Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 February 1911 — Chicago Chinese to Amputate Queues [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Chicago Chinese to Amputate Queues

CHICAGO. —Frank Moy, the mayor of Chicago’s Chinatown, has passed along & recently issued imperial decree that all celestials are to part with their queues. After wear* tog a braid for about. 250 years John Chinaman has come to the conclusion ■that it is a nuisance and a—it would hardly do to say “a relic of a barbarous age.” China has awakened to the fact that its advancement has been retarded by the way it wears its hair, -and the whole empire is going to have h haircut The matter has been agitated for some time by leading Chinese, among them Wu Ting-Fang, former minister to the United States. A cablegram received from Wu* who is in the government service in China, announces the date of disposing of superfluous appendages, which date in the Chinese calendar corre-, jsponds with the 14th of February in [the Gregorian calender, the Chinese new year falling on January 30. * “It is a good, sensible idea,” said S*oy. "I had my queue cut off several years ago and I don’t know that

I ever felt toe loss of it. It is no good, anyway, and it makes lota of work for the wearer. It has got to be braided gxary day and washed once or twice a Week and that’s no small job.” “Do you know that the Chinese did not always wear a queue? This fashion of wearing the hair was introduced by toe Manchoo dynasty about 250 years ago. The Manchoorians. or Mongolians, as they are called, had more hair than they knew whqt to do with. In some way they seized the reins of government and the first thing, they did was to issue an Imperial order that every Chinaman must wear a queue. Before that the Chinese wore their hair like - the Japanese and Koreans. If a Chinaman refused to wear a queue his head was chopped off. He was compelled to adopt the USanchoorian style of wearing the hair. “It is a common belief among Americans that the reason a Chinaman doesn’t cut off his queue is that he thinks he cannot enter heavefl without it. That’s only a story. Chinamen, tbe-world over, will welcome the decree to cut off their queues, to Chicago there Is a Chinese population of about 2,000, of which onefourth have no queues. The other toree-fourths, with few exceptions, will climb in the barber chair on February 14 and say, ‘Give me a haircut’ ”