The History of Clothing

Ancient · East Asia · 3000 BCE - 500 CE

Ancient East Asian Clothing

What people wore in ancient China, Korea, and Japan — silk, cross-collared robes, Han dynasty dress, Goguryeo tomb murals, and the symbolic dress traditions that shaped East Asian clothing for millennia.

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Ancient East Asian clothing runs from the Shang dynasty of northern China to the courts of Nara and Heian Japan. China set much of the pattern: woven silk, the cross-collared wrapped robe, and the idea that clothes, colors, and caps should mark rank. Korea and Japan absorbed those ideas but kept their own garments alongside them, above all the Korean jacket and trousers.

How We Know What People Wore in Ancient East Asia

Little ancient East Asian clothing survives, so the evidence is pieced together:

  • Sealed tombs in southern China, such as Mashan and Mawangdui, which preserved silk robes, skirts, shoes, and quilts
  • Tomb figurines of servants, soldiers, and entertainers, including the Terracotta Army of the First Emperor of Qin
  • Tomb murals, especially in Goguryeo and Japan's Takamatsuzuka tomb
  • Clay figures set on top of Japanese burial mounds
  • Confucian texts on correct dress, court regulations, and Chinese histories describing Korea and Japan

In Korea the gap is widest: no actual clothing from the Three Kingdoms period survives, so the Goguryeo tomb murals are the key record.

Ancient Chinese Clothing

Detail of embroidered silk with dragons, phoenixes, and tigers in chain stitch, from a 4th-century BCE tomb at Mashan, Hubei Warring States tomb at Mashan, Hubei, 4th century BCE. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.

Chinese clothing traditions stretch back thousands of years, with woven silk fabric surviving from about 3600 BCE and chemical traces of silk found in even older graves. The hanfu — a broad term for traditional Han Chinese clothing — was characterized by its cross-collar design, closing on the wearer's right side (a convention called youren), wide sleeves, and a sash or belt at the waist. The specific cut and layering varied by dynasty, but this fundamental silhouette persisted for centuries.

Shang and Zhou Dynasties

A jade figurine from the Shang royal tomb of Lady Fu Hao shows a seated person in a long robe with a wide sash at the waist and a short braid at the back of the neck. The Shang writing system already had characters for the mulberry tree, the silkworm, and silk, and fragments of silk survive stuck to bronze vessels in Shang tombs at Anyang.

By the time of Confucius, dress was a matter of ritual propriety. The Analects tells the gentleman not to trim his robes with crimson or maroon, to wear hemp in hot weather, and to match a black robe with lambskin and a yellow robe with fox. Confucius accepted thriftier silk in place of hemp for ceremonial caps, but detested the new fashion for purple.

Warring States and Qin

The Chu tomb at Mashan in Hubei, excavated in 1982, held 35 items of clothing and bedding, including silk and double-layered robes, a skirt, and brocade trousers, along with shoes, hats, and embroidered quilts.

In the north, King Wuling of Zhao, keen to build up his cavalry, ordered his men into the trousered "Hu" costume of the horse-riding peoples, over fierce conservative opposition to barbarian dress.

The Terracotta Army of Qin wears garments, undergarments, trousers, and shin protectors, originally painted blue, green, red, violet, and pink over lacquer. Generals wear caps with pheasant feathers.

Han Dynasty Clothing

Clay tomb figurine of a Han dynasty attendant with hands clasped inside the long sleeves of a wrapped robe with layered collars Female attendant (tomb figurine), Western Han dynasty, 200s BCE. The Cleveland Museum of Art, CC0.

During the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), court dress became increasingly codified. Fabric, embroidery motifs, headgear, and accessories all carried meaning — an official's rank was shown, for example, by the material of his seal and the color of the silk ribbon (shou) from which it hung. The strict reservation of yellow for the emperor came later, by the Tang dynasty. Silk remained the prestige fabric, though the majority of the population wore garments of hemp or ramie cloth.

Han tombs were filled with mingqi, objects made to accompany the dead in the afterlife. Figurines of female attendants typically wear a long flared skirt under the long-sleeved, wrap-over outer robe.

The most spectacular Han clothing comes from the Mawangdui tomb of Lady Xin Zhui, wife of a chancellor of the Changsha Kingdom, excavated in 1972. Its two unlined gowns of plain silk gauze weigh just 48 and 49 grams.

Ancient Korean Clothing

Mural painting of a woman from Goguryeo-era Anak Tomb No. 3, 4th century Anak Tomb No. 3, 4th century. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.

The Korean peninsula's ancient clothing traditions developed through both indigenous innovation and Chinese cultural influence. The earliest descriptions come from Chinese histories: the third-century Record of the Three Kingdoms says the people of Buyeo favored white, wearing white robes with large sleeves, trousers, and leather shoes, and another history records that the Mahan raised silkworms.

During the Three Kingdoms period (57 BCE–668 CE), the kingdoms of Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla shared broadly similar dress customs, though regional variations are evident in surviving art and artifacts. Goguryeo tomb paintings depict men and women wearing jeogori-like jackets paired with wide trousers or long skirts, with belted waists and narrow sleeves — an early form of what would eventually become the hanbok. The jacket reached the hips and was tied at the front; women's skirts touched the ground, and both sexes wore trousers — close-fitting clothes suited to horse riding and cold winters.

Silla's royal tombs show display carried by accessories: the North Mound of Hwangnamdaechong in Gyeongju held a gold crown with antler-shaped uprights hung with jade, and a gold belt dangling symbolic pendants such as a fish, a knife, and a curved jade.

Silk weaving was well established on the peninsula by the first centuries CE, and Korean artisans produced fine ramie cloth (known as mosi) that was prized for its lightness and cool texture in summer months. Silla had adopted Tang-style court dress for its officials in 649, shortly before it unified the peninsula, and Unified Silla (668–935 CE) brought greater standardization of court dress along Tang lines. New garments appeared over the jacket and trousers, including the dallyeong, a round-necked robe. Despite Chinese influence, Korean dress maintained distinctive elements — particularly the two-piece combination of a wrapped jacket with trousers or a skirt — that would become hallmarks of Korean clothing for centuries to come.

Ancient Japanese Clothing

Japanese clothing in the ancient period drew heavily from Chinese and Korean influences. The earliest documented Japanese garments, described in a third-century Chinese chronicle, were simple: wide strips of cloth tied together with little sewing for men, and a robe with a hole for the head for women. In 243 the ruler Himiko sent the Chinese court bast-fiber cloth and rough silk, and finely woven silk has been excavated at the Yayoi period settlement of Yoshinogari.

Haniwa and the Kofun Period

Clay haniwa figure of a woman with red facial markings and a bead necklace, wearing a wrapped jacket Haniwa figure of a female, Kofun period, 500s. The Cleveland Museum of Art, CC0.

During the Kofun period, named for its great burial mounds, clay haniwa figures were set on top of the tombs. Warriors wear hip-length tunics and billowing trousers tied below the knee, like those of northern horsemen in China; a crowned nobleman wears a round-collared tunic with tube-shaped sleeves and loose pleated trousers. Kyoto's Costume Museum describes the outfit as a jacket called kinu worn with hakama trousers by men or a pleated skirt, mo, by women.

From Asuka to Heian: Dressing the Court

Heian court women in layered silk robes, from the 12th-century Tale of Genji handscroll Tale of Genji handscroll (Azumaya chapter), c. 1130, Tokugawa Art Museum. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.

From the seventh century the Japanese state began dressing its officials by rank. The wall paintings of the Takamatsuzuka tomb, discovered in 1972, show courtiers of the late seventh century, including officials in lacquered gauze caps and court ladies in long robes over skirts with frilled hems. By the Nara period (710–794 CE), the Japanese court had adopted Tang Dynasty Chinese dress styles, including layered silk robes with wide sleeves.

Over the following centuries, these imported styles evolved into distinctly Japanese forms. The junihitoe — a layered court costume whose name means "twelve layers," though the number of robes varied, and five layered robes became standard by the end of the period — exemplified the Heian period's (794–1185 CE) emphasis on color combination and aesthetic refinement. The visible layers at the sleeve openings and hem were carefully coordinated according to seasonal color schemes, a practice called kasane no irome.

Men, Women, and Commoners

Across the region, women's dress paired a wrapped upper garment with a long skirt — the Han attendant's flared skirt, the Goguryeo floor-length skirt, the Japanese mo — while men, especially soldiers and riders, more often wore trousers.

Class showed in cut as well as fabric. In Three Kingdoms Korea, the upper classes wore wide, long trousers and the lower classes narrow, short ones, with short skirts that left the trousers visible. Third-century Japanese commoners wore a simple one-piece garment over a wrapped cloth skirt. Hemp and other bast fibers, not silk, clothed most farmers and laborers.

Silk, Hemp, and Ramie: Fabrics and Weaving

Silk was East Asia's great luxury fabric. Warring States embroiderers worked dragons, phoenixes, and tigers in fine chain stitch, as on the Mashan silks, and Han workshops embroidered scrolling clouds in white, yellow, green, and blue thread.

The most prized Han silk was jin, a polychrome patterned silk. A second-century BCE tomb at Laoguanshan in Chengdu contained four model pattern looms and fifteen painted wooden figurines, probably of weavers — the earliest known evidence for pattern-loom technology. Chengdu's jin traveled northwest onto the Silk Road. For everyone else there were bast fibers — hemp, ramie, and in Japan wild tree and grass fibers, which stayed the everyday cloth there until cotton spread in the late 1700s.

Dress Codes and Court Ranks

Chinese dress regulations took shape during the Han, above all in 59 CE, the second year of the Yongping reign of the Eastern Han. In Japan, Empress Suiko in 603 established a system of twelve court ranks, each marked by colored cloth on the official's cap; a new rank system followed in 647, and Emperor Tenmu later regulated the lacquered gauze caps of officials. In Unified Silla, where society was divided by a hereditary bone-rank system, clothing marked a person's class, and King Heungdeok (r. 826–836) banned certain garments to curb extravagance and reinforce class distinctions.

Common Myths About Ancient East Asian Clothing

"Everyone in ancient China wore silk." Silk was for the elite; most people wore hemp and ramie.

"Silk was invented by Empress Leizu." Chinese legend credits Leizu, wife of the Yellow Emperor, with inventing sericulture in the 27th century BCE. Archaeology has found silk pieces about 4,700 years old at Qianshanyang in Zhejiang, woven silk from about 3600 BCE in Henan, and chemical traces older still.

"The kimono is an ancient Japanese garment." Ancient Japanese wore jackets with trousers or pleated skirts. The kimono became the main dress of all classes only from the 16th century, and the word itself was adopted in the mid-19th.

"Hanbok has always looked the way it does today." The Three Kingdoms jacket reached the hips and was belted, and Korean dress kept changing for centuries afterward.

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