#xianbei

Nav: Photoshoot Duo/Esther/Tara // Background & Influences // Styling Background // Macaron Design Background // Ferghana Design Background

"Call her briar rose or smth tho bc those 12 ft long braids kept picking up thorns on the hills" - Yulan

Pt. 2 of our AAPI series: Meet Esther, our model for the Macaron set! 🍬

A born-and-raised Bay Area resident of Chinese-Mongolian heritage aptly born in the Year of the Horse, Esther works in software engineering and enjoys baking, thrifting, and bouldering in her free time. We chose Esther for this look to help represent the bridge between Mongolian / northern steppe heritage and the Central Plains influences that shaped this style of hanfu.

Our Macaron set is named after a Chinese horse pun: “馬卡龍” is the transliteration of “macaron,” but literally reads “horse-card-dragon.” Keeping with the dessert theme, we designed this set in pastel confectionary colors and styled Esther with pastel eyeshadow shades to match! 🍭

Historically, this outfit draws from Northern Dynasty dress and the legacy of the “胡服騎射” policy — “wearing Hu (non-Han) clothing and shooting from horseback.” During the Warring States period, King Wuling of Zhao promoted the adoption of cavalry-friendly clothing elements associated with non-Han horse-riding peoples of the northern steppes, many connected to the lands of present-day Mongolia and Inner Mongolia. Over time, these styles became integrated into Hanfu. The pants in the Macacron set, for example, are a hybrid of hundred-pleat skirt and lantern pants, literally “百褶燈籠褲” or hundred-pleat lantern pants. The belt is made of imitation Songjin brocade, and features a pattern of golden horses galloping through waves, humorously titled “馬上有錢” 🧧

For styling, we gave Esther dramatic 12-foot-long twin carabiner braids, a modern nod to braided hairstyles long associated with many nomadic steppe cultures for beauty, identity, and practicality on horseback. And if you catch a glimpse of her nails, they’re hand-painted press-ons featuring horse artwork from a small studio in Inner Mongolia!

For AAPI Month, we’re celebrating the many ways heritage moves: across borders, across generations, and across the stories we choose to wear. 🐎

東漢（鮮卑文化） 鎏金翼馬紋銅飾板

~ Plaque with a Winged Horse.

Period: Eastern Han dynasty (25–220), Xianbei culture

Date: 1st century

Culture: North China

Rouran Khaganate: from the end of the fourth century AD to the middle of the sixth, the Rouran succeeded the Xiongnu and Xianbei as a powerful force on the Mongolian plateau, active across the north-west plain along with the Turkic Chi-Le.

松果sir on Weibo

Reconstructed noble attire of the Xianbei people, an ancient nomadic culture from the steppes of what is now Mongolia and northern China. The Tuoba clan of the Xianbei controlled most of northern China during the Northern and Southern Dynasties period from the 4th to the 6th centuries CE, calling themselves the Northern Wei dynasty and overseeing a widespread fusion between Chinese and steppe cultures — as well as adopting Buddhism (then still mostly seen as a foreign faith associated with the Silk Road) as an official religion.

盥薇（破防版）on Xiaohongshu

HARVESTING WOOD IN SOUTHERN SIBERIA/TUVA IN THE XIONGNU-XIANBEI PERIOD

One of the great hurdles for large-scale metal production and blacksmithing in the Eurasian steppes was not the mineral deposits, manpower or furnaces, but the fuel. The smelting process requires a great deal of heat for prolonged periods, which requires a lot of charcoal, which requires a lot of wood.

With most of the Eurasian steppes rather tree sparse and comparatively few navigable rivers, this puts a difficult choice in the hands of the nomadic metallurgist seeking to supply a large project; expend great effort in the movement of raw wood (heavy and cumbersome!); carry the charcoal? (unlikely: charcoal when not in modern briquettes is a flaky substance that will disintegrate when carried over distance); or, bring your furnaces and smelters as close to the fuel resources as possible?

This last choice is what was done majority of the time by our friends in the eastern steppes; convenient, as these areas with more trees (South Siberia/Tuva, Transbaikalia, Northern Mongolia, Altai) were also areas with rich deposits of iron ore and other minerals.

This is demonstrated archaeologically, with our largest collections of furnaces being found in association with these areas even before the Xiongnu state. While that is not to say that transport of the raw materials into the steppe did not happen, for nomadic people it makes more sense to bring yourself to where the resources are (spending part of the year there, at least) rather than go to the effort to bring them out into the grassland.

In this scene you can see them doing just that; harvesting wood and in the background, preparing charcoals in pits covered in earth. Once the process is done, they will be ferried to a nearby production site for utilization.

My latest video series discusses this matter of production, furnaces and other details around nomad blacksmithing:

Part 1: Overview

Part 2: from the Xiongnu to the Türks and Uyghurs

'Thinking of the Flowering Moon' Confucian Young-ho, Yieri Dok2 Quality

“““There have always been women warriors in northern China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and even Korea,” says Christine Lee.

(...)

Because life was hard, both men and women had to participate in battle, she says. And that makes sense “if you have that kind of life on the rugged steppes where, it’s a harsh lifestyle,” Mayor says. “Everyone has to defend the tribe, hunt and take care of themselves.” She argues that “it’s a luxury of settled people that they can oppress women.

An ornament in the shape of a horse’s head with leaves. The leaves are attached in a way that would allow them to move as the wearer walked. This would have been worn by a wealthy member of the Xianbei, a semi-nomadic group of people who lived north of China between 300 and 600 CE. The Xianbei eventually conquered northern China and many of them assimilated into Chinese life, adopting Chinese names, language, and dress.