The queue was a long braided ponytail that Qing China required of Han Chinese men from the 17th century. Most Chinese immigrants to the United States in the 19th century wore one, and it became a focus of American fascination and hostility. In 1881 a San Francisco cartoon imagined a Statue of Liberty figure as a Chinese man with a queue, surrounded by words like filth and ruin to white labour. A city law that forced jailed men to have their hair cut short was struck down in 1879 because it targeted Chinese men. Hair length was increasingly treated as a biological marker of gender and race, and the queue exposed contradictions in American ideas about citizenship and masculinity.

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, with more than 1,600 surviving remains spread over 4,100 hectares. It was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565. Travellers from Persia and Portugal described it as a prosperous, wealthy and grand city with temples, markets and farms along the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world's second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India's richest at the time. In 1565 a coalition of Muslim sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire, its capital was conquered and destroyed, and the city was left in ruins. Hampi remains a religious centre, with the active Virupaksha Temple at its heart.