Keep your head, lose your hair: one order that ruled 267 years | Shenzhou · Beijing 03
《神州大地》第 4 集 · 語言：English · 時長：13:26
出處：sylogs.com — 歡迎轉載分享，請注明出處

In the second year of the Shunzhi

emperor — 1645 — a notice went up in

Beijing. From the day it was posted,

everyone inside the city and outside it

had ten days to shave their heads.

Under the notice stood eight characters,

and they were not ambiguous.

Keep your head, lose your hair.

Keep your hair, lose your head.

How much is a head of hair

worth?

The previous films dealt in things that

can be drawn on paper.

Walls. An axis. Street plans.

The lines of a treaty.

This one is different.

The thing in this film fits on

no map and appears in no treaty.

It grew on every person, from birth

to death.It ran for two hundred

and sixty-seven years.

To understand that order, start with something

it would be easy to get wrong:

the braid was not a Qing invention.

Shaving the front of the skull and

leaving a single tail behind was a

shared habit of the northern steppe peoples.

The Wuhuan did it.

The Xianbei, the Khitan, the Jurchen,

the Mongols — all of them.

The reason was practical: a long forelock

snags when you ride, and grows hot

under a helmet.There was also a

belief attached. In shamanic practice the braid

is where the soul rests, part of

a person's life. If a soldier died

far from home and the body could

not be carried back, the braid was

sent home alone and buried with full

rites. There is a name for it:

shao xiao bian — "sending the little braid

home".So the shaving itself was never

the issue. What the Qing did was

turn a custom into a statute.

And it did not happen in one

step. In 1644, the year the Qing took

Beijing, the order was issued once

and withdrawn in public, because resistance was

too sharp.In 1645 it came back,

and harder. The text set a deadline:

everyone inside and outside the capital to

be fully shaved within ten days.

Each province, ten days from the day

the notice reached it.

The wording left nothing open.

Evade it, cling to your hair,

argue a case — no leniency.

An official who raised the matter again

in memorial — executed without pardon.

From that day, hair was no longer

a matter of taste, and no longer

a matter of ethics.

It was a political category.

Who proposed that second edict?

The record keeps one name: Sun Zhixie.

A man from Shandong, a jinshi of

the Ming, who submitted to the Qing

after they came through the pass and

took a post at court.

At the time the court sat in

two ranks, Manchu and Han.

To show where he stood, Sun shaved

his own head and dressed in Manchu

clothing, then walked over and stood in

the Manchu rank. They saw a Han

man and would not have him.

He went back to the Han rank;

they looked at the Manchu clothes and

would not have him either.

Standing in neither, he asked the regent

Dorgon for permission to re-issue the head-shaving

edict.Dorgon agreed. The ten-day deadline comes

from there.This passage rests on a

Qing author, Wang Jiazhen, and his Notes

from the Yantang — written by a man

of that generation, recording not only where

an order came from, but how it

grew out of one man's humiliation.

A grudge, though, does not make a

policy. Something else put the edict back

on the table.The Qing had just

seated themselves in Beijing.

The frontier was not settled, and from

the throne it was not yet possible

to tell a subject from an enemy.

Hair, of all things, was a sign

that could be read at a glance.

If it is a sign, it has

to be inspectable. This passage is about

how it was inspected.

The legally defined style in the early

Qing was the coin-and-tail: the whole front

of the head shaved, a patch at

the crown the size of a copper

coin left to grow, plaited into a

thin tail that hung at the back,

no thicker than a rat's.

That style was not left loose in

the telling. It had a measurable standard:

the patch that was left had to

pass through the square hole of a

copper coin.Overshooting could kill you.

In 1651 a commoner named Ding Quan was

beheaded because he had left his patch

too large, and the local official was

punished along with him.

Set the standard at the width of

a coin's hole and the intention is

legible: what was wanted was not beauty,

it was recognisability. Stand in the street

and you can see at once who

shaved, who did not, and who left

too much.So why this shape?

Not because it was handsome, and not

because it was ugly — because it was

a mark of loyalty you could check

at a glance and measure with a

ruler. That is the design.

There is one more thing about this

style that few people know: the Qing

itself changed it.Early on, it was

the coin-and-tail. By the middle of the

dynasty the patch had grown to the

size of a palm and the tail

had thickened into the pig-tail.

In the last few decades the front

was shaved and the back combed into

a heavy braid — which is the hairstyle

you see in Qing palace dramas today.

The evidence for this is hard.

In 1793, the artists travelling with the Macartney

embassy drew Chinese men of the Qianlong

reign. What they drew is still the

coin-and-tail. Not the version on television.

So: one and the same ancestral rule,

three different hairstyles in two hundred and

sixty-seven years. The braid in those pictures

belongs only to the last few decades

of its life.

The order went out.

Resistance followed. This passage gives both sides.

The sharpest case was Jiangyin, a county

town in the south, on the Yangtze.

In the sixth intercalary month of 1645,

the magistrate of Jiangyin restated the order.

Local gentry knelt to ask that they

be allowed to keep their hair.

They were shouted out of the room.

The next day, a scholar named Xu

Yong and others swore an oath in

front of the Confucian temple: my head

may be cut, my hair will not

be shaved.The townspeople put the registrar,

Chen Mingyu, in charge of the walls.

They held eighty-one days.

Couplets written by people inside the town

have been preserved, and so have their

plainer words: rather a ghost with hair

than a man with a shaved head.

After eighty-one days, the town fell.

What happened after the walls broke has

to be written out in full,

with both sets of numbers.

The defenders' own record says that in

eighty-one days they killed more than seventy-five

thousand Qing soldiers; that more than sixty-seven

thousand of their own died on and

around the walls; and that after the

town fell the killing went on for

ten days without pause until the city

was emptied, with more than one hundred

and seventy thousand killed and fifty-three people,

old and young, left alive.

Those numbers are as the defending side

recorded them. They are placed here as

they stand.Elsewhere in the south that

same year: Jiading, for shaving resistance,

was put to the sword three times.

Its death toll is given differently in

different accounts — thirty thousand in one,

more than ten thousand in another.

Both are listed. After Kunshan was taken,

fifty-three people remained.The northern record reads

differently. Han settlers in Liaodong who would

not shave their heads walked into the

Yalu River. Pursued, the accounts say the

bodies stopped the water.

And the man who had proposed the

order, Sun Zhixie, has his own ending

in these same years.

In the autumn of 1646, an armed

force under Xie Qian rose in Shandong.

Sun Zhixie had just gone home in

glory. The force took him.

The accounts say holes were pricked over

his body, bristles pushed into them,

and he was beheaded and left in

the open street.Later, Pu Songling wrote

a story in Strange Tales from a

Chinese Studio about a man who steals

a duck and grows duck feathers,

and only loses them when the owner

curses him. Some readers have connected it

to Sun Zhixie.All of this is

what people at the time wrote down.

It is set out here.

So when did the order stop?

At the end of 1910 the Qing

government's Advisory Council passed a resolution to

cut the braid. In 1912 the Republican government

issued a policy on cutting braids and

changing dress; after the revolution the Hubei

military government listed the braid among the

charges against the Qing and banned it.

The most striking scene comes on the

twelfth of February, 1912 — the day the

last emperor abdicated.The final regent,

Zai Feng, went home, picked up a

pair of scissors and cut off his

own braid. To his stunned household he

said: from today, I am an ordinary

subject.Inside the Forbidden City, Puyi did

not cut his until 1919, when his Scottish

tutor Johnston talked him into it.

And when the cutting began, plenty of

people did not want to.

One reason: the fear that a man

without a braid would be beheaded by

the authorities. Some tucked their braids up

inside their hats to look shaved.

Two hundred and sixty-seven years, one order

to the end. But when the order

went, what it left behind stayed.

Ask an old Beijinger today why you

do not get a haircut in the

first month of the lunar year,

and you will usually get one sentence:

a haircut in the first month kills

your mother's brother.The most widely circulated

explanation is a pun: "kills your mother's

brother" sounds like "thinking of the old."

Going a whole first month without a

haircut stands for going a whole year,

and the point was to remember the

previous dynasty and one's ancestors.

The belief is superstitious.

It became a custom, and the custom

was handed down.One thing outlasted even

the custom, and it is still a

physical object in this city: the barber's

carrying pole.To push the order through

quickly, the Qing court organised professional barbers and

issued them these poles.

A small cabinet hung at the back,

with a tall pole set upright and

the imperial notice — those who keep their

hair lose their heads — hung from it.

The carrying pole was red at one

end and blue-black at the other,

wrapped in leather: that was a beating

staff. There was an iron tool like

a large pair of tweezers, plucked to

make a ringing note, used together with

the shout of the eight characters from

the notice.Beyond the matting sheds set

up in the city, where passers-by were

made to go in and be shaved,

men were sent house to house through

the capital region to check.

You do not hear that ringing note

at the barber's any more.

But next spring, when you hear those

five characters about the first month,

you can know where they came from.

They came out of a notice posted

in 1645, and they have walked three hundred

and eighty years into the way people

talk today.

One braid, for two hundred and sixty-seven

years.What it did best was not

to force everyone to wear the same

hair. It was to make obedience into

something visible, measurable, and shared out among

neighbours. It did not ask you to

agree. It asked you to comply.

And it ended simply: the order was

gone, and what was left was a

sentence.But the modern story of this

city is not finished.

With the braid cut, Beijing faced a

harder question — how does a three-thousand-year-old capital

become a modern one?

This is our reading, not the record

itself. The full transcript is at sylogs.com.

---
Source: sylogs.com