The Health Exhibition literature. Vol. XIX : Return of number of visitors and statistical tables. Official guide. Guide to the sanitary and insanitary houses. Handbook to the aquarium and fish culture department. Anthropometric laboratory. Public health in China. National education in China. Diet, dress, and dwellings of the Chinese in relation to health.

  • International Health Exhibition (1884 : London, England)
Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Health Exhibition literature. Vol. XIX : Return of number of visitors and statistical tables. Official guide. Guide to the sanitary and insanitary houses. Handbook to the aquarium and fish culture department. Anthropometric laboratory. Public health in China. National education in China. Diet, dress, and dwellings of the Chinese in relation to health. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

    376/546 (page 346)
    seems to govern the great body of the people. The exceptions to this healthy law allowed in the case of dress .at marriages, funerals, &c., are well understood. Many of the difficulties of the present day regarding dress in the West would be solved if a consistent dress for different ranks of persons could be adopted and adhered to. Public opinion should also restrict the changes of fashion within certain limits. Much of the demand for novelty could be appeased by the endless variety of fabrics, colours, and trimmings, without changing the form, unless to adopt others which reason and common sense point out to be superior to that in use. This leads us to make a few remarks on fashion in China. i We are accustomed to think and speak of the conservatism of the Chinese, and to cite the absence of fickle fashion. Everything is so crystallized, and the people so conservative, j as to appear to us a nation with their faces always turned I to the remote past, sighing for the return of the supposed I Augustan age of their country, and whose most common ] expression is, chin piih ju ku, “ The Present is not equal to 1 the Past.” Although these sentiments imply changes going I on, which do not principally refer to dress, yet the Chinese I themselves do admit change; but the changes are so I infrequent, so small, and so unessential, that even to the I observant foreigner they are not recognised, while even I the unobservant Chinese can at once detect foreign changes, I especially in female attire. The statement, therefore, that I no change takes place in fashion, is both true and false at I the same time, according as one or other meaning is I attached to the word. The minute changes going on in I China do not touch the dress as a whole, and they do not ■ receive acknowledgment as inherent and essential changes I of fashion. We admit some small change in the make of a ■ cap, the ornamentation of a shoe, difference in the shade of 1 the materials composing the dress, or even the width of a '? sleeve, but these amount to so little as hardly to be entitled \ to the name of change, or to compare with the yearly or CT more frequent fashions of the West. If we glance over a '