A Chinese woman, screen named Tingyue, introduced hanfu, the traditional clothing of China’s Han ethnic group, to the world when she was in Australia, converting her passion for hanfu into a career.

Photo shows a screenshot of Tingyue in a TV program of China’s state television broadcaster China Central Television. 

After graduation in Australia, Tingyue, from Luzhou in southwest China’s Sichuan province, turned down good job opportunities and started a business involving hanfu culture in Sydney in 2016.

With 500 Australian dollars (about 2,500 yuan) of initial funding, she launched her own hanfu brand. To display the clothes, she would often wear them while delivering pastries she made on city streets.

As her pastry business garnered popularity in less than three months, she could receive as many as 5,000 Australian dollars worth of orders in one day sometimes.

Meanwhile, she also realized that selling pastries was not what she wanted, because she originally intended to spread hanfu culture.

Tingyue wanted to organize a talent show about hanfu. With her income from the pastry shop and the sponsorship she managed to get, she threw a show which lasted about half a year, with more than 1,000 overseas Chinese who love hanfu culture applying to take part in it.

When the final show was held in Sydney Town Hall, so many people flocked to it that policemen were deployed to maintain order.

In 2017, Tingyue opened the world’s first hanfu-themed culture center in Sydney where people around the world can experience not only hanfu culture but also Chinese tea, snacks and traditional musical instruments.

As she gradually became an ambassador of hanfu in Sydney, the local market soon became saturated, with another issue being she couldn’t control the quality of fabrics in person, as most of them were imported from China.

Tingyue thus decided to find opportunities in her motherland. In 2018, she made trips to cities in the Yangtze River Delta in east China and the Pearl River Delta in south China, two major manufacturing centers in the country, to learn about the suppliers of hanfu.

In 2019, she opened the first online shop of her hanfu brand in China and a work shop in Chengdu, capital city of Sichuan province. She likes to control the quality of every piece of her hanfu garment in every manufacturing process from designing, selecting fabrics and dyeing, to weaving and pattern-making.

In early 2021, Tingyue’s latest hanfu costumes made their debut during a Chinese hanfu fashion show in Hangzhou, capital city of east China’s Zhejiang province.

Models presented the brand’s costumes, which were replicas of the clothing of nine of the 12 beauties from the classic Chinese TV series “A Dream of Red Mansions.” The series adapted from “A Dream of Red Mansions,” written by Cao Xueqin during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) in 1987, is known for its traditional costume designs.

Tingyue, as a big fan of the great novel and the classic TV series, invited an expert to take part in the design. She also added some creations based on her understanding of the novel.

Tingyue’s hanfu costumes based on the novel enjoy a good reputation, which led China’s state television broadcaster China Central Television to borrow these costumes from her for its program featuring the novel.

She also plans to complete the remaining parts of hanfu consumes about the novel and launch new series with the theme of the classic Chinese tale “Journey to the West” and the “Classic of Mountains and Rivers,” known for its mythic geography and beasts, this year.

“We hope that through the research and production of hanfu, we can play a role in promoting the culture and stir the curiosity of consumers for traditional culture through hanfu,” said Tingyue.