The Traditional Chinese Family &

Lineage
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.
For the text of the family-related passages of the late imperial legal
code, click here. For underpinnings (or reflections) of family life in the
words used in Chinese philosophy, click here. Occasional additional
links are provided further down the page.
This page uses simplified characters, printed in red. When the
traditional and simplified Chinese orthographies differ, the traditional
equivalents are added in blue.

Page Outline

I.

The Family

II.

Descent Lines, Lineage, & Clans

III.

People Not in Families

IV.

Marriage

V.

Sexuality

VI.

Adoption & Other Fictive Kinship

I. The Family
Definition: The traditional Chinese family, or ji (colloquial:
jitng ), 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 budgetand (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 ningji ) and affiliated to her husband's
family (her pji ), a transition always very clearly symbolized
in local marriage customs, despite their variation from one region
to another.
Reverence was paid to ancestors (zxin ). 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" (Gu w r jn, ji w r
zh .) 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" nn zn, n bi 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 xio (colloquial:
xioshn / ), 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-inlaw'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 Wf , 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 theTwenty-Four Filial Examplars, available elsewhere on
this web site.Link)
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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" (dozh mio ), and a man who married uxorilocally
was (and is) referred to as a "superfluous husband"
(zhux / ), even though he was, obviously, considered
necessary.

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.

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 (fnji ) 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" (fn ).
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 offsite.
Ancestor veneration was also
practiced at grave sites,
and the solar (!) festival of
Qngmng (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.

This means that it ideally included a descent line of men and their
wives and children. The usual Chinese term was simply "big
family" (dji , colloquial: djitng ). 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.
Return to top.

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 z (colloquial
jiz ), which tends to add to confusion. (Caution: The syllable
z that refers to a descent group is different from the syllable
z 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 Wng, Woman Named Chn, 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, Cantonesespeaking 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" (tng ) 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" (jishn / ), 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 single-lineage 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" (fng ) 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.

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 (fng) 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 Yngzi 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 mutualaid 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.
Return to top.

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 Daoist monasticism
was much less common. 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 Sh / , the first syllable

of the full name of the Shakyamuni Buddha

(Shjimun / ). 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" xio shm / )

Unwed, divorced, abused, or abandoned women, who took

partial, reversable vows and were usually called
zhig / , literally "vegetarian orphans." Zhig
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 zhig later in life. (Hsiu-kuen
Fan TSUNG 1977 Moms, Nuns And Hookers: Extrafamilial Alternatives
for Village Women in Taiwan. Ph.D. dissertation, Antropology, UCSD.)
Return to top.

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 ningji ) 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 1890, 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 in-marrying 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 (mirn ) were
(and are) a constant feature of the Chinese social scene.

Th
e
moder
n
painti
ng at
left
shows
an
eligibl
e girl
in
about
1900
servin
g tea
to a
profes
sional
match
maker, 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 self-presentation 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 Hngning , 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)
Age Differences. The ideal age for engagement and marriage has
varied over time and space, although it has nearly always been believed
that the bride should ideally be slightly younger than the groom.
Although data are lacking, it seems likely that competition between
matchmakers could depress the age of engagement in some areas,
sometimes into early childhood, and that socioeconomic stress (war,
famine, or simply the cost of an unexpected funeral) could lead to
deferral of marriage for at least some people.

Two factors seem especially likely to have produced mismatches

between husband wife. One was the desire of older men for younger
brides or concubines. A man willing to pay a high brideprice or accept a
low dowry was in a good position to be matched to a girl of modest
means who was much younger than he.
The second factor was that in some cases a girl might be wed to a
little boy in the hope that she would help in raising him. (This seems to
have been especially frequent with adopted daughters-in-law, described
below underadoption.)
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 (Q Ch )
As Phrased in Imperial Law

Seen From a Modern Corporate Standpoint

She is insubordinate to a parent-in-law.

(b shn fm / )

She is insubordinate to authority.

She fails to bear a son.

(w z / )

She fails in the main job for which she was hired.

She is lewd and vulgar.

(ynp )

She attracts unfavorable comment and offends clients.

She is envious.
(jw )

She sows discord among the staff.

She is foully diseased.

(j / )

She is not able to perform her assigned duties.

She is talkative.
(dukush )

She reveals company secrets to outsiders.

She is inclined to theft.

(qido )

She pilfers company property.

Three Protections Against Divorce(Sn Bch )

As Phrased in Imperial Law

Seen From a Modern Corporate

Standpoint

She has nowhere to return to.

(yusuq wsugu
/ )

Enough time has passed that it is cruel to turn

her out.

She already observed full mourning for a parentin-law.

(gnggng snnin zhi sng
/ )

She has passed probation and earned job

security.

The family was poor when she entered and is

now rich.
(xin pnjin hu fgu
/ )

She has been a significant contributor to

corporate success.

(This famous list is not always identically worded. This version is from Le P. Guy
BOULAIS 1924Manuel 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
q (colloquial fq / ) and a secondary wife (concubine), who
might be called by a variety of terms, usually involving the syllable
qi . (In modern Chinese a wife is normally referred to as an
irn / or a titi , while a concubine is referred to as a
"little titi" .)
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. Tradi
tional China always
honored "chaste
widows" or
guf / ),
literally "lonely wives,"
who, on the death of a
husband (or fianc),
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 (zhnji pifng / ), some of them
quite elaborate. (The photo here was taken in Schun 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.

Return to top.

V. Sexuality
Traditional Chinese society was as prudish about sex as any other
society, but since the population reproduced itself it is hard to believe
that very many people were fooled by the
rhetoric.
The Confucian view was that sex
properly occurred between married people
and was for the purpose of producing heirs.
Beyond that it was undignified.
The Daoist view was that it was
probably dangerous unless accomplished
using various esoteric techniques (when it
could prolong life).
The Buddhist view was that it tended to distract one from the
business of improving one's karma.
In short, no respectable philosophical school advocated unrestrained
whoopee-making. But, as anywhere else, a lot of whoopee was, of
course, made. (The "coin" shown here purports to be a copy of a late
dynastic brothel token, with suggested sexual positions molded into it.)
Sexual Intercourse. Sexual intercourse was traditionally considered
dangerous for men, since they lost semen, which was identified as a
man's "yng-essence" and was thought to be a non-renewable resource
necessary for life, a belief that is still widespread. (Daoist longevity
exercises involved attempts to avoid ejaculation and instead, through
meditation, to recirculate semen up the spine and into the top of the
head. Appropriately enough, the "god of
longevity" is represented in art with a vertically
elongated head.)
Folklore includes tales of lonely scholars
seduced by maidens who turn out to be yngsucking she-devils, often transformations of
dreaded fairies whose real form is that of a fox. It
is not clear what level of worry the prospect of
losing their yng essence would actually have

stimulated in most young men. The introduction of an unknown bride into

a young groom's life may have been somewhat more traumatic for some
because of this belief. But clearly, rampant promiscuity was not
something that one boasted of, at least in the presence of folklorists.
Extramarital Sex & Homosexuality. Since marriages were usually
(and ideally) by parental arrangement, the sexual attractiveness of the
spouses (at least to each other) was at best a very secondary
consideration. So was their emotional or intellectual compatibility. This is
not to say that married people didn't love each other, but their love was
expected to grow up over years of association as spouses, not to be an
initial or immediate infatuation . The modern expression for this is "wed
first, love afterward" (xin jihn, hu
lini / ). Unfortunately, "afterward" could be
a long time coming, and it should not surprise us if many people believed
there was greener grass in other fields.
A woman was not free to engage in extramarital sexual liaisons
(although of course they did occur sometimes), since children she might
bear were to be the family heirs and hence should not be fathered by
outsiders. However there was no similar constraint on men, whose extramarital sexual affairs were usually regarded as unfortunate but as
significant only if they threatened to drain family wealth away from
legitimate claimants. If they fathered (and acknowledged) children, these
might be subordinate to "legitimate" children, but were often more or less
successfully assimilated into the man's family.
This tolerance comprehended both heterosexual and homosexual
affairs, it appears, and some of the warm friendships and sworn
brotherhoods celebrated in Chinese poetry, folklore, and history were
almost certainly homosexual relationships. (The compact language of
Chinese verse can easily leave the gender of both speaker and lover
unclear.) Although it was not (and still is not) feasible for homosexuals to
establish marriages and households together, intensely affectionate
same-sex companionship was ignored or even admired so long as
familial obligations were also observed.
(I do not know of a study of family values among Chinese
homosexuals similar to the one mentioned about prostitutes and nuns;
there is some hint that family values in this group today are largely
mainstream, and that, when a gay person is in an arranged or reluctantly
accepted heterosexal marriage, his or her emotional investment in
offspring somewhat offsets the absence of sexual attraction to the
assigned spouse.)

Today, there is still a strong concern to maintain descent lines (and

support of elderly parents), and this still normally requires that gay men
(known colloquially as "comrades" or tngzh ) marry women and
father children, usually concealing their sexual preference in order to
remain marriageable. The wife of a tngzh is called a tngq , and
such marriages are referred to as tngq marriages. The descent-line
argument should perhaps be less compelling for lesbian women, but it
appears that they too enter heterosexual marriages in the interest of
social conformity.
One 2012 estimate, by the director of the Chinese affiliate of Parents
and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) (Tngxnglin Qnyu
Hu ), a gay-support group, is that about 90% of gay
Chinese youths hide their homosexuality and enter heterosexual
marriages to avoid disapproval by their families (The Economist 120915,
p. 42).
(Some of my students have suggested that open endorsement of
gay marriage for men could help alleviate the imbalance in numbers of
marriage-age men and women in modern China caused by the
combination of the one-child policy and selective abortion of female
fetuses. This is logical, and arguably could even provide better old-age
security for the parents of both partners, but in China there appears to
be little support for such an idea.)
Infanticide & Its
Alternatives.Contraception and
abortion were both practiced, but
both were dangerous and
unreliable. Since boys could
carry on the family descent line
and girls could not, boys were
considered more valuable
children, and if families simply
could not afford additional
mouths to feed, they sometimes
sold newborn girls or killed them,
typically by drowning them. This
practice was considered
outrageous, and various religious
and other moral societies carried
out a constant propaganda war against it, the picture here is from a
tract condemning it. However, the grinding poverty that underlay

infanticide was widely acknowledged, and poverty was inevitably the

pretext provided by families caught practicing it. (For an interesting
condemnation of the practice by the XIth-century poet and essayist S
Dngp / , click here.) (Click me.)
Today abortion is much safer than in the past and has become
routine in China, partly in response to the famous "One-Child Policy." It
is technically illegal to identify the sex of a fetus in order to abort girls but
not boys, however the greater number of boys than girls being born
suggests that selective abortion is common. In Taiwan (and Japan)
aborted fetuses are sometimes believed to become restless ghosts
(called ynglng / ), and specialized exocists and mortuaries
have grown up to attend to them. (The most extensive study is Marc L.
MOSKOWITZ 2001 The Haunting Fetus. Honolulu: U. of Hawai'i Press.)
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" (tngyng x / ).
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 Qng 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-p-, "little daughter-in-law" (usually

written or ). 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.)
Return to top.

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 y / , "righteous," was frequently used
as a prefix to designate adoptive relationships. For example, an adopted
son would be called an yz / or "righteous son" and his father
an yf / 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 an 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 "prenup" 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 (220280) 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 Ynchng city, Shnx
province .) (Oath Text)
Depending upon whether the group was male or female, they were
thereafter described as "sworn brothers" (jibi
xingd / ) or "sworn sisters" (jibi
jimi / ), 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.
Return to top.

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 hermtique: superstitions, crime et misre. Paris: Librairie
Orientaliste Paul Geuthner. (Female infanticide, plate 26.)
PHILLIPS, E. C. 1882 Peeps into China: or the missionarys 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.)
Dngcn Folklore Museum, Shnx Province . (Matchmaker, from a museum
mural.)
Hong Kong Museum of Art. (God of longevity.)
Private collection. (Brothel token.)
Ynchng Municipal Gund Festival, 1992. (Peach Orchard Oath.)