China: Manchu women buying flowers for their headdress, Beijing. Photograph by John Thomson, 1869.

Two women buying flower decorations or bows as hair-ornaments from two street-vendors with large boxes of such goods. As an ethnic mark of identity, the headdress played an important part in the life of a Manchu bannerwoman. While still a girl, she would wear a single pigtail hanging behind, with the front hair cut into a bang. After marriage, however, she must arrange the hair on the top of the head and put a fan-shaped hair coronet on the arrangement. This hairstyle is called 'Qitou' (which means hair for the Manchu nobility) or 'Jingtou' (which means hair of the capital). Many women also liked to wear flower-press hair ornaments made of gold, silver or emerald