At that time, there was no cotton, during winter, the rich would wear fur to keep warm, while the less impoverished could afford to wear rabbit or dog skins and other domestic animal pelts. Those utterly destitute had no choice but to stuff their clothes with whatever they could find to fend off the cold.
Some stuffed chicken or duck feathers inside, others filled their garments with soft, dried grass.
The original owner of the body that Zhuang Lühe now inhabited used to wear clothes stuffed with chicken feathers; as a village feast chef, when she worked in other people's houses and they happened to be slaughtering chickens, she would ask for some feathers, over the year, amassing quite a collection.
But this "quite a collection" was relative to her family's extreme poverty: the chicken feathers she gathered throughout the year were not enough to clothe everyone in the family with feathered garments.
Their clothing was thin, and so were their nighttime covers.
