China and the Chinese

by Herbert Allen Giles

A foreigner arriving for the first time in China will be especially struck by three points to which he is not accustomed at home.

The people will consist almost entirely of men; they will all wear their hair plaited in queues; and they will all be exactly alike.

The seclusion of women causes the traveller least surprise of the three, being a custom much more rigorously enforced in other Oriental countries; and directly he gets accustomed to the uniform absence of beard and moustache, he soon finds out that the Chinese people are not one whit more alike facially than his own countrymen of the West.

A Chinaman cannot wear a beard before he is forty, unless he happens to have a married son. He also shaves the whole head with the exception of a round patch at the back, from which the much-prized queue is grown.

There are some strange misconceptions as to the origin and meaning of the queue, more perhaps on the other side of the Atlantic, where we are not so accustomed to Chinamen as you are in America. Some associate the queue with religion, and gravely state that without it no Chinaman could be hauled into Paradise. Others know that queues have only been worn by the Chinese for about two hundred and fifty years, and that they were imposed as a badge of conquest by the Manchu-Tartars, the present rulers of China. Previous to 1644 the Chinese clothed their bodies and dressed their hair in the style of the modern Japanese,—of course I mean those Japanese who still wear what is wrongly known as "the beautiful native dress of Japan,"—wrongly, because as a matter of fact the Japanese borrowed their dress, as well as their literature, philosophy, and early lessons in art, from China. The Japanese dress is the dress of the Ming period in China, 1368-1644.

It remains still to be seen whence and wherefore the Manchu-Tartars obtained this strange fashion of the queue.

The Tartars may be said to have depended almost for their very existence upon the horse; and in old pictures the Tartar is often seen lying curled up asleep with his horse, illustrating the mutual affection and dependence between master and beast. Out of sheer gratitude and respect for his noble ally, the man took upon himself the form of the animal, growing a queue in imitation of the horse's tail.

Unsupported by any other evidence, this somewhat grotesque theory would fall to the ground. But there is other evidence, of a rather striking character, which, taken in conjunction with what has been said, seems to me to settle the matter.

Official coats, as seen in China at the present day, are made with very peculiar sleeves, shaped like a horse's leg, and ending in what is an unmistakable hoof, completely covering the hand. These are actually known to the Chinese as "horse-shoe sleeves"; and, encased therein, a Chinaman's arms certainly look very much like a horse's forelegs. The tail completes the picture.

When the Tartars conquered China two hundred and fifty years ago, there was at first a strenuous fight against the queue, and it has been said that the turbans still worn by the Southern Chinese were originally adopted as a means of concealing the hateful Manchu badge. Nowadays every Chinaman looks upon his queue as an integral and honourable part of himself. If he cannot grow one, he must have recourse to art, for he could not appear tailless, either in this world or the next.