Hey again everyone! I’m super excited to be introducing a new series that I’m going to be writing over the next few… days? weeks? However much time it takes me to get all of this out! This collection of articles, Hanfu in Components, is a perfect introduction for those of you semi-newbies who feel a little overwhelmed by all the different kinds of hanfu and want to learn more beyond the very basics but can’t find the best place to start. We’ll break down hanfu into its basic components, talk about what parts make up a piece of han clothing, and briefly explore the shape, history, and pattern of each part so that you can get familiar with the way that hanfu is pieced together, no deep historical background needed.
WHAT THIS SERIES WILL COVER
- Introduction (this article)
- Hanfu Construction
- Tops & Robes (Body)
- Sleeves
- Collars
- Putting it All Together
WHAT THIS SERIES WON’T COVER (may change in the future):
- Skirts (but you can find my article about Types of Hanfu Skirts here! Also may change in the future)
- Pants (may change in the future)
- Hanfu underlayers (but you can find my article about Basics of Hanfu Underlayers here! Also may change in the future)
- Measurement Vocabulary (but you can find my article about Common Measurements of Hanfu here!)
- Accessories (hats, jewelry, etc., may be in a future article, just not this series)
- How to Make Hanfu (I can’t sew lol, when I say ‘construction’ I mean the basic concepts of it, not actually making it)
- In-depth historical context (may be in a future article, just not this series)
- Details on hanyuansu (may be in a future article, just not this series)
- Details on fabrics (may be in a future article, just not this series)
HOW TO USE THIS GUIDE
Trying to keep this introduction short, but there are a few things I want to cover to make it easy for you guys to read through all of these! This is a buttload of information so I’m going to be presenting things to you guys in the most convenient way I can.
First of all, you should probably read the first two articles (this one and hanfu construction) before the rest of them, and the last one in the series (putting it all together) last, otherwise they won’t make sense. The rest you can read in whatever order you’d like. Changes may occur to the articles in this collection later, which I’ll do my best to update here too.
Since a lot of terms are in Chinese, in order to give everyone the best possible reading experience, for these terms, I’ll provide the simplified chinese character, traditional chinese character, pinyin romanization + tone number, and translation when I first mention it. I will refer to it with the pinyin spelling for the rest of the article. (PS: As many of you may know, Chinese language has tones to each of its words. For more efficient typing, I’ll indicate the tone in the pinyin romanization with numbers after the pinyin spelling: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, as in the tones for 子,天,人,水,大, respectively. For example: the character 漢/汉/han4/the name for the Han ethnicity.)
Lastly, as a disclaimer, I’m not a historian—I don’t have any formal education on this, only my own research, which is extensive, but not absolute. I only share what I know to be true at the time that I write it. If I find out otherwise, though, I’ll do my best to correct myself!
If anyone’s got any questions or suggestions, feel free to ask. I’ll probably need some time to work through all of these different articles and cover everything, but I’m hoping I can keep posting them pretty regularly! I won’t waste much time on conclusions and introductions for the rest of the articles so that you can find the information right to the point where you want it. Thanks everyone for their support~
ILY BTW
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Great endeavour! thanks for sharing with us your extensiv research. You don't need to be a formally educated expert to talk about things, as long as you cite your sources.