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Ancient · East Asia · 3000 BCE - 500 CE
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.
By Dan Schnau · Last updated
This survey follows clothing in China, Korea, and Japan, including later developments that help explain the ancient evidence. A Shang jade figure wears a long robe and sash; Han tombs preserve silk garments.4,13 Korean dress paired a jacket with trousers or a skirt, while later Silla court clothing reflected Tang Chinese influence.15,17 For the Neolithic evidence that came before, see prehistoric East Asian clothing.
Ancient East Asian dress included wrapped robes, jackets, skirts, and trousers. Silk survives spectacularly in elite tombs, but hemp and other plant fibers clothed much of the population.34,21 This page also follows some traditions beyond 500 CE to explain their later development; the medieval East Asian guide covers the following era in detail.
| Society | Examples of clothing | Evidence discussed below |
|---|---|---|
| Ancient China | Wrapped robes, skirts, and trousers; silk for elite clothing and hemp and other fibers for most people.11,6,34 | Chinese tomb textiles and figurines |
| Three Kingdoms Korea | Hip-length belted jackets with trousers or long skirts.15 | Goguryeo tomb murals |
| Kofun Japan | Kinu jackets with hakama trousers or mo skirts.26 | Haniwa figures and reconstructed dress |
For the Indian subcontinent, see ancient South Asian clothing. For Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Persia, see ancient Middle Eastern clothing.
This survey draws on the following kinds of evidence:
In Korea the gap is widest: no actual clothing from the Three Kingdoms period survives, so the Goguryeo tomb murals are the key record.15
Chinese clothing traditions stretch back thousands of years, with woven silk fabric surviving from about 3500 BCE and chemical traces of silk found in even older graves.2,1 The hanfu — a broad term for traditional Han Chinese clothing — was built around a long-sleeved, wrap-over robe, often tied at the waist with a sash.11,4 It closed on the wearer's right side: in the Analects, Confucius says that without the statesman Guan Zhong "we would wear our hair loose and button our jackets on the left."5 The specific cut and layering varied by dynasty, but this fundamental silhouette persisted for centuries.
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.4 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.3
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.5
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.6
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.7
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.8
During the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), court dress became increasingly codified,33 and accessories carried meaning — an official's rank was shown, for example, by the material of his seal and the color of its ribbon.9 The reservation of dark yellow for the emperor came later, from the early Tang dynasty.10 Silk remained the prestige fabric, though the majority of the population wore garments of hemp and other fibers.34
Han tombs were filled with mingqi, objects made to accompany the dead in the afterlife.11 One Western Han figurine of a female attendant wears a long flared skirt under a wrap-over outer robe.11
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.13,14
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.15
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.15 Goguryeo tomb paintings depict men and women wearing jeogori-like jackets paired with wide trousers or long skirts, with belted waists — an early form of what would eventually become the hanbok.15 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.15
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.16
Silk weaving was well established on the peninsula by the first centuries CE, and Korean weavers have long made fine ramie cloth (known as mosi), valued because it is comfortable in hot summer weather.15,17,36 Silla had adopted Tang-style court dress for its officials in 649, shortly before it unified the peninsula, and Unified Silla (668–935 CE) kept close ties with the Tang, so its dress shared Tang design features.18,17 New garments appeared over the jacket and trousers, including the dallyeong, a round-necked robe.15 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.15,17
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: clothing fastened around the body with little sewing for men, and for women a garment like an unlined coverlet, worn by slipping the head through an opening in the center.19,20 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.21,22
During the Kofun period, named for its great burial mounds, clay haniwa figures were set on top of the tombs, and figures in military and ceremonial dress appear from the 400s to 500s.25 Warriors wear hip-length tunics and billowing trousers tied below the knee, like those of northern horsemen in China;23 a crowned nobleman wears a round-collared tunic with tube-shaped sleeves and loose pleated trousers.24 Kyoto's Costume Museum describes the outfit as a jacket called kinu worn with hakama trousers by men or a skirt, mo, by women.26
From the seventh century the Japanese state began dressing its officials by rank.27 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.27 Japan sent envoys to Sui and Tang China from the seventh century, and Japanese men's court costume, a round-necked over-robe worn with trousers, was reputedly modeled on Sui and Tang court dress.35
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.28 The visible layers at the sleeve openings and hem were carefully coordinated according to seasonal color schemes, a practice called kasane no irome.28 The Heian court's dress is covered in depth in Heian period clothing.
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.11,15,26
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.15 Third-century Japanese commoners wore a simple one-piece garment over a wrapped cloth skirt.20 In Japan, hemp and other bast fibers, not silk, clothed the vast majority of people, as hemp and other fibers did in China.21,34
Silk was East Asia's great luxury fabric. Warring States embroiderers worked fine, flowing curvilinear designs in chain stitch, as on the Mashan silks,30 and Han workshops embroidered scrolling clouds in white, yellow, green, and blue thread.31
One valuable Han silk was jin, a polychrome patterned silk.32 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.32 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 mid-1700s.34,21
Chinese dress regulations took shape during the Han, above all in 59 CE, the second year of the Yongping reign of the Eastern Han.33 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.27 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.15
"Everyone in ancient China wore silk." Silk was for the elite; most people wore hemp and other fibers.34
"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 3500 BCE in Henan, and chemical traces older still.3,2,1
"The kimono is an ancient Japanese garment." Ancient Japanese wore jackets with trousers or skirts.26 The kimono became the main dress of all classes only from the 16th century, and the word itself was adopted in the mid-19th.29
"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.15
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