Weaving History: China’s ‘Wig Capital’ Fights to Keep Its Crown

The hair service in Xuchang, in China’s main Henan province, has actually been growing considering that the 16th century. Beginning with opera props, the city is now the “Wig Capital of the World.”

Approximately 60% of wigs on the worldwide market originated from Xuchang. According to the regional commerce bureau, the market’s overall import-export worth struck 11.56 billion yuan ($1.72 billion) in the very first half of 2026, up by almost 11% year on year.

The core of this pillar market, Jian’an District, is home to 311 foreign trade business delivering hair items– and organization is flourishing. Life behind the sales figures isn’t so rosy.

Cross-border e-commerce platforms have actually assisted business reach brand-new markets, consisting of North America and Europe, companies here state the commissions they charge are making it hard to turn an earnings.

The market is likewise dealing with a prospective severe labor crisis, with high-than-average incomes stopping working to bring in more skill, specifically more youthful employees.

Long and brief of it

According to regional historic archives, individuals in Xuchang started gathering human hair as early as the Ming dynasty (1368– 1644), utilizing it to make theatrical props and phony beards.

It wasn’t till 1900, when Bai Xihe from the city’s Quandian Village worked together with a German merchant to develop a hair trading depot, that a larger market started to emerge. Quickly, villagers were fanning out across the country to discover products, with the raw products pooled in Jian’an.

By the 1930s, Xuchang had lots of workshops making processed hair, or dangfawhich was delivered through ports in Qingdao in the eastern Shandong province and Wuhan, capital of the main Hubei province, to abroad markets consisting of Japan and the Philippines.

Dangfa is a semi-finished item made from human hair that has actually been cleaned, aligned, arranged, and connected into packages. It’s an essential upstream basic material for wigs.

Lots of rural households opened little home-based operations, forming the embryo of a home market. The males would circumnavigate the country gathering hair, while the ladies stayed at home to sort and knot wigs hair by hair, a vital craft that takes a minimum of 6 months to master.

“A commercial environment does not come together overnight,” states Tian Liangjun, vice president of the Xuchang Hair Products Association, developed in 2004. “Our market has more than a century of built up history. The raw products, the skill, the innovation, the marketplace intelligence are all here– therefore are the supporting devices, devices, printing, and product packaging.”

By the time China started to open its economy in the late 1970s and early ’80s, Xuchang had the raw products and producing capability, however business from South Korea had control of the network channels to abroad markets. They acquired hair and semi-finished items from Xuchang and offered ended up items to charm supply shops in the United States. Chinese business were consigned to agreement processing, with minimal earnings and little market utilize.

“In the past, more than 80% of the U.S. hair-product market was managed by South Korean business. They had us by the throat,” Tian states. “We depended upon them, so when South Korean representatives pertained to Xuchang to check the items, they imitated they were above us. A few of us even needed to bring them bowls of water to clean their hands at the end of their examination.”

Things altered in 1990, when business owner Zheng Youquan established the Xuchang Hair Products General Factory, which saw regional companies advance to producing ended up wigs.

Zheng was born in 1954 in the city’s Xiaogong Village and found out wig-making as a kid before going into the hair processing sell the ’80s.

When he opened his own factory, he dealt with a significant obstacle: the three-head sewing device, a core tool, wasn’t made in China and no foreign makers would offer him one. He got the assistance of a retired factory employee from Qingdao who might draw the maker’s inner operations from memory, which a group of regional engineers then utilized to construct it.

Utilizing this innovation, Zheng’s plant produced Xuchang’s very first wigs for foreign purchasers, branded Qicai Xiufa, suggesting “vibrant hairs.” 3 years later on, he developed Rebecca Hair, a Sino-U.S. joint endeavor with Sina International Corp., and went into the North American market. In 2003, Rebecca ended up being the very first hair-product business noted on the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

Tian thinks Zheng assisted catapult the regional market to a brand-new level, changing the city from a trading center for basic materials into a significant production base for ended up products.

Eliminating the intermediary

The development of cross-border e-commerce in the mid-2010s was another video game changer. International platforms such as AliExpress and Amazon made it possible for Xuchang producers to bypass the intermediary and offer straight with abroad customers, along with develop their own brand names.

UNice, which concentrates on hair items for Black and Latino females, started trading on several platforms in 2014 and established its own sales site about 4 years later on. “We chose to develop our own brand name and signed up hallmarks in China, the European Union, and the United States,” states Wang Qi, who works for the brand name. “With third-party platforms, you require to play by their guidelines, and there are all sorts of unpredictabilities. Structure our own website minimized our reliance on platforms and put operations in our own hands. We have complete control over item quality.”

Some Xuchang business have actually likewise opened storage facilities overseas to acquire a much better understanding of the location market and to cut expenses with less expensive bulk freight.

“In 2025, the cumulative extra tariffs the U.S. troubled Chinese hair items reached 145% at one point, and the tariff expenses on little parcels listed below the $800 tax-free limit increased dramatically,” remembers Bo Luwen, who runs a wig service in Jian’an. “Surrounding factories closed down since they could not deliver anything.” His business had a stockpile in U.S. storage facilities, so it was protected from the marketplace shock.

He includes that storage facilities do more than offer cover in emergency situations; they likewise enhance the client experience. A consignment delivered from China to North America can bob on the ocean for weeks before reaching the purchaser, whereas products sent out from within the continent can get here the next day.

OQ Hair, an online brand name offering 100% human hair items, launched a glueless wig in 2023 that assures to cut application time from 30 minutes to a couple of seconds. Thanks in part to a brief marketing video that amassed 3 million views, the business tape-recorded sales of more than 10 million yuan within 6 months.

“The increase of cross-border e-commerce totally broke the South Korean monopoly over circulation channels,” Tian states. “We went from agreement making to making our own brand names– from passive to active. This was when our market genuinely entered into its own.”

Split ends

The difficult work is far from over. Cross-border e-commerce platforms led to a development in circulation, “they reproduced brand-new issues, too, consisting of reasonably high commissions and ever-shifting guidelines,” Tian describes. “Sellers likewise can’t autonomously choose what to offer or how to price it.”

The commissions charged by Amazon, AliExpress, and Temu range from 5% to 20%, he states. “This is squeezing our business’ already-thin margins. It’s difficult for sellers on those platforms to earn money.”

Another issue is the getting worse skill scarcity. Lots of actions in commercial wig-making still need manual work, and anecdotal proof recommends that less individuals want to operate in Xuchang’s factories, particularly more youthful generations. Some organizations are even using to pay front-line workers 8,000 yuan a month, well above average, yet still have a hard time to fill jobs.

A hand-sewn wig takes a competent employee about a week to finish, and devices can not totally change hand-knotting. As older craftspeople are aging out, some skill-intensive jobs are now being contracted out overseas.

Versus this background, lots of business see just one method forward: desert the low-end rate war in favor of premium, top quality items. Leading business are likewise purchasing research study and advancement, wanting to approach totally automated production.

On the retail side, there’s likewise Xuchang Hair Expo City, a specialized wig trading and industrial market near the city’s train station and long-distance bus terminal.

“Xuchang might be the wig capital, however for years, visitors could not discover a single location to really purchase one here,” states Tian, who has actually run the marketplace considering that it was established in 2022. ‘There were lots of producers, however none served walk-in consumers. The market had no store you might see and touch.”

Inside, racks are stacked with whatever from artificial wigs costing a couple of lots yuan to hand-knotted wig caps made from 100% genuine human hair priced at more than 10,000 yuan.

“We desire purchasers around the world to understand that when it concerns purchasing a wig, Xuchang is all they require,” Tian states. The marketplace’s yearly sales volume, consisting of by means of e-commerce channels, is now about 200 million yuan, with a lot of clients originating from other areas of China. He includes that the number of foreign purchasers is increasing.

Whatever takes place, Tian thinks that real quality is the supreme trump card. “If your products aren’t great, nobody will desire them, even if you plead.”

(Due to personal privacy factors, Wang Qi and Bo Luwen are pseudonyms.)

Reported by Cheng Ting, Kang Jiaxin, Yang Yuan, and Fang Yuejia.

A variation of this post initially appeared in The PaperIt has actually been equated and modified for brevity and clearness, and is republished here with authorization.

Translator: Eunice Ouyang; editors: Wang Juyi and Hao Qibao.

(Header image: Workers design wigs at a factory in Xuchang, Henan province, 2019. VCG)