IT was the strangest sight the Carrington barber had ever witnessed.
The barber, Tom Clarke, later described it as "the day the pigtails came off".
Remembering the event decades after, in 1949, he said his Cowper Street shop was suddenly flooded with visiting Chinese sailors wanting a special type of haircut.
They all demanded that their traditional pigtails be removed. The puzzled barber said there were dozens of Chinese customers all with the same, odd request.
"They kept me going from 6am to midnight," Clarke told a Herald reporter in 1949, recalling the episode that probably happened "about 35 or 40 years ago".
"I forget why they wanted them cut," Clarke said of the removal of special braided hair hanging down the back of their heads.
"I think it was something to do with China becoming a republic. Anyhow, this Chinese ship came in and they all came to me to have their plaits cut," Clarke said.
"When I took the first one off, I was going to throw it in the rubbish bin, but the fellow stopped me. He told me to wrap it up for him.
Oddly enough, there are two forgotten Hunter links to the plunder of Beijing by 20,000 Allied troops in 1901.
"He said people wouldn't think he was Chinese when he got home, unless he had the pigtail with him to prove it," Clarke said.
"How they used to grow those things I don't know. Some of them were so long, they could sit on them. They used to have them done up on the top of their heads with pins, like a bun.
"Kids going to school used to chase them until the pins came out and when the plaits fell down, the kids used to pull them. The Chinese have beautiful black hair. They're very particular today (in 1949), very fussy about the trimming."
The Carrington barber's good memory of the mass haircut probably places the incident about 37 years before, or in 1912.
For January 1, 1912, was when thousands of years of feudal rule ended with China becoming a republic.
The new nation's founding father, Sun Yat-sen, became China's provisional president, but was soon assassinated, followed by power struggles, warlord rule, a civil war, and finally the communist takeover with Mao Zedong in 1949.
Or perhaps our Carrington barber had witnessed the first stirrings of Chinese peasants with the death only a few years earlier, in 1908, of the Grand Empress Dowager Cixi or Tzu-hsi, and the end of the Qing Dynasty.
Cixi was one of history's most remarkable women. She rose from a lowly birth to become a beautiful teenage concubine, and later the supreme leader of China for effectively almost 50 years.
She had caught the eye of the Chinese emperor, then became pregnant with his only son and heir, and the rest is history, sort of.
Today we are witnessing the rise of Communist China with its growing Pacific ambitions and claims on Taiwan.
Once poverty-stricken China has emerged from the Cold War era to become a global superpower through strategic commercial partnerships, especially with America.
So, during Chinese Lunar New Year and the Beijing Winter Olympics, let's reflect on the dying years of China's past imperial grandeur to spotlight the country that gave the world wonders like the Great Wall, Xi'an's Entombed Warriors and the Forbidden City.
The 1912 revolution overthrew 2000 years of imperial rule in China, but disquiet had always been building.
Until her death, the Empress Dowager Cixi (1834-1908) had been the most powerful person in China and a contemporary of Britain's Queen Victoria. But there was internal resentment and unrest, following the Opium Wars in which Britain squeezed concessions from China.
Then there was the bloody 14-year Taiping Rebellion against the Qing dynasty (with at least 20 million dead), and then the British army's burning of the Old Summer Palace in 1860.
Cixi sought to modernise a weakened China with some reforms, including banning female foot-binding, but was criticised (possibly unfairly) for diverting funds from the Chinese navy to build a new summer palace, leading to a humiliating naval defeat against Japan.
The conservative Empress Cixi (in old age being called Old Buddha) was vain, autocratic and dominating, even ruthless, earning the nickname "the dragon lady".
Some modern historians, however, now believe propaganda was also at work discrediting her as a devious despot, finding accusations such as her being immoral could not be verified.
She may have always been insecure, haunted by the knowledge of her humble origin, but above all, she was a cunning political survivor involved in two coups.
Then came the violent Boxer Rebellion in 1899. These secret society rebels began killing foreigners, including missionaries, diplomats and Chinese Christians.
Seizing the opportunity, Empress Cixi supported the Boxers sensing the public mood that foreigners were becoming too powerful and the nation needed defending.
Foreigners in Beijing (then Peking) came under violent attack, leading to a 55-day siege of their embassies.
An eight-nation relief force, including soldiers from Britain, France, Russia, America and Japan, stormed overland to finally end the revolt and occupy Beijing in 1901.
Empress Cixi fled, but later returned, blaming poor judgement for her role and paying compensation.
Cixi even later went on a charm offensive to try to repair foreign relations.
Britain's role in past colonial actions though came under scrutiny in 2013 when then prime minister David Cameron was ambushed in China while on a trade mission.
The Chinese demanded the return of priceless artefacts looted from Beijing in the aftermath of the Boxer uprising, especially the ransacking of the Forbidden City.
In response, the British Museum argued the majority of its 23,000 world-heritage Chinese objects had been peacefully traded or collected.
Earlier, the Chinese were outraged over Cameron meeting the Dalai Lama, whom they described as a dangerous separatist.
Oddly enough, there are two forgotten Hunter links to the plunder of Beijing by 20,000 Allied troops in 1901. The force included a small number of NSW naval brigade members, including some from Newcastle.
They are credited with bringing back some very rare but still "unknown" souvenirs, including a small antique statue of the Goddess of Plenty in a kitbag, a fancy tile allegedly from the bedside of Empress Dowager Cixi and many historic photographs.
Of course, before the West forcefully prised open China in the 19th century Opium Wars, it had been a totally different place, a mighty imperial empire.
A reminder of this came when a Chinese lawyer bought an antique map from a Shanghai bookshop in 2001. If genuine, it indicates that by 1418 China's great sea-going fleets of admiral Zheng He had explored and mapped the whole world, including Australia's east coast, before the country became totally isolationist.
With China's growing assertiveness, our present time has been tipped as becoming "The China Century".
If so, it's been a long time coming.
