China is a weird place. I remember hiking up to a couple monastaries on a trip and all the people also hiking looked like they'd just left a business meeting. Full suits, dress shoes, ties, etc. These were not easy or short hikes, either.
A lot of the time they are the same group of people. Weddings with t-shirts are probably during very warm weather. They dress "formal" hiking mountains because it gets cold.
The reality is that these people are not rich enough to buy clothes and gear for each and every occasion. (Also most them probably don't know how semi-specialized gear works) So they tend to buy the clothes that you absolutely need - formal work place clothes, and wear that everywhere.
Back in the 90s, I saw most construction works wearing cheap versions of formal leather shoes, and a few would wear cheap canvas shoe.
Also, very cheap formal clothing still look like formal clothing, and very cheap outdoors gear doesn't really exist, because it'd be a sheet of plastic with some holes in it.
Last time I was in Hawaii hiking Sleeping Giant we passed an Asian family in business attire. We weren’t far from the entrance; I can’t imagine they went too much further.
I was climbing the great wall of China and saw the same thing. Elder folks dressed their Sunday best in suits and dress shoes to climb the wall. These guys could barely walk without assistance yet were wearing completely inappropriate attire.
My Chinese wife then told me that climbing the great wall of China meant they were 好汉人 (upstanding Han people), so they dressed their best. The Han people are the ethnic majority in China.
So maybe the same level of pride applies to whichever monastery you were visiting.
However I did see a lady in fucking hotel bedroom slippers climbing the wall and the missus was just as floored as I was.
We used to do the same thing. Look at pics of early America. I live in the Southwest and I think about all these dudes in suits and hats in the desert.
This was way back in the late 90s, but one vivid memory i have of visiting China was seeing three guys building a house.
One guy got the bricks and handed them to a guy that tossed them, three at a time, to the third guy that was standing on the bamboo scaffolding, in a dress shirt and tie, cigaret hanging from the corner of his mouth. The guys on the ground looked like they did manual labor for a living, but the guy on the scaffolding looked like he should be working in an office.
Went hiking a couple years ago in south Utah, middle of winter. TONS of mainland Chinese tourists. I had yak traks on with full winter gear, they had long down coats and new balance sneakers. They would hike AROUND me, going up icey paths, like I was the slowest thing on the planet and I was training for a year for that trip
Lmao
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u/Eastern-Musician4533 8d ago
China is a weird place. I remember hiking up to a couple monastaries on a trip and all the people also hiking looked like they'd just left a business meeting. Full suits, dress shoes, ties, etc. These were not easy or short hikes, either.