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EveryHairstyle

Style capital, China

Beijing

The Qing capital that imposed the queue on Chinese men and dressed Manchu women in the tall liangbatou.

Beijing was the capital of the Qing dynasty, the Manchu rulers of China from 1644 to 1912, and its Forbidden City was the centre of a hair policy that touched every man in the empire. The Qing ordered Han Chinese men to adopt the Manchu queue: the front of the head shaved and the rest grown into a long braid. Manchu women of the court wore the liangbatou, a tall headdress built on their hair.

The queue

In 1645, after the conquest of Beijing, the Qing regent Dorgon ordered all men to shave the forehead and wear the queue within days, as a sign of loyalty; the saying went 'keep your hair and lose your head'. Many Han Chinese resisted, and uprisings were put down with great loss of life. Over two and a half centuries the queue became part of Chinese identity. After the 1911 revolution the new republic urged men to cut it off, and most did within a few years.

The liangbatou

Manchu women wore their hair parted and wound into two sections on top of the head, the liangbatou, 'two handfuls'. In the late Qing it grew into a tall, flat headdress of black satin or added hair over a frame, decorated with flowers, tassels and jewels, made famous by the Empress Dowager Cixi and her court ladies. The style was copied in theatre and in photographs, and it can be seen in Qing court portraits held by the Palace Museum.

Hairstyles of Beijing

QueueThe braid imposed on Chinese men by the QingLiangbatouThe headdress of Manchu court women

Photo credits on this page

The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.

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