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保住性命,牺牲头发:一项统治了267年的法令 | 神舟·北京 03

来源:SY 視野 | 2026-09-30 13:29:53

作者:業州愚公

1645年,顺治皇帝二年,北京张贴了一份通告,内容规定所有人必须遵守剃头留辫的风俗。这一规定由清朝政府颁布,涉及的核心人物包括顺治皇帝和清朝统治阶层。这一事件的重要背景是清朝入主中原,需要强制汉人遵守满族的风俗习惯,以示统治的权威和对汉人的控制。这一规定对中国的社会和文化产生了深远的影响,持续了267年,直到1911年清朝被推翻。

「保持冷靜,失去頭髮:統治267年的命令 | 神州 · 北京 03」是《神州大地》系列的一集。以下為本集影片的完整圖文轉錄,可逐字閱讀,也可前往影片頁觀看對應畫面。

順治二年

——1645年——北京的公告發出。從發布那一天起,

城內城外的人都有十天的時間剃光頭髮。

在通知下站着八个字,

它们的意思毫无疑问。

留脑子,失头发。

留头发,失脑子。

头发值多少钱?

前面的电影都是以可以在纸上画出来的东西为主。

墙壁。轴线。街道图纸。

条约的线条。

这一个是不同的。

这部电影中的东西在

任何地图上都找不到,也没有出现在任何条约中。

它出现在每个人身上,从出生到死亡。它持续了267年。

为了理解这一点,先从容易让人误解的地方开始:

辫子不是清朝的发明。

剃掉头顶前部,留下一根尾巴,是北方草原各民族共同的习俗。

乌桓人这样做。

鲜卑人、契丹人、女真人、蒙古人——他们都这样做。

原因是实用:长头发会在骑马时挂在东西上,戴上盔甲时会感到热辣。

还有一个信仰附着在这里。 在萨满教实践中,辫子

是灵魂休息的地方,是

一个人生命的一部分。如果一名士兵在

远离家乡去世,尸体无法运回家

,那么辫子会独自被送回

家,并以全礼仪进行埋葬。有一个名字

:shao xiao bian — "送回小辫子"。所以

剃头本身并不是问题。 清朝做的就是

把一种习俗变成法律。

这也不是一步到位的。1644年清朝占领北京时,下令了一次并在公开场合撤回,因为抵抗太强烈。在1645年它又重新下令,且更加严厉。 设定了一个期限:

全城内外的人都必须在十天之内

剃光头发。

每个省份,从当地收到通知之日起

十天内完成。

字里行间没有留下任何余地。

如果你想逃避,就抓住你头上的毛发

去辩护——一点也不会给你留情面。

提起这个事项在奏折中的人

会被处决而不予赦免。 从那一天起,头发不再是个人喜好问题,也不再是道德问题了。它变成了政治范畴。谁提出了那一第二道诏书?记载中只有一位:孙志锡。来自山东的明朝进士,在清朝统治后投降清朝,任职于朝廷。

当时法庭设在

两排,满洲人和汉人。

为了表明他的立场,孫頭剃了光,穿上滿洲服裝,走过去站在滿洲排里。他们见到一个汉人,拒绝他。

他回到汉人排里;

他们看了看满洲服装,也不让他。

站在两者之间,他要求摄政王

多尔衮批准重新颁发剃发令

。多尔衮同意了。十天的限期从此开始。 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.

▶ 觀看本集影片(含畫面與地圖):Keep your head, lose your hair: one order that ruled 267 years | Shenzhou · Beijing 03