Chinese knot buttons: what pankou are, and how they are made

Every pankou is a pair. The half with the ball is the pan niu, the coiled knob; the half with the loop is the niu pan, the loop that holds it. On a plain button the rest of each cord is a short straight tail sewn to the cloth. On a shaped one the tails are coiled into an ornament, and that part has its own name, the "loop flower". It is the reason a tailor can spend an afternoon on a single button.

The ball is a real knot, and an old one. Knotters call it the Chinese button knot: it starts as a flat double coin knot, the woven figure sailors know as the carrick bend, and then both ends go round the outside and up through the middle, so the knot closes into a sphere with both ends leaving at the same point, ready to be sewn down. Clifford Ashley’s 1944 Ashley Book of Knots gives it as number 599 and, as Wikipedia summarizes him, notes that in China it buttoned underwear and nightclothes, because a cloth knot outlasts a hard button and is kinder to lie on. Carol Wang, whose chineseknotting.org is the most careful knotting reference online, records its other names: the ball knot in Japan, the lotus bud knot in Korea.

It is also one of the two knots that started the modern craft. When Chen Hsia-sheng went to learn knotting from an old museum craftsman in Taipei in 1971, he knew exactly two: the button knot and the good luck knot. Our guide to how to tie a Chinese knot teaches the second, and explains why the first is so hard to draw.

The meanings in the middle column are the ones Deng Xiangpeng of the Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology gave in People’s Daily in 2026, and they are a fair summary of how the shapes are read in China today: the straight button for a life lived upright, the round pipa for a household that wants for nothing, the butterfly for good fortune, long life and a marriage of two flying together. Treat them as the tradition’s reading rather than an old code. Nobody wrote a rule book for buttons, and many shaped buttons, like the spirals and leaves in the V&A’s collection, were chosen simply to suit the dress.

The one rule that does hold is that the knot and the loop are a pair. Deng’s title for the essay is a little couplet about cloth coiled into flowers, "button and loop in harmony", and Chinese writers like the image for the same reason English speakers say two people are tied: two halves, made to close only on each other. That is the same idea the Chinese knot carries in its names, worn at the throat.

For a long time Chinese clothes did not button at all. They wrapped and tied, with sashes and cord ties. Fabric knot buttons crept in slowly. Deng’s outline has a few cloth buttons in the Tang, on armor and close-fitting everyday clothes, and the paired knot-and-loop settling into shape under the Song and Yuan, mostly as the plain straight button. Two researchers at Wuhan Textile University, Hao Xiao’ang and Yin Zhihong, put it the same way in a 2020 paper: cloth braid buttons appear in Song dress and have become decorative by the Yuan.

Then the Ming took a detour into metal. Ming women’s jackets fastened with interlocking buttons of gold and silver, each set a button, a loop and two small plates to sew them on, which Hao and Yin found designed as a single picture: closed, the button and loop make one flower, and the two plates become butterflies circling it. When the Jiangxi Provincial Museum’s Ming princess jewelry went on show at the Fengxian District Museum in Shanghai in 2022, the buttons were shown as jewelry, and the museum noted that gold, jade and gem-set buttons on women’s jackets were a Ming fashion. On a standing-collar jacket only one or two pairs went at the collar, and the rest of the front was still tied. Hao and Yin argue that these collar buttons helped bring in the high collar, later the mandarin collar, and the jacket buttoned down the front, and laid the ground for the cloth knot buttons that followed.

Cloth came back and took over. In Deng’s account the Ming and Qing are the great age of the pankou, and after the middle of the Qing the flower buttons multiply: pipa, butterfly, plum blossom, ruyi, the longevity character. The museum record bears out the ordinary end of it. A Han Chinese woman’s jacket of 1875 to 1900 in the Victoria and Albert Museum fastens down the right side with five loop and knot buttons; a turquoise 1920s jacket in the same collection has five, shaped as leaves. The qipao took the button with it into the twentieth century. On a 1930s Hong Kong qipao in the V&A, the collar buttons are flowers and the ones down the side are spirals, all in blue satin to match the trim, with a modern press stud hidden among them. The museum’s note says such buttons were designed to match the fabric and trim, in flowers, insects and lucky symbols.

English had the word before it met the Chinese button. A frog, in tailoring, is any ornamental loop-and-button fastening, and frogging is the braid that carries it. Its golden age was the military uniform of the 17th to 19th centuries, above all the hussar jacket, so thick with braid that German simply calls frogging Husarentressen, hussar braid. The Fashion Institute of Technology’s history of frogging opens with a photograph of a young Winston Churchill, newly commissioned in the 4th Hussars in 1895, in a frogged jacket.

That history never mentions China, and nobody has shown that the hussar’s frog descends from the Chinese button. The two may simply be the same good idea, had twice. Western sewing guides still teach "Chinese frogs" as the coiled fabric kind, but their "Chinese ball button" can be a different knot: the University of Kentucky’s guide, for one, weaves it from three loops. Carol Wang notes the same muddle in English knot books, where more than one knot goes by the button knot’s name.

Two practical notes. Buttons made to match the garment, in its own fabric or its trim, are the traditional choice, which is why old jackets look so of a piece; a contrasting cord is the modern accent. And the ball is the part that wears, so tie it in the firmest cord or filled tube you have. For the knot itself, flat diagrams fail at the moment it turns into a ball; Carol Wang’s button knot pages photograph it in the hand, step by step.