Hanfu: One Garment, Two Opposite Crimes

A young woman was surrounded by a crowd and made to take off her clothes in the street. It was Chengdu, the autumn of 2010. The crowd, returning from an anti-Japanese demonstration, had decided her long wrapped robe was a kimono. They pressured her until she stripped it off, carried it into the street, and burned it.Chengdu Chunxi Road Hanfu Burning Incident, 2010Sixteen years later, the same garment sits at the center of a very different quarrel. Scholars now argue over whether it has become a vehicle for Han chauvinism, a banner of ethnic supremacy. The charge has flipped completely. In 2010 the robe was punished for being too foreign. By 2026 it is attacked for being too native. Nothing about the cloth changed in those sixteen years.This is the contradictory life of hanfu, the dress of the Han Chinese. To see how one garment can be charged with two opposite crimes, it helps to set the politics aside and ask a simpler question: what did this garment actually look like, before anyone…