chupryna as an inconsistency in the picture. (From the cover of
Martino Martini's
Regni Sinensis a Tartari devastati enarratio, 1661.) The queue (called
soncoho in Manchu) was a specifically male
hairstyle worn by the
Manchu 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 and other ethnicities like the Nanai in the early 17th century during the
transition from Ming to Qing.
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 signified all ethnic groups submission to Qing rule, and also aided the Manchu identification of those Han who refused to accept Qing dynasty domination. The hairstyle was compulsory for all males and the penalty for non-compliance was execution for
treason. After the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912, 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. The Nanais at first fought against the Nurhaci and the Manchus, led by their own Nanai Hurka chief Sosoku before surrendering to
Hongtaiji in 1631. Mandatory shaving of the front of all male heads was imposed on Amur peoples like the
Nanai people who were conquered by the Qing. The Amur peoples already wore the queue on the back of their heads but did not shave the front until the Qing subjected them and ordered them to shave. The term "shaved-head people" was used to describe the
Nanai people by
Ulch people.
Queue order , 1655–57) The Queue Order (), or
tonsure decree, was a series of laws violently imposed by the
Qing dynasty during the seventeenth century. It was also imposed on
Taiwanese indigenous peoples in 1753, and
Koreans who settled in northeast China in the late 19th century, though the
Ryukyuan people of the
Ryukyu Kingdom, 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: As a result of this ideology, both men and women wound their hair into a bun (a
topknot) or other various hairstyles. Han Chinese did not object to wearing the queue braid on the back of the head as they traditionally wore all their hair long, but fiercely objected to shaving the forehead so the Qing government exclusively focused on forcing people to shave the forehead rather than wear the braid. Han rebels in the first half of the Qing who objected to Qing hairstyle wore the braid but defied orders to shave the front of the head. One person was executed for refusing to shave the front but he had willingly braided the back of his hair. It was only later that westernized revolutionaries began to view the braid as backwards and advocated adopting short-haired western styles. Han rebels against the Qing like the Taiping retained their queue braids on the back but rebelled by growing hair on the front of their heads. This caused the Qing government to view shaving the front of the head as the primary sign of loyalty rather than wearing the braid on the back, which did not violate Han customs and traditional Han did not object to.
Koxinga criticized the Qing hairstyle by referring to the shaven pate looking like a fly. Koxinga and his men objected to shaving when the Qing demanded they shave in exchange for recognizing Koxinga as a feudatory. The Qing demanded that
Zheng Jing and his men on Taiwan shave to receive recognition as a fiefdom. His men and Ming prince
Zhu Shugui fiercely objected to shaving. 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 21 July 1645, the regent
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. Qing Manchu prince Dorgon initially canceled the order for all men in Ming territories south of the Great wall (post 1644 additions to the Qing) to shave. It was a Han official from Shandong, Sun Zhixie and Li Ruolin who voluntarily shaved their foreheads and demanded Qing Prince Dorgon impose the queue hairstyle on the entire population which led to the queue order. The Han Chinese were given 10 days to comply or face death. Though 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 "Cut the hair and keep the head, (or) keep the hair and cut the head" (). People who resisted the order were met with deadly force.
Han rebels in
Shandong tortured the
Qing official who suggested the queue order to
Dorgon to death 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 9 October 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, while Han people were initially paid silver to wear the queue in
Fuzhou when it was first implemented. 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). Nevertheless, most Han civilian men voluntarily adopted Manchu clothing like
Changshan of their own free will. Throughout the Qing dynasty Han women continued to wear Han clothing. However, the shaving policy was not enforced in the
Tusi autonomous chiefdoms in Southwestern China where many minorities lived. There was one Han Chinese Tusi, the
Chiefdom of Kokang populated by Han
Kokang people. The Qing dynasty required all subjects of all ethnicities to shave their foreheads and wear the queue braid including Muslims like
Hui people and Salar people but some Turkic Muslim ethnicities like
Uyghur and
Salar people already shaved their entire heads as part of their culture and were bald so they were not able to wear the braids on the back unless they wore wigs with fake queues. According to Jonathan Neaman Lipman the Qing dynasty required Salars to wear the queue. During the Qing Salar men shaved their hair bald while when they went to journey in public they put on artificial queues. Uyghur men shaved their hair bald during the Qing. Uyghur males at the present still shave their heads bald in the summer.
Chen Cheng observed that Muslim Turks in 14th–15th century Turfan and Kumul shaved their heads while non-Muslim Turks grew long hair. 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 refusing to shave one's hair came to symbolize revolutionary ideals, as seen during the
White Lotus Rebellion. Because of this, the members of the
Taiping Rebellion were sometimes called the
Long hairs () or Hair rebels ().
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. 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 and is demonstrated by the fact that Chinese citizens in Hong Kong collectively changed to short haircuts. Cantonese outlaw bandit pirates in the Guangdong maritime frontier with Vietnam in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries wore their hair long in defiance of the Qing laws which mandated cutting. Many people were violating the Qing laws on hair at the end of the dynasty. Some Chinese chose to wear the queue but not to shave their crown, while those people who cut the queue off and did not shave were considered
revolutionary and others maintained the state-mandated combination of the queue and shaved crown.
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 was viewed as an example to emulate by some foreign observers.
H. E. M. James, a
British civil servant in
India, wrote in 1887 that the British ought to act in a similarly decisive way when imposing their will in India. In his view, the British administration should have outlawed practises such as
Sati much earlier than 1829, which James ascribed to a British unwillingness to challenge long-held Indian traditions, no matter how detrimental they were to the country. British author
Demetrius Charles Boulger in 1899 proposed that Britain form and head an alliance of "Philo-Chinese Powers" in setting up a new government for China based in Shanghai and
Nanking as two capitals along the
River Yangtze, to counter the interests of other powers in the region like the
Russians due to what he believed was the imminent collapse of the Qing dynasty. The Yangtze valley was controlled by Qing officials such as
Liu Kunyi and
Zhang Zhidong, who were not under Beijing's influence and whom Boulger believed Britain could work with to stabilize China. He proposed that at Nanjing and Hankou a force of Chinese soldiers trained by the British be deployed and in
Hong Kong,
Weihaiwei and the Yangtze valley and it would have no allegiance to the Qing, and as such they in his idea would forgo the queue and be made to grow their hair long as a symbolic measure to "increasing the confidence of the Chinese in the advent of a new era". Boulger stated he could not discern from the Chinese he spoke to on whether the queue was invented by Nurhaci to impose on the Chinese as a symbol of loyalty or whether it was an already established Manchu custom as no one seemed to know the origin of it from his or other sinologists' inquiries. English adventurer
Augustus Frederick Lindley wrote that the beardless, youthful long haired Han Chinese rebels from
Hunan in the
Taiping armies who grew all their hair long while fighting against the Qing dynasty were among the most beautiful men in the world unlike, in his mind, the Han Chinese who wore the queue, with Lindley calling the shaved part "a disfigurement".
Vietnam After Nguyễn Huệ defeated the
Later Lê dynasty, high ranking Lê loyalists and the last Lê emperor
Lê Chiêu Thống fled Vietnam for asylum in Qing China. They went to Beijing where Lê Chiêu Thống was appointed a Chinese mandarin of the fourth rank in the
Han Yellow Bordered Banner, while lower ranking loyalists were sent to cultivate government land and join the
Green Standard Army in Sichuan and
Zhejiang. They adopted Qing clothing and adopt the queue hairstyle, effectively becoming naturalized subjects of the Qing dynasty affording them protection against Vietnamese demands for extradition. Some Lê loyalists were also sent to Central Asia in
Urumqi. Modern descendants of the Lê monarch can be traced to southern Vietnam and
Urumqi, Xinjiang. == Other queues ==