Do you know what patterns are on the official uniforms of the Qing Dynasty?

While it usually looks quite dull, and probably not particularly elaborate in style, the Qing Dynasty's costumes were actually quite elaborate. First of all, the official dress of the Qing Dynasty was divided into a variety of different dress categories for different occasions. Then the more commonly used ones would be the auspicious clothes and the court dress.

These two kinds of costumes occupy a great part of the officials' life, the court dress is mainly worn when meeting the emperor, and the auspicious dress is usually worn by the officials when dealing with all kinds of official business. The general feeling is that the court dress is more like the clothes we have to wear when attending any major banquet, while the gi dress is probably more like what we call professional clothes.

Generally speaking, the court dress is easier to distinguish, that is, we usually see in some of the palace drama, a lot of ministers in the face of the emperor will be uniform dress. So here we mainly talk about the auspicious clothes.

The pattern of the jiqi is usually a "python", which is not very different from the "dragon". Because of the similarity in shape. But there are subtle differences between the two. The dragon's robe has five claws, while the python's robe has only four.

Because only the emperor could wear the dragon robe, the general ministers wore the python robe. In addition, the bottom of the python robe also has seawater river cliffs, the general meaning should be that I hope that the river and the mountain will be forever~

Then it is about the court dress, the court dress according to the official's rank is different, the pattern on it is also different. Then not all officials of all ranks have pythons on their court dresses, for example, there are no pythons on the court dresses of officials of the eighth rank.

All in all, in fact, the design of the official uniforms of the Qing Dynasty is more ingenious and subtle, and every detail in it may have some very far-reaching meanings.