In his landmark study, Soulstealers (1990), Philip Kuhn offered a riveting account of several cases of sorcery, which shook Chinese society in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Under the prosperous reign of the Qianlong emperor, sorcerers roved the country, clipped off men’s queues (long braids or pigtails), and chanted incantations over them to steal the souls of their owners. Fear of sedition lay behind the emperor’s prosecution of the soul-stealers, as the queue was a political symbol of allegiance to the ruling dynasty. The symbolic significance of hair on top has been widely recognised by historians of China, but can we find politics in body hair?

Where earlier versions in the Daoist tradition saw the acquisition of body hair as a step towards immortality, most of Yuan Mei’s accounts presented excessive hair growth as a transformation away from “civilisation”. Comparable to the myth of the wild man in Europe, the hairy man was located beyond the limits of the cultivated field - in the wilderness, the mountains and forests, the border of human society: he hovered on the edge of bestiality. Interest in body hair as a marker of civilisation was reinforced by the use of evolutionary theories from the end of the nineteenth century onwards. Anthropologists and sociologists in China started to divide humanity into different stages of “racial development”.

The “raw” barbarian (shengfan), coated with thick hair, and an inhabitant of the dark forests of the mountains, became a symbol for the lowest stage of evolution. A development away from the lower furry species, “half-civilised races” (ban kaiming minzu) were thought to have attained the second level of evolution.

In anthropological discourse, the “civilised races” (kaiming minzu) were confined to the English and Chinese, spearheads of the evolutionary process: authors frequently noted that both “races” had patches of body hair only on the chest and legs.

Yu Zhenhuan rapidly became an object of marvel and wonder: news on television, reports in the official press, feature articles in more popular magazines brought images of the “hairy child” to the general public. A widely distributed work, Mysteries of the human body (1989), to take but one instance, reported in compelling detail the story of Yu Zhenhuan.

Officially sponsored research into the “mystery of the wild man” also became prominent in the 1980s. Most noticed were reports about the “wild man” (yeren) from Shennongjia in Fang county, Hubei province, a place were hairy creatures had been sighted since the Ming dynasty. If the hairy barbarian of imperial knowledge had been a spatial notion projected onto the periphery of civilisation, modern versions presented the wild man as the repository of a lost phylogeny, the “missing link” between the ape and the human: hair had become a symbol of borders in time.

Represented as the vessel of evolutionary traits, which had disappeared with civilisation, the scientific analysis of the wild man’s hair was thought to reveal prehistoric conditions of life. The findings of a tuft of brown hair in 1980 and remains of more than 3000 “red hairs” of the “wild man” from Shennongjia were scrutinised. A research team concluded that its hair was structurally comparable to that of humans: “We infer that the hair from these ‘wild men’ could belong to an as yet unknown higher primate”.

Reports about the wild man also became rife in the popular press during the 1980s, one example being a daily newspaper’s article about a girl abducted by a wild man who later escaped back to “civilisation” with her two shaggy children. In 1986, the Science Evening Paper even brought to the attention of the public a “wild boy” coated with hair recently discovered near the Himalayan mountains and kept hidden in a military hospital of Shaanxi province as a living fossil. Illustrations of the “wild man”, based on “scientific data”, became an intrinsic part of popular urban culture by the end of the 1980s.