A Chinese hairpin is a pin pushed through a knot of hair to hold it in place. The oldest word for it is ji (笄), a plain pin. Two later forms grew out of it. The zan (簪) has a single prong, and the chai (钗) has two. In the Han dynasty, men and women both wore hairpins.
The buyao: a hairpin that sways
Buyao (步摇) means "step sway." The Shiming, a dictionary from the end of the Han dynasty, defines it in one line: the top has hanging beads, and when you step, they sway. The Victoria and Albert Museum notes that trembling ornaments were in fashion among court ladies in the 5th and 6th centuries, with flowers, insects or birds set on coiled wire springs.
The hairpin ceremony at fifteen
A girl came of age in the ji li (笄礼), the hairpin ceremony. The Book of Rites gives the age: "At fifteen, she assumed the hair-pin; at twenty, she was married," in James Legge's translation. The Yili, another ritual classic, says a girl promised in marriage received the pin and a courtesy name.
A married woman, often a relative, combed the girl's hair into a bun and fastened it with the pin. China Culture says that at first only noble families held the rite. Boys had their own capping ceremony at twenty.
A hairpin broken in two
A two-pronged chai can be split in half. In Bai Juyi's "Song of Everlasting Sorrow," written in 806, the spirit of Lady Yang breaks a gold hairpin and an inlaid box. She keeps half of each and sends the other halves to the grieving emperor, trusting they will meet again in heaven or on earth. The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney notes that hairpins also served as love tokens and had a part in marriage rituals.
Bone, jade, gold and kingfisher blue
The earliest Chinese hairpins were carved from bone. The Henan Museum notes that bone hairpins turn up often at Neolithic sites, and the Met holds a Shang dynasty bone hairpin from the 13th to 11th century BCE. Later came bronze, silver, gold and wood, and jade hairpins too, such as a 19th-century one at the Met.
Museums hold many Qing dynasty (1644 to 1911) hairpins inlaid with kingfisher feathers, a craft called tian-tsui or diancui (点翠), "dotting with kingfishers." The Palace Museum in Beijing describes the method. Fine wire outlines a gold or silver frame, and the blue feathers are glued into the spaces. The color does not fade.
Hairpins in the Hanfu revival
The Hanfu movement revives the dress Han Chinese wore before the Qing dynasty. CNN traces it to online forums in the early 2000s. University Hanfu clubs now stage coming-of-age ceremonies, and makers showed handmade hairpins at the fair of the 2024 Taiwan Hanfu Festival.
Chinese hairpins at Buddha.store
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