

There might be a discussion about this on the talk page. This paragraph may be confusing or unclear to readers. In his veto, the mayor stated that "this order, though general in its terms, in substance and effect, is a special and degrading punishment inflicted upon the Chinese residents for slight offenses and solely by reason of their alienage and race."

Veto and passage Īfter approval by the Board of Supervisors, the order was immediately vetoed by San Francisco mayor William Alvord. Anti-Chinese sentiment also was a driving factor, hoping that the enforcement of the Pigtail Ordinance would keep potential Chinese immigrants from coming to the United States. In light of this, the idea behind the institution of the Pigtail Ordinance was that Chinese immigrants would be less likely to ignore the city's sanitary ordinance. As the majority of these men planned to return to China, they needed to keep their queues lest they be marked as revolutionaries. Over 90% of immigrants were male and had come to the United States to earn money to send to their families. By 1880, the Chinese population of the United States was over 100,000 and located primarily in California. The late 19th century saw a significant increase in Chinese immigration to the United States. The traditional style of queue with shaved head became a sign of loyalty to the Qing. During the Taiping Rebellion, the Taiping protested against the Qing by retaining their queues but not shaving the rest of their heads. It was only later that Westernized revolutionaries, influenced by European hairstyles, began to advocate against the queue. One person was executed for refusing to shave, even though he had willingly braided the back of his hair. Han rebels who objected to the Qing hairstyle wore the braid but defied orders to shave the front of the head.

This caused the Qing government to focus on forcing people to shave their forehead rather than wear the braid. However, they fiercely objected to shaving the forehead. Han Chinese did not object to wearing the queue braid on the back of the head, as they traditionally wore their hair long. Since the beginning of the Qing dynasty in 1644, Han men in China had been required to adopt Manchu men's hairstyle by wearing the queue and shaving the forehead as a symbol of accepting the Qing dynasty. Many equal rights advocates, however, claimed the Supervisors' true intent was to stem the tide of willing Chinese convicts. Ostensibly to prevent outbreaks of lice and fleas, the Supervisors began requiring that all prisoners' heads be shaved.
#Queue pigtail free
When in violation of the Sanitary Ordinance, one could either pay a fine or serve a week or more in jail for thousands of impoverished Chinese immigrants, free room and board was a welcome punishment. The Pigtail Ordinance was proposed as a solution to the overcrowding of jails due to the 1870 Sanitary Ordinance, which was originally meant to prevent unsafe tenement conditions in San Francisco. An identical version of the law was enacted by the California State Legislature in 1876 and was subsequently struck down as unconstitutional in 1879. The proposal passed by a narrow margin through the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1873 but was vetoed by the mayor.

It affected Qing Chinese prisoners in particular, as it meant they would have their queue, a waist-long, braided pigtail, cut off. The Pigtail Ordinance was an 1873 law intended to force prisoners in San Francisco, California to have their hair cut within an inch of the scalp. Chinese American man with queue in San Francisco's Chinatown
