coolie hat

plural coolie hats

1. offensiveSynonym of Asian conical hat.

   A book entitled Emerging Indonesia has on its cover photographs of a sunrise over palm trees, bent women in coolie hats transplanting rice, a wooden bull burning at a Balinese cremation, and a liquid nitrogen plant belching black smoke into a clear, undefiled tropical sky.

   1996, Clifford Geertz, After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist, Harvard University Press, →ISBN, page 141

   Synonyms: Asian conical hat