Ask for a cheongsam in Mandarin and you may be handed a man's robe
English speakers treat cheongsam and qipao as two names for one fitted women's dress. In Cantonese and Shanghainese that holds, but in Mandarin the same characters, changshan, mean a garment worn only by men, and the women's version is called qipao, the banner gown.
Qipao points back to the Qing dynasty, founded by the Manchu, who ruled China from 1644 to 1911. They organised households into the Eight Banners, and everyone enrolled, at first only Manchu but later Mongols and Han Chinese too, dressed differently from ordinary civilians and became known as banner people. Their long robes were loose and trapezoid-shaped. Men's riding versions carried slits on all four sides for mounting horses and cuffs shaped like horse hooves, and one theory traces the modern dress to a court robe worn by Manchu women, the chenyi, which oddly had no slits at all.
Borrowing ran both ways. The standing collar appears in relics from the Han-ruled Ming dynasty, and the Manchu, who once closed robes on the left, adopted the Han right-side closure. The reverse was harsher: the new Qing rulers ordered Han men, on pain of death, to wear Manchu clothing and the queue hairstyle, though the dress rule was later limited to officials and scholars.
The dress as known today took shape in the 1910s and 1920s and was made fashionable by Shanghai's socialites. The Shanghai style used Western tailoring tricks such as curved cutting and waist darts to follow the body, and in the 1930s and 1940s it came to signal modernity and a break with Confucian ideals of womanhood. Beijing's version stayed conservative and handmade, with wide piping and fasteners that can take days to make, their silk passing through twenty-six processing steps.
Hong Kong absorbed many Shanghai tailors after 1949, and there the word lost its gender, covering garments for both sexes. From the mid-1950s to the late 1960s it was the standard respectable outfit for urban women. After fading in the 1970s it lingered mostly as a uniform for restaurant staff and Cathay Pacific cabin crew, until a revival movement took off around 2016.
Source: Qipao
