A poor county on the Yellow River floodplain in Heze is China's “hometown of human hair” — the country's largest center for collecting, sorting and processing real human hair into wefts, extensions and wigs. By the 1990s the trade reached India and Myanmar and drew in nearly 100,000 people.
Juancheng, a county in the northwest of Heze, is known across the trade as the hometown of human hair: the largest center in China for gathering, grading and processing real human hair, and turning it into wefts, extensions, toppers and finished wigs. Hundreds of factories cluster here, from small family workshops to plants employing a thousand people and shipping a million pieces a month, mostly as OEM production for brands in Europe and America.
The raw material is the catch. Real human hair is finite, and as Chinese women stopped selling theirs, the supply moved abroad. Much of it now comes from India, where temples auction the hair that devotees offer to the gods, and from Myanmar and elsewhere; collectors buy it, and it is washed, sorted by length, de-tangled and re-wefted in places like Juancheng before being exported back out to the world. A wig is, quite literally, made of someone's hair.
The Chinese hair trade has a strange origin. After the 1911 revolution's braid-cutting movement, the country was suddenly awash in cut hair with no use, and German merchants began buying it, sometimes bartering coveted sewing needles for it rather than cash. Europe became the first hair-processing center; over the following century the work migrated to China, and over the last forty years or so Juancheng grew into the Shandong heart of the collecting-and-processing side.
China makes more than 80% of the world's hair products, and the industry has two poles. Xuchang, in Henan, is the finished-wig capital, making over half the world's wigs and extensions with hundreds of thousands of workers. Juancheng is the other pole: the human-hair collecting, grading and distribution heartland, and a vast base of weft and extension OEM. One is famous for the product; the other quietly controls the raw material.
Like its neighbour Caoxian, Juancheng did not invent a new trade so much as plug an old one into the internet. The same county that once sent its people away to find work now runs cross-border e-commerce and livestream sales out of its hair workshops, and the migrants increasingly stay. It is the Heze pattern: a poor county, a single niche, and a screen that reaches the world.