dresses, was woven with threads of blue and white color, and originated in the Otomí town of Santa María del Río (San Luis Potosí). In some instances, the china was accompanied with a scarf or kerchief of silk to hide any cleavage that might peek out of the blouse. Of these scarves, José María Rivera wrote that "these regularly come home on Sunday only to return to the pawn shop on Monday or Tuesday". As footwear, 19th century author Manuel Payno pointed out that despite her financial lackings, a china-dress woman would use satin shoes embroidered with silk thread. This type of footwear appears in some nineteenth century Mexican texts as an indicator that the wearer was a "merry woman". Furthermore, the china wearer completed the outfit with beads and jewels that adorned her ears, her cleavage, and her hands. Cultural representations of la china Nineteenth-century descriptions of women wearing the china paint them as simultaneously attractive and too risque for the times. Men saw these women as beautiful for their brown complexion, their "plump" but not "fat" body and face, and, most significantly, their differences from women of higher social strata in their lack of artifices to enhance their beauty. Author José María Rivera notes that if a china woman would have seen a corset, she would have thought it a torture device such as used on Saint Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins; and that her face was not some sort of "cake frosting", an allusion to the "proper" women whose faces would have to be washed to see if the colors run: In that sense, the wardrobe of the china woman was considered too provocative. Contemporary Mexican journalists and foreigners who knew these women in the first half of the nineteenth century call attention to the way in which the fashion of peasant women showed off their feminine forms, or were an appropriate feature of all the graces that were attributed to these women. A verbal portrait was made of them as excellent dancers of jarabe music popular in that era—like El Atole, El Agualulco, El Palomo and others that form part of the folkloric jarabes of the twentieth century—, also as models of cleanliness and order; of fidelity to "their man" although also seen as very liberal sexually. Not that much is known about the China Poblana mostly because many know it but there is no