The ch’i-p’ao is a traditional Manchu design still popular today
In modern Taiwan society, men are frequently seen at social occasions wearing the dignified and refined traditional Chinese long gown, Women often wear the ch’i-p’ao, a modified form of a traditional Ch’ing Dynasty fashion, on formal occasions. There are endless variations of height, length, width, and ornamentation in the collar, sleeves, skirt length, and basic cut of this elegant and very feminine Oriental fashion. From these examples, it can be seen how traditional Chinese dress is the spring of modern fashion.
In the wax museum of the Chinese Culture and Movie Center in Taipei, and at the Museum of Costume and Adornment of Shih Chien Home Economics College, you can see comprehensive and carefully researched collections of traditional Chinese men’s and women’s fashions from over the ages. A visit to one of these collections is both enjoyable and educational.
The people of Taiwan not only incorporate traditional Chinese dress into modern life; they have taken the silk making, spinning, and weaving techniques developed by the ancient Chinese a step further, and created modern textile industries around them. Through these industries, Taiwan residents can enjoy beautiful fashions with traditional features and modern chic.
Tags: Ch'i-p'ao, Chinese Dress, QiPao, Traditional Chinese DressIntroduction about the Art of Traditional Chinese Dress
A clatter and crash of drums and gongs sound at a theater of Chinese Opera in Taipei as a young warrior appears on stage in traditional Chinese costume. From his head ascend two tall plumes, tracing in the airTraditional Chinese Dress each movement and gesture he makes. Some might think these plumes are simply ornamental, but in fact they originate in the battle wear of the Warring States period (475-221 B.C.). Two feathers of a ho bird (a kind of pheasant good at fighting) were inserted into the headwear of warriors of this period to symbolize a bold and warlike spirit, that that of the ho. An outstanding characteristic of traditional Chinese clothing is not only an external expression of elegance, but also an inter symbolism. Each and every piece of traditional clothing communicates a vitality of its own. This combination of external form with internal symbolism is clearly exemplified in the pair of fighting pheasant feathers used in headwear.
Objects found in archaeological remains of China’s Shantingtung culture, which flourished over 18,000 years ago, such as bone sewing needles, and stone beads and shells with holes bored in them, attest to the existence of the concept of ornamentation and the craft of sewing already in that age. Variety and system in clothing were roughly established by the era of the Yellow Emperor and the Emperors Yao and Shaun (about 4,500 years ago). Remains of woven silk and help articles and ancient ceramic figures further demonstrate the sophistication and refinement of clothing in the Shang dynasty (16th to 11th century B.C.).
The three main types of traditional Chinese clothing are the pien-fu, the ch’ang-p’ao , or long robe, and the shen-i. The pien-fu is an ancient two-piece ceremonial costume, including a tunic-like top extending to thePien Fu Clothing, notice the cylindrical ceremonial cap knees, and a skirt reaching to the ankles; one had to wear a skirt on certain occasions in order to be properly dressed. A pien is a cylindrical ceremonial cap. Typical of these three types of clothing, besides their wide cut and voluminous sleeves, were a design utilizing mainly straight lines, and a loose fit forming natural folds, regardless of whether the garment was allowed to hang straight or was bound with a sash at the waist. All types of traditional Chinese garments, whether tunic and trousers or tunic and skirt, unitized a minimum number of stitches for the amount of cloth used. And because of their relatively plain design and structure, embroidered edgings, decorated bands, draped cloth or silks, embellishment on the shoulders, and sashes were often added as ornamentation. These decorative bands, appliquéd borders, and richly varied embroidered designs came to be one of the unique features of traditional Chinese dress.
Darker colors were favored over lighter ones in traditional Chinese clothing, so the main color of ceremonial clothing tended to be dark, accented with elaborate embroidered or woven tapestry designs rendered in bright colors.
Lighter colors were more frequently used by the common people in clothes for everyday and around the house. The Chinese associate certain colors with specific seasons, for example, green represents spring, red is for summer, white for autumn, and black for winter. The Chinese can be said to have a fully developed system of matching, coordinating, and contrasting colors and shades of light and dark in apparel.
Fashion designers today in the Taiwan are finding new ways to freely combine modern fashion aesthetics and trends with traditional Chinese symbols of good fortune. The great wealth of source material has resulted in a plethora of eye-catching designs for children’s and young people’s clothing, including guardian deities, lions, the eight trigrams, and masks of Chinese opera characters. Another more ancient source of printed, woven, embroidered, and appliquéd design for clothes is Chinese bronzes. Some of these distinctive and unusual designs include dragons, phoenixes, clouds, and lightning. Motifs from traditional Chinese painting, whether bold or refined, often find their way into woven or printed fashion designs, creating a beautiful and striking look.
Traditional Chinese macramé has broad applications in fashion; it may be used to ornament borders, shoulders, bodices, pockets, seams, and openings, as well as in belts, hair ornaments, and necklaces. Some successful examples of combinations of modern and traditional fashion elements are the modern bridal tiara, based on a Sung Dynasty design originally worn over a coiled coiffure; the Hunan Province style embroidered sash made in the traditional Chinese colors of pure red, blue, and green; and traditional sachets and pendants.
Tags: China culture, Traditional Art, Traditional Chinese DressHow to Choose Gifts for Friends or the Elder in Chinese Culture
Chinese people have their own culture when it comes to giving friends or relatives gifts.
When it is a new-born baby, usually jade or silver bracelet or necklace would be good, particularly ones which can make the clinging sound so it will make some noise when the baby moves. Alternatively, some children’s clothes, shoes or gloves would be good too. When it is an older child, some toys or stationary would be good.
When it comes to some old people, something practical should be considered. A walking-stick, some valuable food such as bird’s nests or Chinese mushrooms would be highly welcome.
For those who go to visit their prospective parents-in-law, something more valuable would be an option, such as some good wine or something meaningful.
If it is a family, a vase, some dining sets or pictures would be ideal.
It is not easy to think of something special for every occasion. So very often if it is not of any special visits, some fruits such as apples or oranges would be good enough.
It is important to know that giving someone gifts should not be a one-way business. Courtesy requires reciprocity. The person who receives the gift should find a chance in the future to return the same favor by returning a gift of similar value the next time you meet. You can do so simply by either paying a visit with a similar value gift or by inviting the friend out for a meal with you paying the meal. Don’t do it right on the next day because it may appear awkward.
There are also some taboos to avoid in Chinese culture. Though modern Chinese don’t seem to mind them so much, it is still necessary to know what would be suitable in an occasion.
Books would not be welcome in places like Hong Kong or Macau because the pronunciation of ‘book’ in Cantonese resembles the sound of ‘loss’. Especially for those people who are frequent players in race course or Mark six, they would definitely not welcome this idea.
Umbrellas would not be welcome in most places in China because the pronunciation of ‘umbrella’ resembles separation. Of course nobody would like the idea of separation, particularly concerning your loved ones.
Clocks would not be welcome, particularly on someone’s birthday because the pronunciation of ‘clock’ resembles termination, which means death. No wonder that people don’t like receiving clocks as birthday gifts.
If you want to give your friends some fruits, remember to buy an even number of them because odd numbers would bring bad luck. So buy 10 apples instead of 9.
Foreigners may find it awkward when your friend says ‘You don’t need to buy anything when you come here.’, or ‘Keep it to yourself. I have a lot of these’. He may not mean it. What you need to do is to insist on him receiving the gift since Chinese people do not tend to receive the gift immediately.
Don’t mind it if he doesn’t open your present immediately too. Chinese people would think opening the present in front of you would be impolite and so they would tend to put it aside and only open it after you have left.
These ideas can only be served as guidelines. Knowing that you come from a foreign culture and being more broad-minded to foreign ideas, Chinese people are nowadays more tolerant to things which are not in line with their culture. So, don’t worry too much when you visit a Chinese friend or family. Maybe your exotic idea would bring them a lot of surprises!
Tags: Chinese culture, GiftsSo Romantic on Chinese Valentine’s Day
Chinese Valentine’s Day is on the Seventh Day of the Seventh Month on the Chinese calendar, which falls on July 31st this year. Legend has it that the seventh daughter of the Emperor of Heaven, a weaving maid, fell in love and married a cowherd. They were overindulgent in their love and neglected their farming and weaving duties, which angered the Jade Emperor. As punishment, he exiled them to opposite banks of the Silver River (Milky Way), and only allows them to meet each other once a year on the night of the seventh day of the seventh month.
This legend has been handed down for nearly two millennia. The Chinese people believe that the star, Vega, east of the Milky Way, is Zhi Nu, and that Altair, on the western side of the Milky Way, is Niu Lang waiting for his wife.
The seventh day of the seventh lunar month is the only Chinese festival devoted to love in the lunar calendar. Chinese Valentine’s Day traditions abound and this special day is celebrated differently depending on the Chinese province.
Some of the many traditions include Chinese girls preparing fruits, melons, and incense as offerings to Zhi Nu, the weaving maiden, praying to acquire high skills in needlecraft, as well as hoping to find satisfactory husbands.
Girls place sewing needles on water. If the needle doesn’t sink, it’s a sign of the girl’s maturity and intelligence and she is ready and eligible to find a husband.
People in some Chinese provinces believe that decorating the horns of oxen with flowers will save them from catastrophe. Another tradition is for women to wash their hair to make it look fresh and shining.
On Chinese Valentine’s Day, young lovers go to the temple of the Matchmaker and pray for their love and happiness, and their possible marriage in China.
In the evening, people sit outside to observe the stars. On this night, Vega and Altair are closer together than at any other time of year. Chinese grannies say that if you stand under a grapevine, you can probably overhear what Zhi Nu and Niu Lang are saying to one another.
Tags: China culture, Chinese Valentine's Day, MythThe Wedding Ceremony in Ancient China
A formal Chinese wedding requires the bridegroom to pick up the bride at the bride’s home after respectfully greeted the parents-in-law to be. The couple-to-be will then go to the bridegroom’s home, where the bride will greet her parents-in-law to be, or to the banquet location. If they choose to go to the bridegroom’s home, the young couple will have to greet the parents-in-law to be with a cup of tea each and the parents will return the daughter-in-law to be with a red packet of money inside. Similar to the western culture, the bride and bridegroom will be accompanied by bridesmaids and best men and they are usually still non-married.
One very important procedure is the banquet. All relatives and friends will be invited and they will wish the new couple with all the best. At the banquet, the newly wed has to drink half glass of wine for a pair of glasses linked by a ribbon. After that the newly wed has to cross-hand and drinks the other half of the wine. It is believed that after this ceremony the newly wed will love each other more dearly.
In some parts of China, the fish served in the banquet should not be eaten totally. The head, tail and the whole skeleton of the fish should be left untouched so as to symbolize a good start and end of a marriage.
After the banquet, friends of the new couple will usually continue the night by deliberately disturbing the new couple with a few games. Games will include different quests for some difficult performances or questions. Unfortunately to the newly wed that these games usually last till very late in the night!
However in the modern days, many young people try to skip most of these rituals or ceremonies. They do that either because they think that new generations should not be confined by these old traditions or some do so just because of economical reasons of trying not to spend as much money as possible.
Tags: China culture, Traditional China Culture, Wedding CeremonyThe Development Process of Education in Ancient China
In medieval universities the quadrivium are taught after the trivium. The quadrivium comprised the four subjects or arts. The word is Latin, meaning “the four ways” or “the four roads”: the completion of the liberal arts. The quadrivium consisted of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. These followed the preparatory work of the trivium made up of grammar, logic (or dialectic, as it was called at the times), and rhetoric. In turn, the quadrivium was considered preparatory work for the serious study of philosophy and theology.
Medieval usage
At many medieval universities, this would have been the course leading to the degree of Master of Arts (after the BA). After the MA the student could enter for Bachelor’s degrees of the higher faculties, such as Music. To this day some of the postgraduate degree courses lead to the degree of Bachelor (the B.Phil and B.Lit. degrees are examples in the field of philosophy, and the B.Mus. remains a postgraduate qualification at Oxford and Cambridge universities).
The subject of music within the quadrivium was originally the classical subject of harmonics, in particular the study of the proportions between the music intervals created by the division of a monochord. A relationship to music as actually practised was not part of this study, but the framework of classical harmonics would substantially influence the content and structure of music theory as practised both in European and Islamic cultures.
Modern usage
In modern applications of the liberal arts as curriculum in colleges or universities, the quadrivium may be considered as the study of number and its relationship to physical space or time: arithmetic was pure number, geometry was number in space, music number in time, and astronomy number in space and time. Morris Kline (a Professor of Mathematics, a writer on the history, philosophy, and teaching of mathematics, and also a popularizer of mathematical subjects.) classifies the four elements of the quadrivium as pure (arithmetic), stationary (geometry), moving (astronomy) and applied (music) number.
This schema is sometimes referred to as classical education, but it is more accurately a development of the 12th and 13th centuries with recovered classical elements, rather than an organic growth from the educational systems of antiquity. The term continues to be used by the classical education movement.
Tags: Ancient China, Development, EducationA simple introduction about Xiangsheng in China Culture
If you like Chinese traditional art you can know Xiangsheng. Xiangsheng (comic dialogue) performers traditionally have trained skills including shuō (说)、xué (学)、dòu (逗)、chànɡ (唱) (telling, imitation, amusing and singing). Since Xiangsheng is an art of language, and the techniques of handling language and voice are quite important. Therefore, the four basic skills seem essential to Xiangsheng performers.
Shuo refers to the handling of jokes, twisters, two-part allegorical sayings and so on. It requires the performers to have an articulate pronunciation and a fluent speech. Xue means that the performers should be good at imitating human voice and sound of other objects as well as sound effects, including various kinds of gastriloquy, dialects, hucksters’ voice, arias in traditional operas, and facial expressions and folk customs of different characters, old and young, male and female. Dou means that Xiangsheng of whatever form is supposed to amuse the audience and hopefully make them laugh. Therefore, every sketch, no matter how artistic, must contain at least one gag funny enough to make the audience roll around in laughter. Chang requires the performers to have a good voice and can sing different arias in traditional operas and popular tunes.
Shuo, xue, dou and chang are the foundation of Xiangsheng performance, and every Xiangsheng performer should master the skills. However, in actual performances, different performers have their strong points, and feature different styles.
Tags: China Arts, China culture, XiangshengAn Introduction about Shū and Huà in China Culture
Shū refers to Chinese calligraphy, which dates to the origins of recorded Chinese history, in essence ever since written characters have existed. Chinese calligraphy is said to be an expression of a practitioner’s poetic nature, as well as a significant test of manual dexterity. Chinese calligraphy has evolved for thousands of years, and its state of flux stopped only when Chinese characters were unified across the empire. Chinese calligraphy differs from western calligraphic script in the sense that it was done with a brush instead of metal implements or a quill. Calligraphy was the art by which a scholar could compose his thoughts to be immortalized. It was the scholar’s means of creating expressive poetry and sharing his or her own learnedness.
Huà refers to Chinese painting. Brush painting is the final of the arts that a scholar is expected to learn, and is unarguably the greatest measure of individual creativity. Through painting a Chinese noble would demonstrate his mastery over the art of line. Often Chinese paintings would be produced on a sheet of plain white rice-paper or silk using nothing but black ink and a single brush. These paintings were made to demonstrate the power of a single line, and in them was reflected a skill that valued intentional and calculated strokes over instinctual erratic creation. In a Chinese painting was reflected the artist’s ability to evaluate his own imagination and record it clearly and concisely. Chinese painting can be traced back even farther than calligraphy. Some examples date back to the decorative paintings that were emblazoned on Neolithic pottery. To add tonal quality to paintings the artists would often paint portions of the subject then wash the cloth before continuing. This made for beautiful landscapes and depictions of ritual. Painting was the art by which a scholar could separate him or her from the others and take a name.
Tags: China culture, Huà, Shū, Traditional China CultureAn Introduction about Qín and Qí in China Culture
Qín refers to the musical instrument of the literati, the gǔqín. Although it exclusively meant this instrument in ancient times, it has now come to mean all musical instruments, but essentially it refers to gǔqín only considering the context.
The gǔqín is a seven-stringed zither that owes its invention to the Chinese society of some 3,000 years ago. During the reign of the imperial China, a scholar was expected to play the gǔqín . Gǔqín was explored as an art-form as well as a science, and scholars strove to both play it well and to create texts on its manipulation. Gǔqín notation was invented some 1,500 years ago, and to this day it has not been drastically changed. Some books contain musical pieces written and mastered more than 500 years ago. Gǔqín is so influential that it even made its way into space: the spacecraft Voyager launched by the U.S. in 1977 contained a vinyl style record of a gǔqín piece named ‘Flowing Water’. The fact that the gǔqín’s name breaks down to ‘gu’ (old) and ‘qin’ (musical instrument) reveals the instrument’s great antiquity.
Qí refers to a board game, which is now called Go (围棋), literally meaning “surrounding game”. Current definitions of qí cover a wide range of board games and, given that in Classical Chinese qí could also refer to other games, some argue that the qí in the four arts could refer to xiangqi although it is considered more a popular “game of the people” than weiqi, which was a game with aristocratic connotations. Many theories exist regarding the origin of wéiqí in Chinese history. One of these holds that wéiqí was an ancient fortune telling device used by Chinese cosmologists to simulate the universe’s relationship to an individual. Another suggests that the legendary emperor Yao invented it to enlighten his son. Certainly wéiqí had begun to take hold around the 6th century BCE when Confucius mentioned wéiqí in his masterpiece Analects, sometimes erroneously translated as “chess.”
Tags: China culture, Qí, Qín, Traditional CultureFrom Past to Now, Still Popular
Nowadays the learning style and method are modern and multifarious, especially the usage of internet. When we recall Chinese history we can find that every scholar learns and strives to excel in four art forms. Fine points of these arts are taught as part of one’s formal education; and skills in these arts are diligently honed and improved upon all one’s life. We often see these arts illustrated and mentioned in paintings and poems. The Four Arts of the Chinese Scholar, otherwise known as siyi (四艺) is a term used to describe four main accomplishments required of the Chinese scholar gentleman. They are qin (琴qín), qi (棋qí), shu (书shū) and hua (画huà).
Although the individual elements of the concept have very long histories indeed as activities befitting a learned person, the earliest written source putting the four together is Zhang Yanyuan’s Fashu Yaolu (张彦远《法书要录》) (618—907) from the Tang Dynasty, and as “the four arts” the concept is first found in the Xianqing Ouji by Li Yu (李渔《闲情偶寄》) (1610—1680).
In China to be a scholar is to be an artist. Chinese culture insists that an educated and ‘proper’ individual’s classical training has components of what in Chinese are called qin, qi, shu, and hua. These are translated roughly into “Musical Instruments, Board Games, Calligraphy, and Painting”. For one to be considered scholarly, or a man of the arts, then those are in fact the arts in which to immerse oneself. The Chinese ideals of an educated man are a test and demonstration of the individual’s strength in reason, creation, expression and dexterity, and thus rate highly in China both today and in ancient times.
All of these arts combined made for a platform by which scholars could compete against each other in creativity, expression, ideas, and thinking power. They created a means by which men would judge each other beyond the worth of their possessions. These four arts created a culture in which art flourished freely among the populace.
Tags: China culture, Traditional Arts in China