Age-old Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is where Tibetan, Moinba minority, Lhoba minority etc. live for generations. Majestic Himalayas and wide Yarlung Zangbo River help to bring up their bold and unstrained character and unique clothing culture. It is hard to generalize Tibetan costumes with just one or two styles of clothes and adornments.

For long time, because of Tibet’s vast land and inconvenient traffic, Tibetan costumes in different regions are far more difficult to sum up than people expect. On the contrary, Tibetan clothes are of various types, styles and colors.

One of the most typical Tibetan clothes is the Tibetan robe, which is common among people of different genders and ages. It has a long robe body. The robe pail is covered with surface cloth with edgings and no pockets. In daily days, men’s robes mostly are plain surface and inlaid with wide black edgings. In festive occasions, edgings are colored.

 Women’s robes are more colorful. The material used in the most representative edgings is a kind of wool fabric with delicate colors and patterns. Especially for Tibetan herdsman robe’s edgings, they usually use color blocks of blue, green, purple, black, orange and beige color to form a multicolored ribbon.

The shoulder, lower hem and cuff of a lady robe are usually decorated with stripes in yellow, red, green and purple of about 10cm. They often use complementary colors, such as red and green, black and white, yellow and purple. Sometimes, they even interweave gold and silver threads inside strong contrasting colors.

The bright and harmonious artistic effect displayed by Tibetan robes impresses people deeply. In places like Tibetan area in Qinghai Province, Gannan area in Gansu Province and Tianzhu and Aba area in Sichuan, men like to use leopard skin as adornments.

It is said that this is related with the military life in Tubo Kingdom Period. At that time, tiger skins and leopard skins were used to reward brave soldiers and people with great contributions while fox tails were used to insult dastards and deserters.

The typical climate in tableland is cold in morning and evening, but hot in noon, so no matter men or women, they like to take the right sleeve and tie it around the waist when weather gets hot in noon. In this way, it could dispel heat, and adjust body temperature.

In the past, men bared their body inside robes. Their swarthy and strong arms display the rusticity and sturdiness of the tableland people. Along with the raising of life quality and under the influence of modern city, Tibetan men become accustomed to wear white shirts inside robes in external communication or in festive occasions. Women wear cloth jackets of different small flower patterns inside the robe with one shoulder and arm being exposed outside. This is the kind of typical Tibetan clothes that we are familiar with.