The tools used by self-dressing women to coil their hair into a bun

In Zhaoqing City of South China's Guangdong Province, the smell of opening-up and reform can be felt here and there with the newly built western-style buildings, fashionable girls, and shuttling cars. However, it is right in the middle of such an open city where there lives a group of eleven self-dressing women, whose lifetime creed is "to comb our hair, cook our meals, share our happiness and sorrow, and live our lives all by ourselves."

  The Self-dressing Women's Simple Life

The eleven old women, aged between 63 and 93, live in houses located along Tajiao Lane of Zhaoqing City. Even as young girls, they wore their hair in a bun on their own and pledged never to marry during their lifetime. With a pure heart and few worldly desires, they have lived calm and independent lives for decades in spite of the fast-changing society.

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  Straw-mat Weaving: the only means of making a living

At the end of Tajiao Lane lives the 87-year-old Sister Liu, who is still in good shape and is a good talker. From the photo hanging on the wall, you can tell she was a pretty girl when she was young.

She said she used to have eight sisters. Due to poverty, when she was young, her father sent her to his paternal aunt. As a young girl, she witnessed the miserable lives of her sisters after marriage: Her eldest sister, married a rich man as his concubine at 15, and committed suicide not long afterwards; the second one became a widow at a young age after she married a farmer, who died from disease soon after. Then, at 18, Liu persuaded her grand aunt to comb her hair into a bun, and became a self-dressing woman.

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  The Self-dressing Women and the Armed Policemen

Before these women became self-dressing women, nearly all of them had suffered from the old feudal concept that men are superior to women and from the misery brought on by the wars between warlords. Therefore, these women's prejudice against social conventions and their resentment against the society are both imaginable and understandable. For a long time, they have avoided meeting males like evading a plague. However, when speaking of the armed policemen stationed nearby, they got extremely excited and claimed those policemen are the most intimate people to them, and then began to tell the story between them.

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  About the Origin of Self-dressing Women

The "self-dressing woman" phenomenon appeared in late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), and has only existed around the Pearl River Delta region.

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A special phenomenon in Guangdong Province, self-dressing women can still be found in Sanshui and Qingyuan counties of Guangdong, but not in groups like those in Zhaoqin City, which can be hailed as "the last group of self-dressing women in Chinese history."

Author: Jessie

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