Ancient Chinese clothing

People in China generally wore tunics (like long t-shirts). Women wore long tunics down to the ground, with belts, and men wore shorter ones down to their knees. Sometimes they wore jackets over their tunics. In the winter, when it was cold, people wore padded jackets over their tunics, and sometimes pants under them. In early China, poor people made their clothes of hemp or ramie. Rich people wore silk.

Most people in China, both men and women, wore their hair long. People said that you got your hair from your parents and so it was disrespectful to cut it.
During the Sui Dynasty, in the 500's AD, the emperor decided that all poor people had to wear blue or black clothes, and only rich people could wear colors.
X-ray pictures of someone with bound feet and a diagram
In the Sung Dynasty, about 1100 AD, a fashion started at the emperor's court for women to bind their feet. Women thought that to be beautiful they needed little tiny feet, only about three inches long. They got these tiny feet by wrapping tight bandages around the feet of little girls, about five or six years old.

Some of the earliest versions of the story of Cinderella come from Sung Dynasty China. In these versions, the point of the story is that the Prince loves Cinderella because she has the smallest feet of any girl in the kingdom, so the slipper will only fit her.

Then in the Yuan Dynasty, the Mongols brought cotton to China. At first people didn’t want to grow cotton, maybe because the people running the silk industry wanted to keep people buying silk. But the Mongol invasions in the 1200’s destroyed a lot of the mulberry trees that were needed to make silk. The Mongol emperors, like Kublai Khan, turned to cotton to fill the gap. In 1289 AD they ordered the opening of special training centers to teach farmers how to grow cotton. And in 1296 they ordered that farmers who grew cotton could pay lower taxes. Soon everyone liked cotton better than ramie or hemp. Cotton was warmer, and softer, and stronger, and cheaper. You could make it thin for summer, or you could make thick padded clothes out of it that were warm for winter.

Resource: http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/china/clothing/

Ancient Chinese Food And Chinese

When you think of Chinese food you think of rice, and rice was the first grain that was farmed in China. There is archaeological evidence of rice farming along the Yang-tse River as early as about 5000 BC. People cooked rice by boiling it in water, the way they do today. Or they made it into wine. Rice wine has been popular in China since prehistory. But rice doesn't grow in northern China, which is much drier and colder.

People in northern China gathered wild millet and sorghum instead. By 4500 BC, people in northern China were farming millet. They ate it boiled into a kind of porridge.Another food people associate with China is tea. Tea grows wild in China. By about 3000 BC (or it could be much earlier), people in China had begun to drink tea. Soon everybody drank tea.Wheat was not native to China, so it took much longer to reach China. People in northern China first began to eat wheat in the Shang Dynasty, about 1500 BC. Wheat was not native to China, but people brought it to China from West Asia. People in China boiled it like millet, to make something like Cream of Wheat. These were the main foods of China - rice, millet, sorghum, and wheat. In northern China, people mostly ate millet, wheat, and sorghum. In southern China, people mostly ate rice.

Poor people ate almost nothing but these foods.
GA_googleFillSlot("Contentbox");
When people could afford it, they bought or grew vegetables to put on their rice. Soybeans, for instance, are native to China. So are cucumbers. For fruits, the Chinese had oranges and lemons, peaches and apricots. The native flavorings are ginger and anise (Americans use anise to make licorice).On special occasions, people also put little pieces of meat on their rice. By 5500 BC, the Chinese were eating domesticated chicken, which came originally from Thailand. By 4000 or 3000 BC, they were eating pork, which was native to China. Sheep and cattle, which were not native, reached China from West Asia also around 4000 BC.

Since meat was so expensive, and because Buddhists didn't eat meat, starting around the Sung Dynasty (about 1000 AD) people also put tofu, or bean curd, in their food as a source of protein. Because China doesn't have big forests, it was always hard to find fuel to cook with. Chinese people learned to cut up their food very small, so it would cook quickly on a very small fire.

During the Han Dynasty, millet wine became very popular and was even more popular to drink than tea. Also beginning in the Han Dynasty, about 100 AD, Chinese people began to make their wheat and rice into long noodles. Marco Polo, a visitor to China from Venice, wrote that by the time of Kublai Khan, about 1200 AD, Chinese people ate millet boiled in milk to make porridge. Even as late as 1200 AD, Chinese people did not bake bread.
Here is a video of some Chinese kids eating with chopsticks:

Resource:http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/china/food/




Here's what Chinese people call China and USA.

Zhong guo (jong goo-ah) translates to "Middle Kingdom" or "Middle Country." They call America "Mei Guo" which means "Beautiful country."
Resource: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070807094227AAHQawO

The Population Of China

The population of China on July 19th 2010 is approximately 1,351,718,522