From Hair to Eternity

Chinese history is tangled with hairdos and don’ts. When the Manchus scaled the Great Wall in 1644 and overran the Han Chinese, one of their first decrees was that their new minions adopt the Manchus’ bizarre ’do: the queue. This meant shaving the front of the head and wearing the rest of the hair in a long plait. (Before the Manchus arrived, most men grew their hair long and bound it up in a coil on top of their heads.) Refusal to adopt the new style meant death: “Lose your hair, keep your head; keep your hair, lose your head” was the hair-cutters’ slogan. The queue was a potent symbol of oppression, and over the next 268 years the Manchus put down numerous “haircutting” rebellions. Armed barbers were sent into the countryside to seek out the longhaired rebels: Anyone who refused to change their hairdo was beheaded and the head was displayed on a barber’s pole. Given the circumstances, it seems astonishing that anyone would have refused, but the Han at the time believed in the magical powers of hair for fertility.

Eventually, the style became so accepted that when the Nationalists “liberated” their countrymen from imperialism in 1911 with instructions to chop off their queues, it proved just as troublesome. Instead of a return to traditional values, losing the queue meant establishing a Western-style state. But in 1912 the provisional president, Sun Yat-sen, issued a three-week deadline; mass queue-cutting rallies were held and streetside barbers did a roaring trade. In Guangdong, 200,000 men lopped off their queues on the same day.

Hairstyles remain a political issue in Asia. In 2004, Chinese President Hu Jintao backed an “ideological morals campaign” against hair dye and improper haircuts sported by senior officials. And last year, hermit state North Korea launched its own war on long hair, titled “Let Us Trim Our Hair in Accordance With Socialist Principles.” A five-part TV series aired in Pyongyang stressed the negative effects of long hair on “human intelligence development,” noting, “long hair consumes a great deal of nutrition and could thus rob the brain of energy.” It even went as far as “outing” dodgy 'dos, naming and shaming men with mullets. The North Korean Government stipulates five officially sanctioned cuts, varying in length from one to five centimeters, with a special dispensation for men over 50: They are allowed seven centimeters of “upper hair” for a combover.

Even our own Long Hair Leung Kwok-hung links his haircut to politics: He says he won’t cut his hair until Beijing apologizes for the Tiananmen Square crackdown. However, he found himself on the wrong end of a pair of scissors during one of his many periods in police custody before joining Legco. Samson-like, he was shorn of his symbol of power (pictured below right) but emerged as fist-wavingly defiant as ever.

Like most of us, Long Hair uses his flowing 'do as a form of communication. Whether we shave it off or weave it in, our hair serves as a cultural flagpole that we use to declare our values and our conformity or nonconformity to the zeitgeist. Each generation continues to look for what is new, aided by science, nostalgia and the bright ideas of a few creative entrepreneurs.

With a couple of notable exceptions, Hong Kong is not known for taking the lead when it comes to haircuts. A century ago, the city was just another paddyfield-strewn town on the edges of China, troubled by pesky pirates and foreign imperialists, and taking its style lead slavishly from Shanghai, the “Paris of the East.” And Shanghai, in its 1920s and 30s heyday, looked west for inspiration. At the time, following World War I, men were coming home dazed from the trenches to find their women hard at work in the factories, their hair cut in chin-length, practical bobs and enjoying – gasp! – smoking and short dresses. And they had no intention of returning to the elaborate up-dos, corsetry and entangling gowns of the Edwardian era. While many rural Chinese women continued to wear their Qing Dynasty styles – plaits for the girls, neat buns for the women – Shanghai and Hong Kong women aped the shorter, more liberating styles of the West. Innovations such as electric hair dryers (invented in 1890), the bobby pin (1916), hair gel (1920s), the permanent wave (1928) and heated curlers (1930) led to the finger wave, the pin curl and many variations of the bob – and often clumps of singed hair on the hairdresser’s floor.