The clothing of traditional Chinese clothing can be roughly classified into four categories: silk, hemp, wool and cotton. From the Qin and Han dynasties to the end of the Qing Dynasty, luxurious silk fabrics have always been a luxury for the upper class, while the bulk textile raw materials used as the daily clothes of the people have changed several times.
Textiles around the world start with the use of wild fibers, and China is no exception. Primitive society people collect wild kudzu, hemp, etc., and use the hunted birds and beasts feather feathers, through rubbing, performance, weaving, weaving and other ways to make more crude clothes, instead of grass blades and animal skins. With the development of agriculture and animal husbandry, people have gradually learned the methods of artificial production of textile raw materials such as planting hemp ropes, raising sheep for wool and raising silkworms to draw silk.
The earliest textile fibers
Before the Song and Yuan dynasties in China, cotton was not popularized, and what was called "cloth" in ancient times mainly referred to kudzu and hemp fabrics, so "Xiao Erya Guangfu" has the saying: "hemp, silk, ge yue cloth".
Ge Ke is said to be the earliest textile fiber in China, and the Chinese ancestors learned to extract fibers from the stem skin of Kudzu more than 6,000 years ago to make clothing. Kudzu is also called kudzu vine, the root contains starch edible, the ancestors in the cooking of kudzu, found that the vine skin boiling will become soft to separate a wisp of fiber, this fiber can be made into yarn after twisting processing, so gradually groped out the boiling technology to extract kudzu fiber, the use of kudzu fiber woven cloth is kudzu cloth.
Due to the high breathability of gebu, it was often used to sew summer clothes or mosquito nets in ancient times, so gebu was also called xiabu. According to the fineness of the textile, there are coarse and fine parts, coarse kudzu is called silk (xì), fine kudzu cloth is called silk (chī). The Book of Rites records that "the Son of Heaven..., the scarf is in silk", "the monarch ..., the towel is in silk", indicating that different qualities of gebu were used by rulers of different classes.
The Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period was the golden age of Gebu production, and Gebu was a popular summer clothing fabric. At that time, the artificial cultivation of kudzu was very popular in China, and high-quality kudzu fabrics were not only produced everywhere, but also produced amazingly. According to records, after the defeat of the Yue king at the wu state, the gebu dedicated to the wu king at a time reached 100,000 horses. After the Sui and Tang dynasties, textile technology and production capacity have been significantly improved, but kudzu vine is gradually replaced by hemp because of its short single fiber and is not suitable for finishing.
Sackcloth comparable to silk
Hemp was also the main textile raw material in the Shang and Zhou Dynasties, and many hemp fabrics were very delicately woven. The thickness of the ancient linen cloth is explained by "liters", that is, the number of roots of the warp in a fixed width is expressed, and 80 warp yarns are called one liter. The standard width of the cloth in the Warring States and Qin and Han dynasties was han feet 2 feet 2 inches (about 50 centimeters today), and it can be seen how much it has risen within this width to see the exquisiteness of the cloth. The higher the number of liters, the finer the cloth. The finest liters of linen cloth can often reach 30 liters, and its fineness, feel and appearance are similar to silk.
Hemp commonly used in ancient Chinese textiles includes hemp, ramie, ramie and so on.
Hemp, also known as hemp and hemp, is a hermaphroditic strain. The male plant has slender stems, a high yield of phloem fibers, good quality and early maturation. The female has a thick stem, a low yield of phloem fibers, and a late maturation. The artificial cultivation of cannabis in China began around the Neolithic Age and was popularized in the Shang and Zhou Dynasties. As early as 2,000 years ago, our people have a deep understanding of the phenomenon of hermaphroditism and its textile properties, calling its male strains fir (xǐ) or oysters, and female plants are tho (jū) or hemp. Tamarix is often used to weave thinner cloth, and tho hemp weaves coarser cloth.
Ramie, also known as ramie, is more abundant in warm and rainy southern regions. The biggest advantage of ramie fiber is slender and tough, smooth and mercerized, can be spun with single fiber, ramie fiber made of textiles with light weight, structured, cool and easy to dry, firm and comfortable, white and shiny, etc., is a very important textile raw material in the Central Plains since the Shang Zhou Dynasty. Because ramie is superior to cotton in terms of moisture absorption and heat dissipation, ramie is still widely cultivated in the south even after the popularization of cotton.
Ramie can be grown in most parts of the country, its fiber is short and coarse, and the spinning performance is not as good as hemp and ramie. In ancient times, it was often used to make mourning clothes or clothing for lower-class laborers. After the Qin and Han Dynasties, the lining of amaranth was gradually reduced, but it was still more widely used to make ropes and ponchos. According to Yuan Wangzhen's "Book of Agriculture", "(Amaranth) can be woven as blankets and quilts, as silk and cattle ropes, or as cattle clothes, raincoats, grass shoes and other utensils." The age of the farmer must be indispensable. ”
Abaca includes plantain and glycoside plantain. Bananas are edible bananas, and both it and plantains are perennial herbs of the family Plantainaceae. In ancient times, some regions often used the stem skin fibers of these two plants as textile materials, and the cloth woven was called banana cloth, which was extremely light in texture. During the Tang and Song dynasties, banana cloth produced in Guangdong, Guangxi and Fujian was very famous and was often offered as a tribute to the imperial court.
Animal cuì (cuì) wool is also a very important textile raw material. China's wool textile technology originated from the nomadic peoples in Qinghai, Xinjiang, Gansu and other northwestern regions. In the Zhou Dynasty, there was a special post of "palm skin", which was responsible for collecting leather and felt wool. At that time, the wool fibers used were mainly relatively soft hairs from domestic animals and other wild animals, including wool, camel hair, yak hair, etc., which were collectively referred to as "hair". Later, after a long period of weaving practice, people gradually screened out a few varieties such as wool. When twisting wool, in order to increase the toughness, it is sometimes necessary to add some hemp blending. The clothes woven from wool were called "brown" by the ancients, and they were an important clothing for the working masses at that time.
The cotton cloth of the latecomers
Cotton cloth is a common clothing in today's life, but it is a rising star in the textile raw materials of ancient China. In ancient China, there was no "cotton" character, only "緜" or "cotton", which originally referred to silk wool; later cotton spread, borrowed as "wooden cotton". It was not until the Southern Song Dynasty's "Comments on The Urn" that the word "cotton" appeared. In the Yuan Dynasty's "Book of Wang Zhennong", "cotton" was still mixed, and it was not until the Ming Dynasty that "cotton" was more used.
Cotton was planted and utilized in China's northern and southern frontier regions long before the Central Plains. The earliest to enter China's Xinjiang region was African cotton, no later than the middle of the Western Han Dynasty. Asian cotton is a crop native to India, its quality is better than African cotton, introduced to China no later than the Southern and Northern Dynasties, experts believe it may be the first to be introduced to Hainan and the Lancang River basin through Southeast Asia.
Since the Tang and Song dynasties, people have increasingly seen the superiority of cotton as a wool lining and textile raw material. Cotton fiber is long, strong, elastic, can be worsted out of a very fine yarn, woven fabric soft and smooth shiny and high warmth. In the Yuan Dynasty, Wang Zhen wrote the "Book of Agriculture" and commented that cotton is "better than the silkworm, there is no labor to collect, and it will have the effect of harvesting." The citrus aurantium, the merit of exemption from performance, and the benefit of being able to withstand the cold, can be described as not numb and cloth, not cocooned and silky" "and also used as a substitute for felt blankets to make up for the cost of brown clothes." Therefore, after the Song and Yuan Dynasties, cotton quickly replaced the gema fiber and became a bulk textile raw material as important as silk.
Northern Song Dynasty King's Residence Spinning Wheel Diagram (Partial)
During the Northern Song Dynasty, cotton was widely planted in Liangguang and Fujian, cotton cloth began to be widely popular in the Central Plains, and cotton planting and cotton textile technology were gradually introduced. In the late Southern Song Dynasty, there was a breakthrough in the planting technology of annual cotton, and cotton was gradually popularized in a large area of the country. Cotton gradually became an important cash crop during the Two Song Dynasties, which created conditions for the rise of the cotton textile industry. At that time, there was already a set of cotton textile tools for rolling, bouncing, spinning and weaving. In the historical materials of the Song Dynasty, there are records of processing cotton such as "using bamboo as a small bow, pulling the string with a shrivel, and making it evenly thin".
The Song people used to call cotton "Jibe" and "Wooden Cotton", and cotton cloth was called white laminated cloth, white cloth or draped cloth. Since cotton cultivation has been quite extensive, many textiles of the Song people used cotton. Su Rui has a poem that reads: "The eternal leakage of spring has been counted, and the earth furnace still embraces the wooden cotton coat", and the "wooden cotton fur" in the poem is equivalent to today's cotton jacket. On the bed of the Song Dynasty, there were also quilts, but at that time there was no word quilt, which was generally called heavy quilt and cotton. Su Rui once mentioned the quilt in the poem: "The noon chicken singing house can't exhale, and it owes a heavy weight to The Jibei." ”
Southern Song Dynasty cotton blanket
At present, the earliest cotton textile relics seen in the Central Plains are a cotton thread blanket found in an ancient tomb of the Southern Song Dynasty, 2.51 meters long and 1.16 meters wide, woven from cotton, and the double-sided fleece can be seen that the cotton weaving technology of the Song people has been quite mature. That is, from this period onwards, cotton cloth has gradually become the main clothing material of our people.
Rulers of the Yuan Dynasty and later made cotton cloth the first of the summer taxes (cloth, silk, silk, cotton) and published books on cotton planting techniques to guide the people to grow cotton. By the middle of the Ming Dynasty, the status of cotton had greatly surpassed that of silk, hemp and wool, and had become the main textile raw material. From the Ming Dynasty Song Yingxing's "Tiangong Kaiwu" recorded that "cotton cloth has every inch of soil" and "loom ten rooms must have", it can be seen that cotton planting and cotton textiles have spread all over the country at that time.
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