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Background

History

Entering into the Ming Dynasty I figured I should give some context on how this will be split up. The Ming Dynasty lasted for nearly three centuries (depending on whether or not you count Southern Ming), and lots of mamianqun development—especially as relevant to today’s Hanfu movement—happened here. Four of the six design versions for this series are dedicated to the Ming Dynasty.

This is a helpful graphic of the Ming Dynasty timeline. We usually refer to smaller time periods within a dynasty by the era name of the emperor at the time, e.g. the xth year of xxx’s reign.

Src: Wikipedia/Wikimedia commons, List of Emperors of the Ming Dynasty, Timeline

The rules for where the cutoffs for early/mid/late Ming aren't super well-established, so that part is often up to audience discretion. For many historical applications, it's often not as simple as just splitting the dynasty into four chronologically equal sections: the density of important events might be different at different points, and the development of the whole time period may not scale linearly with time. Often historians will take into account the actual events and economic activity at different points in time when splitting up the eras.

For the Ming Dynasty, for example, usually people split it up into three or four big chunks: early Ming or beginning Ming is when the dynasty was first being established, middle Ming when it's already been established but has changes over time, and then late Ming when the dynasty starts to decline. Middle Ming is longer than the other two so that sometimes gets chopped in half.

There are also different ways to name a set of 4 time periods—I used 初/中前/中後/晚 because these are very face-value names easily read by partially-literate people in mandarin, literally "beginning/middle front/middle back/late," but sometimes the mid-early period can be referred to as 盛 / sheng4 / "flourishing" (this is the case with the Tang Dynasty) while the mid-late is just 中, or sometimes the mid-late period will be called 晚 and the late period called 末 / mo4 / "ending," in which case the mid-early period would just be 中.

For this project I’ve divided it up roughly like this. You'll notice that the each of the time periods are not necessarily the same length as the others. You’ll also notice that the four zones overlap—this is on purpose, to hedge the time zone a little bit.

Src: Wikipedia/Wikimedia commons, List of Emperors of the Ming Dynasty, Timeline, annotated

明初 Early: Hongwu (1368CE) – Jingtai (1405CE) 明中前 Mid-Early: Xuande (1425CE) – Hongzhi (1505CE) 明中後 Mid-Late: Chenghua (1464CE) – mid-Wanli (~1600CE) 晚明 Late: Wanli (1572CE) – Chongzhen (1644CE)

Generally early Ming irrefutably refers to the first two substantial reigns, that of the 洪武 / hong2 wu3 / "vastly martial" emperor and the 永樂 /yong3 le4 / "eternal joy" emperor (sorry Jianwen emperor but you were only there for like four years), as in probably everyone would agree that these two periods belong to early Ming. Technically 明初 is closer in sentiment to "beginning Ming," but “early” seems more standard for referring to historical periods in English. The rest of the period is kinda blurry in terms of where it ends, so I tried to stick to the earliest sources as references for this design.

The Skirt: Research & Evidence

Artifacts

My primary source for this set is from 無錫錢達周氏墓 / wu2 xi1 qian2 da2 zhou1 shi4 mu4 / "Qianda Zhoushi mausoleum in Wuxi city." This site is dated back to the Yongle period, 1402–1424CE. There's a report (太湖流域出土的明代早期女性服饰 / tai4 hu2 liu2 yu4 chu1 tu3 de0 ming2 dai4 zao3 qi2 nv3 xing4 fu2 shi4 / "Early Ming Dynasty Women's Clothing Unearthed from the Taihu River Basin") specifically focused on early Ming women’s clothing written about these pieces by 趙豐 / zhao4 feng1 / Zhao Feng. There are a few places where you can find this article online, but you have to poke around to find a stable one that the images will load for; the one I linked is Sina news and it works right now but it might not later.

Zhao Feng is an extremely accomplished textile researcher & professor at China Silk Museum and Zhejiang Sci-Tech University; his work pops up everywhere in Hanfu research and I highly recommend any work with his name on it.

There were a number of clothing artifacts unearthed from this site, but the most complete ones were this three-piece set including a skirt, a long-sleeved inner top, and a short-sleeved outer top. You can find the whole set in China Silk Museum's collection database.

Src: 趙豐, 湖流域出土的明代早期女性服饰 "Early Ming Dynasty Women's Clothing Unearthed from the Taihu River Basin"

Focusing on the skirt, a sketch from the report clearly shows the same two-panel construction, with each panel being made of 3 full-widths of fabric + 1 half-width. Each panel has 8 total pleats (aka 4 pairs), which you can see represented by the zigzag lines in the diagram. At the center (four pleats in), you can see that the direction of the pleats reverses, resulting in two mirrored sets of pleats that point towards each other.

Src: 趙豐, 湖流域出土的明代早期女性服饰 "Early Ming Dynasty Women's Clothing Unearthed from the Taihu River Basin"

Below is a photo from the China Silk Museum's entry for the skirt itself. I've put it next to an annotated version that I made to help you see the pleats and construction better. At first glance it may look like a regular pleated skirt. It can be hard to tell what's a wrinkle from being stored for so long and what's an actual pleat line—the key is to look at where the pleats are sewn down at the waistband, as well as how they lay at the hemline.

The flat skirt doors are colored in green, and the outside pleat lines are outlined in red and blue: red is the pleats pointing (to the viewer's, aka your) right, and blue is the pleats pointing left. You'll see that the central red and blue pleat lines on each side meet in a ^ shape where they reverse directions. This would be the point where either side of your hips would be.

Src: 素紗裙, China Silk Museum

So you see this is very clearly a mamianqun. You may also be able to see from these photos that this mamianqun has trapezoidal folds: while it's not very pronounced, the waistband curves up on either side because the pleats are slanted so that the bottom is wider than the top, resulting in a 'sunburst' pleat pattern. In modern hanfu-making terms this would probably be classified as 微梯形 / wei1 ti1 xing2 / slight trapezoidal shape: the pleats lean out a little bit, but not by much. The display, too, tacks the skirt's pleats down to show the trapezoidal shape of the skirt. This way you get a flared-out silhouette when you put it on.

You can compare this to earlier mamianqun from the Yuan Dynasty post, which have straight knife pleats: the straight pleats allow the waistband to lay flat, rather than being curved.

According to the report, each skirt door is 17cm wide. The skirt head is 129cm wide, and the hem is 27+56+56+56+27.5+56+56+54.5= 389cm wide.

Design

Skirt

The design for the early Ming version of 龍馬附圖 Metamorphosis is a slight trapezoidal-pleat 馬面裙 with a black body. This skirt uses 6 meters of fabric and has 5 pairs of pleats on each side. That's one more pair of pleats than the Zhoushimu artifact, but I wanted to show a level of progression from the Yuan Dynasty design, so both of them have an extra pair of pleats added.

The black body material is a custom-woven jacquard polyester. Unfortunately the pattern is kind of hard to see in photos because it's a black fabric, but it's a combination of three images: (1) the Cloud9 stamp logo, (2) a section of flower filigree, and (3) a symbol I illustrated based on a representation of the 洛書 / luo4 shu1 / "fallen document." They're arranged in a diagonal checkerboarded pattern with the first two images alternating.

Since all the mamianqun fabrics are versions of each other (and also I keep running out of image limits) I've decided to save the lore behind the fabric design for its own post (and there is a LOT of lore). I'll go through every single designed/illustrated element in that post, since a lot of them are repeated throughout all the skirt fabrics, but these are the three elements used in the solid black fabric.

Other Outfit Pieces

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

L: Wikimedia Commons, 墮胎產亡嚴寒大暑孤魂眾.jpg, Buddhist painting of Ming Dynasty. Death from miscarriage, severe cold and great heat, Baoning Temple, Ming Dynasty.

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. Along with depictions in paintings, several Zhuyao artifacts have been found in the past. Above is part of a Ming Dynasty painting from Baoning Temple dated to have been made during the Tianshun era between 1457 and 1463 (陳玉女, 《成大歷史學報》第三十一號, p73, "寶寧寺的水陸畫推測是天順年間"). The woman in red is wearing a zhuyao that's visible inside her long-sleeved shirt. Ours is made of teal jacquard viscose and lined with a robin's egg silk-cotton-poly mix, with a column of red bead buttons.

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

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. Cut extremely wide, it's held in place with a fabric belt through three belt loops distributed along the waistband and can be folded to accommodate an extremely wide range of waist sizes while not being elastic at all. Ours is made of red jacquard viscose with a matching belt.

Shirt: 對穿交短衫 / dui4 chuan1 jiao1 duan3 shan1 / "Parallel-Worn-Crossed Short Top"

Src: 卍字田格纹绮长袖夹衣, China Silk Museum

Based on this artifact from the aforementioned Zhoushi mausoleum, the inner shirt is a long-sleeved top constructed with a parallel collar. Duichuanjiao, or "parallel-worn-crossed," means that the garment can be worn crossed over or open like a normal parallel-collar top. Often designs with this intent will have ties, s slight slope to the collar angle, or most importantly an especially wide bust to facilitate this. The result is a crossed collar that drapes down the body a little differently from a garment that's constructed in a crossed way. This artifact has a contrasting collar going halfway down the body as well as sleeve cuffs, which we reflected in our design, which has a teal rayon body and red details.

Coat: 對穿交披襖 / dui4 chuan1 jiao1 pi1 ao3 / "Parallel-Worn-Crossed Half-Sleeve Coat"

TL: 绢短袖衫&绮长袖衫&绢裙, China Silk Museum // TR: Annotated ver of prev, red highlighting (wearer's) right collar and green highlighting left collar piece // BR: 绣花卉纹缘素罗短袖夹衣, China Silk Museum

The outer layer for this set is very similar to the inner with some differences: its sleeve length is shorter and it's lined, two features indicating that it's a 披襖 / pi1 ao3 / coat; another more descriptive way to refer to these is 半袖短襖 / ban4 xiu4 duan3 ao3 / half-sleeve short lined top. The artifact shown above is also a part of the Zhoushi outfit. Two clues tell us that it's meant to be worn crossed: first, the collar piece is uneven; one side is longer than the other, because as you can see in the bottom right picture, once it's crossed over, the missing part on the (wearer's) left collar gets covered. Second, there's a tie on the outside of the (wearer's) left armpit, which must be meant to connect to the tie in the center. Notice that this artifact is worn right-over-left as opposed to the traditional left-over-right: this is a hint of residual Mongolian influence left over from the Yuan Dynasty, still abundant during Early Ming. Because most hanfu enthusiasts are used to crossing things left-over-right, though, our design still has its ties placed in the traditional locations rather than following the artifact's design.

Other Styling

L: Photography by Lizi Studio // R: Wikimedia Commons, 仁孝文皇后徐氏（明太宗（成祖））.jpg, National Palace Museum (Taipei)

Makeup didn't move much here either, but there are a few key points. First, the pearl ornamentation on the face fell slightly out of popularity compared to the Song Dynasty, where you could see they were just... slapping them on everywhere. Pearls were still popular, just not directly on the face. Brows were fairly evenly curved, the lip shape fairly natural (by hanfu standards anyway). This did not stop me from squinting over Yulan's shoulder while she was doing the lip makeup and saying "hmm, I think you can go even smaller actually" like fifty times + being a general pest.

Hair maintained the middle part from the previous dynasty to now. Most Ming Dynasty hairstyles have hair pulled away from the face, leaving the temples clear, and a loop of hair hanging down at the neck—there are many different ways to make this loop; for this look Lizi secured it very simply with red string.

Accessories

Hair accessories were fairly minimalistic, only used in a few places as delicate ornamentation. The ones used here are handmade 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 (you can find them at a lot of craft fairs in that area!). 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.

Random aside:

Not a lot of people know this, but chanhua is also known by another name: 春仔花—spring flowers. This is a term originating in the Minnan dialect (a good clue is that it uses the character 仔 instead of 子, which is much more common in southern min). Its pronunciation is written as tshun-á-hue in peh-oe-ji, but since nobody knows how to read peh-oe-ji these days I think it's closest to cun3 a0 hui1 in pinyin (don't come after me, I know the tones and the exact vowel/consonant sounds aren't the same this is just my best approximation because most people on here will be more familiar with pinyin).

Also called bride-flowers, within this context they were traditionally associated with blessings, weddings, and new beginnings—hence the spring name. In the 1800's the southern craft of spring flowers were also brought to Taiwan by immigrants crossing over the strait, where artisans continued to craft them. While certain styles of chanhua has become popular in the hanfu community as accessories, I also encourage you to look up some of the more traditional framed works, dioramas, entire scenes made out of spring flowers. The style is a little different from the chanhua popular with hanfu, but the number of things they manage to depict with this craft is really astounding.

TR: 王玺家族墓 | 金葫芦耳坠（一对）, 四川省文物考古研究院文物圖片庫

Earrings: The hulu is back! Seriously, people went crazy for the gourd shape for a very long time. Above top right pic is a gold gourd earring in Sichuan Archaeology's online database that's dated to the 8th year of the Tianshun Era, 1464CE.

I made a second version of hulu earrings, also with some beads I had lying around: a larger pearl at the bottom and a smaller imitation-jade (it's probably glass or something) bead at the top. I put a small 26 gauge wire coil at the top to imitate the thinner mouth of the gourd, and then allowed it to spiral down over the two beads to meet the bottom of the gourd, just to bring everything together. I disguised the end of the head pin and where the wire ended up with a spacer.

Initially I had these on normal clip-on findings (top left pic), but I didn't love the way that looked, so instead I attached these to spring-back clip-on hoops because Emily doesn't have her ears pierced. I think they look very convincing as going through her earlobe!