In recent years, the streets of Beijing, Xi’an, and even London or New York have occasionally looked like movie sets: young men and women stride past in sweeping silk robes, wide sleeves fluttering, sashes trailing, hair pinned with jade or gold. The garments look “ancient,” yet the wearers hold smartphones and order bubble tea. These clothes are not theatrical costumes; they are hanfu—the living, evolving dress of the Han Chinese, reborn in the 21st century. But what, precisely, is a hanfu dress? The answer is more layered than the garments themselves, entwining three millennia of technology, ritual, gender codes, philosophy, and politics. This essay unpacks the term “hanfu” by tracing its historical construction, its canonical visual grammar, its dynastic mutations, and its modern re-invention as both fashion statement and cultural symbol. I. Etymology and Basic Definition The word hanfu (漢服) is simply two Chinese characters: Han (漢) the dominant ethnic group that formed the core of dynastic China, and fu (服) “clothing” or “dress.” Yet the compound is not ancient. It appears rarely in pre-modern texts because, to the Han themselves, their clothing needed no ethnic qualifier—it was clothing. Only after the 17th-century Manchu conquest imposed the queue and the qipao did Han literati begin to speak self-consciously of “Han clothing” as a lost heritage. Today the term operates on three sliding scales: II. The Canonical Grammar: How to “Read” a Hanfu Regardless of dynasty, a hanfu ensemble is built from modular components whose presence or absence instantly signals gender, status, season, and ritual purpose. Colour and motif form a second language. Zhou ritual texts already codified “green for spring, red for summer, white for autumn, black for winter.” Tang sumptuary law allowed only princesses to wear full-drag phoenix embroidery; Ming merchants caught in dragon robes could be executed. III. Dynastic Evolution: 1000 BCE to 1600 CE Zhou (1046–256 BCE): The ritual classics describe the shenyi—“deep robe” cut in one piece to symbolise integrity. Archaeological finds at Jiangling show hemp shenyi with curved hems (qūjū) already 220 cm long, designed to pool on the floor and force a slow, dignified gait. Han (206 BCE–220 CE): Silk replaces hemp among elites; the ruqun (short blouse + long skirt) becomes the default female silhouette. A 2nd-century CE tomb mural in Henan depicts servants lifting skirts exactly 7 cm off the ground—an early dress-code manual. Tang (618–907 CE): Cosmopolitanism enlarges everything: sleeves balloon to 90 cm cuffs; the chest-high qíxiōng ruqun hikes skirt ties above the bust, creating the empire waist 1100 years before Paris. Foreign motifs—Central Asian pearl roundels, Sasanian lions—march across silk woven with weft-faced samite techniques. Song (960–1279 CE): Neo-Confucianism reins in excess. Palette shifts to ink-wash greys; the beizi coat appears, its side slits allowing the wearer to bow without fabric bunching—a sartorial bow to ritual propriety. Ming (1368–1644 CE): Nationalist revival. The Hongwu emperor orders “return to Tang,” but tailors innovate: the lánshān scholar robe adds a horizontal knee band to echo ancient jūn rank insignia; women’s mǎmiàn qún uses 6–8 metres of cloth, its flat panels perfect for displaying embroidered mǎn hǔ 满襞 pleats that swirl like pinwheels when walking. IV. The Qing Interruption and Diaspora Memory 1645: the Manchu regent Dorgon issues the “Hair and Garment Edict”—cut queue or lose head; Han robes outlawed in public. Hanfu did not vanish overnight: brides still wore fēngguān xiápèi phoenix crowns underground, and Ming loyalist monks painted self-portraits in zhíduō robes. Yet by 1750 the qipao and chángshān had replaced hanfu in daily life, and the memory of “Han dress” survived mainly in Korean hanbok, Japanese gofuku, and Vietnamese áo giao lĩnh—all exported Tang-Ming cuts preserved abroad. V. Archaeology, Nationalism, and the 21st-Century Revival In 2003 a power-plant worker in Zhengzhou, Wang Letian, stitched a Ming-style zhíshēn dàopáo and wore it to the supermarket. Photos went viral; within months online forums coined the slogan “穿我汉家衣裳” (“Wear the clothes of our Han family”). By 2020 the state-run China Daily estimated 5 million “hanfu enthusiasts,” a 1.4-billion-yuan market, and 2,000 rental studios in Xian alone. Contemporary hanfu spans three subcultures: International reception oscillates between admiration and Orientalist flattening. At 2019 New York Comic-Con a hanfu flash-mob was applauded as “real-life poetry,” yet Instagram algorithms still tag such posts “kimono.” Korean netizens accuse China of “stealing hanbok heritage,” igniting Twitter wars over shared Tang silhouettes. Meanwhile UNESCO listed “traditional hanfu craftsmanship” on its 2022 intangible heritage register, citing 24 regional weaving and dyeing techniques. VI. Conclusion: Hanfu as Moving Target So, what is a hanfu dress? It is at once: To wear hanfu today is therefore not to step into a museum diorama but to enrol in an open-source language: the vocabulary was codified by Zhou ritualists, revised by Tang weavers, censored by Qing edicts, and is now being re-coded by TikTokers stitching 1080p embroidery tutorials at 2 a.m. The dress is never finished; it waits for the next body to animate its sleeves, the next observer to read its pleats.
