Queue (hairstyle)

Queue
Chinese American man with queue in San Francisco's Chinatown
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese	辮子
Simplified Chinese	辫子
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin biànzi Yue: Cantonese Jyutping bin1 zi2 Southern Min Hokkien POJ pīⁿ-á (辮仔)
Alternative Chinese name
Traditional Chinese	頭鬃尾 or 毛尾仔
Transcriptions Southern Min Hokkien POJ mn̂g-bué-á/mn̂g-bé-á or thâu-chang-bué/thâu-chang-bé
Manchu name
Manchu script	20px
Romanization	soncoho

The queue or cue is a hairstyle usually worn by men rather than women, in which the hair is worn long and often braided, while the front portion of the head is shaven. It was worn traditionally by the Manchu people of Manchuria, certain indigenous American groups and Gopis (devotees of Krishna). Some early modern military organizations have also used similar styles.

The Manchu requirement that people living in areas under their rule, specifically Han Chinese, give up their traditional hairstyles and wear the queue was met with considerable resistance, although attitudes about the queue did change considerably over time.

Jurchen queue

Jurchen men, like their Manchu descendants, wore their hair in queues. In 1126, the Jurchen ordered male Han within their conquered territories to adopt the Jurchen hairstyle by shaving the front of their heads and to adopt Jurchen dress, but the order was lifted. Some Han rebels impersonated Jurchen by wearing their hair in the Jurchen "pigtail" to strike fear within the Jurchen population.

Manchu queue

A European artist's conception of a Manchu warrior in China – surprisingly, holding the severed head of an enemy by its queue. Later historians have noted the queue looking more like a Ukrainian Cossack chupryna as an inconsistency in the picture. (From the cover of Martino Martini's Regni Sinensis a Tartari devastati enarratio, 1661.)

The queue was a specifically male hairstyle worn by the Manchu people from central Manchuria and later imposed on the Han Chinese during the Qing dynasty. The hair on the front of the head was shaved off above the temples every ten days and the remainder of the hair was braided into a long braid.

The Manchu hairstyle was forcefully introduced to Han Chinese in the early 17th century during the Manchu conquest of China. Nurhaci of the Aisin Gioro clan declared the establishment of the Later Jin dynasty, later becoming the Qing dynasty of China, after Ming dynasty forces in Liaodong defected to his side. The Ming general of Fushun, Li Yongfang, defected to Nurhaci after Nurhaci promised him rewards, titles, and Nurhaci's own granddaughter in marriage. Other Han Chinese generals in Liaodong proceeded to defect with their armies to Nurhaci and were given women from the Aisin Gioro family in marriage. Once firmly in power, Nurhaci commanded all men in the areas he conquered to adopt the Manchu hairstyle.

The Manchu hairstyle was significant because it was a symbol of Han submission to Qing rule. The queue also aided the Manchus in identifying those Han who refused to accept Qing dynasty domination.

The hairstyle was compulsory for all males and the penalty for not complying was execution for treason. In the early 1910's, after the fall of the Qing dynasty, the Chinese no longer had to wear the Manchu queue. While some, such as Zhang Xun, still did so as a tradition, most of them abandoned it after the last Emperor of China, Puyi, cut his queue in 1922.

Queue order

Chinese circus performers soon after the Manchu conquest, wearing queues. (Drawing by Johan Nieuhof, 1655–57)

剃發令

The Queue Order (simplified Chinese: 剃发令; traditional Chinese: 剃髮令; pinyin: tìfàlìng), or tonsure decree, was a series of laws violently imposed by the Qing (Manchu) dynasty in the seventeenth century. It was also imposed on Taiwanese aborigines in 1753, and Koreans who settled in northeast China in the late 19th century, though the Ryukyuan people, whose kingdom was a tributary of China, requested and were granted an exemption from the mandate.

Traditionally, adult Han Chinese did not cut their hair for philosophical and cultural reasons. According to the Classic of Filial Piety, Confucius said

We are given our body, skin and hair from our parents; which we ought not to damage. This idea is the quintessence of filial duty. (身體髮膚，受之父母，不敢毀傷，孝至始也。)

As a result of this ideology, both men and women wound their hair into a bun (a topknot) or other various hairstyles.

A soldier during the Boxer Rebellion with queue and conical Asian hat

In 1644, Beijing was sacked by a coalition of rebel forces led by Li Zicheng, a minor Ming dynasty official turned leader of a peasant revolt. The Chongzhen Emperor committed suicide when the city fell, marking the official end of the Ming dynasty. The Han Chinese Ming general Wu Sangui and his army then defected to the Qing and allowed them through Shanhai pass. They then seized control of Beijing, overthrowing Li's short-lived Shun dynasty. They then forced Han Chinese to adopt the queue as a sign of submission.

A year later, after the Qing armies reached South China, on July 21, 1645, Dorgon issued an edict ordering all Han men to shave their foreheads and braid the rest of their hair into a queue identical to those worn by the Manchus. The Han Chinese were given 10 days to comply or face death. Although Dorgon admitted that followers of Confucianism might have grounds for objection, most Han officials cited the Ming dynasty's traditional System of Rites and Music as their reason for resistance. This led Dorgon to question their motives: "If officials say that people should not respect our Rites and Music, but rather follow those of the Ming, what can be their true intentions?"

The slogan adopted by the Qing was "Not shave your forehead and lose your head, or shave your forehead and keep your head" (Chinese: 留髮不留頭，留頭不留髮; pinyin: liú fà bù liú tóu, liú tóu bù liú fà). People resisted the order and the Qing struck back with deadly force, massacring all who refused to obey. Han rebels in Shandong tortured to death the Qing official who suggested the queue order to Dorgon, and killed his relatives.

The imposition of this order was not uniform; it took up to 10 years of martial enforcement for all of China to be brought into compliance, and while it was the Qing who imposed the queue hairstyle on the general population, they did not always personally execute those who did not obey. It was Han Chinese defectors who carried out massacres against people refusing to wear the queue. Li Chengdong, a Han Chinese general who had served the Ming but defected to the Qing, ordered troops to carry out three separate massacres in the city of Jiading within a month, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths. The third massacre left few survivors. The three massacres at Jiading District are some of the most infamous, with estimated death tolls in the tens or even hundreds of thousands. Jiangyin also held out against about 10,000 Qing troops for 83 days. When the city wall was finally breached on October 9, 1645, the Qing army, led by the Han Chinese Ming defector Liu Liangzuo (劉良佐), who had been ordered to "fill the city with corpses before you sheathe your swords," massacred the entire population, killing between 74,000 and 100,000 people.

Han Chinese soldiers in 1645 under Han General Hong Chengchou forced the queue on the people of Jiangnan.

The queue was the only aspect of Manchu culture that the Qing forced on the common Han population. The Qing required people serving as officials to wear Manchu clothing but allowed other Han civilians to continue wearing Hanfu (Han clothing) but most Han civilian men voluntarily adopted Manchu clothing like Changshan on their own free will. Throughout the Qing dynasty Han women continued to wear Han clothing.

Since the Qing dynasty grouped Muslims by language, the Han Hui (currently known as Hui people) were classified as Han Chinese, so they were required to wear the queue. Turkic Muslims, like the Uyghur and Salar people, were not required to wear the queue.

However, after Jahangir Khoja invaded Kashgar, Turkistani Muslim begs and officials in Xinjiang eagerly fought for the "privilege" of wearing a queue to show their steadfast loyalty to the Empire. High-ranking begs were granted this right.

The purpose of the Queue Order was to demonstrate loyalty to the Qing and, conversely, growing one's hair came to symbolize revolutionary ideals, such as during the White Lotus Rebellion. The members of the Taiping Rebellion were called the Long hairs (長毛) or Hair rebels (髮逆).

Resistance to the queue

Han Chinese resistance to adopting the queue was widespread and bloody. The Chinese in the Liaodong Peninsula rebelled in 1622 and 1625 in response to the implementation of the mandatory hairstyle. The Manchus responded swiftly by killing the educated elite and instituting a stricter separation between Han Chinese and Manchus.

In 1645, the enforcement of the queue order was taken a step further by the ruling Manchus when it was decreed that any man who did not adopt the Manchu hairstyle within ten days would be executed. The intellectual Lu Xun summed up the Chinese reaction to the implementation of the mandatory Manchu hairstyle by stating, "In fact, the Chinese people in those days revolted not because the country was on the verge of ruin, but because they had to wear queues." In 1683 Zheng Keshuang surrendered and wore a queue.

The queue became a symbol of the Qing dynasty and a custom except among Buddhist monastics. Some revolutionists, supporters of the Hundred Days' Reform or students who studied abroad cut their braids. The Xinhai Revolution in 1911 led to a complete change in hairstyle almost overnight. The queue became unpopular as it became associated with a fallen government; this is depicted in Lu Xun's short story Storm in a Teacup in which Chinese citizens in Hong Kong collectively changed to short haircuts.

Exemptions

Neither Taoist priests nor Buddhist monks were required to wear the queue by the Qing; they continued to wear their traditional hairstyles, completely shaved heads for Buddhist monks, and long hair in the traditional Chinese topknot for Taoist priests.

Foreign reaction

The Manchus' willingness to impose the queue and their dress style on the men of China and their success in suppressing the resistance was viewed as an example to emulate by some foreign observers. H. E. M. James, a British administrator in India, wrote in 1887 that the British rulers ought to act in a similarly decisive way when imposing their will in India. In his view, the British administrators should have outlawed the suttee much earlier than they actually did (1829), and in James' own day they should have acted as severely against Indian journalists expressing opposition to the British rule.

Other queues

Curley Bear with queued hair.

• The queue is also a Native American hairstyle, as described in the book House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday.
• British soldiers and sailors during the 18th century wore their hair in a style known as the queue. While not always braided, the hair was similarly pulled back very tight into a single tail, wrapped around a piece of leather and tied down with a ribbon. The hair was also often greased and powdered in a fashion similar to powdered wigs, or tarred in the case of sailors. It was said that the soldiers' hair was pulled back so tightly that they had difficulty closing their eyes afterwards. The use of white hair powder in the British Army was discontinued in 1796 and queues were ordered to be cut off four years later. They continued to be worn in the Royal Navy for a while longer, where they were known as "pigtails". Officers wore pigtails until 1805 and other ranks continued to wear them until about 1820.
• 

  Painting of the Battle of Leuthen with the Prussian soldiers wearing the soldier's queue
  In the 18th century, European soldiers styled their traditionally long hair into a queue called the "soldier's queue" (Soldatenzopf), which was previously only allowed for noble officers. That hairstyle first became mandatory in the Prussian Army and those of several other states within the Holy Roman Empire under Frederick William I of Prussia. An artificial or "patent" queue was issued to recruits whose hair was too short to plait. The style was abolished in the Prussian army in 1807.

See also

• Braid
• Cheongsam
• Chupryna
• Foot binding
• Hanfu
• Pigtail
• Pigtail Ordinance
• Rattail (haircut)
• Sikha

References

• Also mentioned in "Dragonwings", by Laurence Yep, Chapter 4

Further reading

• .
• . In two volumes.
• Voices from the Ming-Qing Cataclysm: China in Tigers' Jaws – By Struve, Lynn A. Publisher：Yale University Press, 1998 (ISBN 0-300-07553-7, ISBN 978-0-300-07553-3) (312 pages)