The characteristic Manchu hairstyle attracted the immediate attention of early Western visitors. Even today, when no reader can have missed the hairstyles advertising counter-cultural protest, there may be no case study more instructive than the queue, which not only makes it possible to condense two-and-a-half centuries of Qing rule into the following pages, but also illustrates a number of the symbolic uses of hair in Chinese history. However, as the anthropologist Raymond Firth concluded, 'different forms of social control may demand different forms of hair treatment even in the same society.' Although obviously a private asset, hair needs to be interpreted as a public symbol. Indeed, Freudians have often argued that hair-cutting is ritual castration. Prisoners, slaves and soldiers have all endured the imposition of short hair. So, too, has the shaven head of the true believer. Bound hair may signify marital status or even subjugation. Loose hair has sometimes expressed the nubile state, freedom, sorrow and insurrection, just as dishevelled hair has also been a common, but not universal, sign of grief. Its removal has signified surrender, rejection of the feminine or material worlds, as well as the bonding of martial groups. Hair has represented the life force-strength, energy, vitality, and the power of Samson. Both long locks and bald craniums have demonstrated political power and its absence. The Normans wore theirs short at the time of WiIliam the Conqueror, which is said to have prompted the English to grow theirs quite long. After queue-cutting had become something of a mania, the North-China Herald observed that, while the act might not 'mark an epoch,' it was 'inevitable that a queueless China should mean a new China.' Be this as it may, hair cannot be so casually discarded by the modern social historian.

Thus, the removal of the 'queue' or 'pigtail' became one of the better-known symbols of the fall of imperial rule, modernization and political change. Before another year had passed, the Qing dynasty was also in danger of being toppled by revolutionaries who, in a gesture of defiance as well as practicality, severed their own tails. When he returned to the contest without the hairpiece, one foreign wag remarked that China had many useless appendages to be dispensed with.

See his 'Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: Sun Yatsen and the International Development of China', The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, 18 (July 1987): 109-125.- The EditorĪ Chinese athlete attempting the high jump in the autumn of 1910 reportedly displaced the bar with his queue.

An earlier essay by Michael Godley on Sun Yatsen's approach to minsheng and Chinese economics is also worth rereading in the context of the commemoration of and contestation over the Xinhai period and its contemporary relevance.

That journal is now published electronically and, like China Heritage Quarterly, it appears under the aegis of the Australian Centre on China in the World. Michael Godley's 'The End of the Queue' first appeared in the pages of the December 1994 issue of East Asian History. From the 1890s cutting the queue was an overt gesture of rebellion, by 1911 it was an act integral to political revolution. In the early decades of the Qing dynasty the queue was the focus of resistance to Manchu dominance, and it became so again in the dying years of imperial rule. Attitudes towards the queue in China and more broadly were complex. Originally a physical expression of submission, the braided queue was also a sign of repression. The following essay offers a social history of the queue ( bianzi 辮子).

Queue hair