Hanching Qipao / Work

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These are garments the shop has made, together with design directions it can take on. Turn the pages left and right for the detail, or use the filters above to leave out what you are not looking for.

全部作品

• No.12 — Sleeveless full-length indigo silk-satin cheongsam with bamboo-leaf sprays, vermilion mandarin collar and cream piping, full-length studio shot against a bamboo-shadowed wall
• No.13 — Teal embroidered Xiuhe wedding top with matching skirt, styled with an antique vase and furniture
• No.14 — Men's black-and-gold dragon brocade Tang jacket with a mandarin collar and hand-knotted frog buttons, full-length studio shot against a dark background
• No.16 — Silver-grey floral lace short cheongsam with cream edging, full length against a pure white studio backdrop
• No.17 — Two dark cheongsam with folding fans, in a red-brick arcade
• No.20 — Pink floral short-sleeved cheongsam seen from behind, the model glancing back so the cut of the back is visible, red lanterns in an old house at night
• No.21 — Black long cheongsam with multicoloured floral embroidery, leaning beside a dark wooden counter in a warmly lit interior
• No.23 — Short cheongsam with a multicoloured botanical print on red, mid-stride against a cobalt-blue studio backdrop
• No.30 — Black patterned cheongsam, the model seated with a pipa, against a wine-red backdrop
• No.32 — Long cheongsam in a black-and-white leaf pattern, standing before the red temple door with red paper diamonds, hard midday light
• No.33 — A customer choosing cloth at the fabric racks in the shop, bolts of coloured silk on the shelves
• No.34 — Gold cheongsam, the model reaching towards a wooden cabinet in a dimly lit old house
• No.35 — Design concept: bone-white satin short cheongsam, a single deep navy arc motif sweeping across the skirt, city rooftop at blue hour
• No.37 — Design concept: girl's porcelain-blue cheongsam with cloud motifs, apricot piping, calf length, natural window light
• No.38 — Design concept: long black sequinned cheongsam with gold-and-copper floral embroidery, an emerald satin turned-back collar and matching slit lining
• No.39 — Design concept: long silver-grey satin cheongsam with cream lace floral appliqué, mandarin collar and sleeveless cut, before the carved timber screen of a Chinese garden
• No.40 — Design concept: long cheongsam in mineral blue-green damask, a still-water ripple woven tone on tone, low collar and three frog buttons, daylight in a bare concrete room
• No.41 — Design concept: loose straight moon-white satin cheongsam worn over graphite straight-leg trousers, terracotta piping and three frog buttons, city street in daylight
• No.42 — Design concept: long pink brocade satin cheongsam, floral damask woven tone on tone with rose piping, seated on a wooden table in an old house among blue-and-white porcelain
• No.43 — Design concept: pink satin halter-neck short cheongsam, a row of matching hand-knotted frog buttons set along the mandarin collar and the diagonal front opening, a watercolour peony motif, in a glass conservatory
• No.44 — Design concept: floor-length lilac velvet cheongsam, a tone-on-tone floral pattern, a long slender keyhole opening below the bar-shaped frog button at the mandarin collar, edged with narrow piping in the same colour, a row of matching bar-shaped frog buttons down the centre front, each hung with a silver teardrop drop, gathers at one side of the waist, in the terrazzo stairwell of an old hotel
• No.45 — Design concept: wine-red satin halter-neck short cheongsam, gold-thread floral appliqué, a teardrop keyhole opening at the chest and a flower-shaped frog button at the collar, both edged with gold piping, the hem and the slit edged in gold to match, before a grey-green plaster wall
• No.46 — Design concept: halter-neck short cheongsam with a blue watercolour rose print on ivory, a blue butterfly-shaped frog button at the mandarin collar and a small teardrop opening just below it, horizontal gathers all over the waist and hips, the hem cut on the diagonal and overlapping, before a wall of washed-stone render, slanting afternoon light
• No.47 — Design concept: long cheongsam with a pink watercolour floral print, a two-layer construction with a sheer outer layer over a plain lining, a high mandarin collar and a row of silver-tipped pink bar-shaped frog buttons down the centre front, running all the way to the hem, an empty room backlit through sheer curtains
• No.48 — Design concept: ivory silk long cheongsam with a crossover front, indigo-violet wisteria in ink-wash print cascading along the crossing line, the crossing edges, sleeve hems, lower hem and side slit all bound with very fine navy piping, pale ink twigs and small pink plum blossoms scattered over the skirt, photographed before a timber corridor in a Chinese garden
• No.49 — Design concept: sleeveless long cheongsam in hand-dyed satin blending emerald and teal, a low mandarin collar closing at the centre front with a slender teardrop keyhole below it fastened by a single coral-red hand-knotted button, no piping anywhere, olive-gold washing across the waist and hip, backlit at dusk in a red-brick arcade
• No.50 — Design concept: halter-neck cheongsam in wine-red satin with an all-over gold floral brocade, the mandarin collar and the keyhole opening both piped in gold and fastened with gold hand-knotted buttons, the high side slit piped to match, a half-length frame in an old interior with a warm lamp and a vase of red plum branches
• No.51 — Design concept: sleeveless long cheongsam in white satin printed with blue-and-white porcelain florals, a mandarin collar closing at the centre front with a single self-coloured knot button and a deep teardrop keyhole below it, the front line, armholes and side slit all piped in fine pale blue, framed to the knee beside the iron railing of a stone bridge in a Jiangnan water town
• No.52 — Design concept: short halter-neck cheongsam in cream printed with blue florals, the halter tied in a bow at the throat, a deep teardrop opening at the centre front, a small slit at the side of the skirt, beside the wet flagstones of an alley in a Jiangnan water town
• No.53 — Design concept: sleeveless cheongsam in ivory lace, sheer throughout and unlined, a mandarin collar closing at the centre front with a long narrow keyhole below it running down to the bustline and finishing in a single red stone, the lace scattered with red, green, blue and gold stones and gold floral motifs, the high side slit and the hem both piped in fine self-coloured plain satin, framed above the knee beside a tea table in a Chinese timber gallery
• No.54 — Design concept: halter-neck cheongsam in ivory guipure lace, wide open areas between the heavy lace bands and unlined through the waist and midriff, a mandarin collar trimmed with a lace floret that continues below into a fanned band of openwork panels, a plain satin bow tied at the side waist, the high side slit piped in fine self-coloured plain satin and worn over a plain satin underskirt, framed to the knee in an old interior with a warm lamp and a hanging ink landscape scroll
• No.55 — Design concept: short-sleeved short cheongsam in cream printed with blue watercolour florals, a mandarin collar and diagonal front opening fastened at the throat with a single navy knot button, the collar edge, the crossing line, the sleeve hems, the side slit and the lower hem all bound in fine navy, in a bright room by a window with a white sheer curtain and white flowers in a stoneware vase
• No.56 — Design concept: long halter-neck cheongsam printed with pink watercolour florals, a mandarin collar and a row of bar-shaped frog buttons down the centre front, a deep teardrop keyhole below them, the collar edge and the opening both piped in fine pink, a high side slit, seated on a wooden chair beside a tea table in an old interior
• No.57 — Design concept: long halter-neck cheongsam in ivory satin, a single self-coloured knot button below the mandarin collar with a slender teardrop keyhole beneath it, a pink-violet flowering branch printed diagonally from the chest down into the skirt, no piping anywhere, a high side slit, seated by a wooden lattice window and a pond in a Chinese garden
• No.04 — Couple portrait: the bride in an orange-and-gold floral cheongsam, the groom in a grey mandarin-collar Tang jacket
• No.06 — Couple portrait: the groom in a cream embroidered Tang jacket, the bride in a teal embroidered top and skirt
• No.07 — Mint-green brocade short cheongsam; the model sits sideways on a wooden bench holding a folding fan, dappled light in a timber walkway
• No.09 — Ivory floral cheongsam with vermilion piping; the model stands on the stone bridge of a Japanese garden under a paper parasol
• No.02 — Two cheongsam side by side — one black patterned, one black-and-white — in an old street arcade
• No.03 — Men's black jacquard Tang robe, standing at the wooden window of an earth-walled old house

These Steps Have Been Studied in Earnest

A cheongsam is not only a matter of looking good. Each note below first says what the thing is inside the shop, then how it has been discussed in textile and clothing research — every point carries its source, so you can look it up yourself.

Whether It Fits Comes Down to Where the Darts Go

The master measures you himself and cuts the cloth himself. From the same set of measurements, change where the waist darts sit and how much they take in, and what you put on is a different garment.

陳研 and colleagues examined surviving cheongsam held by the Folk Costume Museum of Jiangnan University and the Yifengtang Museum in Shanghai, and describe the move from a flat shoulder with a cut-in-one sleeve and no darts to a sloping shoulder with a set-in sleeve and darts; in the paper's own words, the change “ended the era of the person adapting to the garment and opened a new era of the garment adapting to the person.” 史玉媛 and colleagues took it further with an experiment: one set of finished-garment measurements, three ways of distributing the waist darts, compared by scanning the dressed dress form with a non-contact 3D scanner. Their conclusion is that how much the waist is drawn in is closely related to how the darts are distributed. The earlier “cruciform flat structure” has been set out in a book by 李迎軍.

How High the Collar, How High the Slit — There Is a Record

These are the two things customers ask about most, and the two with the least standard answer. We adjust them to your figure and the occasion, but it is not done on instinct — over the past hundred years, collar height and side slits have followed clear directions.

Yang and Huang, writing in Fashion Theory, took 187 Taiwanese photographs from the 1910s to the 1970s held in the Taiwan digital archives (TELDAP) and had six coders with textile-design backgrounds measure collar height, sleeve width, waistline height, slit length and garment length in each one. The averages they recorded: collar height about 70% of neck length, slit length about 16% of garment length, and the waistline at 57% of the vertical distance from neck to hip. Earlier examples are looser, with lower collars and longer bodies; later ones become close-fitting, with the waistline and the collar both higher. This is one of the few quantitative studies of cheongsam structure that takes Taiwan as its subject.

The Cheongsam in Taiwan Did Not Begin in 1949

Hanching opened on Anhe Road in Taipei's East District in 1979 and only moved to Zhongshan North Road in 1997; the first-generation master, Chen Hsing-chun, entered the trade in 1964. What the shop says about its own lineage comes from interviews with the master himself (see the main page); what follows here is the industry background that can be found in published sources. The two should not be run together.

洪郁如's research shows that the cheongsam became popular in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period and was already part of the discussion of women's dress in Taiwan by the 1930s — “it only arrived after the war” is a common mistake. 忽欣燁's master's thesis deals with the division of schools within the Taipei cheongsam trade from the 1950s to the 1970s, and shows that the Fuzhou school was an important strand of local Taipei cheongsam craft, and that the Shanghai school was not the only one. The entry on 祺袍 in the National Cultural Memory Bank, written by the Chinese Textile and Costume Culture Center at Fu Jen Catholic University, further records that from the 1970s masters who had moved to Taiwan — 楊成貴 among them — began writing 祺袍 in place of 旗袍 in their shop names, and that this carried over to the generation of masters after them.

Inlaying, Insetting, Piping, Banding, Knotting, Embroidery

Piped edging and frog buttons are the two steps every cheongsam in the shop goes through. The frog buttons are knotted one at a time from strips of cloth; they are not ready-made pieces sewn on.

Those six words are not trade slang. They are the official wording of the entry on the hand-making of the Longfeng cheongsam, under “Chinese garment-making techniques” (no. Ⅷ-193) on China's national list of intangible cultural heritage. The entry on Manchu cheongsam making under the same item records that the sewing makes “extensive use of a distinctive invisible stitching: the seam can be seen, the stitches cannot,” and that the levels of inlay and piping run “from three rows of inlay and piping to five rows, and as far as eighteen.” The frog button is itself separately listed — the making of frog buttons for Chinese garments, in Shanghai's second batch of municipal intangible cultural heritage (no. Ⅷ-42, announced in 2009). As for making a garment fit without darts, 郭唱 and 方麗英 made sample garments in three fabrics and tested them on five wearers, confirming that guiba — shaping by ironing, that is pushing, easing and stretching — can take the place of darts, and that it works best on silk.

Choosing Cloth Is Not Only About How It Looks

Once you have been measured, the second thing is the cloth. How stiff the cloth is decides in turn what the pattern can do — from the same pattern, a soft cloth and a stiff one make two different garments.

The craftsmanship of Nanjing Yunjin brocade and sericulture and silk craftsmanship of China were both inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009. Sun and colleagues measured Yunjin Zhuanghua satin and found its ground and figure weaves to be 5-, 7- or 8-harness satin weave; they measured its bending rigidity in the weft direction at three to eight times that of a plain satin of the same specification, and its crease recovery angle nearly 30 degrees lower — in other words, Yunjin is stiff and holds a structure, but it also keeps creases more readily. As for where the drape of silk comes from, Kim and Lee measured samples on the KES-FB system, and their statistical analysis showed bending properties to be the main parameter determining the drape coefficient (the samples in that study were silks used for hanbok, not cheongsam fabric, which should be said plainly).

After the Garment Goes Home

A made-to-measure cheongsam is usually not everyday clothing; it comes out a few times a year. How you store it decides how long it lasts more than how you clean it does.

Gong and colleagues found that even with ultraviolet filtered out, long-term exposure to other light still causes photodegradation in silk, and that the more aged and the more disordered the silk already is, the more readily light damages it. Vilaplana and colleagues set out the routes by which silk degrades — oxidation, hydrolysis, chain scission and structural rearrangement — and show that molecular-level changes in amino acid composition and crystallinity correspond to macroscopic changes in brightness and mechanical properties. The conclusion is a simple one: do not leave it sitting in the light for long.

The portfolio images are based on garments actually made in the Hanching workroom: the styles, fabrics, motifs and cut are all the shop's own work. Those marked “design concept” are directions the shop can make to order; no finished piece exists yet. The models, settings and lighting shown are digitally recreated and are not the original photographic locations. The finished garment is what counts — it is made to your measurements.

1F, No. 53-6, Sec. 3, Zhongshan N. Rd., Zhongshan Dist., Taipei 02-2586-6781