The History of Clothing

19th Century · East Asia · 1800 - 1900

19th Century East Asian Clothing

Confronted by Western imperial pressure, East Asian nations navigated a turbulent century in which traditional dress became entangled with questions of modernization and national identity — from Meiji Japan's Western uniforms to Qing dragon robes and the Korean hanbok.

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Nineteenth-century East Asian clothing was shaped by a single overwhelming pressure: the arrival of Western powers demanding trade, treaties, and influence. Japan, China, and Korea each responded differently. Japan adopted Western dress deliberately and from the top down as part of a program of rapid modernization. Qing China kept its Manchu court dress system almost to the end of the dynasty. Korea held onto the hanbok while its government made cautious, contested reforms. In every case, what people wore became a public statement about how a nation should face the modern world.

Japan: From Edo to Meiji

Emperor Meiji seated in an embroidered Western-style military uniform, 1873 Uchida Kuichi, photograph of Emperor Meiji, 1873. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.

Edo-Period Dress

For most of the 19th century, Japanese dress followed Edo-period traditions. Men and women wore variations of the kimono, a T-shaped wrapped garment secured with an obi sash, with fabric patterns and layering conventions signaling season, status, and occasion.

Dress was closely tied to social class. Samurai men wore hakama, wide pleated trousers or divided skirts, over the kimono; for formal occasions they wore the kamishimo, an ensemble of hakama and a matching sleeveless, stiff-shouldered vest (kataginu), and carried two swords as the mark of their rank. Merchants, who were often wealthier than samurai but lower in status, faced sumptuary laws restricting silk and bright colors — and responded with subtle luxury, such as plain outer garments lined with extravagant silk. Working people wore cotton kimono dyed with indigo, the most common color in Japanese everyday clothing, along with short happi jackets and straw sandals.

Women's kimono sleeves and obi reflected age and marital status. Young unmarried women wore the long-sleeved furisode, while married women wore shorter sleeves and more subdued patterns.

The Meiji Restoration and Western Dress

The Meiji Restoration of 1868 brought sweeping reforms that extended to clothing. The new government mandated Western-style military uniforms for its armed forces and encouraged officials to adopt Western dress as a symbol of modernization. The emperor himself was photographed in a Western military uniform, and in 1872 Western-style formal dress became official court wear.

Other reforms dismantled the dress of the old order. Men were encouraged to cut off the samurai chonmage topknot and adopt short Western haircuts, and in 1876 the government banned the public carrying of swords, ending the most visible sign of samurai status. Police, postal workers, railway staff, and students were put into Western-style uniforms.

By the 1880s, Western clothing was required at court and in government offices. During the Rokumeikan period of the 1880s, named for a Tokyo hall built to host Western diplomats, elite women attended balls in Paris-style bustle dresses. In 1887 Empress Shōken issued a statement encouraging women to adopt Western clothing.

Yofuku and Wafuku

The general population, however, continued to wear traditional garments for daily life. This created a distinctive dual wardrobe system — yofuku (Western clothing) for public and professional settings and wafuku (Japanese clothing) for domestic and ceremonial use. A government official might wear a Western suit to the office and change into a kimono at home. Many men combined the two, wearing a bowler hat and leather shoes with a kimono.

Women adopted Western dress far more slowly than men. Late in the century, a new schoolgirl uniform emerged that combined a kimono with maroon hakama, a practical outfit that let girls move freely. The transition was neither smooth nor complete; it sparked fierce debates about cultural identity that continued well into the 20th century.

China: Qing Dynasty Dress

In Qing dynasty China, the Manchu court dress system remained officially in force throughout the century. The Qing rulers were Manchus from the northeast, and they required their officials to dress in Manchu style as a sign of loyalty to the dynasty.

Court and Official Dress

Qing dynasty embroidered rank badge with a tiger, the emblem of a military official Rank badge with tiger, Qing dynasty, 19th century, silk and metal-thread embroidery on silk satin. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Public Domain (Open Access).

Officials wore dragon robes under a surcoat bearing mandarin squares — embroidered badges indicating rank through specific bird or animal motifs. Civil officials wore birds, from the crane at the highest rank down to lesser birds, while military officials wore animals such as the lion, tiger, and leopard. The robes themselves were cut in the Manchu style, with close-fitting sleeves ending in flared cuffs called horse-hoof cuffs, a reminder of the dynasty's origins as mounted warriors.

Rank was also displayed on the head. Officials wore hats topped with a colored finial, or hat button, whose material — ruby, coral, sapphire, lapis lazuli, gold — indicated grade, and the emperor could award the honor of a peacock feather. A long court necklace of beads completed the formal ensemble.

Everyday Dress and the Queue

The flowing wide-sleeved robes of the Han Chinese majority coexisted with the tighter-fitting Manchu riding garments mandated by the ruling dynasty, including the changshan for men and the early form of the qipao for women. Men commonly wore the changshan with a short jacket called a magua over it.

All men were required to wear the queue: the front of the head shaved and the remaining hair grown long and braided down the back. Imposed on the Han Chinese when the Qing conquered China in the seventeenth century, the queue was a symbol of submission to the dynasty. In the 1850s and 1860s, rebels of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom made a point of growing out all their hair, and the Qing called them the "long-haired rebels."

Women's Dress and Footbinding

Manchu and Han Chinese women dressed differently. Manchu women wore long, straight robes and tall platform shoes with a central pedestal, sometimes called flowerpot shoes, and wore their hair in elaborate raised arrangements. Many Han Chinese women wore a jacket over a pleated skirt or trousers, richly embroidered at the hems and cuffs.

Han women were also subject to footbinding, the practice of tightly binding young girls' feet to create a small, pointed shape considered beautiful and a sign of respectability. Manchu women did not bind their feet, and a Qing proposal of 1664 to ban the practice was withdrawn before it took effect. Late in the century, Chinese reformers and Western missionaries formed the first anti-footbinding societies, beginning a campaign that would succeed only in the twentieth century.

In the treaty ports opened to foreign trade, especially Shanghai, Western and Chinese clothing began to mix, a process that would eventually produce the modern qipao of the 1920s.

Korea: The Hanbok Under the Late Joseon

On the Korean peninsula, the hanbok continued as everyday dress under the Joseon dynasty. Women wore the short jeogori jacket paired with the voluminous high-waisted chima skirt, while men wore wider jeogori with baji trousers. Over these, men wore a long outer robe, and a man of standing wore the gat, a wide-brimmed hat of finely woven horsehair and bamboo lacquered black, over his topknot.

Koreans wore white so widely that they were sometimes called the "white-clad people." Undyed or bleached cotton and hemp were the everyday fabrics of most of the population, while bright colors were reserved for children, brides, festivals, and the upper classes.

In the 1880s the government began to simplify Korean dress, promoting the narrow-sleeved durumagi overcoat for men of all classes in place of the many wide-sleeved robes that had distinguished rank. The Gabo Reforms of 1894 attempted to modernize Korean dress codes further, simplifying court attire and permitting Western-style clothing for officials. In 1895 an order requiring men to cut off their topknots provoked fierce resistance, because Confucian teaching held that the body, including the hair, was a gift from one's parents. As in Japan, these sartorial reforms reflected deeper tensions between preserving tradition and embracing change under external pressure.

Textiles and Craft

Nineteenth-century East Asia had some of the most sophisticated textile traditions in the world:

  • Chinese silk embroidery, centered in Suzhou and other cities, produced the dragon robes and mandarin squares of the court as well as embroidered women's clothing and shoes
  • Japanese resist dyeing — including stencil-dyed katazome and tie-dyed shibori — decorated everything from luxurious silk kimono to cotton work clothes
  • Kasuri, cloth woven from threads dyed in patterns before weaving, was popular for everyday cotton kimono
  • In the Ryukyu Kingdom, now Okinawa, brightly colored stencil-dyed bingata cloth was worn by the royal court and nobility
  • Among the Ainu of Hokkaido, robes woven from the inner bark of elm trees were decorated with bold appliqué patterns

Common Myths About 19th-Century East Asian Clothing

"The qipao is ancient traditional Chinese dress." The modern close-fitting qipao dates to the 1920s. Its ancestor was the loose, straight Manchu women's robe of the Qing dynasty.

"Japan stopped wearing kimono after 1868." Most Japanese people wore kimono in daily life until the mid-twentieth century. Western dress spread first through uniforms, men's official clothing, and the elite.

"Clothing reform was simply Westernization." Reformers in Japan, China, and Korea saw clothing as a tool of national strength. Adopting Western uniforms was often meant to show that a country could stand as an equal to the Western powers, not to become Western.

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