The Revolt of the Short Hair was a part of the modernization movement that was advocated by a group of Vietnamese Confucian scholars. In 1907 they founded a private school called the Dong Kinh Nghia Thuc (Tonkin Free School) on the model of the Japanese Keio Gijuku Daigaku. This school aimed at fostering the study of Western sciences, because its founders felt that the French-established educational system neglected such studies in favor of the humanities. Surprisingly enough, for those Confucian scholars, modernization meant first Westernization and then rejection of Confucianism and, by extension, of anything Chinese. They wanted to emulate France in order to fight against French colonialism. Students attending the Dong Kinh Nghia Thuc were urged to wear their hair short so that they could look like Frenchmen, and to cut off their long hair, because it had been the Chinese invaders who forced Vietnamese men to wear their hair long and tied in a bun. Thus, the proponents of the movement aimed at severing Vietnam from any cultural values, including Confucian ones, that the Chinese had inculcated in the Vietnamese.
It was indeed a revolutionary suggestion. For the traditional Vietnamese, hair has the same significance as the head, and the head corresponds to a symbolic altar where the ancestors are worshiped. To cut one's hair is, therefore, a sacrilegious act, equivalent to a repudiation of everything worth living for. Some early opponents of the French invasion went as far as asking: What is the meaning of life when you have to share their wine and nibble their bread? What is the meaning of life when you must cut your hair and shave your beard? Yet the movement that promoted the cutting of hair was a successful one, and in the large body of literature created by the Dong Kinh Nghia Thuc, a dozen short and easy-to-memorize popular songs are found. However, the cutting off of hair may not have represented such a trauma after all, because the Vietnamese must have been quite familiar with Buddhist monks and nuns who had to shave off their hair before entering the monastery. However, the Dong Kinh Nghia Thuc was short lived: the French colonial authorities closed down all their schools less than a year after their establishment. The Revolt of the Short Hair, however, survived, and, in the late 1920s, those from both town and city were amused whenever they encountered a man who wore his hair in a chignon at the back of his head.
Further Reading
Jamieson, Neil L. (1995) Understanding Vietnam. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Truong Buu Lam, ed. (2000) Colonialism Experienced: Vietnamese Anti-Colonial Writings: 1900–1931. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
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