However, the creation of the tangzhuang and the debate surrounding it appear to have been the genesis of a movement whose members show no sign of being content for their preferred garb to be mere space fillers in a wardrobe. These are the aficionados of traditional clothing based on that worn by the country's ethnic majority, the Han, 5,000 years ago.

Though the term tangzhuang was deployed to describe the APEC jacket, there was no Chinese word in the early 2000s to denote clothing from the Han Dynasty, and the term eventually coined was hanfu (Han clothing). The irony is that what has led to a revival in this centuries-old style of clothing and that keeps the flame flickering is 21st-century technology-the internet and social networking.

One aficionado of hanfu is Wang Tianjiao, 26, of Shandong province.

"Tieba is where I first learned about hanfu 11 years ago," Wang says, referring to the community online forum Baidu Tieba.

"I was absolutely spellbound by this time-honored clothing."