heyja
Eg var ad lata mer leydast a
netinu thannig ad eg akvad ad setja thett inn

Ancient chinese clothing
People in
China generally wore tunics (like long t-shirts). Women wore
long tunics down to the ground, with belts, and men wore shorter
ones down to their knees. Sometimes they wore jackets over their
tunics. In the winter, when it was cold, people wore padded jackets
over their tunics, and sometimes pants under them. In early China,
poor people made their clothes of hemp or ramie. Rich people wore
silk.
Most people in China, both men and women, wore their hair long.
People said that you got your hair from your
parents and so it was disrespectful to cut it.
During the
Sui Dynasty, in the 500's AD,
the emperor decided that all poor people had to wear blue or black
clothes, and only rich people could wear colors.

X-ray pictures of someone with bound feet and a diagram

A shoe for someone with bound feet
In the
Sung Dynasty, about 1100 AD, a fashion started at the emperor's
court for women to bind their feet. Women thought that to be
beautiful they needed little tiny feet, only about three inches
long. They got these tiny feet by wrapping tight bandages around
the feet of little girls, about five or six years old. The bandages
were so tight they broke the girls’ toes and bent them underneath
their feet and then they had to walk on them like that. The girls
spent most of their time crying for two or three years and then the
feet stopped hurting so much. Women with bound feet couldn’t walk
very well at all, and when they had to work in the fields often
they would crawl. The earliest versions of the story of Cinderella
come from Sung Dynasty China. In these versions, the point of the
story is that the Prince loves Cinderella because she has the
smallest feet of any girl in the kingdom, so the slipper will only
fit her.
To see a video of a girl walking
with her feet bound, click here:
Then in the
Yuan Dynasty, the Mongols brought
cotton to China. At first people didn’t want to grow cotton,
maybe because the people running the silk industry wanted to keep
people buying
silk. But the
Mongol invasions in the 1200’s destroyed a lot of the mulberry
trees that were needed to make silk. The Mongol emperors, like
Kublai Khan, turned to cotton to fill the gap. In 1289
AD
they ordered the opening of special training centers to teach
farmers how to grow cotton. And in 1296 they ordered that farmers
who grew cotton could pay lower
taxes.
Soon everyone liked cotton better than ramie or hemp. Cotton was
warmer, and softer, and stronger, and cheaper. You could make it
thin for summer, or you could make thick padded clothes out of it
that were warm for winter.