There are many Chinese characters indicating clothing, and these characters are mostly pictographs and phonograms and are closely connected with the old set of etiquette.

Take the character  (guan, it means hat) for instance. In the compound , the element  means head,  means moral standard. In ancient China, the hat people wore indicated their status and the practice was an epitome of China's feudal society.

The character  (jin) means a piece of cloth that can be used to swathe the head and wipe off sweat. This character is a pictograph. Wearing coif was prevalent in the end of the Han Dynasty (206BC-220AD) and coifs of various styles came into being in the later period.

 means single ( ) clothes ( ) and it is a piece of clothe worn in summer.

Other characters such as (it means trousers in ancient times),  (short coats),  (leather coats),  (sleeves),  (full front and back of a Chinese jacket or gown) and so on. (trousers) was written as  in ancient times and, different from today's trousers, it only had two trouser legs without crotch.