Peasent clothes in China were pretty consistent- think wide sleeves with tight cuffs- from about 1600 BC to about the 12th C. These gave lots of movement and you could store small personal items in them (think your Grandma stuffing a tissue in her sleeve). These were on a loosefitting tunic called a hanfu. A one-piece version known as the ch'ang p'ao, while the two-piece version was called the shenyi. The gendered shenyi was developed during the Eastern Zhou dynasty, with men's tunics reaching to the knees and women's extending to the ankles. As you said, silk was prohibitively expensive so common fabrics were coarse like hemp and ramie: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramie#Properties After the Mongol invasion in 1289 and the introduction of cotton most people had access to this fabric but colours were limited as dyes were expensive. Most people could only have colours from local naturally occurring minerals or animal products etc. In the Sui dynasty (581-681) the emperor issued an edict reserving bright colours for aristocratic classes and peasants were limited to blue or black. EDIT: for homophones

Can't say anything about China, but the oldest and cheapest material for clothing way back in Japan was hemp. As technology improved, cotton, silk, and finally pongee materials were available. In the Edo period most clothing was made of hemp and cotton, with silk kimono being more like a suit. Silk is lovely and has this great swishing sound, but impractical for the daily grind. So people who had to move around more (we serfs) would wear more practical fabrics. Even today, the practical daily wear kimono are usually hemp and cotton, and more recently, polyester.