When short-video clips of young women running through city streets in sweeping, wide-sleeved robes began flooding Chinese social media, few viewers knew the garment’s real name. The viral silhouette is the Warring States robe, and its most famous surviving source is a single artifact excavated from a Chu tomb in Hubei: the N15 robe. One of the people most responsible for turning that archaeological fragment into a contemporary fashion phenomenon is Chen Shiyu, a Chinese costume historian who has spent more than two decades restoring traditional Chinese dress.
Who Is Chen Shiyu?
Chen Shiyu is a costume historian and restoration consultant who has devoted his career to reconstructing the actual appearance of historical Chinese clothing. His interest began in 2001, when he was still in high school. Searching online for “Tang dynasty clothing,” he found only two useful results: one about the famous painting Court Ladies Adorning Their Hair with Flowers and another about Dunhuang donor figures. The scarcity of reliable information surprised him and set him on a path that would eventually shape how a generation understands ancient Chinese dress.
As a teenager, Chen spent his free time in libraries, paging through archaeological reports and costume albums, scanning anything useful. To save money, he even bought his own scanner and carried it to the library. In 2005, he and several like-minded friends founded the Daming Yiguan Costume History Forum, one of the earliest online digital archives for Chinese historical clothing. Many historical costume images still circulating online today bear that forum’s watermark, a testament to its foundational role in the field.
The N15 Robe from Mashan No.1 Chu Tomb
The centerpiece of Chen’s recent public work is the Warring States robe known as N15. The original was excavated from Mashan No.1 Chu Tomb in Jiangling, Hubei province, where it had lain underground for more than two thousand years. The robe’s sleeve span is close to three meters, making it the earliest and largest Warring States garment yet discovered. For Chen, the piece is not merely an antique; it is a window into Chu state weaving techniques and the aesthetic sensibility of a forgotten era.
Chen often tells visitors that the goal is not to be nostalgic. “We are not trying to revive the past,” he says. “Restoring clothing is a way to find our roots.” That idea underpins his entire approach. By reconstructing how the N15 robe was cut, stitched, and worn, he hopes to show modern audiences that the elegance and grandeur of ancient Chinese clothing were real, not just decorative fantasies in period dramas.
Chen Shiyu’s Four-Evidence Restoration Method
Chen developed a rigorous methodology for reconstructing garments. He compares costume restoration to detective work, because each piece requires multiple independent sources to verify. His method relies on four types of evidence: archaeological textiles, painted or sculpted images, written documents, and pottery or stone figurines. The more complete the chain of evidence, the more reliable the final restoration.
This approach is necessary because excavated textiles are often damaged, faded, or flattened. A single piece of cloth may not reveal how it draped on the body, what undergarments were worn beneath it, or how hairstyles and accessories completed the look. By cross-referencing murals, tomb figures, and historical records, Chen and his team can rebuild not just the garment but the total silhouette of the person wearing it.
In 2008, Chen and a few friends launched their first restoration project in a small studio in Hangzhou. They had no professional equipment, no academic background in textiles, and no models. They visited silk markets to find fabrics with similar textures, checked measurements against archaeological reports, and recruited friends to wear the finished pieces. Despite the modest conditions, the results attracted attention within the small but growing community of historical costume enthusiasts.
The breakthrough came in 2019, when Chen was invited to contribute to the National Museum of China’s Ancient Chinese Costume Culture Exhibition. Working under curator Sun Ji, one of China’s most respected archaeologists, Chen helped produce more than a dozen life-size figures wearing historically accurate outfits, from inner layers to outer robes, hair ornaments to footwear. The exhibition became a viral sensation, with queues stretching from the fourth-floor gallery to the museum’s north gate.
Restoring Costumes for Film and Television
Chen’s influence extends beyond museums into popular entertainment. In 2018, the production team of the drama Serenade of Peaceful Joy asked him to help with the complex Song dynasty court costumes. The relevant historical text, the Song Dynasty Treatise on Carriages and Apparel, opens with over a thousand unpunctuated classical characters. Chen and his team parsed the text word by word, cross-referenced it with murals and figurines, and produced detailed three-view drawings of the garments. The empress dowager’s temple-sacrifice costume appeared on screen for only a few seconds, but it was backed by dozens of pages of research.
Chen believes this work has helped raise standards across the costume-drama industry. Starting with productions such as The Longest Day in Chang’an and continuing with more recent series, careful costume research has gradually become a mainstream expectation rather than a niche luxury.
Over the years, Chen has built a restoration resource library of more than three thousand garments. He also founded the Chinese Costume Restoration Team and an ancient costume restoration practice base, collaborating with museums on dozens of exhibitions. More recently, he has shifted focus toward Chinese ceremonial dress, including sacrificial, court, and wedding garments. These categories are harder to research and more expensive to produce, but Chen argues that they carry the core characteristics of Chinese sartorial culture: continuity, unity, and ritual meaning.
Why Restoration Matters for Hanfu Today
Chen Shiyu’s work sits at the intersection of scholarship and the modern hanfu movement. Without accurate restoration, contemporary hanfu designers would have little reference material beyond stylized opera costumes or fantasy dramas. The N15 robe, once a crumbling archaeological specimen, is now a recognizable silhouette worn by young people in cities across China. Chen’s restoration process transformed an academic object into a living cultural symbol.
For readers interested in hanfu history, Chen’s career offers a practical lesson: authentic hanfu design starts with evidence, not imagination. Whether the topic is a Warring States robe from a Chu tomb or a Tang dynasty round-collar robe, the most respected contemporary work is grounded in the same four sources Chen uses: real textiles, visual art, written records, and three-dimensional representations. That standard, refined over twenty years, is what separates costume reproduction from costume revival.