A Chinese athlete attempting the high jump in the autumn of 1910 reportedly displaced the bar with his queue. When he returned to the contest without the hairpiece, one foreign wag remarked that China had many useless appendages to be dispensed with.[1] Before another year had passed, the Qing dynasty was also in danger of being toppled by revolutionaries who, in a gesture of defiance as well as practicality, severed their own tails. Thus, the removal of the 'queue' or 'pigtail' became one of the better-known symbols of the fall of imperial rule, modernization and political change. After queue-cutting had become something of a mania, the North-China Herald observed that, while the act might not 'mark an epoch,' it was 'inevitable that a queueless China should mean a new China.'[2] Be this as it may, hair cannot be so casually discarded by the modern social historian.
Hair has a way of personalising history. The Normans wore theirs short at the time of WiIliam the Conqueror, which is said to have prompted the English to grow theirs quite long. Both long locks and bald craniums have demonstrated political power and its absence. Hair has represented the life forceâ??strength, energy, vitality, and the power of Samson. Its removal has signified surrender, rejection of the feminine or material worlds, as well as the bonding of martial groups. Loose hair has sometimes expressed the nubile state, freedom, sorrow and insurrection, just as dishevelled hair has also been a common, but not universal, sign of grief. Bound hair may signify marital status or even subjugation. So, too, has the shaven head of the true believer. Prisoners, slaves and soldiers have all endured the imposition of short hair. Indeed, Freudians have often argued that hair-cutting is ritual castration.[3] However, as the anthropologist Raymond Firth concluded, 'different forms of social control may demand different forms of hair treatment even in the same society.' Although obviously a private asset, hair needs to be interpreted as a public symbol.[4] Even today, when no reader can have missed the hairstyles advertising counter-cultural protest, there may be no case study more instructive than the queue, which not only makes it possible to condense two-and-a-half centuries of Qing rule into the following pages, but also illustrates a number of the symbolic uses of hair in Chinese history.
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