Charles Fort was keenly interested in the phenomena of collective action and the behaviour of crowds, and he recorded many episodes of ‘mass hysteria’, from contagious fainting fits triggered by ‘strange smells’ to mystery assailants who stab with pins and epidemics of lights in the sky or ghosts.

In the sixth chapter of Wild Talents (1931), Fort, at the end of a discussion of puzzling outbreaks of hair-snipping in western cities, spends a couple of pages describing a panic in China in 1876 1. Beginning in Nanjing in May 1876, invisible and uncatchable culprits were cutting off people’s pigtails, generally instantaneously and without the owner’s knowledge. The panic spread to Shanghai and Hangzhou during the summer, and men in Shanghai, fearing attack from behind, held their pigtails in front of them. Quack doctors offered charms and soldiers were stationed on the streets. The use of acid to remove the queue was mooted, as it was thought impossible to cut it with shears without the victim feeling anything. Suspects included the charm-sellers (hoping to stimulate business), mischievous children and missionaries. But while Fort tells only one tale, there are many more.

The earliest case I have found so far dates from AD 477, when the History of the Wei Dynasty records, laconically, that “fox-elves cut off the people’s hair”. The same work records another outbreak in AD 517, in the capital, Luoyang, that terrorised the population. Around July that year, the empress-dowager Ling issued a decree that all persons found cutting hair should be whipped outside the Thousand Autumns gate by the chief of the guards 2.

But we have a slightly more detailed account – from the Record of the Temples of Luoyang by Yang Xuanzhi of the 6th century 3 – of a professional mourner, Sun Yan, who lived in the coffin-makers’ and undertakers’ quarter of Luoyang. He married a woman who went to bed fully-dressed. She did this for three years until Sun undressed her while she was asleep and found she had a three-foot-long tail like a fox. Afraid, Sun divorced her but as she left she cut off his hair and ran. Pursued by the neighbours, she turned into a fox. Subsequently, more than 130 other citizens lost their hair; men told of stopping to talk to an attractive woman who turned into a fox and cut off their hair. (Just how much literary invention there might be in the tale is impossible to tell.)

In old China, foxes were thought to be supernatural creatures, capable of changing themselves into human form, usually to plague mankind in some way. In literature, they are portrayed as beautiful fairy seductresses and sexual vampires, while in everyday life their activities seem to centre round poltergeist-type hauntings and acting as possessing spirits. Hair-cutting is typical of the sort of viciously mischievous pranks attributed to them.

In 1221, when the Daoist alchemist Chang Chun was travelling west to visit Chingiz Khan, his party met a retainer of the mongol prince Chinkai, who told them that at some previous time a spirit had cut off his back hair in the Altai mountains, to his great alarm. Whether this was a fox or some other mountain spirit is not made clear 4.

Supernatural foxes (kitsune) are also known in Japan, where the hair-cutting tradition is similarly attached to them. The Kiyu Shoran (date and author unstated), a book of strange happenings, records that a fox named Benkuro once lived in Yamato province. This fox was in the habit of cutting women’s hair and breaking earthenware pans 5.

The folklorist Kiyoshi Nozaki also refers to a hair-cutting panic in Edo (Tokyo) “during the life of the artist Utamaro” (1753-1806). This outbreak was also attributed to fox spirits, who were thought to cut women’s hair as a pledge when assuming the forms of beautiful ladies 6.

Returning to China and more recent cases, we find the explanation shifting away from fox spirits. It should be remembered that the rulers of the Qing dynasty (the last Imperial dynasty in China, AD 1644-1911) were foreigners, Manchu, who conquered China from the north. They decreed that all the men in China wear their hair braided into a queue or pigtail; it was a token of subservience to the Manchu, and to cut it off was viewed as an open sign of rebellion. To lose one’s hair therefore put a man in a very awkward position; on the one hand, this might provide an explanation for the beginning of the scares (a wild story made up as an excuse by someone with short hair); on the other, it also explains why the panics were taken so seriously when they were in full flow. When rumours spread that supernatural agencies were cutting off the queues of men while they slept – or worse yet, in public places in broad daylight – the result was widespread and all-consuming panic. And, unlikely as it may seem now, these panics occurred repeatedly throughout the dynasty.

In the autumn of 1768, one such panic – beginning in the eastern provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and spreading in the south as far as Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, Guangxi and Guangdong provinces, and in the north as far as Jilin – was considered so important as to be the subject of a number of Imperial edicts. These edicts also make reference to an earlier, undated, case in Zun-hua, in Hebei province, where a number of heretic sects were found and punished as being responsible for the hair-cutting. Indeed the government seems to have regarded both the Zun-hua and 1768 panics as being entirely the work of rebellious sects, eager to stir up fear and promote a revolution. However, yet another explanation surfaces when the edict also records that, in Jiangsu, two Buddhist priests were arrested for distributing charms said to counteract the evil and charged with trying to profit from selling protection against their own rumours 7.
In August and September of 1821, rumours of tail-cutting were rife in Shandong province, only this time they were also said to cut the sex organs from young boys and girls. Again, “heretical villains” were blamed, along with the sellers of charms and medicines who were believed to be thriving in the atmosphere of fear 8.

Another edict, dated 12 September 1844, records an outbreak of tail-cutting in the city of Taiyuan, in Shanxi province, and that the culprits were said to “vanish like spectres”. De Groot points out that in most of these panics, it’s likely that the “heretical sects” were not thought of as physically cutting hair themselves, but of commanding spectres to do so for them 9. For this, sorcery could be added to their crimes, as well as sedition.

De Groot goes on to describe the 1876 outbreak, as it happened in Xiamen (Amoy), in Fujian province. There are tales of respectable gentlemen having lost their queues in broad daylight, usually in busy streets, or at the theatre, in bazaars and shops, and even in their own homes with the door securely barred. Opinion was divided as to whether the miscreants were men or spectres. Tumults arose and a number of alleged heretics, outlaws or outsiders, even harmless strangers, were arrested on the slightest grounds for suspicion. Some people were said to have seen the phantom clippers and fantastic descriptions of them – usually that they were tiny and made of paper – circulated rapidly among credulous and anxious communities. 10

Paper men are again mentioned as being responsible for the hair-clipping, and Giles mentions that Daoist priests were generally credited with the power of cutting out human, animal or other figures from paper, imbuing them immediately with vitality, and using them for either good or evil purposes 11 ... all of which seems a bit unfair to Daoists, as everyone was getting the blame for the panic: Buddhists, Daoists, non-denominational sorcerers, and especially Christians.

Which brings us to the Rev. Henry Du Bose, 14 years resident at Suzhou, whose wonderfully preposterous book 12 not only completely fails to understand Chinese religion but is written in the splendid “foaming maniac” style so beloved of Protestant missionaries at the time. Leaving aside such priceless allegations as that Buddhism and Roman Catholicism are identical forms of idolatry, or that all Chinese gods are made of mud, he was actually present for an outbreak of the tail-cutting mania.

Du Bose dates this “widespread delusion” to the summer of 1877 13 and claims that it travelled down the Grand Canal – running roughly from Shanghai to Peking (modern Beijing), though in which direction the story travelled isn’t stated – and that persons were allegedly being deprived of their pigtails by flying paper-men. The peasants left their houses and slept in the fields or under trees, 50 or 100 in a group. Gongs were imported and beaten, all night and every night, in every hamlet, while processing with lanterns, torches and raised voices, from village to village.14

It was said that paper-men could enter a house through cracks in the roof, expand to the size of a cow, and crush the sleeping inhabitants. In Suzhou men kept to the streets all night long, afraid to enter their homes. Heat, fright, excitement, demoralisation and wild rumours made the city like a boiling cauldron, and eventually three Catholics (probably innocent Chinese fishermen) were accused of sending the paper-men, and duly beheaded.

One night, we’re informed, a rumour went round that two foreigners were on the roof of a temple, despatching paper-men. As he says he was absent from town at the time, we’re not sure how much credence should be given to Du Bose’s statement that the two were identified as himself and his friend. Anyway, “tens of thousands” assembled below, beating gongs and yelling, in an attempt to drive away the two who were about to slay all in the city. Two companies of soldiers were marched a mile and a half into town to fire blank cartridges. Again, Du Bose fails to understand that the noise is the important thing, not the bullets, and attributes the use of blanks to fear that the “foreign devils” would unleash a massive shower of paper-men if physically attacked. After two hours, he says, the “foreigners” were discovered to be the shadows of trees, thrown on the roof by the moonlight.

In his concluding remarks, Du Bose changes the location of the panic to central China, and mentions the sale by Daoist priests of “genii powder” in small packets, to be tied into the queue as a charm to frighten away the paper-men. Even the ‘Daoist Pope’ 15 was moved to publish a charm to deal with the problem, translated as follows: “Ye who urge filthy devils to spy out the people! The Master’s spirits are at hand and will soon discover you. With this charm anyone may travel by sunlight, moonlight, or starlight all over the earth.”

I later found two other sources on the 1876 panic, which, according to Giles, “convulsed whole provinces”. 16 The first thing of note is that the great panic of 1876 was both more widespread and longer-lasting than I previously thought, lasting until 1879. Where previous accounts dealt with the panic in cities on the east coast of China, these new ones witness the phenomenon in Peking, in the north.

While neither of our new sources refer to the sorcery of “paper men”, Joseph Edkins 17 refers instead to the “tail-cutting fairy” or to “the assaults of witchcraft”. Once again, the protective agency against assault is a written charm that is curled up in the queue, and the purveyors of these charms are said to be Daoist priests. Edkins – who states that the ‘delusion’ died out in 1879 – reports that, while he was in Peking, he heard of a writer of charms who hired men to go along the streets shouting to people that they should place charms in their hair and detailing cases of men losing their hair in the night, or while they were asleep during the day. As a result, everyone was talking about the panic on the streets and it was thought that “there must be something in it”. The charm-writers did a roaring trade, of course.

From a reference in de Groot, I located a book by Chester Holcome 18. He was “for many years Interpreter, Secretary of Legation, and Acting Minister of the United States at Peking” and was present during the Peking panics of the 1870s. His work contains some interesting additional details, not the least of which is that it was customary to cut off the queues of criminals; the loss of the hair would thus make the unfortunate concerned a ‘marked man’ in more ways than one.

Holcombe asserts that such hair-cutting panics occurred almost every year in various parts of the empire, and offers numerous “absurd” stories: that someone was walking down the street when his queue dropped off and vanished without anyone being near him; that another man put his hand up to his queue and found that he didn’t have it anymore; that one man got into conversation with a stranger, who vanished suddenly, taking the man’s queue with him.

Significantly, Holcombe points out that the hair-cutting panics were often associated with anti-foreigner sentiments. This was a period when resentment at foreign exploitation of China was running high, leading up to the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. Holcombe states that in some cases the panics were whipped up by educated Chinese to gratify their hatred of foreigners, and that pains were then taken to direct suspicion towards non-Chinese as the culprits; and that some unoffending foreigners were actually placed in peril of their lives by the reports. This, of course, does not explain the earlier hair-cutting panics when resentment of foreigners was less pronounced, but does provide some interesting contextual background for the 1870s panics.
For example, Holcombe tells of a man who glanced at a child, and when the child returned a steady gaze, the man’s queue faded from sight, leaving only an odour of burnt hair. It transpires that it was a foreign child involved; only a minor detail, but important in the circumstances.

Holcombe had seen at least a dozen proclamations on the subject from the magistrates of Peking. They declared that these were days of danger, when everyone should stay at home and mind their own affairs. Strangers were to be avoided, doors and windows carefully closed at all hours, people were not to go out after dark, and should look after their children. Several proclamations also contained remedies. One, issued by the mayor of Peking in January 1877, “directed that a sort of monogram, composed of three Chinese characters intertwined in a certain manner, should be written in black ink upon three squares of a fixed size of a peculiar yellow paper. One of these squares must be burned, the ashes carefully saved and swallowed in a cup of tea; the second must be worn braided into the strands of the queue; and the third must be pasted upon the outside of the doorframe, exactly over the centre of the door.” The title of the prescription was “The Universal and Infallible Queue Protector”.

Holcombe also seems to have been involved in an actual tail-cutting incident in 1877. He was woken early one morning by an American missionary, who reported that a Chinese man, sleeping in his chapel the previous night, had had his queue cut off. Knowing that if word got out the chapel would be destroyed within the hour by a howling mob, the missionary locked up the Chinese and hastened to the American legation for advice. Holcombe immediately sent a note to the military governor of Peking, intending to request troops to guard the chapel.

The victim was a country boy who had come to Peking to study Christianity. Holcombe’s first reaction seems to have been that the man might have been an agent provocateur, sent to the chapel and pretending Christianity, who had then cut off his own queue in the hope of raising a disturbance against the foreigners. But the man told a straight and consistent story, and the suspicion was abandoned.

The victim had gone to bed at nine o’clock, and the other two men had followed shortly thereafter. At two in the morning, he had woken and found his queue gone. He woke his companions, who lit a candle, and the three sat trembling until nearly dawn, when the missionary was called. He went outside and found the queue lying in the snow in the yard. The other two men were known and trusted; the doors and windows had been fastened; and a high wall surrounded the yard. Eventually, it was realised that another young Chinese, pseudonymously called ‘Ah Hsin’, had been in the room at the time the victim went to sleep. Ah Hsin had been sewing some paper into a book and had had shears with him.

Ah Hsin was questioned at length, and strenuously denied the charge, even when Holcombe declared that he would turn him over to the Chinese authorities. Only when Holcombe had actually sent his card to the police station did Ah Hsin confess. He had cut the queue to frighten the victim, because he was “such a very green countryman”. Holcombe then recalled his message to the police and withdrew his request to see the military governor; Ah Hsin was sent out of the city within the hour, and the victim was sent home with presents.

A week later, Holcombe was visited by Prince Kung, the Prince Regent of the empire, who wanted to know, amongst other things, why Holcombe had contacted the military governor. On hearing the explanation, Kung declared that Ah Hsin knew very well what he was doing, and that he had forfeited his life. But Holcombe knew neither Ah Hsin’s family name nor place of residence, and so was unable to give a lead… otherwise the youth would certainly have been executed.

Since the 1911 revolution, most Chinese have worn their hair short, which is no doubt one reason why we don’t hear too many tail-cutting stories these days. But what can we make of these reports? Undoubtedly our records of these events are biased, coming as they do mostly from western missionaries and politicians who mention them only as examples of the “extraordinary superstition” of the Chinese, but the phenomenon provides some interesting material for the study of panic reactions to unexplained events.

The only underlying theme that I can see is one of emasculation; from the fox-enchantress who emasculates her partner with prolonged debauchery, to the symbolic emasculation of cutting off a braid of hair, to the rumours of organ-cutters. This doesn’t work with the Japanese cases, of course, which feature female victims.

It would be idle to speculate that, as the majority of the panics occurred in the late 19th century, when colonial interference by the western powers was weakening China, the ‘emasculation’ of the country was being reflected in the prevailing fortean phenomena, but who knows? Celestial hints, perhaps? 19