Family Lineage Organization and Social Change in Ming and Qing Fujian Family Lineage Organization and Social Change in Ming and Qing Fujian ZHENG ZHENMAN Translated by Michael Szonyi with the Assistance of Kenneth Dean and David Wakefield University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu Originally published in Chinese by the Hunan Educational Press in 1992 English translation 2001 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 010203040506654321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cheng, Chen-man. [Ming Ch’ing Fu-chien chia tsu tsu chih yu she hui pien ch’ien. English] Family lineage organization and social change in Ming and Qing Fujian / Zheng Zhenman ; translated by Michael Szonyi, with the assistance of Kenneth Dean and David Wakefield. p. cm. ISBN 0–8248–2333–8 (alk. paper) 1. Family—China—Fujian Sheng. 2. Fujian Sheng (China)—Social conditions. I. Title. HQ684.Z9 F843 2001 306.85'0951'245—dc21 00–061604 University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Designed by Kenneth Miyamoto Printed by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group Contents List of Illustrations vii Ming and Qing Reign Periods ix Terms for Measures and Money xi Translator’s Preface 1 1. Introduction 21 2. Family Structure and the Household Development Cycle 31 3. A Basic Typology of Lineage Organization 71 4. The Development Process of Lineage Organization 143 5. Family Lineage Organization and Social Change 268 6. Conclusion 325 Notes 329 List of Characters 353 Bibliography 357 Index 367 v Illustrations Maps 1 Fujian Province in the Qing Dynasty 18 2 Taiwan in 1885 20 Figures 1.1 Basic Typology of Family Lineage Organization 26 1.2 Relationship between Different Family Lineage Forms 27 1.3 Family Lineage Development Process 28 1.4 Model of Family Lineage Organization Forms and Development 29 2.1 Potential Development Cycles of Different Household Structures 48 3.1 Organizational Structure of the Su of Pucheng 77 3.2 Inheritance and Control-Subordination Lineage Organizations of the Wang of Beixiang 98 3.3 Organizational Structure of the Zou of Longzu 125 3.4 Organizational Structure of the Li of Liancheng 138 4.1 Organizational Structure of the Zu of Tunshan 163 4.2 Genealogical Chart of the Ge of Huangxi 173 4.3 Genealogical Chart of the Zhu of Qianjiang 225 4.4 Estates and Organizations of the Xiao of Shetou and Tianzhou 249 Tables 1.1 Equivalency Chart of Household Structure Terminology 5 2.1 Maximum Expansion of Sixty Households in Qing Taiwan 58 vii viii Illustrations 2.2 Household Structure in Qing Taiwan 69 3.1 Tablets Entered into the Ancestral Halls of the Li of Wenchuan 140 4.1 Distribution of Households by Surname in Chong’an County 145 4.2 Structure of the Liao Residentially Dispersed Lineage in Shanghang and Yongding Counties 183 4.3 Village Surname Structure in Houguan County 188 4.4 Founding Ancestors of the Major Surnames of Min County 189 4.5 Coastal Evacuation of Fujian in the Early Qing 214 4.6 Tablets in the Great Descent-line Hall of the Huang of Xianxi 239 4.7 Surname Distribution and Native Places of the Taiwanese Population 244 4.8 Share Ownership in the Hall of Fragrant Ancestry of the Xiao of Shetou and Tianzhong 251 5.1 Corporate Property in Fujian at the Time of Land Reform 309 Ming and Qing Reign Periods Ming Qing Hongwu 1368–1398 Shunzhi 1644–1661 Jianwen 1399–1402 Kangxi 1662–1722 Yongle 1403–1424 Yongzheng 1723–1734 Hongxi 1425 Qianlong 1735–1795 Xuande 1426–1435 Jiaqing 1796–1820 Zhengtong 1436–1449 Daoguang 1821–1850 Jingtai 1450–1456 Xianfeng 1851–1861 Tianshun 1457–1464 Tongzhi 1862–1874 Chenghua 1465–1487 Guangxu 1875–1907 Hongzhi 1488–1505 Xuantong 1908–1911 Zhengde 1506–1521 Jiajing 1522–1566 Longqing 1567–1572 Wanli 1573–1619 Taichang 1620 Tianqi 1621–1627 Chongzhen 1628–1644 ix Terms for Measures and Money A bewildering range of local terms for weights and measures appear in these texts, and it is not always possible to find a modern equiva- lent. Moreover, the meaning of the terms, and the ratios of correspon- dence between them also varied greatly according to time and place. All of the figures below should be treated as approximations. Area: 1 mu =7,260 square feet or 0.14 acre 1 mu =10 fen =100 li =1,000 hao =10,000 si 100 mu =1 qing Because these ratios did not vary, measures of area in the text have been converted into decimal units of mu and qing. The situation is made more complex because plot sizes in Fujian were often expressed in terms of a measure of volume corresponding to the amount of seed that should be planted. Capacity: 1 picul (shi/dan) =67 liters or 99 quarts 1 picul =4 baskets luo( ) =10 pecks (dou)=17 boxes (tong) =100 pints (sheng) Weight: 1 picul (shi/dan) =133 lbs 1 picul =100 catty jin( ) =16 taels (liang) Length: 1 li =1/3 mile 1 zhang =3.581 meters or 12 feet 6 inches 1 zhang =10 chi xi xii Terms for Measures and Money Money: Value is expressed in three main ways in texts translated here. 1. In terms of silver: 1 tael (liang) =37.8 grams of silver 1 tael =10 mace qian( ) =10 candareen (fen) 2. In terms of silver coin: 1 silver dollar (yuan) =10 jiao Many types of silver dollars were in use in Ming, Qing, and Republican China. Two of the most common terms used were the big silver dollar (da yuan) and the foreign silver dollar (yang yuan). 3. In terms of copper coin (wen) Translator’s Preface The important and complex role of agnatic kinship in the history of Chinese local society must have been impressed on Zheng Zhenman since his youth in a village in Putian, where stately ancestral halls and rows of huge courtyard-style family dwellings have survived the tur- moil of the Maoist period. In Family Lineage Organization and Social Change in Ming and Qing Fujian, Zheng outlines a new model of the history of agnatic kinship in Chinese history. He begins by build- ing a typology of household and lineage organizations and a struc- tural model for the relationship between the two. Next, he considers the internal development cycles of households and lineages in different historical contexts, elucidating the impact of geographical and histor- ical factors on the development of the Chinese lineage. He then links the emergence of lineage society to broader trends in Chinese eco- nomic, political, and cultural history. Zheng’s work will strike Western readers by its strong empirical basis, and its use of rich and complex local documents, particularly genealogies, and also contracts of land sale and household division, stone inscriptions, official documents, and the writings of local elites. These sources provide a candid and little-known commoner’s perspec- tive on the crucial issues of everyday life that intrigue the social histo- rian: how did families or lineage organizations avoid taxes, corvee labor, or military conscription? How did a family prevent dissolution, given the principle of partible inheritance? How did individuals, house- holds, and lineages respond to the growing commercialization of the Chinese economy from the mid-Ming to Qing dynasties? Was capital- ism incompatible with the Chinese lineage, or did the lineage possess the flexibility to transform itself into an efficient economic investment organization? The wealth of source materials gathered over the course 1 2 Zheng Zhenman of ten years of fieldwork and translated here permits new and more comprehensive answers to these questions, and provides a broader his- torical context for research by modern anthropologists. The use of these types of materials for historical research also presents new meth- odological challenges that will be of interest to historians not just of China but also of other societies. In the late 1970s, Zheng was a member of one of the first cohorts to return to the universities after the Cultural Revolution, studying history at Xiamen University, where Fu Yiling and Yang Guozhen were teaching the collection and analysis of local documents. Their students would later spread throughout the universities of southern China and lead a profound rethinking of many aspects of Ming and Qing social and economic history. In the 1980s, Zheng Zhenman traveled widely throughout Fujian, gathering documents and writing about some cen- tral issues in the history of the Ming and Qing: the processes and in- stitutions of local society; the relationship between local society and the state, and the relationships between economics, ideology or norms, and behavior. His ideas were first introduced in the pages of the journal Chinese Social and Economic History Research, published by the his- tory department at Xiamen, where Zheng continues to teach. Family Lineage Organization and Social Change in Ming and Qing Fujian, which originated as Zheng’s 1989 doctoral thesis and was published in 1992, is a synthesis and further development of this historical project. It relies on new sources and comes to new conclusions about society in the late imperial period and, perhaps most importantly, offers readers a contemporary Chinese perspective on central issues in Chinese history. The Scholarly Context: Chinese and Western Scholarship on Household and Lineage Zheng Zhenman is a product of a different intellectual tradition from that which informs most Western-language work on the Chinese household and lineage, and it is therefore useful both to set his work in its own context and to discuss briefly its relation to the Western- language literature.