Adoption and the Construction of Kinship in Late Imperial China
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Getting an Heir Getting an Heir Adoption and the Construction of Kinship in Late Imperial China ANN WALTNER Open Access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. Licensed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 In- ternational (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits readers to freely download and share the work in print or electronic format for non-commercial purposes, so long as credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require per- mission from the publisher. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. The Cre- ative Commons license described above does not apply to any material that is separately copyrighted. Open Access ISBNs: 9780824879952 (PDF) 9780824879969 (EPUB) This version created: 16 May, 2019 Please visit www.hawaiiopen.org for more Open Access works from University of Hawai‘i Press. © 1990 University of Hawaii Press All rights reserved Contents Acknowledgments v Introduction vi 1 Procreation, Adoption, and Heredity 1 2 Attitudes toward Adoption 35 3 Case Studies 68 4 Fiction 101 Conclusions 127 Notes 131 Glossary 189 Bibliography 200 About the Author 230 iv Acknowledgments I would like to thank the many people who have helped me with this project since its inception as a doctoral dissertation many years ago. The members of my dissertation com- mittee—Frederic Wakeman, Wolfram Eberhard, and Tu Wei- ming—provided encouragement and assistance. Suzanne Cahill and Victoria Vernon, then fellow graduate students, made me a better writer and a better critic through our monthly meetings as we wrote our dissertations. Other friends and colleagues have commented on this manuscript in a variety of forms: Char- lotte Furth, Robert Hymes, Susan Mann, the late Sharon Nolte, and numerous others. Librarians at the University of Minnesota, University of California at Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Chicago, and the National Central Library in Taipei all provided assistance. A special word of thanks is due to the interlibrary loan staff at the University of Minnesota for their help during the final revisions. Financial as- sistance for this project was provided by grants from the Uni- versity of California at Berkeley and the American Council of Learned Societies. The graduate school of the University of Min- nesota has provided, through a McKnight-Land Grant Profes- sorship, extraordinarily generous research support. And finally, I would like to thank my research assistants, Peter Ditmanson and Hsü Pi-ching, who during a summer of careful checking and spirited discussion made this a better book. v Introduction On the fifteenth day of the seventh month of 1524, several hundred officials, including a number of the most important ministers of the Ming state, demonstrated at the Tso-shun gate to the Forbidden City in Peking to protest the Shih-tsung em- peror’s refusal to permit himself to be named the adopted son of the Hsiao-tsung emperor. While other residents of the capital busied themselves with preparations for the Ghost Festival, these officials risked careers and lives to protest what Shih- tsung insisted was a private decision. But in the imperial family, especially in regard to succession, there were no private deci- sions. And so the demonstrators, chanting, invoked the names of Shih-tsung’s imperial predecessors, both Hsiao-tsung, his immediate predecessor, and T’ai-tsu, the Ming founder. Court eunuchs, the guardians of peace and propriety in the inner sanctum of the palace, ordered the crowds to disperse. They would not. The eunuchs took the names of the demonstrators and arrested eight of them. As if the arrests were a signal, the remaining officials stormed the gates of the Forbidden City. Confucian decorum vanished as several hundred scholar-bu- reaucrats pounded on the gates and wailed. The pounding and wailing reverberated throughout the palace. The seventeen- year-old emperor, his patience exhausted, ordered the rest of the demonstrators to be arrested. In all, 134 men were de- tained. They were sentenced five days later, on the twentieth of the seventh month (August 19, 1524). Eight of the most im- portant leaders were exiled. The remainder were punished ac- cording to their rank. The salaries of those whose rank was the fourth degree or above were confiscated. Those whose rank was below the fourth degree were flogged. Sixteen of those flogged died as a result. A week later, punishments were inflicted on a vi Introduction second group of demonstrators. Three more men were exiled for life, and several more were reduced to the legal status of commoner. Another man died as a result of flogging. 1 This episode, known as the Ta li i, or Great Ritual Contro- versy, was a conjunction between public and private interests, between affairs of state and conceptions of family duty. At issue was, on the one hand, the orderly succession to the throne, and on the other hand, the duty owed by a son to his natural parents. The problem arose when the Wu-tsung emperor (r 1505–1521) died in 1521 without an heir. His will named his cousin, who reigned as the Shih-tsung emperor, as his suc- cessor. 2 But the Ming rules for succession, spelled out in the ancestral instructions of the founding emperor, did not permit succession by a cousin. The Ministry of Rites, under the lead- ership of the powerful Yang T’ing-ho (1459– 1529), advocated that Shih-tsung recognize Hsiao-tsung (r 1488–1505, the father of Wu-tsung) as his father and assume the role of Wu-tsung’s younger brother. Since the succession of a younger brother was permitted in the ancestral instructions, the succession would be ritually correct. And the posthumous adoption of Shih-tsung by Hsiao-tsung (his father’s brother) would have fulfilled the re- quirements of propriety: the adoption of a brother’s son was legally and ritually permitted. Indeed, there were precedents from both the Han and the Sung dynasties where adoption had been invoked to remedy a problem in the imperial succession. But were Shih-tsung to permit the adoption, he would be dimin- ishing the honor due his own father, the Prince of Hsing. The ritual status of father of the emperor would adhere to Hsiao- tsung. In the faction-ridden atmosphere of Ming court politics, the emperor’s position readily found bureaucratic adherents. Because of the emperor’s refusal to follow the recommendation of the Ministry of Rites, the controversy raged at court for three years. Finally, Shih-tsung simultaneously legitimized his succession and honored his father by granting his father the posthumous rank of emperor, with the name of Hsien Huang-ti. Factionalism, power politics, and self-aggrandizement all played a role in the Ritual Controversy. But it was also a dispute about filial piety and adoption. When the emperor was initially presented with the recommendations that he acknowledge the Hsiao-tsung emperor as father, he reportedly asked: “Can a man change parents so easily?” 3 When Chang Ts’ung (1475–1539) and Kuei O (d 1531), in supporting the emperor’s position, cited Mencius as saying “Heaven gives birth to creatures in such a way that they only have one root,” they were voicing a sen- vii Introduction timent about filiation and about loyalty that found resonance elsewhere. They interpreted this passage as meaning that for Shih-tsung (and by extension, for anyone) to perform rituals to two men as father was an offense against the course of nature. 4 Furthermore, in a memorial quoted in the dynastic history, Fang Hsien-fu (d 1544), a supporter of Chang Ts’ung’s position, wrote: “The rituals established by the former kings had their origin in human emotions (jen ch’ing).” 5 Thus, Fang implies, a ritual cannot run counter to human nature. A ritual that violates human nature is not a true ritual. Chang Ts’ung went so far as to suggest that the guide to correct behavior (li) lay in the human mind. 6 Yang T’ing-ho, on the other hand, argued that li lay not in the minds of men but in the words of texts. 7 A crucial text in this debate is the Kung-yang commentary to the Ch’un-ch’iu, a text purportedly from the hand of Confucius himself. Mao Ch’eng (1460–1523), the Minister of Rites, cited a passage from this text saying that he who succeeds (to property or to office) is in effect a son. Mao argued that, according to this principle, the Shih-tsung emperor ought to be adopted by his predeces- sor’s father. Furthermore, he suggested, following the interpre- tation of the Sung Neo-Confucian Ch’eng I, that one who had been adopted out ought to regard one’s own parents as aunt and uncle. 8 To be sure, the Ritual Controversy was politically motivated. But the debate as to how best to resolve the conflict between human emotion and the requirements of classical texts should the two conflict had been a major issue in Neo-Confu- cianism since the Sung dynasty. Indeed, many of the arguments in the Ming Ritual Controversy were aired during a Sung suc- cession controversy known as P’u-i. That controversy was re- solved in a compromise solution when Ying-tsung (r 1064–1067) recognized Jen-tsung as his father. But it was a solution that continued to arouse controversy. 9 These succession struggles were, in addition to everything else they were, arguments about loyalty, about filiation, and about the unalterable nature of the natural world. These issues found resonance in the wider debate on adoption: How can a man have two fathers? For what reasons may a man abandon the parents who bore him and transfer his loyalties to outsiders? The conflict between ritually correct succession and the duties imposed by blood kinship was acknowledged by private citizens as well as by emperors.