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In the second year of the Shunzhi

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emperor — 1645 — a notice went up in

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Beijing. From the day it was posted,

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everyone inside the city and outside it

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had ten days to shave their heads.

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Under the notice stood eight characters,

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and they were not ambiguous.

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Keep your head, lose your hair.

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Keep your hair, lose your head.

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How much is a head of hair

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worth?

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The previous films dealt in things that

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can be drawn on paper.

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Walls. An axis. Street plans.

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The lines of a treaty.

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This one is different.

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The thing in this film fits on

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no map and appears in no treaty.

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It grew on every person, from birth

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to death.It ran for two hundred

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and sixty-seven years.

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To understand that order, start with something

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it would be easy to get wrong:

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the braid was not a Qing invention.

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Shaving the front of the skull and

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leaving a single tail behind was a

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shared habit of the northern steppe peoples.

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The Wuhuan did it.

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The Xianbei, the Khitan, the Jurchen,

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the Mongols — all of them.

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The reason was practical: a long forelock

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snags when you ride, and grows hot

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under a helmet.There was also a

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belief attached. In shamanic practice the braid

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is where the soul rests, part of

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a person's life. If a soldier died

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far from home and the body could

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not be carried back, the braid was

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sent home alone and buried with full

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rites. There is a name for it:

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shao xiao bian — "sending the little braid

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home".So the shaving itself was never

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the issue. What the Qing did was

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turn a custom into a statute.

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And it did not happen in one

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step. In 1644, the year the Qing took

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Beijing, the order was issued once

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and withdrawn in public, because resistance was

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too sharp.In 1645 it came back,

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and harder. The text set a deadline:

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everyone inside and outside the capital to

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be fully shaved within ten days.

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Each province, ten days from the day

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the notice reached it.

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The wording left nothing open.

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Evade it, cling to your hair,

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argue a case — no leniency.

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An official who raised the matter again

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in memorial — executed without pardon.

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From that day, hair was no longer

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a matter of taste, and no longer

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a matter of ethics.

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It was a political category.

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Who proposed that second edict?

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The record keeps one name: Sun Zhixie.

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A man from Shandong, a jinshi of

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the Ming, who submitted to the Qing

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after they came through the pass and

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took a post at court.

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At the time the court sat in

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two ranks, Manchu and Han.

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To show where he stood, Sun shaved

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his own head and dressed in Manchu

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clothing, then walked over and stood in

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the Manchu rank. They saw a Han

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man and would not have him.

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He went back to the Han rank;

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they looked at the Manchu clothes and

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would not have him either.

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Standing in neither, he asked the regent

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Dorgon for permission to re-issue the head-shaving

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edict.Dorgon agreed. The ten-day deadline comes

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from there.This passage rests on a

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Qing author, Wang Jiazhen, and his Notes

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from the Yantang — written by a man

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of that generation, recording not only where

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an order came from, but how it

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grew out of one man's humiliation.

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A grudge, though, does not make a

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policy. Something else put the edict back

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on the table.The Qing had just

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seated themselves in Beijing.

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The frontier was not settled, and from

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the throne it was not yet possible

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to tell a subject from an enemy.

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Hair, of all things, was a sign

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that could be read at a glance.

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If it is a sign, it has

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to be inspectable. This passage is about

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how it was inspected.

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The legally defined style in the early

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

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of the head shaved, a patch at

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the crown the size of a copper

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coin left to grow, plaited into a

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thin tail that hung at the back,

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no thicker than a rat's.

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That style was not left loose in

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the telling. It had a measurable standard:

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the patch that was left had to

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pass through the square hole of a

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copper coin.Overshooting could kill you.

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In 1651 a commoner named Ding Quan was

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beheaded because he had left his patch

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too large, and the local official was

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punished along with him.

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Set the standard at the width of

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a coin's hole and the intention is

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legible: what was wanted was not beauty,

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it was recognisability. Stand in the street

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and you can see at once who

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shaved, who did not, and who left

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too much.So why this shape?

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Not because it was handsome, and not

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because it was ugly — because it was

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a mark of loyalty you could check

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at a glance and measure with a

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ruler. That is the design.

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There is one more thing about this

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style that few people know: the Qing

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itself changed it.Early on, it was

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

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dynasty the patch had grown to the

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size of a palm and the tail

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had thickened into the pig-tail.

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In the last few decades the front

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was shaved and the back combed into

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a heavy braid — which is the hairstyle

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you see in Qing palace dramas today.

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The evidence for this is hard.

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In 1793, the artists travelling with the Macartney

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embassy drew Chinese men of the Qianlong

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reign. What they drew is still the

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

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So: one and the same ancestral rule,

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three different hairstyles in two hundred and

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sixty-seven years. The braid in those pictures

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belongs only to the last few decades

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of its life.

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The order went out.

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Resistance followed. This passage gives both sides.

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The sharpest case was Jiangyin, a county

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town in the south, on the Yangtze.

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In the sixth intercalary month of 1645,

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the magistrate of Jiangyin restated the order.

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Local gentry knelt to ask that they

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be allowed to keep their hair.

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They were shouted out of the room.

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The next day, a scholar named Xu

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Yong and others swore an oath in

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front of the Confucian temple: my head

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may be cut, my hair will not

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be shaved.The townspeople put the registrar,

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Chen Mingyu, in charge of the walls.

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They held eighty-one days.

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Couplets written by people inside the town

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have been preserved, and so have their

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plainer words: rather a ghost with hair

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than a man with a shaved head.

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After eighty-one days, the town fell.

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What happened after the walls broke has

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to be written out in full,

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with both sets of numbers.

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The defenders' own record says that in

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eighty-one days they killed more than seventy-five

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thousand Qing soldiers; that more than sixty-seven

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thousand of their own died on and

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around the walls; and that after the

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town fell the killing went on for

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ten days without pause until the city

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was emptied, with more than one hundred

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and seventy thousand killed and fifty-three people,

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old and young, left alive.

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Those numbers are as the defending side

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recorded them. They are placed here as

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they stand.Elsewhere in the south that

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same year: Jiading, for shaving resistance,

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was put to the sword three times.

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Its death toll is given differently in

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different accounts — thirty thousand in one,

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more than ten thousand in another.

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Both are listed. After Kunshan was taken,

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fifty-three people remained.The northern record reads

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differently. Han settlers in Liaodong who would

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not shave their heads walked into the

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Yalu River. Pursued, the accounts say the

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bodies stopped the water.

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And the man who had proposed the

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order, Sun Zhixie, has his own ending

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in these same years.

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In the autumn of 1646, an armed

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00:08:49,432 --> 00:08:52,256
force under Xie Qian rose in Shandong.

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Sun Zhixie had just gone home in

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glory. The force took him.

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The accounts say holes were pricked over

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his body, bristles pushed into them,

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00:09:03,491 --> 00:09:05,300
and he was beheaded and left in

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the open street.Later, Pu Songling wrote

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00:09:08,815 --> 00:09:10,800
a story in Strange Tales from a

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00:09:10,815 --> 00:09:13,373
Chinese Studio about a man who steals

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00:09:13,388 --> 00:09:15,388
a duck and grows duck feathers,

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00:09:16,006 --> 00:09:18,006
and only loses them when the owner

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00:09:18,020 --> 00:09:21,016
curses him. Some readers have connected it

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00:09:21,031 --> 00:09:23,668
to Sun Zhixie.All of this is

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00:09:23,682 --> 00:09:25,800
what people at the time wrote down.

216
00:09:26,218 --> 00:09:27,600
It is set out here.

217
00:09:28,744 --> 00:09:30,450
So when did the order stop?

218
00:09:30,921 --> 00:09:33,127
At the end of 1910 the Qing

219
00:09:33,141 --> 00:09:36,465
government's Advisory Council passed a resolution to

220
00:09:36,480 --> 00:09:40,200
cut the braid. In 1912 the Republican government

221
00:09:40,230 --> 00:09:42,509
issued a policy on cutting braids and

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changing dress; after the revolution the Hubei

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00:09:45,921 --> 00:09:48,318
military government listed the braid among the

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charges against the Qing and banned it.

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00:09:51,112 --> 00:09:53,068
The most striking scene comes on the

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00:09:53,082 --> 00:09:56,406
twelfth of February, 1912 — the day the

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00:09:56,421 --> 00:09:59,612
last emperor abdicated.The final regent,

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00:10:00,141 --> 00:10:03,362
Zai Feng, went home, picked up a

229
00:10:03,377 --> 00:10:05,229
pair of scissors and cut off his

230
00:10:05,244 --> 00:10:07,950
own braid. To his stunned household he

231
00:10:07,965 --> 00:10:11,641
said: from today, I am an ordinary

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00:10:11,656 --> 00:10:15,259
subject.Inside the Forbidden City, Puyi did

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00:10:15,274 --> 00:10:18,980
not cut his until 1919, when his Scottish

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00:10:18,994 --> 00:10:21,068
tutor Johnston talked him into it.

235
00:10:21,538 --> 00:10:23,759
And when the cutting began, plenty of

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people did not want to.

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00:10:25,818 --> 00:10:28,494
One reason: the fear that a man

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without a braid would be beheaded by

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the authorities. Some tucked their braids up

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00:10:33,715 --> 00:10:35,803
inside their hats to look shaved.

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00:10:36,274 --> 00:10:39,332
Two hundred and sixty-seven years, one order

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00:10:39,347 --> 00:10:41,582
to the end. But when the order

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00:10:41,597 --> 00:10:43,891
went, what it left behind stayed.

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00:10:44,362 --> 00:10:46,465
Ask an old Beijinger today why you

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00:10:46,480 --> 00:10:47,935
do not get a haircut in the

246
00:10:47,950 --> 00:10:49,612
first month of the lunar year,

247
00:10:49,965 --> 00:10:52,200
and you will usually get one sentence:

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00:10:52,612 --> 00:10:54,524
a haircut in the first month kills

249
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your mother's brother.The most widely circulated

250
00:10:57,685 --> 00:11:01,185
explanation is a pun: "kills your mother's

251
00:11:01,200 --> 00:11:04,803
brother" sounds like "thinking of the old."

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00:11:05,303 --> 00:11:07,259
Going a whole first month without a

253
00:11:07,274 --> 00:11:09,465
haircut stands for going a whole year,

254
00:11:09,847 --> 00:11:11,524
and the point was to remember the

255
00:11:11,538 --> 00:11:14,127
previous dynasty and one's ancestors.

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00:11:14,582 --> 00:11:16,641
The belief is superstitious.

257
00:11:17,112 --> 00:11:19,332
It became a custom, and the custom

258
00:11:19,347 --> 00:11:22,803
was handed down.One thing outlasted even

259
00:11:22,818 --> 00:11:24,965
the custom, and it is still a

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00:11:24,980 --> 00:11:28,068
physical object in this city: the barber's

261
00:11:28,082 --> 00:11:30,818
carrying pole.To push the order through

262
00:11:30,832 --> 00:11:34,965
quickly, the Qing court organised professional barbers and

263
00:11:34,980 --> 00:11:36,465
issued them these poles.

264
00:11:36,935 --> 00:11:38,965
A small cabinet hung at the back,

265
00:11:38,994 --> 00:11:41,038
with a tall pole set upright and

266
00:11:41,053 --> 00:11:43,671
the imperial notice — those who keep their

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hair lose their heads — hung from it.

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The carrying pole was red at one

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end and blue-black at the other,

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wrapped in leather: that was a beating

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staff. There was an iron tool like

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a large pair of tweezers, plucked to

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make a ringing note, used together with

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the shout of the eight characters from

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the notice.Beyond the matting sheds set

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up in the city, where passers-by were

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made to go in and be shaved,

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men were sent house to house through

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the capital region to check.

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You do not hear that ringing note

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at the barber's any more.

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But next spring, when you hear those

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five characters about the first month,

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you can know where they came from.

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They came out of a notice posted

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in 1645, and they have walked three hundred

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and eighty years into the way people

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talk today.

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One braid, for two hundred and sixty-seven

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years.What it did best was not

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to force everyone to wear the same

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hair. It was to make obedience into

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something visible, measurable, and shared out among

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neighbours. It did not ask you to

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agree. It asked you to comply.

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And it ended simply: the order was

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gone, and what was left was a

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sentence.But the modern story of this

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city is not finished.

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With the braid cut, Beijing faced a

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

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become a modern one?

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This is our reading, not the record

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itself. The full transcript is at sylogs.com.