“It's Strange, Women Overseas Have Whiskers”: Observations of Women's Facial Hair in Late-Qing Foreign Travelogues and Cross-Cultural Imaginations

In travelogues of the late Qing Dynasty, there was an "observation" made about Western women; namely, that Western women were born with facial hair. The reason why this record is worth attention is that the narrator "saw it with his own eyes," and this description is not an isolated example, which can be found in many documents, such as Zhang Zuyi's "London Zhuzhi Ci," Wang Yixuan's "Fa Jing Ji Shi," Zhang Deyi's "San Shu Qi," Yuan Zuzhi's "Ying Hai Cai Wen Ji Shi," and others. There are records of female facial hair in Western literature, which are mostly described as mysterious, abnormal, and curious. In Chinese historical records, there are many records about women's facial hair, either to describe the appearance of barbarians, to indicate the omens of disasters, to show the results of retribution, or to show the image of auspiciousness. In short, the records of female facial hair in Chinese and Western literature can be classified as "heterogeneous" culturally. Although the observation of Western women's facial hair is the narrator's personal view, the result of observation is determined by the observer's cultural position, which contains many imaginative elements. A misunderstanding described by Chaster Holcombe in The Real Chinaman is enough to prove that this kind of "on-the-spot observation" of different cultures is also fundamentally influenced by cross-cultural "imagination." The result of cultural observation is not changed by the distance of observation. The image of different cultures is essentially a kind of "social collective imagination."