As we all know, 1644 was a year of many disasters in Chinese history. This year was the year of Jiashen in the lunar calendar, when the Dashun army led by Li Zicheng attacked the city of Beijing, and the Chongzhen Emperor was martyred and died. Subsequently, the Qing army defeated the Dashun army in the Battle of a Stone Outside Guanwai and entered the capital. Began the Qing Dynasty's nearly 300-year rule in China.
As a minority regime, the Manchu Qing Dynasty adopted a strict shaving system during its rule over the Central Plains. How was this decree implemented? And how many waves have been caused among the Han chinese?
As we all know, in Chinese history, The Han people often pay attention to "the skin of the body and the parents". This is the beginning of the filial piety listed in the Filial Piety Sutra. Long before the Manchu Qing entered the customs, the Han generals and people who had surrendered to the Qing Dynasty at that time had been ordered by the rulers of the Later Jin Dynasty to shave their hair and change their clothes. At that time, Huang Taiji once stipulated that as long as it was a person who surrendered, he was not allowed to wear other countries' costumes, and it was not allowed to tie his hair and feet. It was at this stage that the famous Ming Dynasty generals Hong Chengzuo and Zu Dashou kept the braids of the rat's tail of money.
On the first day after the Qing Dynasty entered Shanhaiguan, it had ordered the soldiers and civilians in the city to shave their hair and change their clothes. On the way from Shanhaiguan to Beijing, the regent Dorgon issued several shaving orders. At the beginning of the Qing army's entry into the customs, it was under the banner of avenging the Ming Dynasty, but in fact, it still won the hearts of many Han people. Many places surrendered to the Qing Dynasty because of their hatred of the peasant rebels.
As the Qing Dynasty occupied more and more land, the shaving order spread more and more. And the Han people also began to become angry from the joy of the Qing Dynasty avenging the Chongzhen Emperor. In this process, many places that had originally surrendered to the Qing Dynasty changed their minds because they were forced to shave their hair, so that the situation that was about to stabilize the whole country was soon in turmoil again.
The strictest shaving order came in June 1644, when the regent Dorgon ordered that shaving be completed within 10 days after receiving the official document of the shaving order nationwide, and if those who refused to shave their hair, they would not be spared. After the strictest shaving order was issued, the places under the Qing Dynasty were full of Qing soldiers and shavers carrying burdens, and when they saw people with buns, they forcibly grabbed the shaved hair and killed them on the spot if they resisted.
At that time, Confucius's sixty-second generation grandson Kong Wenchen was serving as an official in Shaanxi, and once wrote to the Qing court, saying that the crown of the Confucius family had been passed down for more than two thousand years and hoped to continue to maintain it. After seeing this letter, Dorgon replied that Kong Wenchen had already committed a capital crime by asking for hair growth, but for the sake of being a descendant of Kong Sheng, he was spared death and punished by dismissal. In the process of unifying the whole country, the Qing army left behind the notoriety of Jiading Three Massacres and Yangzhou Ten Days. The Three Massacres of Jiading and the Ten Days of Yangzhou were all because of the order to shave their hair, which provoked the rebellion of the people in the south.
In fact, large-scale shaving operations were not carried out on all the residents of the Qing Dynasty. For example, the Mongols and Uighurs are exempt from shaving their hair, while the Tibetan people only shave their hair by the army.
In the process of shaving hair, there is also a saying that "ten from ten do not follow". The so-called ten from ten do not follow, the most common of which is that men do not follow women, life does not follow death, yang does not follow yin, and Confucianism does not follow the Tao. This means that for those who surrendered to the Qing Dynasty, men must shave their hair and change clothes, while women can still keep the costumes of the former dynasty; before they die, they must wear the costumes of the Manchus, and they can be buried with the crown of the former dynasty; before they die, they must use the customs of the Manchus, and the funeral after death can use the habits of the Han people; Confucians need to shave their hair and change clothes, while Taoists and monks can retain the dress of the former dynasty.
This is also the reason why hundreds of years later, The Taoist priest looks so different from the people's clothing, because the Taoist clothing still retains the appearance of many traditional Chinese costumes.