A city in central Henan makes about six of every ten wigs sold anywhere on Earth. On the cross-border platforms a Xuchang hair product now sells roughly every two seconds. It is the finished-wig capital of the world, and the other half of the hair axis that begins in Juancheng.
Xuchang, a city of some 4.3 million in central Henan, is the wig capital of the world. By the common figure, six out of every ten wigs sold globally are made here, by a cluster of more than 4,000 firms employing around 300,000 people and turning out close to 3,000 varieties of hair product. In 2023 its hair exports reached about 16.85 billion yuan ($2.4 billion), and by 2025 hair made up roughly 82% of the city's entire foreign trade. On the cross-border platforms, a Xuchang hair product sells about every two seconds.
The trade is more than a century old. Locals were already making hairpieces for theatre troupes in the Ming dynasty, but the modern industry began in the early 1900s, when Bai Xihe, from Quandian village, partnered with a German merchant to collect, roughly process and export human hair to Europe, sometimes paid in the coveted steel sewing needles of the day. Europe did the finishing for decades; eventually the whole craft came home to Xuchang.
Like Juancheng, Xuchang runs on imported raw material. Bundles of human hair, known as xiaofa, travel from India and Myanmar along what is now marketed as a modern Maritime Silk Road; a 2020 bonded-logistics center cut the journey from India to Xuchang to as little as three to five days. The city has become the world's largest collection and distribution base for human hair, the upstream that feeds its own workshops and others.
Xuchang's biggest move was geographic. For a Caucasian or Asian buyer a wig is an accessory; for much of the African diaspora it is a daily necessity, replaced often. Rebecca, the first listed company in China's hair industry and long the world's largest wig producer, pivoted from being a quiet component supplier to the United States toward building the African market directly. Today Xuchang's hair products reach more than 120 countries, with a market share above 70% in Africa and over 40% in Europe and America; new logistics cut delivery to Africa from forty days to under a week.
A hand-woven wig can take more than a day and over ten thousand stitches, and that craft is hard to copy. Xuchang has used it to climb from invisible OEM toward brands of its own: "simulation scalp" wigs now pass for real hair, and local firms hold hundreds of patents and overseas trademarks. The city built the world's first logistics-and-livestreaming park dedicated entirely to hair, selling direct to global audiences over AliExpress, Amazon and TikTok Shop.
The hair axis has two ends. Juancheng, in Shandong, is where raw human hair is collected, graded and processed; Xuchang, in Henan, is where it becomes the finished, branded wig and ships to the world. One county owns the material; one city owns the market. Between them they turn a strand cut from a stranger's head, often in an Indian temple, into the crowning glory worn on another continent.