How a Common Hat Became China’s Byword for Holding Office

In Chinese, to win a government post is still described as “putting on the black gauze cap,” and to be fired is “having the black gauze cap taken off.” An official worried about his career is said to be trying to “hold on to his black gauze cap.” The image is so common in period dramas and everyday speech that it seems to reach back to the very origins of Chinese officialdom. In fact the black gauze cap, or wushamao, began as ordinary headwear that anyone could put on, and it became the badge of office only after centuries of slow change in how Chinese rulers dressed their bureaucrats.

Before the ‘hat,’ there was the ceremonial cap

The very word for “hat,” mao, is not ancient. In the pre-Qin era, before the third century BC, Chinese texts referred to headwear by other names: guan, bian, ze, or the general term touyi, meaning “head clothing.” The most important of these was the guan, a formal cap placed on a young man’s head at his coming-of-age ceremony to mark his passage into adulthood and social standing. The classical ritual manual known as the Yili called this first set of adult garments the yuanfu, the clothing formally worn once a man had come of age. The everyday word mao spread only later, after the Han and Wei periods, from roughly the third century AD onward.

An Eastern Jin fashion anyone could wear

The black gauze cap can be traced to the Eastern Jin dynasty in the fourth century AD, when attendants and officials at the imperial court began wearing caps made of black silk gauze. That material gave the cap its name: wu means black, and sha means fine silk gauze. Historical records place such caps at the court of Emperor Cheng of Jin, and new versions appeared later under the Liu Song dynasty in the south.

At this stage the cap carried no rank or authority. It was a common piece of casual headwear. Officials wore it, but so did scholars and ordinary people, and it signaled nothing about a man’s position.

The Sui dynasty writes the cap into the rulebook

Under the Sui dynasty, which reunified China in the late sixth century, the black gauze cap entered the official dress code for the first time. The Tang-era institutional history known as the Tongdian records that in the early years of the Kaihuang reign, the founding Sui emperor, Emperor Wen, allowed everyone from senior court ministers down to junior clerks to wear the black gauze cap to court. The cap had become a recognized part of official dress rather than simple street wear.

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Rank, however, was still marked by the whole outfit, including the color of the robe, the belt, and its ornaments, rather than by the cap alone. A popular saying later held that a first-rank official’s cap bore nine pieces of jade, a second-rank official’s eight, and so on down the scale, but this belongs to folk tradition, and official standing was never settled by counting jade on a hat.

Under the Tang, the cap stayed common across ranks

The Tang dynasty, which followed the Sui in the seventh century, kept the same system, and the black gauze cap remained standard dress for civil and military officials, growing steadily more associated with the official’s public image. Even so, it was not yet the exclusive mark of office. People of different ranks and stations still wore black gauze caps in various forms, and no strict, fixed link had been drawn between the cap and a specific tier of the bureaucracy.

Song officials and the cap with long wings

Under the Song dynasty, from the tenth century onward, the shape of the official cap changed sharply. Its most distinctive feature was a pair of long flat wings extending outward from either side, which later generations called the “spread-wing futou,” futou being the term for this style of soft headdress.

One story about those wings has been told for centuries. It holds that the founding Song emperor, Zhao Kuangyin, ordered the wings lengthened to stop his ministers from leaning together and whispering during audiences: with such wide caps, officials could not stand close, and any turn of the head to murmur to a neighbor would be caught by the emperor at once. The tale appears constantly in popular histories, films, and television.

The official Song histories, including the Songshi, record no such order. Most researchers therefore treat the long wings as a product of ritual convention, changing tastes, and the ordinary development of court dress, rather than a surveillance device aimed at chattering ministers. The whispering emperor makes a good story, and little more.

The Ming dynasty makes the cap mean ‘official’

The black gauze cap became a true symbol of office under the Ming dynasty. After founding the Ming in 1368, its first emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, laid down a completely new dress code for officials. The Ming dynastic history, in its treatise on carriages and clothing, records the rule: in the third year of the Hongwu reign, in 1370, it was fixed that for routine court business, officials would wear the black gauze cap, a round-collared gown, and a fitted belt as their formal service dress.

From then on the cap was a required part of every official’s court dress. Ming law barred commoners from wearing official garments, so the black gauze cap became firmly and permanently tied to official status. “Wearing the black gauze cap” grew into a standard way of saying a man held office, and “losing the black gauze cap” meant he had been stripped of his post. Both expressions survive in Chinese today.

The Qing retires the cap but keeps the phrase

When the Qing dynasty took power in 1644, it overhauled official dress entirely. Officials switched to Manchu-style hats, and rank was now shown through a new system of colored beads and peacock feathers mounted on the hat. The Ming black gauze cap left the stage. During the early transition between dynasties, some regions kept the old Ming garments for a time, but as Qing rule settled, the new dress code replaced the Ming cap completely.

The cap was gone from officials’ heads, yet the words for it were not. Because the black gauze cap had stood for official rank throughout the Ming, the term stayed alive in Chinese as a symbol of office, career, and power.