Page:History of Corea, ancient and modern; with description of manners and customs, language and geography (1879).djvu/327

 DBEsa SOS spinach, garlic, and onion ; no potatoes or carrots. The fields produce wheats barley, buck wheat, and the large millet of northern China, in addition to the more common rice, of which there are five or six varieties, some very fine, grown principally in the hot south ; and small golden millet, the only food of the sparsely peopled cold northern provinces. DBEsa The style of dress is unlike that of the present Chinese, because the latter is changed, since the accession of the Manchu dynasty, from the ancient Chinese style still worn by the Coreans. The robe is very full in front, tied by a small piece of the material of the dress under the right arm ; and one can imagine the queer figure, when that fullness is further distended by a firee application of starch. This applies, however, only to the white cotton robe, made principally of English best cotton ; for the Coreans, unlike many of the Chinese, will not have, at any price, the trashy English cottons in our Chinese marketa The common man, merchant or farmer, dresses in a robe, which we call white, but which is divided firom the colour of mourning by a tinge of blue. A long strip of blue at each side of a man's white robe, is a badge of literary degree; and the man with a blue entire robe, is a mandaria Silks of all colours and qualities are in use by men and women ; yeUow, the present imperial colour, being the only forbidden shade. The enormously baggy trowsers, tightly tied round the foot with a white string, is invariably white; the woman's trowsers difiering from that of the man, in that its ^'bagginess'' begins above the knee, at and below which it is as close fitting as our western trowsersf, and not tied at the foot Women dress unlike the men. Their dress, as compared with that of Chinese women, is always said to resemble that of the women of the west (see pictures). For the first two years evety child is clad in only a single garment, — a jacket reaching to the knee; his first walking steps being rewarded with a pair of trowsers and a shorter jacket, of the same shape as those of men; but he has no long robe. Girls' dress differs from boys' only