The dress of the Hakka women merits description. It consists of a long, loose tunic, crossing at the front after the manner of a Japanese kimono, and without buttons, which are always present in the Chinese woman's dress. The Hakka women I say were! all wearing short trousers, reaching but little below the knee, but I have been informed that in other parts they wear a skirt, which has stitching in lines lengthwise that give it the appearance at a distance of being plaited like a kilt. They wear no socks or stockings, though in cold weather they don puttees of cotton cloth, which they tie on with red cord end white tape. Their feet are shod with daintily worked shoes when in the house. They go barefooted or wear the usual rope sandal when abroad. Their clothes are all of dark indigo blue, and trimmed on the borders with red and white brede. No other colour is used. They wear a sash of red and white woven cotton.
The peculiar hat, as it may be called for want of a better term, which the women wear when they to market is difficult to describe, cause it bears a resemblance to nothing in particular, the uninitiated observer being unable to see any reason for its existence. It is composed of bamboo, mounted with silver, and decorated with red twill and long strings of blue glass beads. The hoar is parted in the middle, passed down either side of the head to the back, where it is turned up once more in a strand and passed to the top of the fore head. Here it is caught up with a second strand from the top of the head, and coiled up into a knot. This coiled knot on tha forehead reminds one very much of the way the men of some of the western aboriginal tribes wear their hair. There is probably some close connexion here. The Ohinese have it that as the original inhabitants of the province of Fukien were conquered the men were killed while the women were saved alive, husbands being provided for the latter in their old homes. May not this method of doing the hair, then, be a relic of a time when it was in common vogue amongst both men
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.