A History of Ancient Chinese Dress

A History of Ancient Chinese Dress is the posthumous work of Zhou Xibao (1910–1984), professor at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, and the first systematic and comprehensive general history of dress in mainland China. Begun in 1956 as a research project of the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Education and listed in 1961 in the national catalogue of teaching materials for institutions of higher education, the book was completed through more than a decade of effort and first published by China Theatre Press in September 1984. The work is divided into chapters and periods covering China from earliest times through the Ming and Qing dynasties to the modern era, setting forth the initial formation of Chinese dress and the continuity and evolution of later dress characteristics and regulations. Each chapter uses documentary sources and illustrations to describe official and everyday dress for men and women—such as the mian, bian, court, public, ordinary, informal, and military garments—and also covers ritual customs of successive dynasties. Opening with two chapters on the origins of dress and the mian garment that examine the roots of form and structure, it then proceeds through the late Zhou, Han, Wei-Jin and Northern and Southern Dynasties, Sui-Tang, Five Dynasties, Song, Liao, Jin, Yuan, Ming, and Qing, and closes with a chapter on changes in dress after the 1911 Revolution. Methodologically, the author emphasizes citing images recorded in historical sources and verifying documents against forms he collected by sketching actual garments in various regions, while supplementing these wherever possible with archaeological objects and images, creating a research path in which texts and visual evidence corroborate each other. The book includes color explanatory plates; with illustrations and text together, it combines rigorous scholarship with high academic quality. It has long served as a textbook for dress-history courses in art academies and for folklore courses in university history programs, and provides reference for costume and ceremonial design in theater, film, television, painting, and sculpture.