Baijiayi (), also known as baijia pao () and sometimes referred as One hundred families robe, Hundred-Families robe, or One hundred families clothing in English, is a form of

Chinese patchwork Chinese patchwork is a traditional form of Chinese needlework which has been widely circulated in Chinese folk arts. In China, patchwork has been used for millennia. Chinese patchwork is made by sewing scraps of fabric together into a desired sha ...

jacket A jacket is a garment for the upper body, usually extending below the hips. A jacket typically has sleeves and fastens in the front or slightly on the side. Jackets without sleeves are vests. A jacket is generally lighter, tighter-fitting, and ...

, particular for male children. The baijiayi is used as a protective talisman for children. It is a traditional

Han Chinese The Han Chinese, alternatively the Han people, are an East Asian people, East Asian ethnic group native to Greater China. With a global population of over 1.4 billion, the Han Chinese are the list of contemporary ethnic groups, world's la ...

custom garment, which has been passed down for centuries.

Cultural significance and symbolism

The baijiayi is a symbol of longevity, and it was one of the ritual procedures of the "One-hundred-day celebration", along with the baijia locks. It is made of donated fabrics, and is composed of one hundred pieces of fabric which could be shaped into

tessellated A tessellation or tiling is the covering of a surface, often a plane, using one or more geometric shapes, called ''tiles'', with no overlaps and no gaps. In mathematics, tessellation can be generalized to higher dimensions and a variety of g ...

squares, triangles, diamonds, rectangles, and hexagons. It could also be embroidered with symbols and motifs which were considered auspicious, such as auspicious clouds, the

Chinese zodiac The Chinese zodiac is a traditional classification scheme based on the Chinese calendar that assigns an animal and its reputed attributes to each year in a repeating twelve-year (or duodenary) cycle. The zodiac is very important in traditional ...

, the

bagua The ''bagua'' ( zh, c=八卦, p=bāguà, l=eight trigrams) is a set of symbols from China intended to illustrate the nature of reality as being composed of mutually opposing forces reinforcing one another. ''Bagua'' is a group of trigrams—co ...

and the

five poisons The Five Poisons (Chinese: 五毒; Pinyin: ''wǔ dú''; Jyutping: ''ng5 duk6''; Vietnamese: ''Ngũ độc''), or the ''five noxious creatures'', can refer to an ancient Chinese set of poisonous or otherwise hazardous animals or five perceived th ...

. In the past, due to the lag in health care and education,

infant mortality Infant mortality is the death of an infant before the infant's first birthday. The occurrence of infant mortality in a population can be described by the infant mortality rate (IMR), which is the number of deaths of infants under one year of age ...

was relatively high. Nevertheless, people believed that an infant's death was due to a ghost. The baijiayi was supposed to protect the child from evil spirits through the use of many donated fabrics of multiple colours. These small pieces of cloth was collected from various local families, which were supposed to represent " one hundred families". These pieces of fabric would symbolize the combined strength of the donators and were believed protect their sons from or ward off evil spirits and ghosts. The mother would receive these pieces of fabrics in order to make the finished baijiayi for her child. The baijiayi could not be taken off until the child reaches one year old.

History

Origins

People started making Chinese patchwork in the

Liu Song Song, known as Liu Song (), Former Song (前宋) or Song of (the) Southern dynasties (南朝宋) in historiography, was an Dynasties of China, imperial dynasty of China and the first of the four Northern and Southern dynasties#Southern dynasti ...

of the Southern dynasty era. The first emperor of

Liu Song dynasty Song, known as Liu Song (), Former Song (前宋) or Song of (the) Southern dynasties (南朝宋) in historiography, was an imperial dynasty of China and the first of the four Southern dynasties during the Northern and Southern dynasties peri ...

, named Liu Yu, was born in an underprivileged family. His mother gathered rags from the neighbourhoods to make a patchwork cloth. When he became the emperor, he perceived this kind of patchwork as the symbol for his impoverished childhood. All the infants in Liu's family had to use the patchwork so that his offspring could know how fortunate they were. Afterward, his subjects followed this royal custom of making "Bai jia yi" for their babies.

Other version

A similar style of clothing to the baijiayi is the

shuitianyi Shuitianyi (), also known as “paddy field garment”, "Shuitian clothing", or "rice-paddy robe", is a non-religious Chinese patchwork gown which was made and worn by women in China during the Ming dynasty and Qing dynasty; it was made by using ...

Gallery

File:Childrenhanfu2.jpeg, Baijiayi

References