---
node: garment_shang_dynasty_dress
type: garment
slug: shang_dynasty_dress
title: "Shang dynasty dress"
lead: "Shang dress was the two-part set that Chinese clothing would keep for three thousand years: an upper garment crossing at the collar and closing to the right, worn over a lower skirt, with a wide woven sash at the waist and often a panel hanging in front of the knees."
published: 2026-08-16
updated: 2026-08-16
image_file: shang_dynasty_dress.jpg
image_source: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shang_Jade_Figure_cropped.jpg"
image_author: "Gary Todd — jade figure in cross-collared robe and wide sash, tomb of Fu Hao, Yinxu, National Museum of China"
image_license: "CC0"
---

## Overview

The arrangement is called yi-shang, upper garment and lower garment, and the Shang is where it first becomes visible. The robe crosses at the chest and the right side goes underneath, a direction that stayed fixed in Chinese dress from here on, and the sleeves narrow at the wrist. There is no cloth to look at, so the cut has to be read from small figures in jade, marble and bronze — most famously the kneeling figures from the tomb of Fu Hao at Anyang, opened in 1976, which show the collar, the sash and the hem clearly.

## How it is worn

The robe has no fastening of its own: it is closed by crossing the two front panels, so the sash does all the work. It is a broad woven band wound at the waist and knotted, holding the collar shut and the skirt in place at the same time. From the front of it hangs the bixi, a rectangular knee-cover, originally protective and already a mark of standing by the time it was being carved in jade. Hair was worn coiled high on the head and held with a pin — the jade and bone hairpins recovered from these tombs run into the hundreds — and some figures wear a close cap over the coil. Jade pendants hung at the belt, and the whole assembly was built to be read from the front, standing or kneeling.

## History

Silk was already being woven. It survives not as fabric but as impressions and mineralised traces on the surface of the bronze vessels it was wrapped around when buried, which is how the weave counts are known. Dress at this date is a statement about rank and ritual rather than about season or comfort: what a person could wear followed from birth and office, and the burials make the gradient plain — jade, patterned silk and worked bronze at the top, and nothing of the kind below it. The Zhou inherited the whole system and wrote it down, and the cross-collared, right-closing robe over a skirt remained the base of Chinese formal dress until the Qing.