Nearly every province in China has its own customs and peculiarities in dress as well as in everything else, but they all agree on the rich reds and blues, the purples and mauves for the making of their jackets, while their wide, skirt-like trousers are often of a much deeper colour than the jacket and trimmed with a wide band of black. The mixture of tints sounds most incongruous to foreign ears, but Chinese women have the faculty of weaving the most clashing hues into a work of harmonious art. Except in the case of an old lady, black is seldom worn, and as white is the colour of mourning, it is seen only on occasions of sorrow. A Chinese lady can never understand why European babies are dressed in white. Children are the symbols of happiness, and it seems to them most inappropriate to garb them in sorrow’s colours. All the gayest and brightest colours of China’s dye-pots are made to produce the clothing for China’s children.
The dress of the Chinese woman, rich or poor, is very modest, fastening close around the neck, with sleeves coming to the hands and the loose jacket formed so as to disguise the lines of the body. European women are severely censured in China because of their _décoletté_ gowns and tight dresses, which seem to the Chinese the height of vulgarity. When one of the Imperial princes was _en route_ to England, he attended his first foreign dinner in Shanghai. About twenty-five of the guests were English and American ladies, dressed in their most elaborate gowns, which means extreme _décoletté_. The attachés of the prince had tried to prepare his highness for the sight he was to witness; but they had evidently underestimated its startling qualities, because when the prince arrived and gave one amazed look at his hostess and the line of waiting ladies he was nonplussed. He looked pitifully for his interpreter, and, not receiving aid from him, put down his head, shut his eyes, and bravely stumbled around the room, groping blindly for each lady’s hand, as he had been informed that he should shake hands with them. This was another serious breach of Chinese etiquette, as no Chinese man must ever touch a woman. The Chinese views in regard to modesty connected with the dress of women has caused the missionaries in the interior to expurgate from the magazines that may by chance fall into the hands of Chinese visitors all pictures of lightly clad ladies who are used to advertise soaps and powders and the underwear of our American markets.