Tonga 2017 - The Cheongsams on Four Seasons

Date of Issue: 14 July 2017

While the word may not be familiar to most people outside of Asia, the South Pacific nation of Tonga has released this souvenir sheet that will match up the unfamiliar name with the familiar style known as cheongsam.

The souvenir sheet shows the development of the outfits from early, loose-fitting style to modern form-fitting dresses that are extremely popular not only with the Chinese woman but also with a widening worldwide population of non-Asians. At https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheongsam, Wikipedia provides some in-depth information on the cheongsam fashion, as follows: “The cheongsam is a body-hugging one-piece Chinese dress for women, also known as qipao (from Mandarin Chinese). The stylish and often tight-fitting cheongsam that is best known today was created in the 1920s in Shanghai and made fashionable by socialites and upper class women, partly under the influence of Beijing styles. At that time, people eagerly sought a more modernized style of dress and transformed the old qipao to suit their tastes. Slender and form fitting with a high cut, it had great differences from the traditional qipao.

“Like the male changpaos they derive from, cheongsams in the beginning were always worn in conjunction with trousers. However, with the introduction of Western fashion during the Nanking decade, it became a popular choice to replace these with stockings. The formerly purely utilitarian side slits were repurposed into aesthetic elements to highlight the new fashion, and by the 1940s, trousers had completely fallen out of use with cheongsams. As hosiery in turn declined in later decades, cheongsams nowadays have come to be most commonly worn with bare legs.” A modern version is shown here.

In the souvenir sheet, each stamp is perforated to the edges of the design of the particular cheongsam version. Now that you know what the cheongsam fashion is.