 理解自己的文明（16）：华服锦绣（下）｜图鉴, October 2024 // R: 壽字紋, 燎泽文创｜中国传统纹样之寿字纹, November 2025

The other thing is that 壽 is a homophone for the character 獸 / shou4 / "beast." In the Ming Dynasty nine-rank badge system, there are two categories of officials—civil and martial—with nine ranks each. Each rank/category combination was represented by an animal depicted on a badge they wore on their uniforms. The animals depicted for the civil ranks were all heavenly animals, like birds. The animals for the martial ranks, however, were earthly animals, or 獸. The dragon-like 海馬 haima sea-horse, representing the ninth rank martial official, is one of those—tying it all back together.

Okay I'm tired now, saving the rest for the next post!!! Hopefully won't put it off for like three months again x-x

Okay we're almost done! Just a fabric design post + concluding comments left! Also sorry for lack of pics in the first half making it really dense lol, the 30 image limit is lowkey killing me

Background

Terminology

First some terminology clarifications. Late Ming can refer to two periods: 晚明 and 明末. 

晚明 is the more literal translation of Late Ming. It usually refers to the period starting either at the beginning or middle of the Wanli era, going until the end of the Ming Dynasty where it gets taken over by the Qing. This period is sectioned out because it includes the gradual decline of the dynasty.

明末 more literally means ending Ming, referring to  only the last few years of the dynasty, from about 1620 onwards, when the dynasty was pretty much on its deathbed. It may or may not include Southern Ming, also called 後明/hou4 ming2/“later/after/back Ming,” a tiny remnant of the Ming that hung around for a bit after the fall of the dynasty, which coexisted with the first few years of the Qing Dynasty.

For the purpose of this project, though, the last look focuses on the late Ming period starting from the mid-Wanli era and going until the official end of the dynasty in 1644, because Late Ming has established itself in the modern Hanfu community as its own popular sub-aesthetic. Late Ming style typically consists of long, minimalistic tops, very wide sleeves, and delicate ornamentation in very few select spots.

A note, though: while the Late Ming style as referred to in today's hanfu community means one thing, it's important to remember that "late Ming" actually lasted quite a long time, and moreover that it was especially known for how quickly trends changed at this time. 余懷/Yu Huai, a writer who lived from 1616–1695CE, stated that "衫之短長, 袖之大小, 隨時變易, 見者謂時世粧也.” or "the length of their robes, the size of their sleeves, all of these changed completely randomly, and these were called 'fashion' by those who saw it."

It's extremely likely that what we call Late Ming style today is only one small part of what was trendy at this time; there is no "Late Ming Style" in history. We know it was at least trendy at one point during Late Ming, but it's far from representative of the whole period in general. Beyond that, there were many conflicting opinions about fashion going on at the same time: some people liked the flashy stuff, some people thought minimalism was better, some people were super progressive in ushering in new trends, others thought that these new trends would upset the balance of nature.

So just keep in mind that when we say Late Ming style, we're referring to the specific style that the hanfu community calls "Late Ming style," which we know existed at some point for some people during Late Ming, but was almost definitely not ubiquitous throughout the time period.

The Invention of Taste

Part of the possible reason for the emergence of minimalism was the idea of tastefulness, which rose in opposition to the flashy, flamboyant style of middle Ming. I talked about the problem of mimicry in the previous post, how anyone with money could now afford extravagant fabric and fashion to look affluent and well-off, and the idea of conspicuous consumption, where your rank and social credit came from your material possessions.

“True” nobles from historically important households were very unhappy about this—they looked down on merchants and artisans as, like, “common people,” as opposed to their well-connected, socially superior families. Scholars, gentlemen, etc. held similar views. They needed a different way to distinguish themselves from the newly rich.

That distinguishing factor was taste. As a concept, it’s a set of… limitations, so to speak, on these material objects—and how to use or display them—exclusive to people with “good upbringing;” aka basically a set of symbolic rules that only the noble families would know about. Boundless extravagance from new money was labeled as superficial, gaudy and excessive, or in other words, distasteful. (We definitely have a similar concept of sophistication vs trashy flashiness today.)

That’s how I'm led to believe that the minimalistic but grand Late Ming style arose: they still wanted to show that they were well-off—super big robes that required lots of fabric to make, large sleeves that meant you had servants to do things for you, etc.—but the designs on them were very simple and elegant, with a lot of solid colors or subtle jacquard patterns, nowhere near as flashy as the mid-early Ming trends. In this way the “true” aristocrats distinguished themselves from the “fake” wealthy people: the real noble families were tasteful and sophisticated, while the overly gaudy merchants were just playing at looking high-class while not truly being from noble, educated, cultured households.

And again—this is only one sub-style, like cottagecore or lolita or dark academia, that was well-liked during this time period. Just think about how fast trends change now. Massively flashy gold embellished coats and stuff definitely existed at the same time.

The Little Ice Age

Note: most of the information references The Little Ice Age and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty: A Review, by Fan Ka-Wai. It is publicly available with extensive references. Refer to sources spreadsheet at the bottom of this post for more.

The Little Ice Age hit worst in late Ming, stirring up even more unrest among the people. It hit during "the late 16th century to the end of the 17th century" (Fan Ka-Wai, The Little Ice Age and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty). Again, it wasn’t just the weather being colder—the LIA came with a whole host of issues related to rapid climate change, similar to (though opposite of?) global warming today: increased storms, weak summer monsoons, weather phenomena like El Niño, etc. China being a largely agricultural economy, the climate effects were devastating for most people. Probably the biggest effect was the "megadrought" that started in 1637, worsened in 1641 by the eruption of Mount Parker (among other volcanic eruptions), causing plague, famine, and general chaos.

We’ve seen before that the more anxious people get, the bigger the class divide gets. It’s happening today, too: to cope with the sense of impending doom, people turn to other things to take up their thoughts: material possessions, gossip, etc. Late Ming was no stranger to this. In addition, the colder temperatures encouraged the lengthening of tops into ankle or floor-length robes, under which the hem of a skirt could peek through. As a result, skirt decorations migrated to the bottom of the skirt (since the rest of it would be covered anyway).

We also see an increase in the popularity of embroidery on skirts here. I don't know the exact reason for this but I would guess that it's a more economical way of adding decoration to only a very small part of the skirt, rather than something all-over.

The Fall of Ming

I won't pretend to be in expert on the ending Ming/early Qing period; in fact it's probably one of the periods I know least about (in proportion to the amount of available info about it) because I generally don't really like the aesthetic of this time period, which is heavily Qing-influenced, so I haven't looked into it as much.

But from what I have seen, the factors contributing to the fall of a Ming as a whole were largely:

Natural effects from the LIA, as discussed above, causing "famine, drought, locusts" (Fan 2023)

Internal rebellion, from people unhappy with the government, especially because of the materialistic class war going on + the crop failures from the LIA

Inter-ethnic conflict, possibly made worse by the culture thing

Persistent invasion from the Manchus

People still don't really agree on which one/ones contributed most; many don't agree on the LIA being a factor because it should've equally affected the Manchus (I see the point but I still think it made people Not Happy, so I put it there anyway). I couldn't presume to tell you which I think was the most impactful either; I don't know enough to form much of an opinion. At the end of the day, though, I'm tempted to blame capitalism, because why not?

The Skirt: Research & Evidence

Artifacts

Various Skirts From 嘉興王店李家墳明墓 / jia1 xing4 wang2 dian4 li3 jia1 fen2 ming2 mu4 / Li Family Mausoleum in Wangdian, Jiaxing

Src: “梅里雲裳”明代服飾形象復原系列作品, 蔣玉秋, 北京服裝學院美術學院/中國絲綢博物館, various exacavation images from p7-10 (2022?) pdf

The Li Family Mausoleum in Jiaxing consists of four tombs labeled M1, M2, M3, and M4. From the tomb epitaphs it was determined that M2 belonged to 李湘 / Li3 Xiang1, M3 belonged to his principal wife with an unknown surname, M1 belonged to a secondary wife whose surname was 陳 / chen2, and M4 to another wife with the surname 徐 / xu3. As a result, three of the four tombs contained various women's clothing articles that we can examine for a look into late Ming fashion.

Out of these we know that Madam Chen died when she was 92 years old in the seventeenth year of the Wanli era, which would've been 1589. We don't know exactly when the other tombs were buried, but the report says it was probably before Madam Chen because her epitaph says she was entombed "to the left of the tomb of her late husband," so he must have already been deceased.

The most intact skirt artifacts were found in M1 and M3, so Madam Chen and unknown-surname-principal-wife's tombs.

Src: 嘉興王店李家墳明墓清理報告, 吳海紅, 嘉興博物館，彩插3，圖5、6，p53（2009）

Above are artifacts M3:17 and M1:24, screenshotted from a scan of the initial excavation report's colored print section, both of which have gold-thread woven decoration confined to the bottom of the skirt.

Src: “梅里雲裳”明代服飾形象復原系列作品, 蔣玉秋, 北京服裝學院美術學院/中國絲綢博物館, 四季花蜂蝶绸裙 p25-26 (2022?) pdf

Another artifact restored from tomb M4, the 四季花蜂蝶绸裙 / si4 ji4 hua1 feng1 die2 chou2 qun2 / Four Seasons Flowers, Bees & Birds Silk Skirt, was documented in a restoration report, with the technical line drawing included. You can see that the pleats are not at all trapezoidal, and the waistband is completely straight, in opposition to the flared shape of the earlier mamianqun. This skirt has a damask floral pattern for most of the body and a gold-threaded yingluo/beaded jewelry pattern decoration concentrated at the bottom.

白色暗花紗繡鳥紋裙 / bai2 se4 an4 hua1 sha1 xiu4 niao3 wen2 qun2 / White Organza Embroidered Bird Pattern Skirt

Src: 白色暗花纱绣花鸟纹裙, Baidu

From 孔府舊藏 / kong3 fu2 jiu4 zang4 / Kong Family Mansion collection, heirloom piece (so not an excavated object, an heirloom passed down over generations). Known colloquially in the hanfu community as 花鳥裙 / hua1 niao3 qun2 / "flowers and birds skirt," super popular recreation style now. 3-4 wide pleats on each side, slightly trapezoidal shape but much less pronounced curvature than middle Ming.

Not dated to a particular part of Ming, but given context and trends I would say it's very likely to have been from late Ming: we know that white skirts were one (of many) trend during late Ming, and that embroidery briefly overtook woven decoration.

Design

Skirt

低欄 / di3 lan2 directly translates to "lower lan" (refer to prev post for the definition of a lan), aka the band of patterning located near the hem of the skirt, which can peek out from the bottom of a longer robe/top. We know that this was a very popular arrangement during Late Ming (although many arrangements were simultaneously popular, so it's difficult to relegate any particular style to a particular period).

In addition, the pleats on this design are straight/parallel, not arranged in a trapezoidal sunburst pattern, leading to a straighter horizontal waist band with less curvature to it. Very early mamianqun had straight-shape pleats as well, but the trapezoidal silhouette took over in popularity for most of middle Ming. Straighter pleats made a comeback because they fit better inside of the long robes, whereas the trapezoidal skirts—which widen out from the waistband—tend to protrude outwards and ruin the shape of the top.

This skirt design has six pairs of pleats per side (again higher than average number historically, but more commonplace for the modern hanfu community).

Other Outfit Pieces

Cami/underlayer: 主腰 / zhu3 yao1 / "Zhuyao Bodice"

Src: "Leisurely Life of a Lady," 孫璜 Sun Huang, mid-17th century, Qing Dynasty, Freer Gallery of Art Collection

The innermost layer for all four of the Ming Dynasty sets is a 主腰 / zhu3 yao1. Bearing some resemblance to western bodices, it's a slightly more sophisticated front-opening torso garment with straps tied over the shoulder and a line of buttons (or ties) down the front. Later on sleeveless versions may or may not have existed (there's one artifact floating around but it's unclear if the straps just rotted off). Shown above is a painting from the early Qing Dynasty by Sun Huang, formerly attributed to famous Ming Dynasty painter Qiu Ying. While the painting was made during the Qing Dynasty, it was made very early on during Qing by a Han painter, and it depicts Han women dressed in extremel characteristic late Ming clothing (as is common for paintings of ladies—often they are clothed in outfits from previous time periods, it's a genre norm). The two women in the painting are shown wearing a red zhuyao under a longer sheer robe, a very common summer fashion choice of the time. (Refer to the Early Ming Dynasty post for more details.)

Pants: 直腰褲 / zhi2 yao1 ku4 / "Straight-Waist Trousers"

Src: Yellow plain damask trousers, 334, 大明衣冠論壇, pg 288

The pants for all four of the Ming Dynasty sets is of the form of the 直腰褲 / zhi2 yao1 ku4 / straight-waist trousers, a very standard form of pants worn by both men and women throughout the Ming Dynasty. Shown above is an example from the Dingling mausoleum of the Wanli emperor. (Refer to the Early Ming Dynasty post for more details.)

Shirt: 無領衫 / wu2 ling3 shan1 / "Collar-less Top"

The so-called 'collar-less' top is named that way because it lacks a separate collar piece/strip/rectangle that's pieced together with the body of the garment; instead, the raw edge of the collar area is just enclosed with bias tape. However, the result is remarkably similar to the round collar parallel-lapel shirt, just with a very thin collar piece; as a result, it's also referred to as 窄圓領 / zhai3 yuan2 ling3 / narrow round collar. Our design has a red rayon body with teal collar binding and placket, plus agate bead buttons running down the front.

Coat: 立領斜襟長襖 / li4 ling3 xie2 jin1 chang2 ao3 / "Standing Collar Diagonal Lapel Robe"

Src: 明暗云纹白罗长衫, 文物山東, 山東博物館

While similar to the mandarin collar, the standing collar is a separate collar type hailing from the Ming Dynasty. The popular Late Ming aesthetic often features the long standing collar robe with a diagonal lapel going from the center of the collar to the side of the body, often paired with a very long length and large sleeves, as embodied by the artifact shown above from the Shandong Provincial Museum. One feature of Ming Dynasty wide sleeves is that the front of the sleeves are almost always sewn closed, leaving only a small opening at the wrist, which is highlighted in our design by a gold piping, 圈金/quan1 jin1/'gold outline.' Our design is a dark inky rayon-polyester blend lined with a pale teal polyester-cotton-silk blend. The inside of the collar is lined with a red rayon, which can be folded down for a slightly shorter two-tone collar, also outlined in gold.

Other Styling

L: 明代帝后半身像（二）　冊　孝靖皇后, Empress Xiaojing, 中畫000327N000000006, National Palace Museum Collection // R: 明代帝后半身像（二）　冊　孝定皇后, Empress Xiaoding, 中畫000327N000000004, National Palace Museum Collection

Makeup is where you start to see the eyebrows starting to droop at the outer ends—not only are they pretty much completely flattened out with no arch at all, the outer half curves downward, giving you this sort of permanently-slightly-disappointed look. The lips also continue to take on a flatter and thinner shape. The petal shape is a lip shape that was at least existent during Late Ming—it's a bit more exaggerated than the thinner historical shape, which is shown above in the empress portraits of the Xiaojing Empress, the wife of the Wanli Emperor, and the Xiaoding Empress/Empress Dowager, his mother.

I lowkey can't find where I got this painting from but from what I remember it should be a Qing dynasty painting of Han women sitting around a table playing some sort of card or other gambling game, I think in an opium den or something???? If someone else manages to find it lmk lol but I know there's more than one version of it, I just for the life of me I can't track it down, all the women in the painting have this hairstyle so it's a really good example

Hair was based on the 牡丹頭 / mu3 dan1 tou2 / "peony head" hairstyle (idk why it's called that either tbh), which was a look that imo looked very similar to a beehive or pouf where the hair was coiffed with extra volume on top and hair combed directly back from the hairline. This lasted from late Ming into ending Ming and (I think? Not sure about this one) early Qing as well, with varying degrees of exaggeratedness from a slight bump to a prominent Marie Antoinette-style high roll. We kept it kind of in the middle for this one.

Accessories

Hair accessories were once again 纏花 / chan2 hua1 / “wrapped silk” flower hair pins sponsored by the Forbidden Boutique (ig: @/forbidden_boutique), a small business selling handmade traditional jewelry and hair accessories based in LA. This traditional technique is estimated to have originated in the Ming Dynasty and involves wrapping silk threads around paper petal forms and wire to create flowers. The one shown is actually a brooch that I managed to work into the hair.

Src: 明代帝后半身像（二）　冊　孝純皇后, Empress Xiaochun, 中畫000327N000000008, National Palace Museum Collection

Earrings: The five-petal plum blossom earrings I made here were based on the pearl petal flower earrings worn by some of the later empresses in their portraits. The photo on the right above is a portrait of the Xiaochun Empress/Empress Dowager, the mother of the Chongzhen Emperor, the last emperor of the Ming Dynasty, in which she is wearing similar earrings. These took the most effort to make out of all of the pairs of earrings.

Src: 金脚宝玉佛面环 上海肇嘉浜路打浦桥明代顾姓族墓出土

The original most likely had a stamped or cut metal base that the gemstones were then welded or glued onto; for my version, I twisted the frame out of 18 gauge brass jewelry wire (essentially just made 5 connected double-layered loops with round-nose pliers and then bent then around each other until the end loops met in a plum blossom shape). Then I used 28 gauge brass wire to wrap the pearl beads onto the frame, plus a tiny red bicone that I just had laying around for the center.

The longer pearl strands are just pearl beads threaded onto a head pin, then attached to the flower frame. The last pearl in the center one is slightly larger than the rest.

-

Okay we're almost done! Just a fabric design post + concluding comments left! Also sorry for lack of pics in the first half making it really dense lol, the 30 image limit is lowkey killing me

The Hongwu Emperor was the one that set up the whole clothing regulation system after the Yuan-Ming transition. It was probably partially related to his personal philosophy, but it was also most likely a way of purging the influence of the previous dynasty to secure his rule: Yuan rulers and aristocrats were obsessed with nasij/nashiri, or cloth of gold, and indulged in more and more lavish fashions as time went on; plus, clothing had long been one of the main differences between Han people and northern Steppes nomads. The Hongwu Emperor's regulations restricted certain styles of clothing and types of silk to certain people, setting up the precedent of fashion representing rank, and it worked for a while.

But it didn't work forever: there were many problems with this: in placing the means of control in clothing, a material matter, you've already handed over a huge portion of your power to the object of clothing itself. You’ve said that this color is only for people who are this powerful, so that when you see someone wearing it you have proof of powerful they are. If that’s the case, who’s to stop me from making my own clothes in that color, wearing it, and calling myself powerful too?

Src: Illustration of the Jin Ping Mei, Wikimedia Commons, 17th century. Jin Ping Mei is a 16th century erotic novel satirizing this exact social issue—it's very famous and there are English translations of it floating around on the web.

And with commercialization on the rise, this was entirely possible for wealthy people, regardless of nobility, to do—as long as they could pay someone to make it. Everyone wanted the best and brightest. The worst offenders were people already in power, because nobody wanted to criticize them, lest they risk retribution or disrupting the delicate social ecosystem of a household that could probably buy you and your entire family's souls without blinking.

Some emperors tried to combat this by passing more detailed laws, but it never worked for long—at a certain level of detail, it becomes impractical or impossible to enforce. Emperors even violated their own laws, bestowing gifts of robes on individuals that they'd previously stated were banned from wearing said gift, and then expecting them to show up wearing it in court.

Src: 蓝地妆花纱蟒衣, 孔子博物館藏, 孔府舊藏, 齐鲁网, 2017. This is an example of a mangfu, clothing depicting the four-clawed dragon, a common motif for robes bestowed upon individuals by emperors as a sign of favor. Other common motifs include the qilin, feiyu flying fish, and ox.

Over and over again sumptuary fashion laws have been enacted, enforced, and then pretty quickly ignored by everyone. At a certain point, fashion was no longer an indication of your power, it gave you your power. By overemphasizing fashion as a vehicle to enforce ruling structure, they gave power to the fashion itself, not just what it was supposed to represent.

Formerly, only noble families with history and sociopolitical sway might have had access to these kinds of fabrics. But now, the divide between “wealthy” and “powerful” began to dissolve—when they both look the same, how can you tell the difference?

The Nine-Rank System: Mingfu and Buzi

Buzi

Src: 明中葉藍地織金獅紋方補, Middle Ming Blue-Ground Gold-Woven Lion Badge, Southern Branch of the National Palace Museum, Chiayi County, Taiwan

One of the systems first set up by the Hongwu Emperor was the nine-rank badge system for government officials. 補子 / bu3 zi0, also known as rank badges or mandarin squares, are decorative woven or embroidered squares (sometimes also circles) sewn onto the front and back of robes, usually depicting some kind of animal or scene. While their use goes all the way back to the Tang Dynasty, they were used in the Ming and Qing Dynasties to uniform differently ranked government officials.

It worked like this: there were two categories of officials, civil and martial. Each category had nine ranks, with the first rank being the highest. Each rank for civil officials was assigned a different type of bird, and each rank for martial official officials was assigned a different type of land animal. The animal would be depicted on the badge they wore on their robes.

For example, a first-rank civil official wore a crane badge, and a ninth-rank martial official wore a sea-horse badge (not a seahorse, a literal horse galloping over the ocean). First and second rank martial officials both wore lion badges.

Officials were allowed to wear badges of their own rank and also of lower ranks, so a first-rank martial official could wear a sea-horse badge if they wanted. But they couldn't wear badges of ranks above them, so a ninth-rank martial official could not wear a lion badge.

Mingfu

Src: 明代官夫人漢族服飾3D創作 - 以北京故宮女性肖像畫為列, The 3D Creation of Outer Peeress's Han Garment in the Ming Dynasty—Using The Palace Museum of Ten Female Portraits as an Example, dissertation by 徐儷心, advised by 長妃滿, Ming Chuan University, August 2015. Figures 3-2-3 失明男女像軸 (pg 53) and 3-2-2 失明夫婦像軸 (pg 51).

命婦 / ming4 fu4 were the wives of government officials. This set is primarily based on their style of clothing, because they were in an interesting position socially: they got their power through association with their husbands, so they were directly impacted by clothing regulations for officials, but they were also afforded a level of flexibility because they didn't work directly for the central government, and they were women.

But they were still powerful people protected by their ranks, so you couldn't go around accusing them of things randomly without severe consequences. As higher-ups, their fashion choices had the ability to set precedents for other people, but they were also immediately subjected to regulations from the central government specifically made for mingfu. I view them as a very well-positioned indicator of this entire cultural phenomenon as it was happening—their fashion choices reflected the situation.

Src: 明代官夫人漢族服飾3D創作 - 以北京故宮女性肖像畫為列, The 3D Creation of Outer Peeress's Han Garment in the Ming Dynasty—Using The Palace Museum of Ten Female Portraits as an Example, dissertation by 徐儷心, advised by 長妃滿, Ming Chuan University, August 2015. Figure 5-4-8, 一品夫人常服像:霞帔, 3D正背面二視圖 (pg 101). 3D recreation of mingfu dailywear from figure 3-2-2 above.

For example, mingfu were supposed to wear the same buzi as their husbands on round-collared robes of red luo silk. However, there are tons of portraits of mingfu wearing buzi badges way above their station. Apparently it got so bad that at a certain point, everyone only wanted to wear crane and lion badges; nobody wanted to wear the badges assigned to ranks 3-9, and workshops even stopped making them because of the lack of demand, which meant that even someone trying to follow the system would have a hard time.

The Little Ice Age

This is barely relevant at this stage tbh, but I included it in the video so I figured I'd talk about it a bit here. The Little Ice Age hit Asia at a different time than Europe, so the timelines don't match up completely, but most papers I've seen estimate it started in the last few years of the 16th century or the early 17th century, so it's plausible that the mid-late Ming fashions were impacted.

However it's also equally possible that the lengthening of robes got popular for a different reason, since the overlap in time period was so small. The impacts of the Little Ice Age weren't just colder climate either, it was more importantly the whole drought/famine/storms/etc. extreme climate change effects that disrupted everything else, whcih I'll talk about more in the Late Ming post.

Also since I'm looking at mingfu portraits for this, which is more of a formal thing, it makes sense that their robes are longer anyway.

The Skirt: Research & Evidence

Portraits

I'm gonna be so fr the sources for these are all over the place and the Shandong artifact organization's website has been down for like the past two weeks, so I'm having a really hard time tracking down the original sources for these, but I'll tell you what I do know about these images.

The leftmost portrait is of Lady Yu, wife of 藍銅 / Lan2 Tong2, and there's a watermark from Shandong Museum on it, so I'm guessing it was previously exhibited there, but I'm not sure if it's in their permanent collection. Lan Tong was the father of 藍章 / Lan2 Zhang1, who lived from 1453–1525CE, who was in turn the father of 藍田 / Lan2 Tian2, who lived from 1477–1555CE, whose second wife Lady Liu is depicted in the second portrait. So the second portrait is the granddaughter-in-law of the first portrait.

There isn't much information on Lan Tong, but assuming the age gap was similar to gap between Lan Zhang and Lan Tian, and assuming the wives of these men were of similar ages to them, it seems reasonable that all three generations lived during middle Ming. Lady Liu would be closer to mid-late Ming.

If Random Twitter Post is to be believed, the rightmost portrait is a portrait defaced during the Cultural Revolution, so it's very likely that the original name of the woman depicted has been lost. However, her rank appears to be the same as that of the middle portrait, and looking closely at the brushwork, I would not be surprised if the two were illustrated by the same painter at around the same time. All three wear very similar clothing, with a red round-collar robe with a badge + double-banded mamianqun.

Artifacts

There's like a hundred of these so I'm not gonna do in-depth detail on each of them, just kinda list the most relevant four out and the main features.

黃織錦絨繡裙 / huang2 zhi1 jin3 rong2 xiu4 qun2 / Yellow Brocade Embroidered Skirt

Src: 刘林,余家栋 & 许智范.(1982).江西南城明益宣王朱翊鈏夫妇合葬墓. Cultural Relics,(08),16-28+100-101.https://doi.org/10.13619/j.cnki.cn11-1532/k.1982.08.004.

Unearthed from 江西南城明益宣王朱翊鈏夫妇合葬墓 / jiang1 xi1 nan2 cheng2 ming2 yi4 xuan1 wang2 zhu1 yi4 yin3 fu1 fu4 he2 zang4 mu4 / Couple's Tomb of Yi Xuanwang and Zhu Yiyin in Nancheng, Jiangxi. Embroidered rather than woven, but has a knee + hem banding design pattern. Unlined, white cotton waistband, 87cm length, 108cm waist width. Jiajing era (1522–1566CE).

駝色纏枝蓮地鳳襴妝花緞裙 / tuo2 se4 zhan2 zhi1 lian2 di4 feng4 lan2 zhuang1 hua1 duan4 qun2 / Skirt of Brocaded Camel-Tan Damask with Interlocking Lotus Pattern Bearing Phoenix Design in the Lower Portion

Src: 北京文物精粹大系: 織繡卷, Gems of Beijing Cultural Relics Series: Textiles and Embroidery, China Press 2001, ISBN9787200042016, fig 25–27 pg 75

Unearthed from 北京618厂苇子坑明墓 / bei3 jing1 618 chang3 wei3 zi3 keng1 ming2 mu4 / Ming Tomb of Wei Zikeng at Factory 618 in Beijing. Dated to middle Ming. Has horizontal bands as well with woven phoenix designs.

裙M1:16 (it does not have a detailed name lmao)

Src: 王爲剛,張偉,周金波 & 劉偉.(2016).江蘇泰州明代劉鑑家族墓發掘簡報 The Excavation of the Tombs of Liu Jian' s Family of the Ming Dynasty in Taizhou City, Jiangsu Province.文物,(06),41-62+1. https://doi.org/10.13619/j.cnki.cn11-1532/k.2016.06.003. Fig. 9

Unearthed from 江蘇泰州明代劉鑑家族墓 / jiang1 su1 tai4 zhou1 ming2 dai4 liu2 jian4 jia1 zu2 mu4 / Tomb of Family of Liu Jian, Taizhou City, Jiangsu. Interestingly only 58.5cm long, waist width 122cm, hem length 193cm. Has two horizontal bands, qilin and cloud patterns.

葱绿地妆花纱蟒裙 / cong1 lv4 di4 zhuang1 hua1 sha1 mang3 qun2 / Bright Green Zhuanghua Gauze Mang Skirt

Src: Wikimedia Commons, 山东博物馆藏明葱绿地织金妆花纱蟒裙, Ming Dynasty Bright Green Brocaded Gauze Skirt with Gold Woven Floral and Dragon Patterns, Shandong Museum, March 2023

From 孔府舊藏 / kong3 fu2 jiu4 zang4 / Kong Family Mansion collection, heirloom piece (so not an excavated object, an heirloom passed down over generations), extremely well-preserved down to original color. 5-6 pleats on each side. Very clear knee and hem bands. Dated to Wanli era, so at the tail end of what could be considered mid-late Ming.

Design

Skirt

雙襴 / shuang1 lan2 literally means "double-banded," with the word "band" here referring to a horizontal length of multicolored pattern stretching across the skirt's fabric. 襴 / lan2 is used to refer to any number of clothing-related things that go across, typically at the bottom or lower half of a garment, so it can also be used to refer to the bottom half of a 襦 / ru2 top or the hem piece of a 襴衫 / lan2 shan1 scholar's round-collared robe.

The double-banded skirt pattern is one of the most popular mamianqun fabric pattern structures in modern times. The top band is called a 膝襴 / xi1 lan2 / "knee band" because it's at the height of the knee, and the other band is called the 底襴 / di3 lan2 / "lower band" because it's at the hem of the skirt. Since the knee band is thinner and the lower band is much thicker, this arrangement could be called 窄膝襴 + 寬底襴 / zhai3 xi1 lan2 + kuan1 di3 lan2 / "narrow knee band + wide lower band." Other combinations with a wider knee band and thinner lower band, only a knee band, only a low band, etc. also exist, but over time this combination has proved to be the most popular in the modern Hanfu movement.

Other Outfit Pieces

Cami/underlayer: 主腰 / zhu3 yao1 / "Zhuyao Bodice"

Src: 云缕心衣: 中国古代内衣文化, 潘建华, 上海古籍出版社, 2005, ISBN9787532540945

The innermost layer for all four of the Ming Dynasty sets is a 主腰 / zhu3 yao1. Bearing some resemblance to western bodices, it's a slightly more sophisticated front-opening torso garment with straps tied over the shoulder and a line of buttons down the front. It has a high back with wide straps and buttons/ties down the front. (Refer to the Early Ming Dynasty post for more details.)

Pants: 直腰褲 / zhi2 yao1 ku4 / "Straight-Waist Trousers"

Src: 王爲剛,張偉,周金波 & 劉偉.(2016).江蘇泰州明代劉鑑家族墓發掘簡報 The Excavation of the Tombs of Liu Jian' s Family of the Ming Dynasty in Taizhou City, Jiangsu Province.文物,(06),41-62+1. https://doi.org/10.13619/j.cnki.cn11-1532/k.2016.06.003. Fig. 11

The pants for all four of the Ming Dynasty sets is of the form of the 直腰褲 / zhi2 yao1 ku4 / straight-waist trousers, a very standard form of pants worn by both men and women throughout the Ming Dynasty. Shown above is an example from the same Liu Jian family tomb as the third skirt artifact shown, M1:31, a pair of lined cotton pants. (Refer to the Early Ming Dynasty post for more details.)

Shirt: 立領對襟短衫 / li4 ling3 dui4 jin4 duan3 shan1 / "Standing Collar Parallel Lapel Short Top"

Src: 刘林,余家栋 & 许智范.(1982).江西南城明益宣王朱翊鈏夫妇合葬墓. Cultural Relics,(08),16-28+100-101.https://doi.org/10.13619/j.cnki.cn11-1532/k.1982.08.004. The The standing collar emerged in the last half of the Ming Dynasty, a variation from the basic cross-collar. This is something that the hanfu community has been arguing about recently because... idk some people just like looking for trouble, but yeah basically it's another variation of inner-garment usually only found in the Ming Dynasty. It's not quite the same as the Qing Dynasty standing collar or mandarin collar. Standing collars or vertical collars can also come in crossed or parallel lapel versions; the parallel lapel version is more commonly seen in innerwear. Our design has a red rayon body with a quiver-sleeve shape and bead buttons down the front. The inside of the collar is lined with teal, so it can be worn flipped down to expose the color if you want.

Coat: 圓領大襟補服 / yuan2 ling3 da4 jin4 bu3 fu2 / "Round Collar Overlapping Lapel Badge Robe"

Src: 盐池冯记圈明墓, 宁夏文物考古研究所, 科学出版社, 2010, ISBN9787030289148, 彩版68

The round collar top or robe has evolved all the way from Tang to Ming. Women's round-collar robes typically don't have 擺 / bai3 or protruding flaps on each side. These are usually considered slightly more formal outerwear garments, with the buzi we talked about earlier on the front and back. Reflecting the discussion on the social phenomenon of the mid-late Ming Dynasty from earlier, the design for the buzi here is of a five-clawed 龍 / long2 dragon, which would historically be reserved for the emperor and only the emperor—this would be a unique restriction case that would almost never be violated. We are, however, in the present day where we can wear whatever we want, so I figured I'd basically max out the blasphemy to represent this phenomenon. The style of the buzi is also very much modernized and not meant to mimic a Ming or Qing style buzi, it's just a continuation of the white dragon theme from Journey to the West.

Other Styling

Makeup was still mostly similar, but we start to see the lip shape getting even thinner. The eyebrows also start to flatten out to almost a straight line rather than the arched look from previous time periods.

Hair continued on with the structure of the 三綹頭 / san1 liu3 tou2 / three-strand hairstyle. The mingfu portraits would've had a different kind of hairstyle mandated by, once again, fashion restrictions for official's wives, but for this project we went with another 三綹頭 variation, this time with a simpler doubled-up swoop style in the back.

Accessories

Hair accessories were once again 纏花 / chan2 hua1 / “wrapped silk” flower hair pins sponsored by the Forbidden Boutique (ig: @/forbidden_boutique), a small business selling handmade traditional jewelry and hair accessories based in LA. This traditional technique is estimated to have originated in the Ming Dynasty and involves wrapping silk threads around paper petal forms and wire to create flowers. We used two flower clips for this one, purple and light pink.

Earrings: Sooooooooo full disclosure there were originally gonna be earrings for this set but I Straight Up Forgot To Put Them On and only noticed when we got to the rotating shots, so like. Too late. Uh, here's a photo of them anyway, the pair on the right. These were also laser-cut and based on a carved jade artifact. I spent like several hours sanding the edges to make them look nice and then forgot to use them at all ;-;

Sources

I find this a pivotal time period for the Ming Dynasty so apart from the main spreadsheet I'm gonna point out a few sources that I think are especially good here.

Superfluous things: material culture and social status in early modern China by Craig Clunas, slightly older but extremely good discussion on material culture in the Ming Dynasty

Wearing the hat of loyalty: imperial power and dress reform in Ming Dynasty China by Buyun Chen

Dressing the state, dressing the society: Ritual, morality, and conspicuous consumption in Ming dynasty China by Yuan Zujie

Historical text: 大明會典, Wanli Era, 61st section

Historical text: 明史, 43rd section, translated

Background

History

We’re heading into the Middle Ming territory now. Technically “Middle” includes all of the time between the establishment of the empire and the decline of the empire. Where the “establishment period” ends is iffy, but the decline is generally known to have started during the Wanli era.

I’ve split Middle Ming into two sections, mid-early and mid-late. However, while I’ve drawn my timeline this way, the transition between mid-early and mid-late is probably the murkiest line out of all of them, and the designs for both periods skew significantly later within their allotted years. This is because a lot of interesting stuff related to fashion happened in the mid-late Ming.

A more accurate phrasing would be “early mid-late Ming” and “later mid-late Ming,” but that’s a massive mouthful, so like. Just work with me here ;-;

This is a very rough split. I chose to do it this way for a couple reasons: first, because there were two main varieties of mamianqun that hadn’t been represented yet in the project, and second, because certain types of sources lend themselves sliiiightly better to one end of middle Ming than the other; for example, I found a ton of portraits of women specifically from mid-late Ming, but there were lots of burial sites from both mid-early and mid-late Ming, so in order to represent both I placed inspiration emphasis more heavily on portraits for mid-late and more heavily on artifacts for mid-early. 

The Commercialization of Silk

Something very interesting began happening to textiles in the Ming Dynasty, which I think is extremely relevant to the situation of the world today: commercialization. I want to be careful here, because we are today all victims of capitalism and thus are very ready to condemn it, and it certainly is screwing most everyone over (and it would eventually screw the Ming Dynasty over too). But to its credit, industrialization drove the development of technology and efficiency up at a terrifying pace, something that would not have happened if not for the concept of greed. Whether or not that’s a worthwhile exchange I will leave up to you to decide.

I suck at economics, so take this with a grain of salt, but to my understanding the setup for this shift goes even further back to the success of the Song Dynasty, then the Yuan Dynasty, and then finally the Ming. A lot of different factors including the industrialization of textile weaving, the introduction of cotton, and the rise of conspicuous consumption contribute to this, but the gist of it is that People Wanted More Stuff.

Src: 大明衣冠——泰州明墓出土服饰专题展, 泰州市博物館 Taizhou City Museum (permanent exhibit)

How do we make more? One method is technology—make better devices that speed up the tasks necessary for production. For example, the invention of the 改機 / gai3 ji1 / "changed loom" in the Hongzhi era (1488–1505CE) by 林洪 / lin2 hong2 / Lin Hong, a type of double heddle/double treadle loom, allowed weavers to more efficiently weave complex fabrics including cloud brocade.

But another very very big one is division of labor. Where silkworm cultivation, harvesting, spinning, dyeing, and weaving might have originally all been done under one roof by the rural women within their households, now there are factories and workshops located in big cities dedicated JUST to weaving, and families that might focus JUST on silkworm cultivation and raw materials. This speeds up the process significantly. It also meant that the people in charge of weaving might have more time to get really really good at weaving, and even figure out some ways to weave more and more complicated things, just like any of the industrial revolutions in the west.

Francesca Bay has a really good paper on the development of the textile industry in Imperial China. She’s looking at it from a feminist perspective, focused on the shifting role of women; it’s a really good paper that’s not too hard/dense to read and I’d check it out if you have time. In a nutshell, though, between Song and Qing, textile production shifted from its traditional almost “agricultural” form that could be contained within the household to a full-blown industry—with division of labor, more government oversight, etc.

This moved factors of textile production out of people’s households and into urban workshops, almost like factories. Bay’s paper focuses on how this shift took agency away from women, which I find deeply and viscerally sad. I almost wonder if part of the later rise in conspicuous consumption, especially around women, was a reaction to this loss, like an alternative way to exert power over themselves through their way of dress. From a purely practical perspective though, this did lead to some advancements in textile production that weren’t accessible before (more on that later).

I will continue to elaborate on this in the next post for mid-late Ming, since a LOT of stuff happens then; this is just a little foreshadowing for what’s coming next. For now all that’s happening is that rich people are ignoring laws and wearing whatever they want as long as they can afford it (as rich people do), and things are getting more and more fancy.

Zhuanghua Cloud Brocade

Src: 纹样探微与墓主推测—由长辛店618厂明墓引发的思考 Exploration of Patterns and Inference of Tomb Owner: Thoughts on the Ming Tomb Located at Factory #618 in Changxindian, by 周少华 Zhou Shaohua, fig 43, 44 (detail of zhuanghua skirt artifact)

Perhaps one of China’s greatest achievements in textile technology was the development of 妝花 / zhuang1 hua1 / "Zhuanghua" brocade. It's a sub-technique of Nanjing cloud brocade, often considered its most difficult and most representative form. The technique most likely took shape during the Ming Dynasty, supplanting the 織錦 / zhi1 jin3 / Zhijin brocade technique that had previously been the most popular during the Yuan Dynasty.

The earliest known record of the term zhuanghua appearing was in the 天水冰山錄, a record that features Capulets-vs-Montague levels of family beef and art forgery between the Wang and Yan families, but that's not super relevant—all you gotta know is that there's a record of a guy called 嚴嵩/ yan2 song1 / Yan Song (quite a character if you look him up) from whom 14,000 bolts of fabric, including zhuanghua brocade, were confiscated.

The record was dated to the Jiajing era, but I think that if the record was using the phrase zhuanghua without any further explanation, it stands to reason that the term had to be common knowledge by then, so the technique had to have been around for long enough to a) get a name of its own and b) circulate far enough for that name to become common knowledge. So I think it’s fairly likely that the technique had been around for a while before that record. Plus this is just the record we have access too; there could very well have been other records mentioning zhuanghua brocade that were lost or even just not as well-known. Just for the purposes of this design project, which does require some hand-waving and simplification, I’m tentatively going to be attributing the invention of zhuanghua to mid-early Ming.

These days most mamianqun that you see labeled as zhuanghua mamianqun are really imitation zhuanghua mamianqun, because the zhuanghua technique can only be done by hand; there are currently no technologies that can automate this specific process. As a result, zhuanghua cloud brocade is very very expensive, usually only used sparingly for small applications like accessories, book covers, etc. instead of large clothing items that require several meters of the stuff. There are a lot of people who try to pass off machine-woven stuff as zhuanghua brocade especially online though, so like, rule of thumb, if you cannot feel your soul leaving your body as you gaze upon the price tag it's probably not authentic. Do not underestimate people's willingness to just straight up Lie.

The Skirt: Research & Evidence

Artifacts

My primary source for this set is from 無錫七房橋錢樟夫婦墓 / wu2 xi1 qi1 fang2 qiao2 qian2 zhang1 fu1 fu4 mu4 / "Qianzhang Couple mausoleum in Qifangqiao, Wuxi city." It's the burial site of Qianzhang, 華貞/hua2 zhen1/Huazhen, his wife, also located in the Taihu area in Wuxi city in the village Qifangqiao (literally seven-house bridge), a village whose name comes from the seven-courtyard Qian family mansion. Qianzhang was a member of the Qian family who lived from 1486 to 1505CE. Numerous well-preserved clothing artifacts were found belonging to his wife Huazhen, who married him when she was 20 years old.

A full report of this tomb can be found in the book 無錫前房橋明代錢氏家族墓 / wu2 xi1 qian2 fang2 ming2 dai4 qian2 shi4 jia1 zu2 mu4 / Wuxi Qianfangqiao Ming Dynasty Qian Family Mausoleum, where it's listed under M1. Excavated in 2012, the tomb had two main skirts that the 百褶馬面 / bai3 zhe2 ma3 mian4 / hundred-pleat mamianqun are based on.

M1:S9 - 四季花鳥紋織金妝花緞襴裙 / si4 ji4 hua1 niao3 wen2 zhi1 jin1 zhuang1 hua1 duan4 lan2 qun2 / Four Season Flowers and Birds Patterned Gold-Woven Zhuanghua Satin Skirt

Src: 彩版87/Photoset 87 (1 and 2), 四季花鳥紋織金妝花緞襴裙 (M1:S9), 無錫前房橋明代錢氏家族墓地, 無錫市文物保護中心 Wuxi City Artifact Conservation Center, 無錫市鍚山區文化體育和旅遊句 Wuxi City Yangshan Area Culture & Travel Department

The first is S9, the 四季花鳥紋織金妝花緞襴裙. This is the main supporting reference. The first thing you might notice is that it has an extremely strong curvature around the waistband in the drawing. This is partially exaggerated to better show the skirt structure, but from the photos it does seem fairly clear that the skirt is constructed with trapezoidal pleats, with the bottom wider than the top, resulting in a curved waistband. The curvature is also maintained in the technical line drawing, below.

Src: 圖六 Figure 6, 裙形制圖, M1:9, pg 204, 無錫前房橋明代錢氏家族墓地, 無錫市文物保護中心 Wuxi City Artifact Conservation Center, 無錫市鍚山區文化體育和旅遊句 Wuxi City Yangshan Area Culture & Travel Department

From far away it looks very similar to a normal pleated skirt, but it is indeed made up of two panels in the same way as the mamianqun and has four skirt 'doors,' unpleated areas, with two of them overlapping. Said doors are much narrower to make room for all those tiny pleats—the biggest is 24cm, with some of the others smaller—but they're definitely there. According to the report, each of the two panels are made up of four loom-widths of fabric, each about 60cm, for a total of eight widths of fabric.

There is also a reversal in the pleat direction halfway through each pleated section as expected of mamianqun, it's just harder to see because the pleats are so small/there are so many of them. Each side has 18-15 pairs of pleats (uneven, the sections closer to the middle skirt doors have more pleats than the other side). The skirt is 93.5cm long with a 139cm long waistband and a 120x2cm long waist ribbon on one side (other side not specified).

Src: 彩版87/Photoset 87 (3), 四季花鳥紋織金妝花緞襴裙 (M1:S9), 無錫前房橋明代錢氏家族墓地, 無錫市文物保護中心 Wuxi City Artifact Conservation Center, 無錫市鍚山區文化體育和旅遊句 Wuxi City Yangshan Area Culture & Travel Department

The fabric for this skirt is zhuanghua cloud brocade with multicolored gold thread. It has a base pattern of birds & flowers, with what's generally organized into three horizontal bands: the first has lions, the second is an yingluo beaded pattern, and the third at the bottom has leaping stags.

M1:S19 - 四合如意雲紋緞錦裙 / si4 he2 ru2 yi4 yun2 wen2 duan4 jin3 qun2 / Four-Sided Ruyi Cloud Patterned Satin Brocade Skirt

Src: 彩版94/Photoset 94 (1 and 2), 四合如意雲紋緞錦裙 (M1:S19), 無錫前房橋明代錢氏家族墓地, 無錫市文物保護中心 Wuxi City Artifact Conservation Center, 無錫市鍚山區文化體育和旅遊句 Wuxi City Yangshan Area Culture & Travel Department

S19 is a skirt with similar construction but made of a simpler brocade fabric with the same pattern all-over. Each of the skirt panels on this one are made of three widths (also 60cm) of fabric, for a total of six widths of fabric. This skirt is lined, with a layer of plain silk and silk wadding on the inside.

Src: 圖六 Figure 6, 裙形制圖, M1:[sic]20, pg 204, 無錫前房橋明代錢氏家族墓地, 無錫市文物保護中心 Wuxi City Artifact Conservation Center, 無錫市鍚山區文化體育和旅遊句 Wuxi City Yangshan Area Culture & Travel Department

The construction of this skirt is very similar, with the same two-panel structure and 15-18 pairs of mirrored pleats. The largest skirt door is 22cm wide, the full skirt length is 92cm, the waist length is 118cm, and the labeled skirt ribbon is 118x2cm.

The pattern is a diamond-like ruyi pattern with clouds on plainer brocade. This skirt doesn't use zhuanghua techniques but is still a good reference for the 百褶 / bai3 zhe2 / 'hundred-pleat' mamianqun structure.

妝花織金藍緞裙 / zhuang1 hua1 zhi1 jin1 lan2 duan4 qun2 / Zhuanghua Gold-Woven Blue Satin Skirt

Another skirt artifact reference I used was the 妝花織金藍緞裙 from 孔府舊藏 / kong3 fu2 jiu4 zang4, the private collection of the Kong family mansion in Shandong. Because it was part of a private collection and not excavated, it's in extremely good condition and still preserves its original deep blue color.

L: Splendour of Skirts: The Enduring Appeal and Contemporary Resonance of the Mamianqun, Tsinghua University Art museum (Sept 2025–Mar 29 [it's still there!]) // R: It's the back side of the skirt, but I lost the source :(((( but I remember I think it was a scan of a book and it had 孔府舊藏服飾 somewhere on it, but the name is too general and I can't find it anymore

This skirt isn't dated to any particular part of the Ming Dynasty, but construction and pattern-wise it looks very similar to the other two skirt references from the Qianzhang burial site: it similarly has a main base pattern of winding flowers taking up the majority of the top half of the skirt, then three (ish) bands of different patterns going across the bottom half. The first band is of flying phoenixes, the second is a thin one with some flowers, and the bottom-most band is a similar yingluo beading pattern. The waistband is similarly made of a different plainer fabric than the rest of the skirt.

Construction-wise, the skirt is 88cm in length, slightly shorter than the other two artifacts, with a 104cm long waistband. The pleats also appear to be trapezoidal from the curvature of the waist. You can see at least six seams from the backside/inside of the skirt (theres a photo but im not posting it because idk the source), though there might be more hidden in the pleats/behind one of the interior skirt doors, so we can safely say that each panel was made of at least three widths of fabric. Each panel seems to have 5-6 pairs of pleats in it (it's a little hard to tell since they're no longer prssed very crisply and the fabric is patterned), so much fewer than the Qianzhang tomb artifacts.

Design

Skirt

The Mid-Early Ming skirt is the fanciest out of all six designs. It can be described as a 滿地金百褶馬面裙 / man3 di4 jin1 ma3 mian4 qun2 / gold-ground hundred-pleat mamianqun (with some caveats). It uses six meters of fabric. There are ten trapezoidal pleats on each side and a narrow skirt door.

滿地金 means gold-grounded. Usually 'ground' technically refers to the base/background color of a fabric that designs are woven now. I would only tentatively call this skirt gold-grounded, because the background color for many of the parts is black instead of gold. However, if you take a closer look at the blue skirt from the Kong family mansion, which is sort of the OG 滿地金 skirt, you'll see that most of the fabric also has blue, not gold, as the background color—rather I think the 'gold-grounded' term is referring to how there's gold all over the skirt, rather than only in select areas, which is in line with my fabric design.

I'll talk more about the fabric design in a separate fabric post, but I referenced both the S9 artifact from the Qianzhang tomb site and the blue skirt from the Kong family masion for this. Both skirts have a main base pattern on the top half of the skirt, with three main 'bands' of patterns going across the bottom half of the skirt, with some borders between them. The S9 artifact's background base pattern also returns at a lower location between the second and third pattern bands; my fabric design has the main pattern return between the first and second pattern bands. There are also some repeated 'divider' bands separating the pattern bands, similar to the Kong family mansion artifact's red bands.

The term "hundred-pleat" can be a bit confusing because by itself "hundred pleat" also refers to normal pleated skirts that just have straight knife pleats all the way around. When put in front of mamianqun, though, "hundred-pleat" refers to a specific category of mamianqun that usually have at least 10-12 pairs of pleats on each side, resulting in a noticeably narrower skirt door width. "Hundred" is just an exaggeration to refer to "many."

Usually in order to make room for the pleats, hundred-pleat mamianqun are always made with four widths of fabric, each between 120-180cm wide (most mamianqun are made with either three or four widths of fabric). The S9 Qianzhang tomb artifact used four 60cm widths of fabric per panel, for a totsal of 4*60*2 = 480cm of fabric. The electric loom that our fabric was woven on has a width of 150cm, so each skirt uses 150*4 = 600cm of fabric, but if the loom width had been closer to 120cm, then it would have been 120*4 = 480cm of fabric as well. I wanted to exaggerate the whole age of materialism that started to rise in middle Ming, so I went with the max amount of skirt material (more than 600cm especially with brocaded fabrics tends to get too heavy and uncomfortable).

Other Outfit Pieces

Cami/underlayer: 主腰 / zhu3 yao1 / "Zhuyao Bodice"

Src: 大明衣冠——泰州明墓出土服饰专题展, 泰州市博物館 Taizhou City Museum (permanent exhibit)

The innermost layer for all four of the Ming Dynasty sets is a 主腰 / zhu3 yao1. Bearing some resemblance to western bodices, it's a slightly more sophisticated front-opening torso garment with straps tied over the shoulder and a line of buttons down the front. Shown above is an example from the tomb of 蔡善慧 / cai4 shan4 hui4 / Cai Shanhui, a female war general who died in 1461CE (sorry for the shitty quality public access picture, I have better ones but I'm not supposed to share them hhh). It has a high back with wide straps and buttons/ties down the front. (Refer to the Early Ming Dynasty post for more details.)

Pants: 直腰褲 / zhi2 yao1 ku4 / "Straight-Waist Trousers"

Src: 彩版92/Photoset 92 (4), 棉布褲(M1:S17), 無錫前房橋明代錢氏家族墓地, 無錫市文物保護中心 Wuxi City Artifact Conservation Center, 無錫市鍚山區文化體育和旅遊句 Wuxi City Yangshan Area Culture & Travel Department

The pants for all four of the Ming Dynasty sets is of the form of the 直腰褲 / zhi2 yao1 ku4 / straight-waist trousers, a very standard form of pants worn by both men and women throughout the Ming Dynasty. Shown above is an example from the same Qian family tomb as the skirt was based off of, artifact S17, a pair of cotton pants. (Refer to the Early Ming Dynasty post for more details.)

Shirt: 交短衫 / jiao1 ling3 duan3 shan1 / "Crossed-Collar Short Top"

Src: 我市两个保护修复项目通过结项验收: 珍贵文物历时五载获“重生”, 鄂州政府网 E'Zhou Government Online, 2023

The cross-collared shirt is a classic—above is an example from a garment restoration report. Ming Dynasty cross collars often have asymmetric lapels and a slight curve to the outer lapel to better contour to the shape of the body. A common sleeve shape for cross-collared shirts are 琵琶袖 / pi2 pa2 xiu4 / Pipa sleeves, an iconic sleeve shape that has a wide belly that narrows up to the wrist. Some also have a contrasting collar detail called a 護領 / hu4 ling3 / collar protector detail, sometimes removable (ours isn't), meant to strengthen/protect the area usually drawn tight around the neck since it's more easily dirtied. Our design has a teal rayon body with red ties, sleeve cuffs, and collar protector.

Coat: 方領披襖 / fang1 ling3 pi1 ao3 / "Square Collar Half-Sleeve Coat"

L: 明鑲金襟素絹短袖夾衫, 常州市武進區博物館 Changzhou City Wujin Area Museum // R: 明代素綾織金龍紋短袖夾衫, 常州市武進區博物館 Changzhou City Wujin Area Museum

The square collar is a unique shape that only emerged during the Ming Dynasty. Square collars almost always have parallel lapels, buttoned in the front. This example is from the tomb of 王洛 / wang2 luo4 / Wang Luo. Since this is a women's garment it's more likely that it belonged to his wife, with whom he was buried, whose surname was 盛 Sheng, and lived from 1459–1540CE. Two very similar square-collar garments were unearthed from this site; both are lined, have short flared sleeves, a separate trim on the collar & lapel, buttons on the top half of the lapel, and then a tie halfway down the top. Ours is a dark inky rayon-polyester blend lined with a pale teal polyester-cotton-silk blend, with rayon trim details and functional metal 子母扣 / zi3 mu3 kou4 / mother-child buttons + a tie at the middle (there are three pairs on ours instead of the two on the artifact; the lapel was prone to gaping when we only had two pairs so we added another one).

Other Styling

Makeup was largely similar to Early Ming, with the lip shape getting slightly thinner and the eyebrows slightly curved. Pearl ornamentation was still a thing but we took it off for this look just for styling purposes.

Hair began to take on the structure of the 三綹頭 / san1 liu3 tou2 / three-strand hairstyle, which got really popular a bit ago as its own thing but can be seen more as sort of a base structure that many hairstyles kind of grow out of. The key parts are the swoop in the back, called a 燕尾 / yan4 wei3 / swallow's tail (there are a few different variations to this, the one we did is a flatter double swallowtail but there are also ones that only have one loop and stand up more), the tuft at the front that sort of looks like the y2k hair bump, and the parts on the side that sort of curve back around the temples. All of these parts join at the top of the head and then you can do whatever you want with the rest. It's a very Ming Dynasty structure with a lot of variations to it.

Accessories

Hair accessories were once again 纏花 / chan2 hua1 / “wrapped silk” flower hair pins sponsored by the Forbidden Boutique (ig: @/forbidden_boutique), a small business selling handmade traditional jewelry and hair accessories based in LA. This traditional technique is estimated to have originated in the Ming Dynasty and involves wrapping silk threads around paper petal forms and wire to create flowers. The one shown is actually a brooch that I managed to work into the hair.

Src: 金玉喜相逢耳坠, 北京定陵出土, 珠宝设计素材-中国古代金银首饰探源-明代, , HCD国际艺术教育

Earrings: I had fun with this one—these earrings are based on the pair shown above. These are from 定陵墓/ding4 ling2 mu4 in Beijing; they're technically late Ming but there have been similar carved-jade character earrings unearthed from various earlier sites before, I just used these ones because I liked how they looked + I think they went pretty well with the set. The artifact is a stylized version of the character 喜 / xi3 / 'happiness,' with a four-winged moth at the bottom (look at its cute little antennae!), and some red gemstones embedded.

Laser cut pieces + wrapped earrings. I changed out the findings in the end to small circular hoops for pierced ears so we could put them on Tiona.

I laser-cut my version out of 1/8" thick white cast acrylic after recreating the shape by drawing it out digitally + tracing the bitmap with Inkscape to get vector outline. It took a second to get the settings right—I wanted the engraved details to be at a certain depth so that they were visible but subtle, and because the details were so small it was easy for the kerning on the laser cutter to melt through some parts of the character. I cut like 4-5 pairs before I was satisfied with the look. I added extra holes so that I could use 28-gauge brass jewelry wire to wrap red glass beads in the appropriate places.

Fun fact about the prop that Tiona's holding for this set—it's a ruyi scepter carved out of wood from 惜物国风, carved out of African Padauk, a species of tree from central/west African with a unique naturally red coloration. It has a subtle scent to it and it's one of my favorite hanfu props that I own. I got it last year.