Created with AI assistance and human review. How we check our sources · Corrections
Medieval · East Asia · 500 - 1500 CE
What people wore in medieval China, Japan, and Korea — Tang and Song silks, Mongol cloth of gold, Heian court robes and samurai dress, Goryeo hanbok, and the color-by-rank rules that governed them.
By Dan Schnau · Last updated
This survey compares dress in China, Japan, and Korea during the site's medieval period. Tang elites adopted riding dress influenced by the steppe, while Mongol courts used silk woven with gold.32,14 In Japan, the kosode developed from an undergarment into outer clothing.20 Korean court clothing reflected successive Chinese and Mongol influences while retaining local forms.24
This guide covers East Asia between about 500 and 1500. For India and its neighbors, see medieval South Asian clothing; for Arab and Persian dress, see medieval Middle Eastern clothing.
| Place and period | Examples of dress | Detailed guide |
|---|---|---|
| Tang China (618–907) | Court women's jackets, skirts, and shawls, alongside riding outfits influenced by steppe dress.1,32 | Tang dynasty clothing |
| Heian Japan (794–1185) | Layered court robes, with distinct garments for formal and everyday court wear.21 | Heian period clothing |
| Medieval Japanese warriors | Hitatare jackets and trousers; the outfit developed from ordinary people's clothing.22,23 | Japanese clothing below |
| Goryeo Korea (918–1392) | Jackets with skirts or trousers, court robes influenced by China, and later Mongol dress at court.24,25,15 | Korean clothing below |
The examples below draw on garments, paintings, and written sources:
Korea is the hardest case: so little Goryeo clothing survives that costume historians call it an "undiscovered era."25
The Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) was fascinated by all things foreign: men and women often dressed in foreign fashions, and fashion changed remarkably quickly during the dynasty's first century.2 Women of the Tang court wore ruqun — a short jacket (ru) with a skirt (qun) — often paired with a shawl called a pibo.1 Silk was the prized fabric, and a court lady's ensemble began with a short robe cut from a single length of it.1 From the steppe came a riding outfit of tight-sleeved robe, trousers, belt, and boots, which the Tang ruling class adopted widely, often made up in luxury silks with hybrid designs.32 Sogdian silks with paired animals in pearl roundels traveled the Silk Road too; one eighth-century child's coat combines such a Sogdian silk with a Chinese damask lining.33 For a fuller account of women's ruqun, riding dress, veils, rank colors, and Tang silk, see Tang dynasty clothing.
Elite Tang women also borrowed foreign men's clothes. The hufu, or "foreign dress," combined a long patterned robe, a leather belt, long trousers, and boots, and paintings and pottery figurines show elite women wearing it.3 The style came along the Silk Road with other Persian imports, such as the game of polo.3
Officials wore a black cap, the futou, which began as a cloth wrapped round the head.4 Over the Tang it became a fitted, structured cap, and officials added two long "wings" of stiffened ribbon.4
The Song dynasty (960–1279 CE) shifted toward a more restrained aesthetic.5 Women's dress in particular was reserved and conservative, with quieter colors and fewer variations than before.5 The beizi, a long robe whose center-front opening was edged with a band, was worn by both men and women.6 Song-era advances in silk weaving — particularly kesi (cut silk tapestry) — produced textiles of extraordinary intricacy, with pictorial designs that blurred the line between fabric and painting.7
The best picture of a Song lady's wardrobe comes from the tomb of Huang Sheng, a noblewoman who died in 1243 and was buried in Fuzhou.10,8 It held 354 silk textiles in more than twenty styles, the largest and best-preserved collection of Southern Song clothing, made of gauze, damask, satin, and crepe; one pleated gauze skirt is printed with paired phoenixes and peonies.8,9 Her tomb also gives some of the earliest physical evidence of footbinding: her feet had been wrapped in gauze and placed in specially shaped shoes.10
Under the Song, people of all classes wore the futou. On officials' caps the wings indicated rank, and in one style they projected as much as two feet on either side of the head.4
The Khitan Liao dynasty (907–1125), which ruled the north, ran a dual administration that decided who wore Khitan dress and who wore Chinese, and elite Liao women used their clothes to signal that they were the equals of the Song court, not imitators.12 A brocade robe excavated at Daiqintala in Inner Mongolia, probably made in the late Tang and passed on to Khitan officials of the Liao, carries geese holding ribbons in their beaks, a pattern the Tang used for officials above the third rank.13 Steppe peoples were also marked out by hair: the Jurchen of the Jin dynasty (1115–1234) braided theirs, while the Mongols shaved parts of the head and braided the rest behind the ears.15
Under the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), the grandest court garment was the jisün (Chinese zhisun), a robe given by the emperor for court banquets.14,15 Chinese sources called it "one-color dress," because at these feasts everyone from the emperor to the musicians wore the same color, jeweled with pearls and jade and made of nasij, a silk woven with gold.15,14 One surviving cloth of gold of the period, woven in Central Asia, mixes eastern Iranian and Chinese motifs.14
Heian period clothing (794–1185) was built in layers. A courtier's full dress was the sokutai, worn with a stone-studded belt; his regular court dress, the ikan, paired an outer robe, the ho, with full trousers. For everyday wear he wore the kariginu, literally "hunting robe," open at the sides, which began as private dress and later became formal wear for lower-ranking officials.21 A court lady's full dress was the karaginu jacket and the mo skirt over her layered robes.21 For the court's layered robes, color combinations, and commoners' dress in more detail, see Heian period clothing.
Japanese clothing underwent a profound transformation during the medieval period. The layered court robes of the Heian era gradually gave way to the kosode, a smaller-sleeved garment that had served as an undergarment at the Heian court, though people of low status also wore it.20,22 From the Kamakura period (1185–1333) to the Muromachi period, the kosode gradually became an outer garment, forming the foundation of what would eventually be called the kimono.20 Samurai dress centered on the hitatare, a two-piece outfit of a wide-sleeved jacket and trousers.23
The hitatare had started as ordinary people's clothing. Made of silk, it became the samurai's formal dress; in hemp, marked with large family crests, it was the daimon.22 In formal dress, women of the upper warrior class in the Kamakura period wore a white kosode with a narrow sash under court-style robes, while women of lower status wore a kosode with a short wrapped skirt. In the Muromachi period the shogun's Ashikaga family and the imperial court copied each other's dress, and the hitatare came to outrank the kariginu.22
For the garment's longer story, see kimono history: from kosode to modern Japanese dress.
In Korea, the Goryeo dynasty (918–1392) developed a distinctive dress tradition that balanced Chinese influence with indigenous style.24 The hanbok — comprising a jacket called a jeogori with a long skirt (chima), usually worn by women, or trousers (baji), usually worn by men — continued to develop as the defining Korean silhouette during this era,24 while contact with the Mongol Yuan court brought new garments such as the cheollik, a robe fashionable in Yuan China that in late Goryeo was worn beneath outer robes and official robes.25 Goryeo textiles were valued for their quality; the kingdom's ramie and fine linen were prized abroad and regularly sent as royal tribute, and its weavers also produced damask silks.15
Goryeo officials' robes followed Tang and Song models, but underneath them officials wore the same jeogori and baji as everyone else, a pairing inherited from Unified Silla.25
Mongol domination changed Goryeo dress from the top down. The Mongols never formally imposed their clothes or hairstyles, and Goryeo people at first found the shaved Mongol head shameful, a mark of criminals.15 But after the future King Chungnyeol (r. 1274–1308) married a daughter of Qubilai Khan, Mongol hairstyles and clothing spread through the ruling class.15 Much later, despite his promise to respect Goryeo customs, Qubilai was surprised to find the Goryeo king and his officials all in Mongol dress.15 In 1300 Chungnyeol received a jisün from the emperor and attended a jisün banquet, and his son, King Chungseon, obtained the tall Mongol women's headdress, the boghtaq, from the Yuan court for his favorite consorts.15
Under the Joseon dynasty, which replaced Goryeo in 1392, neo-Confucian values came to shape what people wore, and a system of rank badges for officials was set up in 1454.24,28 The later Joseon hanbok is covered in early modern East Asian clothing.
Much elite dress began at the bottom. The hitatare was commoners' clothing before warriors adopted it, the kosode rose from underwear to outerwear, and the jeogori and trousers under a Goryeo official's robe were what ordinary Koreans wore.22,20,25 Women's dress could cross lines men's did not: Tang women took up men's robes and boots.3 Footbinding became common among the wives, daughters, and courtesans of Song scholar-officials by the twelfth century, but it was still optional.11
Silk was the cloth of courts. The Famen Temple textiles include early gold thread woven into silk and a very early silver thread wound on paper, centuries before Mongol cloth of gold.16 Goryeo clothing used silk, ramie, hemp, and later cotton.25
Some cotton had already reached Goryeo through contact with Yuan China, but cotton was not widely grown until late in the Goryeo period.29 According to his official obituary of 1398, the envoy Mun Ik-jeom picked about ten cotton seeds by the roadside on his way home from Yuan China in 1363. In 1364 he shared them with Jeong Cheon-ik in Jinju, and only one plant survived. A visiting foreign monk, Hongwon, then showed Jeong how to spin and weave it and built the equipment, and within ten years the skill had spread nationwide.29
East Asian states graded their officials by color. In the early Song, which inherited the Tang system, officials' robes ran from purple through red and green to blue, purple marking the top ranks, and from the early Tang to the late Yuan, dark yellow was forbidden to everyone but the emperor.30,31 In the eleventh year of his reign, Goryeo's King Gwangjong set up an official costume system with uniforms in four colors, part of building a bureaucracy loyal to the throne.27,26 At the Heian court, a green called kikujin, the emperor's own everyday color, could be worn by others only by imperial permission.21
"Footbinding began with a Tang court dancer." One origin story concerns Yao Niang, a dancer for Li Yu, the last ruler of the tenth-century Southern Tang, who bound her feet into the shape of a new moon.10,11 It is a legend; the earliest written reference to footbinding comes from Zhang Bangji around 1147, and the earliest physical evidence from Song tombs of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.11,10
"The futou's long wings were invented to stop officials whispering." The idea goes back to Yu Yan, a thirteenth-century scholar who guessed that the wings were "perhaps to avoid [the officials] whispering to each other"; modern scholars call it unfounded speculation.4
"Mun Ik-jeom smuggled cotton seeds out of China in his writing brush." That detail first appears in a family biography supposedly written in 1464 by his great-grandson. The official record of 1398 says he picked the seeds by the roadside, and it credits a foreign monk with the technique of turning them into cloth.29
