I often wonder why, in our mother-island, people of Chinese descent don’t wear their ethnic clothing when people of Malay and Indian descent often wear theirs.
The two explanations often given and dismissed are:
1. The cheongsam is costly.
Yes, the cheongsam can be costly, but so can a sari and a baju kurong. And if there is a high demand for affordable off-the-shelf cheongsams, there will be a ready supply.
2. The cheongsam is inconvenient or uncomfortable to wear.
Yes, it might be, but I can imagine that the sari is more so. But one colleague says she is so comfortable in a sari, she can conduct an exercise lesson in it. A cheongsam doesn’t have to be fitted to every curve of one’s body. It can also be a looser and easier to wear shift, as it originally was. Tight-fitting cheongsams only came about in the early 20th century.
So that leaves me at square one.
Why are ethnic clothings so much more a part of our compatriots’ wardrobes than it is ours? Why is it, that when one wears a cheongsam, it is often rather contrived, something that one puts on for a theme party, a special occasion, or is part of one’s wardrobe only when one is rather wealthy or of a certain social status? Why do we not have the same affinity towards the cheongsam that our compatriots have for the sari or the baju?
I was once again mentally working on this conundrum on the way to work last week, as I spotted more than a few Malay ladies outfitted in graceful baju kurongs, when the answer presented itself with a big *tada!!*
I knew the answer all along but just never put one and one together.
The cheongsam, or qipao as it is known in Mandarin, is the ethnic clothing of the Qi people, i.e. the Manchurians. And we are not Qi people, we are Han people. Thus, the cheongsam is, indeed, not our ethnic clothing!
In fact, the cheongsam was forced onto the Han people during the Manchu’s Qing dynasty under the penalty of death!
Before the Qing dynasty, Han people wore the hanfu, literally Han clothing, which consists of an yi, a cross-collared robe tied with a sash, and a shang, which is a skirt. Later, the yishang became the shenyi, which is a 2-in-1 version of the yishang. If that’s hard to visualise, think the flowy robes in the movie Yingxiong.
So there, now you know!
All my fellow Han people out there, burn your cheongsams!
