The Traditional Chinese Family & Lineage (Excerpts)
Prof. David Jordan (UCSD)
Arguably there has never been a stable human society in which any institution has been
more important to the participants than the family. Thus China is by no means unique in
considering the family important, and scholars of Chinese life are well served by focusing attention
upon it.
The strong institutionalization of the family in traditional China would seem to have made
familism even more central in that society than in most.
It is not possible to do justice to the complexity and diversity of this institution on a simple
web page, but this page attempts at least to provide a few coordinating principles and define a few
terms. (Given the state of college teaching about Chinese society, this web site is probably the only
place you will ever have the Chinese terms revealed to you if you happen to be studying Chinese.
Copy them now!)
Because this page is devoted to the traditional Chinese family system, I have tended to use
the past tense (and the pictures are mostly from the 1800s). Many of the institutions, beliefs, and
values discussed here are still present in China, but I have preferred to focus on the past in order
to stress traditionalism and to avoid dealing with the complexities introduced by the modern growth
of industries, urban populations, and foreign influences, especially foreign influences on law.
Page Outline
The Family
Descent Lines, Lineage, & Clans
People Not in Families
Marriage
Adoption & Other Fictive Kinship
I. The Family
Definition: The traditional Chinese family, or jiā 家 (colloquial: jiātíng 家庭), called a "chia"
by a few English writers, was a (1) patrilineal, (2) patriarchal, (3) prescriptively virilocal (4) kinship
group (5) sharing a common household budget and (6) normatively extended in form.
(It was not the same thing as a descent line, lineage, or clan, all of which also existed in
China.)
This means:
1. Patrilineal
The term means that descent was calculated through men.
A person was descended from both a mother and a father, of course, but one inherited one's family
membership from one's father. China was extreme in that a woman was quite explicitly removed
from the family of her birth (her niángjiā 娘家) and affiliated to her husband's family (her pójiā 婆家),
a transition always very clearly symbolized in local marriage customs, despite their variation from
one region to another.
Reverence was paid to ancestors (zǔxiān 祖先). For a man this referred to his male ancestors and
their wives. For a woman it referred to her male ancestors and their wives only a couple of
generations up, but was extended also to all of her husband's male ancestors and their wives.
In popular belief ancestors depended upon the living for this reverence (usually seen as
provisioning them with sacrificial food, literally feeding them), and therefore the failure to produce
(or, if necessary, adopt) male offspring was considered an immoral behavior or, if accidental, a
great misfortune. In popular religion, dead people without male descendants to look after them
tended to be thought of as potentially dangerous ghosts. Among the living, people of age to be
parents but without children tended to be looked down upon.
2. Patriarchal
The term means that the family is hierarchically organized, with the prime institutionalized authority
being vested in the senior-most male, who was considered to be responsible for the orderly
management of the family. (A fascinating late Imperial text of instructions to family heads is
available on this web site [Link])
No two members of a Chinese family were equal in authority. "A state cannot have two monarchs,"
a widely cited proverb held, "or a family two heads" (Guó wú èr jūn, jiā wú èr zhŭ
国无二君，家无二主.) Officially at least, (1) senior generations were superior to junior generations,
(2) older people were superior to younger ones, and (3) men were superior to women. ("Men are
high, women low" — nán zūn, nǚ bēi 男尊女卑— said another old proverb.)
Normatively (that is, in what most people thought of as the ideal form), a family would be headed
by a man who was older and/or of more senior generation than anybody else. However, whatever
the deference due to older people or older generations, if it was a choice between an adult man
and his widowed mother, say, it was the man who became the household head. (Click me.)
In actual practice, there is no known family system in which members do not contribute to the
collective welfare and decision making, with their differential knowledge, perspectives, and skills.
Thus patriarchy is a "jural norm," but is differentially salient in different families. Obviously,
personality has much to do with how the members of a family actually behave. In China there were
always families dominated by women, old people whose lives were run by their children, and so on,
just as elsewhere.
Family hierarchy was very emphatically symbolized in the concept of xiào 孝 (colloquial: xiàoshùn
孝顺 / 孝順), which is usually translated "filial piety," but is more accurately rendered "filial
subordination." When wills clashed, it was expected (and legally enforced) that the will of a family
superior should prevail over the will of a family inferior. Traditional law held a child's
insubordination to a parent to be a capital offense, and a daughter-in-law's insubordination to her
parents-in-law grounds for divorce. (The picture shows a son, lower right, begging a court to allow
him to suffer the punishment for his father's crime.)
At the same time, popular morality made it the right or even obligation of a child to point out the risk
if a parent or monarch was about to embark on an ill-advised course of action. The action is usually
referred to as "remonstration." (Link)
Grief over the death of a parent was considered the deepest kind of grief, calling for the longest
period of mourning. (In contrast, in some regions it was considered inappropriate to mourn the
death of a child, since the child had proven its unfiliality by dying first.) Mourning was highly stylized
in traditional China and was structured to throw kinship relationships into high relief. Click here for
a separate page on the famous Wǔfú 五服, or traditional Chinese mourning categories.
Acts of heroic sacrifice in the support of one's parents were the commonest and most important
genre of Chinese moral tales, and were considered especially fit material for the education of
children. (The most important group of such tales is a collection called the Twenty-Four Filial
Examplars, available elsewhere on this web site. Link)
3. Prescriptively Virilocal
The term means that there was a strongly held preference and expectation that a newly married
couple should live with the groom's family.
It was considered ideal for all men in a family to marry and bring their wives to live on the family
estate, and for all women born to a family to marry and go out to live with their husbands. The
change of families was of course a defining event in the life of a woman, and the traditional, even
prescriptive, sentiment was great sorrow at leaving her girlhood home, only sometimes mitigated
by a sense of adventure or excitement about assuming her new status as married woman. In some
parts of western China there is a tradition of women's musical lamentations on this theme, and the
days leading up to marriage may be celebrated with carefully structured sessions of ritualized
sobbing involving the bride-to-be and her unmarried friends or younger sisters.
In actual fact, sometimes a family lacked the resources to support additional personnel. A man with
two daughters whose income derived from carting goods in a wheelbarrow had little chance of
becoming the head of a unit with sons and married-in daughters-in-law, after all. Thus many other
arrangements in fact were found.
Sometimes —probably in about twenty percent of all marriages— the groom in fact went to live
with the wife's family. (This practice is called "uxorilocality," from the Latin word uxor "wife.")
Sometimes this was merely a matter of economic convenience, but often it was because the wife's
family had no son, and the son-in-law was accepted in lieu of a son, sometimes changing his
surname (which was an act of disgraceful unfiliality towards his own parents, if living) or more often
promising that the first son born to the marriage would take the name of the wife's father.
Because uxorilocality broke the cultural prescription for virilocality, it was considered a last resort,
and uxorilocal husbands, whatever their personal merit, tended to be viewed with suspicion and
scorn. An uxorilocal marriage was disparaged as a "backward-growing sprout" (dǎozhù miáo
倒住苗), and a man who married uxorilocally was (and is) referred to as a "superfluous husband"
(zhuìxù 赘婿 / 贅婿), even though he was, obviously, considered necessary.
4. Kinship Group
The "kinship" part of this means that members of the family were related genealogically, i.e. either
by having common ancestors or by being married. The "group" part means that they had known
boundaries and shared activities or resources with each other that they did not share with
outsiders.
A family is not a household. A household included whoever lived in the same building, which might
mean tenants, servants, apprentices, sometimes a resident priest, or whoever. Although a
household is a useful census unit, and can be used as a proxy for families if one has data on
households and not on families, it is not the same thing.
Just as a household can incorporate people who are not part of the family, the family can
incorporate people who are not part of the household. Many Chinese throughout history have lived
for longer or shorter periods away from the families. Shorter separations might involve living during
the summer in a small shed to protect fields from the theft of irrigation water, for example, or
traveling over the countryside as a peddler. Longer separations might occur if a member went
away to serve in the army or to study or to set up a business in another location.
Despite this close and rather legalistic definition of a family as a kinship group, the word could also
be extended metaphorically, as in English, to refer to all relatives.
Membership in a family was sometimes accorded people by adoption. In cases where a couple had
no son, an "extra" son of a close relative might be adopted, although there was wide variation
between families in the extent to which the child was actually assimilated into family life. Less often
a son might be adopted from a distant relative. In most regions at most periods, it was considered
undesirable to adopt a son from an unrelated family, but the practice was in fact by no means
uncommon, even when it was considered unfortunate.
It was not unusual for friends of roughly the same age to swear oaths of fidelity to each other that
brought them into a relationship of sworn brotherhood (or less frequently sworn sisterhood). In
theory, and occasionally in practice, such alliances were honored by families as creating family
ties, although never, to my knowledge, was the assimilation of sworn siblings actually complete
enough to change official genealogies.
5. Sharing a Common Household Budget
This means that the possessions, income, and expenses of all family members were pooled, and
decisions about resource distribution were the legitimate business of all family members, and were
ultimately taken through the patriarchal authority structure of the family.
It has been convincingly argued that the common budget is one of the most important defining
characteristics of Chinese families. One effect of this custom is to define who is in or out of a family
by means other than kinship. Kinship makes one a potential member of a family. But close kinsmen
can be in different families if the family has decided to stop sharing a budget.
It is possible for the same family budget to be shared by a family that crosses several households.
One can imagine a family with some members living in a farming village and others living over their
shop in a small town, for example. In modern times, Chinese families have been studied that have
had members living in several different countries, but all sharing a common budget.
Sharing a budget is a strictly economic way of viewing what families shared, but sharing went
beyond that. In the religious sphere, families tended to share luck. A family in which one member
was chronically sick while another had bad habits and a third tended to make bad investments
might seek to treat all of these as symptoms of a single ill, the inharmony of the family as a whole.
(For more on this, see my book, Gods, Ghosts, & Ancestors. The full text is available on this web
site.)
Family division (fēnjiā 分家) is therefore a critical event. When family members decided that their
union had become economically or socially unviable, they would agree to a division of the family's
resources and the creation of financially separate new families. Typically this occurred after the
death of a senior generation had left two brothers and their wives and children as a common
economic unit. Although there might be natural affection between the brothers, differences in their
economic productivity and differences in the numbers of their children often led to arguments that
were most easily solved by family division. A usual mediator would be a sympathetic but
disinterested third party, traditionally the brother of one of the older married-in women, and usually
a contract would commit the agreements to writing. While memory of the old, united family was still
fresh, each of the new units tended to be called a "segment" (fèn 份).
Because of the cultural value placed on family unity, size, cooperation, and mutual support, family
division was always considered an unfortunate event.
The family as an economic unit was symbolized by the stove, and at division the new units would
always maintain separate stoves, even if it meant somebody cooked on a small charcoal burner in
the courtyard while everyone continued to occupy the same house.
Members of the same family might occasionally live apart, sometimes for decades at a time. (An
example might be a family member away at school, or working in a different region.) Married
couples also might live apart. When marriage is defined by its attendant duties rather than its
emotions, this is perhaps easier than in societies with a strong stress upon romantic love in
marriage, and even today Chinese couples sometimes endure separations so long as to seem
heroic (or bizarre) to people in some other societies.
Since the family was the unit of ownership (even down to the level of sharing toothbrushes), there
was nothing that quite corresponded to inheritance. An important debate emerged early in the XXth
century as western-inspired law sought to guarantee inheritance for women as well as for men.
This was strongly resisted by many tradition-minded Chinese, who argued that there was no such
thing as inheritance, and that women were provided for in the traditional scheme in that they were
members of the families and segments to which their husbands belonged. One effect of switching
from corporate ownership to individual inheritance and of including married daughters as legitimate
inheritors from their parents would logically be the greater segmentation of land into ever smaller
fields with different ownership. (As events actually unfolded, land was subject to other redistributive
schemes throughout the XXth century, so that the issue of inheritance tended to recede into the
background.)
Ancestor veneration was a fundamental duty of every Chinese, and this followed genealogical
lines. Accordingly family division had no effect on the need to engage in ancestor worship. At
family division a slightly larger share of property was accorded one party (traditionally the oldest
son if there was one) to cover the costs of ancestral sacrifices and of housing the shared ancestral
tablets. When possible, cadet lines would assemble at the altar of the senior line on occasions
requiring ancestor worship. Occasionally (and controversially) cadet lines unable to send
representatives to the senior altar would make copies of the tablets for worship off-site.
Ancestor veneration was also practiced at gravesites, and the solar (!) festival of Qīngmíng 清明
(usually falling on April 5) is associated with tomb "sweeping" followed by presentation of incense
and sacrificial foods or other gifts to the dead. (The sacrificial food was often then consumed in a
graveside "feast," as shown here.)
Although individual ancestor worship was more or less inevitable for ancestors actually
remembered, it tended to become more casual for those who had faded from memory. Importantly,
ancestors from whom one had not inherited economic goods were soon forgotten, and their cult
folded into the general sacrifices offered to ancestors in general on a calendrical schedule that
varied from place to place and period to period.
6. Normatively Extended in Form
This means that it ideally included a descent line of men and their wives and children. The usual
Chinese term was simply "big family" (dàjiā 大家, colloquial: dàjiātíng 大家庭). This is more precise
than the popular usage of the term "extended family" in English, but somewhat less precise than
the English term "extended family" as used by sociologists, which is sometimes placed in contrast
to "stem family" to provide a technical term for cross-cultural application.)
As envisioned by those inclined to sentimentalize about it, the ideal Chinese family might be
headed by an elderly patriarch and his wife, and include their five sons and their wives, and the
children of all these people, including perhaps some adult grandsons who already had wives, but
excluding any daughters who had married out and become members of other families.
Since the population of China was increasing only very slightly or not at all through most of
Chinese history, the average number of sons that a married couple had was in fact only slightly
more than one. When there was a second son, there was tremendous pressure to make the lad
available to a relative who had no son at all or to provide him as an uxorilocal husband (and heir) to
a friend who had no son. Thus in most cases, a family could not in fact include two adult brothers.
Throughout most of Chinese history the mean age at death was quite low, and one's sixtieth
birthday was an event of awe and celebration. Accordingly, it was unusual for elderly people to live
to see their grandchildren grow to adulthood. For this reason, although three-generation families
were common, four-generation families were rare, and five-generation families truly remarkable. (In
funerals of elderly people, it was conventional to write the number of generations they had
spawned on funeral lanterns, usually adding a couple of generations to make it sound better. Five
was a common number.)
Hence, although Chinese families were normatively extended, and although many Chinese spent
at least some years living in families of considerable complexity, it was unusual for a family to
conform to the ideal image of a truly large group of relatives living together and sharing a budget.
Mean family size in most villages was between four and five people.
II. Descent Lines, Lineage, & Clans
A distinction should be made among (1) a descent line, (2) a lineage, and (3) a clan (which,
in the case of China, is more conveniently called a surname group).
In Chinese, all three entities can be called a zú 族 (colloquial jiāzú 家族), which tends to add
to confusion. (Caution: The syllable zú 族 that refers to a descent group is different from the
syllable zǔ 祖 that refers to an ancestor. English authors who do not mark tone sometimes get
them mixed up.)
In each case, the fundamental concept is that a person (male or female) is "descended"
from a succession of ancestors. Although this normally means being the biological son or daughter
of a parent, it is possible to be adopted into (or ejected from) a descent line; what is at issue is
social classification, not biology.
Chinese descent is patrilineal, which means that traditionally descent was calculated
through male links only (the same way that surnames have traditionally descended only through
male links in Euroamerican society). If I am Chinese, my significant ancestors are my father,
father's father, father's father's father, &c. Although wives of male ancestors are considered also to
be ancestors, a person's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother, for example, is not an
ancestor in a patrilineal descent system. In traditional Chinese genealogies married-in women,
even when they produced children, were sometimes recorded with only a surname: Woman
Named Wáng, Woman Named Chén, and so on.)
A distinctive feature of traditional Chinese patrilineal descent is that a woman, at marriage,
is assumed to be removed from her own descent line (except for the acknowledgement of her
immediate parents and grandparents) and assimilated into her husband's descent line. (In most
patrilineal descent systems around the world, a person keeps his or her affiliation throughout life.
China is unusual in this.)
1. A Patrilineal Descent Line (or Patriline)
Definition. A patrilineal descent line is the line of fathers and sons making up all of my male
ancestors. In theory I can regard it as going back to an atomic globule, or as starting at any
ancestor and continuing down to me. I can also regard it as continuing down through my sons, their
sons, their sons, and so on.
Size. One characteristic of a descent line is that there is only one person per generation when I
count up (since a person has only one father), but there may be many people per generation
looking down (since a person may have many sons).
Dying Out. Another characteristic is that all ancestral generations successfully produced children
—that is where I came from— but descending generations may or may not produce sons: any
descent line has the prospect of dying out in the future.
Collateral Lines. Since any man, ancestral or descendant, may have a brother, and since the
brothers of my ancestors are not ancestors to me, there are any number of "collateral" lines made
up of their descendants. My father's brother's son (my patrilateral parallel cousin, in anthropological
jargon) is a collateral to me because I have an ancestor (my grandfather) shared with him, but also
a more recent ancestor (my father) not shared with him.
2. A Patrilineal Lineage (or Patrilineage)
Definition. A patrilineage is an organized group of descendants of a single, specific ancestor. The
ancestor is referred to as an "apical" ancestor because he is at the "apex" of the genealogy by
which the lineage membership is determined, and the descent links to this person are known (or
anyway written in a genealogy where they can be looked up).
Exogamy. In China, as in other lineage systems, it was (and is) regarded as incestuous to marry
(or mate with) a member of the same lineage.
Women & Lineages In China a woman is a member of her father's lineage at birth, but at marriage
she is transferred to her husband's lineage. As noted, cross-culturally this is an extremely unusual
arrangement. One effect of it is that it is usual for all members of the same family to be members of
the same lineage. (In most lineage systems around the world, members of the same family belong
to different lineages.) Women did not usually participate very significantly in lineage worship,
however, and their level of interest in lineages was far less than that of men (even though they
cooked the sacrificial food).
Geographical Distribution Lineages were an optional feature of Chinese social structure.
Although every person by definition had a descent line, organized lineage groups were nearly
universal in some periods and regions (particularly the southern, Cantonese-speaking world), but a
rarity in others.
Lineage Property. Where they existed, lineages owned property. In some cases this consisted of
little more than an ancestral hall, or a few fields that were rented out to provide income used for the
worship of shared ancestors. In other cases lineages had substantial holdings, and could afford to
maintain loan funds, catastrophe insurance, student scholarships, or even schools for the benefit of
lineage members.
Genealogies. Because lineage membership had potential benefits, most lineages maintained
written genealogies, which began with their apical ancestor and then included all lines descended
from him. Written genealogies allowed a lineage to be very clear about who was and who was not
entitled to various lineage benefits.
Ancestor Veneration. The prime collective activity of a lineage was ancestor worship, and
whatever else it did, it always did this. Many a lineage would maintain a modest (or occasionally
pretentious) "hall" (táng 堂) for this purpose, usually with provision for the permanent storage of
ancestral tablets. The commonest procedure was for members to move tablets from family altars to
the lineage hall as the tablets got older. In some regions there was a general rule about this —
tablets over five generations old would be moved out of private houses and into the hall, for
example. In other regions tablets would be moved in whenever the hall was rehabilitated. In some
cases members who wanted to put tablets in the hall would pay for the privilege, the income going
to the maintenance of the hall. Not infrequently tablets were recopied or consolidated under cover
terms (like "five generations") when they were moved to the hall. (The hall altar shown here is from
the Hong Kong Heritage Museum.)
Social Class. Because lineages were based on kinship, and because different descent lines from
the apical ancestor might have fared differently with the passing of generations, many lineages
cross-cut social classes. To the extent that richer members tended to provide lineage resources
which were used by poorer members, this tended to recycle wealth and reduce social class
difference, but it also potentially alienated the rich members from the lineages as these
organizations began to be a financial drain. "Anti-poor" measures sometimes included the payment
of fees for the enjoyment of full lineage benefits.
Lineages & Politics. At times and places where lineages were strong, they were sometimes
charged by the government with local administrative functions ranging from tax collection to dispute
settlement or defense. There is a tradition of lineages supplementing their genealogical documents
with "family instructions" (jiāshùn 家顺 / 家順), moral injunctions by elderly members passed down
to their descendants, sometimes with rules for the conduct of lineage business, and often with
general instruction on citizenship and moral behavior.
Lineages lost face if their members engaged in illegal or immoral acts, and they had provisions
both to punish errant members and, if necessary, to eject members and expunge their names from
the written genealogies.
Lineage Benefits. Lineages sought to promote the welfare of their members, and since this might
be at the expense of non-members, conflict between lineages was not unusual. In times and
places where lineages have been strong, local warfare has been an occasional result. Even when
open violence does not occur, there is a tendency for residence with lineage-mates to be more
comfortable when there is inter-lineage tension. The result, even today, is the existence of singlelineage villages, or villages where most residents are members of a single dominant lineage.
Lineage Division. Lineages normally could not divide, like families, but since any ancestor could
be taken as the apical ancestor of a new lineage, the work-around for lineage division was for a
dissident group to contribute property as an endowment of a new lineage centered on a lower-level
ancestor whose descendants included "the right people" and excluded "the wrong people." When
Lineage B was centered on a genealogically lower apical ancestor than was Lineage A (that is,
when the apical ancestor of Lineage A was an ancestor of the apical ancestor of Lineage B),
Lineage B was said to be a "branch" (fāng 方) of Lineage A. (The same vocabulary is sometimes
used of multi-household families.) Anthropologists sometimes use the term "sublineage" instead.
Lineages in the XXth Century. Lineages have, at least in concept, been prestigious (except
briefly during the Communist period), and few Chinese willingly concede that the system is not
universal in China, even though it patently is not. In many cases, this derives from confusing
lineages with clans. (See below.) In fact, the "lineage system" was so frail by the time the
Communists came to power that no official steps needed to be taken to end such organized
lineages as remained. Once ownership of private property was restricted, lineages usually lost their
financial base and collapsed on their own.
Higher-Order Lineages. Lineage membership is based in genealogy, but participation in lineage
affairs is difficult if a member is not living with lineage mates. Many anthropologists studying
Chinese rural life have found it convenient to impose upon the definition of lineage the need for it to
be localized. This generates the need for a term to refer to lineages that are diffuse or are localized
in more than one concentration. (A lineage might have two localized settlements at considerable
distance from each other for example.) A lineage that is not completely localized, for whatever
reason, is called a "higher-order lineage" in that case.
3. A Clan
Definition. A clan, as the term is used today by anthropologists, is a wannabe lineage. That is to
say, it is a property-holding group made up of descendants of an apical ancestor, but the details of
the descent lines from that ancestor are unknown. In some cases the ancestor is clearly mythical
and in some societies the apical ancestor may even be non-human (a sweet potato, say).
Clans & Surnames. In China, clans were created on the basis of common surname, usually
asserting common descent from a real or fictitious ancient person of that name.
Some such surname groups were exclusive, considering themselves to be branches (fāng) of an
imaginary greater clan. They thereby excluded some people of the same surname. But more
commonly they were inclusive, and anybody of the same surname could potentially participate.
(Confusion is avoided if one simply calls such clan entities "surname groups.")
Clan Benefits. Clans provided a way in which Chinese who traveled away from their home regions
could locate putative kinsmen and procure assistance from them if necessary. In the expansion of
Chinese from north of the Yángzi River into the southern half of China, and later in the migration of
Chinese from China into southeast Asia and other parts of the world, a fundamental mutual-aid
device has been the same-surname association.
Clan Ancestor Veneration. Although worship of the putative apical ancestor occurs in clans, the
lack of genealogical records successfully linking other members and branches to each other makes
more specific ancestor worship less common (even potentially embarrassing in some cases), and
clans are inevitably centered on the mutual protection and shared risk functions of lineages more
than on ancestor worship.
III. People Not in Families
Circumstances. Not all Chinese were able to live in family groups. Flood, fire, famine, war,
banditry, plague, infertility, flight from the law, madness, and willful disregard for social mores were
all reasons why some individuals might be left alone to wander the world without family ties.
Attitudes. People outside of families were usually regarded with a mixture of pity,
suspicion, and contempt. They were unable to attain positions of economic security or social
prestige, and tended to live at the margins of society as prostitutes, beggars, and casual laborers,
so far as historians can determine.
Monasteries. The principal exception was the world of celibate monasticism, especially
Buddhist monasticism. Individuals might take Buddhist vows (and receive initiatory scars by
burning small cones of incense on the scalp that made the vows difficult to reverse). This removed
them from their original families (if any) and affiliated them in perpetuity to the Buddhist clergy as
monks and nuns.
A fully ordained monk or nun received the dummy surname Shì 释 / 釋, the first syllable of
the full name of the Shakyamuni Buddha (Shìjiāmóuní 释迦牟尼 / 釋迦牟尼). He or she was
regarded as the disciple of a specific master, took on the burden of offering "ancestral" reverence
to the master and his/her line of earlier clerics, and was in turn to be reverenced on temple
"ancestral" altars by a line of later ones.
Fully ordained clerics were permitted to change monasteries at will (in theory) and carried
their ordination papers with them so that they could be fitted into monastic hierarchies wherever
they went. Life was no picnic for them —on the contrary they were permitted to own nothing and
were held by their vows and by the authority of their abbots to hundreds of behavioral restrictions.
They usually worked hard in monastic gardens or in the performance of liturgy. However they had
the consolation that they were gaining religious merit, and they seldom starved.
In addition to ordained clerics, monastic establishments also were home to unmarriageable
people, wandering children, abandoned old people, battered women, and other people who did not
take full vows, but had no place else to go (or in some cases simply preferred the ambiance of the
monastery). The most important categories were:
Abandoned children (assimilated under the general term "small disciples" xiǎo shāmí
小沙弥 / 小沙彌)
Unwed, divorced, abused, or abandoned women, who took partial, reversable vows and
were usually called zhāigū 斋孤 / 齋孤, literally "vegetarian orphans." Zhāigū were not
permitted to change monasteries at will and tended to work as servants in the monastic
establishments. Some eventually chose to take full vows and become full nuns.
Not all such shelters were orthodox monastic institutions. The general organizational
principles were sometimes copied by small-scale sectarian or even non-religious societies to
provide shelter to people (especially women) outside of the family system, although typically such
groups had at least a veneer of Buddhist trappings.
Finally, monasteries sometimes served as hospices for the dying, as asylums for the
disfigured, diseased, and insane, and in general as shelters for people unable to care for
themselves. In all parts of the world, care for such people in premodern societies was shocking to
modern understandings, but Chinese Buddhists did what they could, even if it was not much. (I
visited one monastery and saw a frighteningly violent "lunatic woman" who had been kept caged
for decades in a small outbuilding built by her brother to contain her.)
Values. Did people outside of families have the same values about families that other
Chinese held? One study based on interviews in the 1970s with Hakka-speaking nuns and
prostitutes in Taiwan found that in general they did share general Chinese values about families,
and they also shared the general social view of themselves as tragic failures. In most cases their
life stories involved grinding poverty, premature deaths, abusive husbands, family alcoholism, and
a host of other untoward circumstances. The same interviews collectively seemed to imply (but not
to demonstrate) that women who had once been driven to prostitution may have tended to become
zhāigū later in life. (Hsiu-kuen Fan Tsung 1977 Moms, Nuns And Hookers: Extrafamilial
Alternatives for Village Women in Taiwan. Ph.D. dissertation, Antropology, UCSD.)
IV. Marriage
One does not teach about the traditional Chinese family system to sexually enthusiastic
California college students without being asked (1) whether the Chinese nation can't be
retroactively compelled (perhaps by armed intervention) to stop using matchmakers and
(2) whether there were homosexual alternatives to married life. The answers are no and no, in that
order. This section elaborates on marriage, the following one on sexuality.
Arranged Marriage. Traditional Chinese marriage was not the free union of two young
adults to establish a new household. Rather it was thought of as ideally a union of families of
different surnames for the purpose of providing descendants to one of them (the groom's) and
some level of mutual benefit to both. For practical purposes, it was the movement of a woman from
her natal family (or niángjiā 娘家) to her married family and her assimilation into her married family
as an economically productive member of the family corporation and the mother of her husband's
children. (The importance of this "transfer" was dramatized in an elaborately ritual-encrusted
procession of the bride and her dowry to her new husband's abode. The picture here, probably
taken about 1900, shows a bride, in her embroidery-covered, closed palanquin, closely followed by
the simpler palanquin of her matchmaker.)
In thinking about the social structural constraints on this, it is more useful to think of the inmarrying bride being like a newly hired corporate employee than being like a modern bride. She
depended upon her parents or other favorably inclined people to find her the best "job" possible,
and the family "hiring" her sought to get the best "worker" available. As with all things else, the final
decision lay with the hierarchically senior decision maker in each family, although as a practical
matter both parents of the potential groom or bride had a voice, and not infrequently even the
young people themselves dared to voice advisory opinions.
(Chinese theatre, folklore, and fiction is full of marriages undertaken by lovestruck people
who don't consult anybody. That may be largely fantasy, but it also suggests that we should not
imagine the system was entirely rigid. A separate page on this site includes a range of traditional
love stories. Link)
Matchmakers Although friends and relations were constantly alert for possible mates for
young boys and girls, sometimes professional help was required (particularly if one had an only
marginally marriageable kid on one's hands), and professional matchmakers (méirén 媒人) were
(and are) a constant feature of the Chinese social scene.
The modern painting at left shows an eligible girl in about 1900 serving tea to a professional
matchmaker, with two anxious parents looking on at the right. (The man standing with his back to
us is more likely a son of the family than the prospective groom.) The artist captures the selfpresentation of a professional matchmaker, who wanted to be seen as accustomed to associating
with high quality people, and hence likely to know many worthy potential spouses. Although often
suspected of lying to clients in the interest of making a quick "sale," matchmakers were also
sometimes celebrated, the most famous and most sympathetic of them being a certain Hóngniáng
红娘, whose name has become a generic term used when matchmakers refer to their profession
today. (Story link)
(Professional and semi-professional matchmakers still operate today. A conference paper I
wrote on modern matchmakers can be found elsewhere on this web site. Link)
Divorce. Late imperial family law, based on earlier moral and legal codes, provided seven
grounds for divorce and three protections against divorce, and it is easy to understand them by
thinking of the analogy just mentioned of a corporation hiring a worker. In essence. the new family
member had to prove herself a valuable team player, capable of doing the job for which she was
recruited, of getting on with the other members of the family, and of advancing (or anyway not
hindering) family interests. When she had been in a family for a reasonable period, she was "off
probation" and could no longer be divorced. With this in mind, let us look at the two lists:
Seven Grounds for Divorce (Qī Chū 七出)
As Phrased in Imperial Law
Seen From a Modern Corporate Standpoint
She is insubordinate to a parent-in-law.
She is insubordinate to authority.
(bú shùn fùmǔ 不顺父母 / 不順父母)
She fails to bear a son.
She fails in the main job for which she was hired.
(wú zǐ 无子 / 無子)
She is lewd and vulgar.
She attracts unfavorable comment and offends clients
(yínpì 淫僻)
She is envious.
She sows discord among the staff.
(jíwù 嫉妒)
She is foully diseased.
She is not able to perform her assigned duties.
(èjí 恶疾 / 惡疾)
She is talkative.
She reveals company secrets to outsiders.
(duōkǒushé 多口舌)
She is inclined to theft.
She pilfers company property.
(qièdào 竊盜)
Three Protections Against Divorce(Sān Bùchū 三不出)
As Phrased in Imperial Law
Seen From a Modern Corporate Standpoint
She has nowhere to return to.
(yǒusuǒqǔ wúsuǒguī
Enough time has passed that it is cruel to turn
有所取无所归 / 有所取無所歸)
She already observed full mourning for a parent-in-law.
(gònggēng sānnián zhi sàng
She has passed probation and earned job sec
共更三年之丧 / 共更三年之喪)
The family was poor when she entered and is now rich.
(xiān pínjiàn hòu fùguì
She has been a significant contributor to corpo
先贫贱后富贵 / 先貧賤後富貴)
(This famous list is not always identically worded. This version is from Le P. Guy BOULAIS 1924
Manuel du Code Chinois. Shanghai: La Mission Catholique, p. 301. The Chinese expressions are
not quite those used in the law code, but rather are those used in an earlier document to which the
law code alludes. The differences are trivial.)
Concubinage. Until well into the XXth century, most Chinese regarded it as a reasonable
thing for a man to take more than one wife, especially if the first wife did not produce male
offspring, and so long as the family budget could afford the additional person. (Secondary wives
still exist, although today they are often kept in secret, sometimes in a different country.)
However, there was always a distinction between the first wife or qī 妻 (colloquial fùqī
妇妻 / 婦妻) and a secondary wife (concubine), who might be called by a variety of terms, usually
involving the syllable qiè 妾. (In modern Chinese a wife is normally referred to as an àirén
爱人 / 愛人 or a tàitài 太太, while a concubine is referred to as a "little tàitài" 小太太.)
In some far western regions under Tibetan influence, a woman could have more than one
husband, but for "mainstream" Chinese society that was not possible.
Remarriage. Traditional China always honored "chaste widows" or guǎfù 寡妇 / 寡婦),
literally "lonely wives," who, on the death of a husband (or fiancé), did not remarry, but remained
attached to the husband's household and continued to serve his family. An important consideration
was such a woman's economic security, since she was legally entitled to continuing support from
her dead husband's family just as she was obligated to continue her service to it. In the case of
young widows, the practice of remarriage seems to have been far more common than not, since
women who did not remarry after early widowhood could be honored for this by the erection of
stone "chastity" arches (zhēnjié páifāng 贞节牌坊 / 貞節牌坊), some of them quite elaborate. (The
photo here was taken in Sìchuān 四川 Province in about 1911.)
Such a convention was not always comfortable for all parties concerned. Some law cases
turned on efforts by other family members to eject or marry off younger widows, or to sell them as
prostitutes or servants. Others turned on the "escape" of widows from intolerable servitude, or their
voluntary abduction by lovers. As far as I know, we lack detailed data on actual practice, but it
seems likely that most younger widows, especially without children, probably did eventually
remarry in most periods (with varying levels of enthusiasm or family approval), while most older
widows probably did not.
Not surprisingly, men were expected to remarry after a decent interval following the death of
a wife if she had not given birth to a son. If a man already had a son, remarriage was regarded as
largely a matter of his comfort and was left to his discretion. In general, growing old without a wife
was considered a greater tragedy for a man than growing old as a chaste widow was for a woman,
so "re-matchmaking" for elderly men was probably always a feature of Chinese life, just as it is
today.
Adopted Daughters-in-Law. When an unwanted additional girl was not killed, she might be
given or sold to a wealthier family to work as a serving girl. Alternatively, she might be transferred,
at any age from shortly after birth to about ten or eleven, to a poor family where she would be
raised as an "adopted daughter-in-law," intended to become the eventual wife of the family's son.
This avoided the cost of an engagement, extensive entertaining, and wedding gifts.
In most parts of China, such an "adopted daughter-in-law" was called a "daughter-in-law
raised from childhood" (tóngyǎng xí 童养媳 / 童養媳). Pending that marriage, she would work
essentially as a servant in the family, sometimes charged with the care of the little boy who would
later become her husband. When the wedding day arrived (selected by a fortune teller), it was only
very modestly celebrated. Like infanticide, these kinds of arrangements were obviously also
adaptations to extreme poverty.
Not surprisingly, given their association with poverty, such marriages were held in very low
esteem, and it is easy to see how they would have seemed disagreeable to the bride and groom.
The custom seems to have been most widespread in Taiwan (so much so that the term "minor
marriage" is sometimes used for it in English). In that region it was most common at the end of the
Qīng 清 dynasty and well into Taiwan's Japanese period (1895-1945).
Taiwanese adopted daughters-in-law are frequently discussed in English-language
anthropology, based especially on the life-long research of Arthur Wolf, who calls them "sim-pua
marriages," from the Taiwanese Hokkien term sim-pū-á, "little daughter-in-law" (usually written
息婦仔 or 媳婦仔). Wolf has argued that, in addition to the stigma of poverty, such marriages were
disliked by participants because, after they had spent all or part of their childhood together, mating
would have felt incestuous, at least subconsciously. The resistance to these matches by the bride
and groom and the very low fecundity and high divorce rates linked to them are taken by some
writers, following Wolf, as ethnographic evidence of a psycho-biological basis for the universal
taboo on brother-sister incest. In making this argument, some writers pay little attention to the
custom's low prestige deriving from its link to extreme poverty. (For more see Arthur P. Wolf &
Chieh-shan Huang 1980 Marriage and Adoption in China, 1845-1945. Stanford: Stanford U.
Press.)
VI. Adoption & Other Fictive Kinship
Given the critical importance of kinship in Chinese society (as elsewhere), it is not surprising
to find adoption and other forms of fictive kinship. Such arrangements can establish by cultural
convention relationships thought badly handled by fickle nature. (Kinship, after all, is a cultural idea
with a biological inspiration; where nature fails, culture makes the necessary repair.)
In Chinese, the syllable yì 义 / 義, "righteous," was frequently used as a prefix to designate
adoptive relationships. For example, an adopted son would be called an yìzǐ 义子 / 義子 or
"righteous son" and his father an yìfù 义父 / 義父 or "righteous father." However other terms are
found in local use, sometimes with more specialized meanings.
Adoption ranged from full responsibility for a child to a kind of superficial god-parenthood,
depending upon the period, place, circumstances, and personalities involved. In general, adoption
occurred when:
A child needed to be cared for.
An example might be a daughter born to a family too poor to raise her. Another example might be a
child whose parents died.
Someone needed a heir (1).
An example might be a couple who had failed to produce a son, and who adopted a son from a
relative. Such adoptions varied in actual detail, although they were nearly always boys. Such an
"heir adoption" was often purely nominal, the only actual transfer being the boy's eventual
obligation to tend to ancestral rites for the adopting parent. At the other end of the scale, a child
might be transferred to a new family, given a new surname, and cut off from any continuing
reltionship with his natal family. But many intermediate forms are found. For example, parties
would somtimes agree that the adoptive son's first child (or first son) would be filiated to the
adopting descent line and subsequent children to the adoptive son's original line (or vice versa).
Someone needed an heir (2).
Occasionally an heir was needed but no appropriate boy was available to be adopted, and a
couple lacked a daughter whose husband could be made their successor. In such a case, a girl
might be adopted, whose eventual husband would be treated as the son for purposes of continuing
the family line. In a kind of "pre-nup" contract, parties would agree to a division of future children
between descent lines for ritual purposes, more or less the way plans would be made in the case
of an adopted son, just mentioned.
A daughter-in-law was needed.
This is the comparatively rare case of the adopted daughter-in-law mentioned above.
An especially frail child was born.
Such a child could be reassigned to a friend or relative who had conspicuous success in raising
children. Often there was no actual change of residence, and the adoption can be considered
largely a matter of ritual. In some parts of China —my impression is especially western China—
this practice became quite common.
A friend of the family seemed likely to contribute to the welfare of the child.
Such a friend might be a prominent scholar or even a Buddhist priest, who was not expected to
raise the child, but merely to express concern about its general welfare and provide benign moral
guidance. Sometimes an affluent friend might have such a relationship and also contribute
materially to the child's welfare.
Sworn siblinghood was created by the parties themselves by means of a simple oath,
usually accompanied by made-up ceremonial trappings and a shared meal. The model for the oath
was one taken in a peach orchard during the Three Kingdoms period (220-280) by three
flamboyant warriors, who pledged to die together in shared loyalty to each other. (They are shown
here in a temporary festival chapel in Yúnchéng city, Shānxī province 山西省云城市.) (Oath Text)
Depending upon whether the group was male or female, they were thereafter described as
"sworn brothers" (jiébài xiōngdì 结拜兄弟 / 結拜兄弟) or "sworn sisters" (jiébài jiěmèi
结拜姐妹 / 結拜姐妹), although other terms also can be applied. I have written in more detail about
this in an article reproduced elsewhere on this web site. (Link) Sworn siblinghood could occur
when:
Two or more people (usually of the same sex unless the group was large) felt a special affinity to
each other.
Two or more people (usually of the same sex unless the group was large) joined in a common
cause (commercial, military, criminal, political, or other).
Communities required a code of laws, which could be incorporated into an oath among their
leaders. (Click here for an extreme example of such a case.)
A striking feature of sworn siblingship is that it can entail responsibilities between family
members of the parties involved, even though it may be undertaken, even by young people,
without consulting other family members. There is little research on this topic, but it may be one of
the very few spheres in which traditional Chinese society permitted autonomy in formalized social
relations for young people.
Picture sources:
DINGLE, Edwin J. 1911 Across China on foot.: life in the interior and the reform movement.
Briston: J.W. Arrowsmith, Ltd. (Chinese family, p. 132. Priest, p. 237. Graveside feast p. 273.)
KENDALL, Elizabeth 1913 A wayfarer in China: impressions of a trip across west China and
Mongolia. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. (Arch commemorating a virtuous widow, p. 168)
MacGOWAN, John 1912 Men and manners of modern China. London: T. Fisher Unwin. (Bridal
procession page 253; White Deer Monstery Priest, p. 145.)
MATIGNON, J. J. 1936 La Chine hermétique: superstitions, crime et misère. Paris: Librairie
Orientaliste Paul Geuthner. (Female infanticide, plate 26.)
PHILLIPS, E. C. 1882 Peeps into China: or the missionary’s children. London: Cassell.
(Newlyweds engraving, p. 185.)
WILLIAMS, S. Wells 1883 The middle kingdom: a survey of the geography, government, literature,
social life, arts, and history of the Chinese empire and its inhabitants. Revised edition. Vol 1. (Court
scene, page 504.)
Dīngcūn Folklore Museum, Shānxī Province 山西丁村民俗博物馆. (Matchmaker, from a museum
mural.)
Hong Kong Museum of Art. (God of longevity.)
Private collection. (Brothel token.)
Yúnchéng Municipal Guāndì 关帝 Festival, 1992. (Peach Orchard Oath.)