A Study On The Costume Of Dong Tribe In Liping

Dong tribe, as much as 2.9million population, is one of the primary minorities in China. Dong people has created glorious culture and art in its long history. The Dong tribe in Liping, Guizhou province keeps an excellent traditional culture for its conservative traffic, and has become research basis for minority scholars and anthropologist. The Dong tribe's costume culture is an important part of Dong culture. Due to the different surviving and living environment in local area, the costume has developed distinct style and decoration trait, which is very unique in aesthetics and culture, and also giving an extraordinary emphasis on research for minorities' research.On the basis of local survey and literature data, this thesis will use nationality and aesthetics theory to analyze Dong tribe's clothing in style, patterns, decoration, and accessories aspects of 11 towns in Li ping county. The conclusion is bellow.The Dong tribe costume can be clarified into male, female, and children costume in gender and age, as well as daily and dressing costume according to different occasion. The female dressing clothing has styles of edge-edge dress, left-edge crossed collar dress and right-edge crossed collar. The accessories of Dong tribe in Liping includes adornment of head, collar, hands, back, waist, leg wrappings and shoes, which often appear in festivals and much of them are made of silver. Dong tribe people believe all creatures have spirit. In their mind, they think whatever sky, earth, sun, moon, mountain, river, old tree, huge rock, well, dragon, phoenix and other animals and plants can destroy evil and devil, which become the objects of people worshipping. The patterns on clothing are these connotation's expansion, which has shaped the nature-core aesthetics view.Under the influence of geographic location and climate aspect, Dong costume in Liping has practical functions of keeping warm, activity convenience, keeping mosquito and insect away, as well as social functions of labels of ploughing culture, nationality identification, social status and wealth and ethic. Besides the practical and social functions, the whole design of Dong costume has complied with the aesthetics rule. Men and women often wear waistband which is an excellent example for proportion division rule. In color aspect, the contract between dark in majority field and bright in collar edge takes gloom and dummy away. In structure aspect, the male and female edge-edge jackets comply with symmetry rule.