Xuchang

Sixty percent of the world's wigs come from Xuchang. A transaction completes on AliExpress every two seconds. Four thousand enterprises employ 300,000 workers producing over 3,000 product types exported to 120 countries. The annual export value exceeds $2 billion. Xuchang controls more than 70% of the African wig market and over 40% of the European and American markets. It is the undisputed monopoly supplier for a global industry that most people outside it cannot locate on a map.

Eighteen hundred years ago, Xuchang was equally dominant in a different domain. Cao Cao made it the capital of the Wei Kingdom during the Three Kingdoms period, the political centre of a military strategist who unified northern China. The city's name appears in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms more often than most characters. Modern Xuchang has traded military hegemony for follicular hegemony, but the underlying pattern is identical: a single city concentrating a disproportionate share of a critical supply chain.

The hair industry's supply chain is global and vertical. Raw human hair is sourced from India, Myanmar, and domestic Chinese collectors. It arrives in Xuchang as bulk material. Local factories sort, treat, dye, weave, and style it into wigs, extensions, toupees, and hairpieces. The finished products ship to markets where the end consumers — disproportionately African and African-American women for whom hair is a significant cultural and economic expenditure — often have no idea that their hair was assembled in a Henan prefecture-level city.

Rebecca, Xuchang's largest hair company, earned nearly half its revenue from African markets alone, with 884 million yuan from the continent in a single year. Nigeria ranks as the third-largest wig market on Alibaba, with transaction volumes growing 74% year over year. African salons derive 80% of their income from human hair products. The dependency runs in both directions: Xuchang needs African and diaspora demand; African and diaspora consumers need Xuchang's manufacturing scale. Over 100 million units ship to African women annually.

The mechanism is preferential attachment accelerated by e-commerce. Xuchang's early concentration of hair expertise attracted raw material suppliers, which attracted more manufacturers, which attracted logistics infrastructure, which attracted platform sellers. Starting a new hair business is now cheaper in Xuchang than anywhere else because every input — human hair, synthetic fibre, packaging, photography, express shipping — is locally available at cluster-discounted prices. The moat is not technology. It is the accumulated density of a supply chain that took decades to build and would take decades to replicate.