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The revolutionary Sun Yat-sen and many of his
associates to lose faith in the Qing dynasty which
was overthrown in the Chinese Revolution in 1911.
He recalled: “I cut off my cue, which had been
growing all my life”.
Some claim that the word barbecue comes from the
French phrase
barbe a queue
meaning from head
to tail, possibly describing the practice of cooking the
whole animal over an open flame. Good manners are
sometimes referred to as your Ps and Qs which might
come from the etiquette of bowing before the King
where one needs to mind that your
pieds
(feet) don’t
get tangled up and your
queues
or wigs don’t fall off.
Hair has long been useful in making a statement. In
the modern era hair styles have helped the rebellious
young signal their opposition to conformity, as for
example in the Teddy Boy quiff or the punk Mohican.
Nothing’s new. The Normans wore their hair short
at the time of William the Conqueror’s invasion of
these islands, which is said to have prompted the
English to grow theirs quite long. In London William
built the Tower of London to protect himself from
these long-haired Londoners who the French called
cockneys meaning weak-kneed and effeminate.
Scarcity of Victual
In 1837
the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle, living in
a house on Chelsea’s Cheyne Row, now looked after
by the National Trust, became the first person to use
the word queue in the English language to describe a
line of people waiting to be served. He was talking
about bread shortages during the French Revolution:
Minding Your Ps and Qs
The word
queue
comes, via French from the Latin
cauda
, meaning tail.
It’s also the source of the Italian
word
coda
which has been adopted into English as a
musical term. A coda is thus literally the “tail end”
of a movement or composition. When we stand in a
queues we are forming a tail. The French word
queue
first appeared in English in 1748 and referred to a
plait of hair hanging down the back of the neck.
By 1802 wearing a queue was a regulation in the
British army, but by the mid-19th century queues
had disappeared along with cocked hats.
The Chinese
queue
is the hairstyle in which the hair
on the front of the head is shaved off above the
temples and the remaining hair is grown long and
plaited into a long ponytail, or queue. The
queue
was a specific hairstyle worn by the Manchus from
central Manchuria. When they overthrew the Ming
Dynasty (our equivalent time in history was Tudor)
to establish the Qing Dynasty they imposed the
Manchu queue on the Chinese in China as a sign of
their submission to Manchu rule. Traditionally adult
Chinese did not cut their hair: Confucius said:
" We are given our body, skin and hair from our
parents; which we ought not to damage.’
Therefore once grown the ponytail was never to be
cut and besides it would signify rebellion and justify
execution for treason.
Thus it was that the removal of
the 'queue' or 'pigtail' became a symbol of the fall of
imperial rule and of the modernization and political
change that followed. From a Chinese point of view
humiliation in the Sino-Japanese War of 1895 caused