The breakup of extended families began with the destruction of the Zhou nobility by theWarring States, which tried to maximize the number of households providing taxes and adult male service. Qin in particular used tax policies to encourage the division of households and the establishment of the nuclear family as the basic social unit. The most common size for such households was five or six people. Early Han rulers continued this policy, and the small, nuclear family became the basic unit of residence and labor in Western Han society.
This policy was modified under the Eastern Han, when classicist theory and the cult of filial piety seriously influenced the court. The government acknowledged an ideal of multiple generations living together, though in practice this meant that families of brothers lived near one another (not in the same household) and perhaps were buried in a lineage graveyard. It produced a more integrated residential pattern without altering the nuclear family as the basic household unit. The great families stressed the importance of lineage in order to maintain alliances across numerous households, but the residential kin groups of the period consisted of husband and wife, children, and occasionally an elderly parent living in a household, with extended family living nearby in the case of great families.
Throughout early imperial China, kinship was marked by tension between the individual household and the patriline. This stemmed from a fundamental contradiction in the principles that defined these two domains.
The lineage or patriline, as described in the ritual classics and laid out in ancestral temples, was defined by transmission from father to son to son across the generations. It was a world of men that women entered only as adjuncts to their husbands. The household, in contrast, was defined primarily by the relationship of husband to wife, and secondarily by that of parents to children. It was a realm in which women wielded great influence as wives and even greater power as mothers.
The lineage was the textually sanctioned unit advocated by literati who took an interest in kin structures, but the household was the unit in which people actually lived and established kin ties. The contradictions between these two models affected every aspect of the Chinese family, and extended outward into the spheres of economics, politics, and religion.
Gender in the Lineage and Household
From the perspective of the classical texts, a household represented just one bead in a long string of ancestors traced back from senior male to senior male until reaching an original male ancestor. This lineage was defined by the relations of father to son and brother to brother. Women were outsiders, necessary for reproduction but otherwise aliens within the husband’s family. After marriage, a wife retained her natal surname and maintained links with her birth family, which were crucial for securing political alliances. But despite these natal ties, women were aliens in their birth homes as well. A daughter was not a permanent member of her father’s household; she married out and lived with her husband’s family. Even unmarried daughters who stayed at home generally did not inherit a share of the family land.1
This textual definition of a woman’s place in the patriline did not guide everyday practice, however. Inside the household, women held considerable power, which flowed primarily from a mother’s influence over her sons. In early imperial China the authority of age usually took precedence over the authority of gender, and filial obedience to both parents—his mother as well as his father—was a son’s highest obligation. Although a woman, according to the celebrated “three forms of obedience,” should always be subject to the men in her family, in actual Han households women commanded their sons, who were obliged to respect and obey them.2
A key demonstration of the authority of women can be found in the only surviving Han will, dating to 5 a.d. The will is written in the name of a widowed mother, who calls upon local officials as witnesses to validate it. She lists the members of the household and their relations, then dictates how the fields are to be distributed among her sons, and under what conditions the lands are to be held. The participation of officials as witnesses shows that the state regarded the widowed mother’s authority over the disposition of the family’s land as normal and proper. A similar case is recorded in a stone inscription erected in 178 a.d. that recounts how a widow surnamed Xu dictated the distribution of family land.3 In both cases, the supposed obligations of widows to obey their sons, as defined by ritual, had little impact on actual practice.
The will also reveals some of the difficulties introduced when a widow remarried, for the treatment of each son depended on the relation of their respective fathers to the widow allocating the inheritance. In this case, the threat was mitigated by the fact that the woman remained in the household of her first husband. Her subsequent husbands lived with her family, rather than the other way around. Consequently, the well-being of the first husband’s patriline—her highest concern according to the ritual texts—was not challenged. Just as the status of the sons depended on that of their father, so children of a second or third wife were always subordinate to those of the first.
Evidence of the mother’s power also figures in Han poetry. “The Peacock Flies Southeast,” written from the point of view of an oppressed daughter-in-law, narrates how her husband is controlled by his mother, who ultimately forces him to divorce his wife. Another poem concludes with a statement about an ideal woman: “When such a stalwart woman controls the house, she even surpasses a man.” A further indication of the power of women over their husbands is indicated in the “Song of the Orphan,” which describes a child forced to toil as a peddler after his uncle took over his upbringing upon the death of his parents. Brotherly devotion to the child’s dead father should have led to the proper treatment of a nephew, but the sister-in-law used her influence to undermine it.4
A more serious problem than the sister-in-law was the stepmother, who came into the household when a man remarried after the death of his first wife. That a second or third wife would persecute the children of her husband’s first marriage in order to advance her own biological children was so common that it was treated as a structural feature of the Chinese household. Anxiety over the problem of stepmothers and the care of children whose mother had died figured prominently in early Han stories and in Han art. Tales such as those of Min Sun and Jiang Zhangxun feature classic evil stepmothers. In the former, the stepmother persecutes the son of the first marriage until the father discovers her cruelty. In the latter, the mother attempts to kill the son after his father has died, until repeated failures convince her that Heaven is protecting the child.5
Given women’s supposed tendency to favor their own children, the exemplary woman is one who protects the offspring of the first wife even at the expense of her own child. This not only preserves the lineage hierarchy, in which the first wife’s offspring is senior, but more importantly signals a willingness to abandon her own interests, as embodied in her offspring.
Thus when the two sons of the “righteous stepmother of Qi” were found next to a murdered corpse, each confessed to protect the other. Unable to judge, the officials asked the stepmother to select the guilty party: Weeping, she replied, “Kill the younger.” An official asked, “The youngest son is the one people most love, yet now you desire to kill him. Why?” The mother replied:
"The younger one is my child; the elder is the son of the previous wife. When their father was ill and on the point of death he charged me, “Raise him [the elder] well and look after him.” I said, “I will.” Now having received a trust from him and agreed to it by saying, “I will,” how could I forget that trust and be faithless to the promise?
Moreover, to kill the elder and preserve the younger would be to abandon a public duty for the sake of a private love. To turn my back on my words and forget good faith would be to cheat the dead man. If I disregard my words, forget my pledge, and having already accepted [an obligation] then not keep faith, how can I live among men?"6
The king pardoned both sons out of respect for the woman’s devotion to duty, but this happy resolution does not soften the story’s harsh lesson. Celebrating a woman for choosing to kill her own child in order to protect her husband’s patriline, as indicated here in the appeal to the contradiction between “public duty” and “private love,” offers a chilling demonstration of the moral convolutions entailed in defining kin ties exclusively through male transmission.
So great was the suspicion of women that certain anecdotes celebrated choosing a brother’s lineage over a husband’s, simply because this entailed the woman’s rejection of her own affections and interests. Thus, when the virtuous aunt of Lu abandoned her own son to rescue her brother’s, she once again justified the action in terms of rejecting “private love” in the name of “public duty.” Similarly, a woman in Liang tried to rescue her elder brother’s son from a burning house, but accidentally picked up her own son. By the time she had discovered her mistake, the flames were too advanced for her to return and rescue her nephew. When her companions tried to stop her from leaping back into the flames, she exclaimed: “Bearing the name of unrighteousness, what face can I have to meet my brothers and the men of the capital? I want to throw my son back into the fire, but this would disregard a mother’s kindness. In this situation I can no longer live.” She then dashed into the flames and perished.7
A correlate of the threat posed by the stepmother or sister-in-law was the danger that a widowed mother might herself remarry. This issue was already engraved by the First Emperor on a stone atop Mount Guiji: “A woman who has a child, if she remarries, betrays the dead and is unchaste.”8 The issue of remarriage was of great importance in the Han, for any patriline could face loss or extinction if a widow remarried and transferred her loyalties to the new family. Understandably, the natal families of widows often encouraged them to remarry, in order to establish new alliances, and women themselves doubtless chose in some cases to wed again. In such an event, she would be pushed by her new family to favor her new husband’s sons over her sons from the previous marriage.
To avoid these difficulties, some texts argued that a woman should not remarry at all: “Good faith is the virtue of a wife. Once having been united with her husband she will not change for her entire life. Thus, if the husband dies she will not remarry.”9 The classic embodiment of this idea was the widow Gao Xing (“Lofty Conduct”) of Liang. Celebrated for her beauty, she was widowed young and refused to remarry. The king of Liang sent a minister with betrothal gifts to take her as his wife. She replied:
“I have heard that the duty of a wife is that once she has gone out to marry she will not change. Thereby she keeps intact the moral integrity of chastity and good faith. To forget the dead and run after the living is unfaithful. Perceiving honor [the king] to forget the humble [her first husband] is unchaste. One who abandons duty and follows profit loses all means of being human.” She took a mirror and knife and cut off her nose. She said, “I have become a mutilated person. I did not commit suicide because I could not bear for the children to be orphaned again. The king’s seeking me was for my beauty but now as this mutilated remnant I can probably escape.”10
This gruesome story is not an invention—the histories record cases where widows cut off ears, fingers, or nose to avoid remarriage. Some opted for suicide.
Kin structure, as depicted in these stories and in Han art, is the patriline formed by fathers and sons. The nuclear family—the dominant form of Han households—is fundamentally unsafe for the patriline because it incorporates women from outside. Relations with wives, in-laws, mothers, and stepmothers all threaten the sole reliable tie, that between father and son. Loyal to her natal family, to a future second husband, and to her biological children, a wife menaces both her spouse and his offspring. This is especially true of stepmothers, but all women are threats, even a mother, if she remarries after the death of her husband, or has too much influence over the behavior of her sons. The intensity of this suspicion of women is shown by the extraordinary acts of self-negation to which they are called in order to demonstrate their loyalty to a patriline. For male members of a patriline, physical mutilation and suicide were among the highest crimes, threats not only to the self but to the lineage. That women could have been celebrated for such actions shows their marginal position in classicist thinking.11
The wife in these stories stands in the same relation to the patriline as a household servant. An outsider tied to the kin group through the exchange of loyalty for employment or recognition, she is linked to the lineage in the same manner that assassins and ministers were tied to their lord in the Warring States period. It is no coincidence that the extreme acts by which the women in these stories prove themselves are the same self-negating acts by which exemplary assassins and loyal ministers of the Warring States proved their devotion to their lords.12
Fathers do not appear in these stories, and their responsibility to motherless orphans is never called a “public duty.” Fathers needed no such parables on proper behavior because they were both the constituents of the patriline and its beneficiaries. The private love of men for their sons (and concern for their material self-interest) coincided with their public duty. For women, on the other hand, love and duty were sometimes antithetical, and the former might have to be sacrificed to the latter. To the extent that the Han kin system followed the teachings of the classics, it forced women into the position of outsider, condemned them as morally deficient for being in that position, and then offered them the possibility of redemption through renouncing their emotions, abandoning their interests, and if necessary committing self-mutilation, infanticide, or suicide.13 In practice, women successfully subverted these teachings at every turn.
The most detailed evidence for the ability of women to pursue their own interests comes from accounts of the political power of imperial affines (relations by marriage). Just as mothers dominated private households, so dowager empresses wielded great authority during the Qin and Han empires. The First Emperor’s mother was a powerful presence at court during his youth. The Han founder’s widow also dominated the court and filled it with her kin. And Emperor Wu’s mother controlled the early years of his reign. Starting with its fourth emperor, the Eastern Han was ruled by a succession of boys whose courts were guided by their mothers and her kin, or by the eunuchs who shared inner chambers with the imperial women. In many cases, imperial wives or concubines controlled their adult husbands as well. Particularly notable is the case of Emperor Cheng (r. 33–7 b.c.), whose reign was dominated by his inability to produce a male heir but who, according to the histories, killed two such heirs because they threatened the position of his favorite wife.14
Domination by dowager empresses or wives was made possible by the shift of authority from the official bureaucracy to the emperor’s private chambers. With increasing concentration of power in the person of the emperor, the conduct of government business was moved from the outer offices and court assemblies into this “inner court.” Policy decisions, with their decrees and proclamations, came to be handled by those gathered around the emperor. At first, these were the private secretaries who made up the secretariat. In time, even greater influence was wielded by eunuchs who looked after the emperor’s bodily needs, or by the women of his harem and their kin. While none of these people had formal power, they controlled the conduct of business through immediate access to the person of the ruler.15 This pattern was repeated in the centuries following the Han, in which the secretariat became the officially recognized center of power, only to be supplanted by newly emergent offices in even closer physical proximity to the emperor.
Gender and the Spatial Structuring of Power
From earliest times, Chinese political power was articulated in terms of the authority of the inner over the outer. Temples, palaces, and houses in early China and throughout its history were walled on the outside, and the first buildings encountered after entering the gate were the more public ones where men conducted their business. Here “insiders,” that is, members of a family or the ruler and his household, would receive people from the outside. As a visitor moved toward the back, buildings became more “inner” and private, and access to them became more restricted. In a residential compound, these buildings would be the private chambers of the men and women of the house. In an imperial palace, these buildings would be the emperor’s living quarters, which in the Han dynasty became the locus of the inner court.16
The earliest known expression of this pattern is theWestern Zhou temple/palace compound at Fengchu in Shaanxi province.17 The entry gate in the south-facing wall led into a front courtyard, along the north side of which was the front hall. Behind this hall were two smaller courtyards divided by a corridor that led to the back hall where the temple was located. Rows of side chambers lined the east and west walls. Thus, a single central axis through the gate, across the courtyard, up into the front hall, down through a corridor between the two rear courtyards, and finally to the back hall moved the ritual procession inward toward the temple at the rear of the complex.
The temple itself was arranged with the tablets of the most recent ancestors nearest the front, and with the shrine dedicated to the founding ancestor at the very back. Consequently this inward movement marked a movement backward in time as well, from the present day through the sequence of ancestors, to the origins of the ruling house. Since the authority of the Zhou kings was based on their access to the spirit power of potent ancestors, this movement inward toward the ancestors was also a movement to both the origin and center of the dynasty’s power.18
The structural principles of this early Zhou temple complex provided the template for later Chinese palaces and dwellings, at least among the elite. Passages in the Records of Ritual, the Transmissions of Master Zuo (Zuo zhuan), and other Warring States texts describe dwelling compounds formed along a similar horizontal axis moving from an outer gate to private chambers, through alternating buildings and courtyards. While no examples of Han houses survive, models of individual buildings have been found in tombs, and images of walled compounds composed of alternating courtyards and buildings appear on several tomb walls.19
The significance of such a structure is suggested in a story in the Analects (Lun yu) telling of Confucius’ encounter with his son in the family home:
"Chen Kang asked Bo Yu [Confucius’ eldest son], “Have you learned anything different [from what we have]?” Bo Yu replied, “Not yet. Once he [Confucius] was standing alone, and as I hastened respectfully past the courtyard he said, ‘Have you studied the Odes?’ I replied, ‘Not yet.’ He said, ‘If you do not study the Odes, you will be unable to properly speak.’ So I withdrew and studied the Odes. On another day when he was standing alone, I hastened respectfully past the courtyard and he said, ‘Have you studied the Rites?’ I replied, ‘Not yet.’ He said, ‘If you do not study the Rites, you will be unable to properly stand.’ So I withdrew and studied the Rites. I have learned these two things from him.” Chen Kang withdrew and happily said, “Having asked one thing, I have learned three. I have learned about the Odes and the Rites, and I have also learned how the true gentleman keeps his son at a distance.”20
Confucius as the ideal father stands in majesty overlooking the courtyard, like the ruler at a court assembly. His son respectfully scurries along the side corridors, speaking only when addressed. As Chen Kang notes, the lesson on the proper relations of father and son is clear, and it is mapped out in the placement and movement of people through the dwelling compound.
During the Warring States and early imperial periods, political power was walled off and rendered invisible, or visible only in the walls and towers that were its outer manifestation. This was true particularly of rulers, who for security and the cultivation of an aura of spiritual power were hidden from the outside world. In the case of the First Emperor, this tendency toward withdrawal and invisibility was treated as a sign of despotism and megalomania. But by the Western Han, the characterization of imperial power as hidden or “forbidden” to ordinary people was routine and built into the spatial organization of the empire. Power was hidden behind not one wall but a whole series: those of the city, the palace district, the palace itself, the court, and finally the inner chambers. Passage through each wall was controlled, and each movement closer to the center was reserved for a smaller number of people. Power and prestige were marked by the ability to move ever inward into the holy of holies that was the imperial presence.
At the same time, gender in China was becoming spatially structured according to a logic of outer and inner. However, it was the theoretically powerless women who occupied the inner spaces, while men were assigned to the outer public realm.21 Thus, the Chinese world was marked by a contradictory set of equations in which power was located in the hidden depths of the interior, women were also located in the interior, but women were to be excluded from power. The institutional expression of this contradiction was that as power flowed inward toward the hidden emperor, it flowed away from male officials in the outer public realm and into the hands of women, their kin, and the eunuchs who shared their physical space. This reality, which represented a radical disjunction between the formal institutions of power and its actual locations, always came as a shock and a scandal, despite its regular recurrence.
This spatial ordering of political authority linked power with interiority, secrecy, and origins. Since women occupied the deepest interior and the place of greatest secrecy, and since they were the physical origins of male heirs, their place within the structure of the Chinese household represented both a restriction and a source of power. It was a hidden power, however, kept secret rather than acknowledged. Whenever knowledge of this hidden power seeped out into the public realm, it was greeted with outrage.
Children in Early Imperial Life
The Han dynasty was the first period in which childhood became a topic of conscious literary reflection.22 Several Western Han authors—Jia Yi, Dong Zhongshu, and Liu Xiang—wrote about “fetal instruction” as a means of influencing the moral development of the child at the earliest possible opportunity. This idea, first articulated in theWarring States text Words of the States (Guo yu) and elaborated by Jia Yi as a means of assuring the development of the imperial heir, stipulated that the mother should be guided by proper ritual in what she saw, ate, heard, said, and did while pregnant. If she was “stimulated” by good things, then the child would be good; if by bad things, then bad. This emphasis on the decisive importance of origins probably grew out of the argument in the Canon of Change (Yi jing) and in military texts that a process could best be determined at the moment of its inception. Although it is unclear how widespread the practice of fetal education might have been, a manual on its techniques found in a Mawangdui tomb dated 168 b.c. indicates that at least the elite attempted to employ it.
During the Eastern Han, theories about child development and the ability of education to alter inborn endowments spread widely. At a time when a classicist education was the approved avenue to office and when powerful families dominated court appointments through control of recommendations, scholars debated the relative importance of heredity, early experience, and book learning in forming character. Biographies of leading officials and scholars routinely included long discussions of childhood actions or experiences that presaged or led to later eminence.23
Great emphasis was placed on literary prodigies who could recite and discourse on the classics in their early teens or even younger—Zhang Ba is described as understanding the principles of yielding and filial piety at the age of two, and Zhou Xie displayed such virtues at three months. These examples led to debates about the significance of early achievements as signs of later intellectual and moral development. Critics of the cult of prodigies argued that “small vessels are quickly filled.”24
The following account of childhood not only casts light on the ideal of education and scholarship in the Eastern Han but also the relations between adults and children in the period:
"In the third year of jianwu [a.d. 27] Wang Chong was born. As a child when playing with his companions, he disliked all deception or bullying. His comrades loved to trap birds, catch cicadas, gamble for money, and play on stilts. He alone refused to do so, to the amazement of his father. At six, they began to teach him texts. He was respectful, honest, kind, and obedient, completely mastering ritual reverence. He was grave, earnest, and quiet, resolved on becoming an official. His father never beat him, his mother never criticized him, and fellow villagers never scolded him. When he was eight years old, he went to school, where there were over a hundred small boys. For offenses they had to bare the right shoulder, and were whipped for bad writing. Chong’s writing progressed daily, and he never committed any offense. When he could write, his teacher gave him the Analects and the Canon of Odes. He daily read a thousand characters."25
Those under seven sui (six years old in Western terms) were exempted from the poll tax, and this seems to have been the standard division between infancy and childhood. Children were said to begin developing understanding at this age and could then enter school (although prodigies were an exception to this rule).26 One did not become an adult until the age of twenty (for males), at which point a capping ceremony was held. Even here there were later demarcations, such as registration for military service that in some times and places was done at twenty-three or twenty-six.
Disaster relief edicts in the Eastern Han specified that aid would go only to those above the age of six, and the death of a child was not as significant as that of an adult. In the Qin code it was legal to kill a physically handicapped child. An Eastern Han stele to an adult named Zheng Gu refers to an older brother who died at the age of seven sui but is never mentioned by name and does not receive his own stone. He appears only as an incident in the funerary account of his younger brother. Children who died under the age of six were categorized as “early deaths for whom no mourning garments are worn.” Deaths between the age of six and twenty, the age at which the attainment of full humanity is acknowledged with the capping ceremony, were divided into three categories of “early death.”27
Children could not participate fully in the funerals of others because, according to Zheng Xuan, a Han commentator, children “are not yet full people.” While this statement represents how families formally viewed their children, in actual practice parents no doubt felt great affection for individual sons and even daughters and were not as callous as the ritual texts suggest. This idea is supported by Eastern Han stone inscriptions devoted to dead children which depict them playing with their toys and grievously mourn their deaths.28
As for children’s relations to their parents, the key term in Han sources is filial piety (xiao). This entailed honoring and obeying one’s parents when they were alive, sacrificing to them after their death, and adhering to their guidance throughout one’s life. Such conduct was held to be natural, as stated in the Canon of Filial Piety (Xiao jing): “Affection for parents grows up in early childhood, but in the act of nourishing parents daily become more severe. The sages proceeded from the severity to teach respect, and from the affection to teach love . . . This was the root.
The Way of father and son is Heaven-conferred nature, and also the principle of duty between ruler and subject.” Filial piety was thus the basis of being a proper subject. Not surprisingly, the Canon of Filial Piety was the first text studied in Han schools. In addition to inculcating the fundamental virtues of the son and the subject, it had the advantage of using only three hundred and eighty-eight different characters—all of them fairly common.29
The temple names of all Han emperors were preceded by the epithet xiao, indicating that they too were obedient sons. Given the Western Han’s notion that the empire belonged to the Liu clan, and the Eastern Han’s emphasis on filial piety as the foundation of all virtues, this routine application of the adjective “filially pious” to all emperors emphasized that they were members of a lineage and as such bound to revere and follow the precedents established by earlier rulers. The ultimate target of all imperial filial piety, and the supreme source of authoritative precedent, was the founder Gaozu. He alone did not receive the epithet xiao.
The emperor also had to be filial toward Heaven, whose “son” or “child” he was. Often during the Eastern Han, the emperor as “child of Heaven” was indeed a child himself, owing filial piety and obedience to a regent and a dowager empress. Some courtiers manipulated the imperial succession by enthroning an infant or young child who served as a puppet and figurehead for powers ruling from “behind the screen.” These were generally the maternal relatives of the emperor, specifically his mother (or maternal grandmother) and her brothers. In this way, the “outer relatives,” or relatives by marriage, dominated the imperial household and threatened the imperial patriline at its very core.
Adult Women and Men
As the position of women was discussed at length above, I shall here examine only the most prominent case of female authority, the history of the imperial house of Liu. With the death of Gaozu, his empress became regent in 188 b.c., and from the beginning she was depicted by Han loyalists as an unlawful usurper. She never declared herself ruler, but she issued edicts with unquestioned authority and elevated her own kin to the highest posts. When she died eight years later, her relations unsuccessfully attempted to eliminate the Liu house, thus causing her to become a watchword for treacherous outer relations.
Not every empress dowager took advantage of her station to this extent, but it became a fixed precedent that she approved the new heir in the absence of a clear claimant. The empress dowager also selected the regent of a child emperor, if she did not fill the role herself, and she usually chose a man from her own clan. This was howWang Mang rose to power in the Western Han. In the Eastern Han, succession became a constant worry. After the first three rulers, virtually all the emperors acceded while still children. Since eight of the eleven empresses were childless, competition for power arose among offspring of concubines. No fewer than seven regents controlled the empire for a total of thirty-seven years.
Empresses thus came to be representatives of their natal clans and were chosen to link the Liu house to lineages that dominated different regions of the empire. Four different lineages supplied two empresses each, and through the empress’s ability to secure court appointments for her relatives, these lineages obtained tremendous political influence and wealth during their periods of domination. However, rivalries with other families, the eunuchs, and the occasional emperor who reached adulthood shifted power among the lineages. Each fall of a lineage led to criminal proceedings, executions, and confiscations of wealth.
These “outer relatives” served as allies of the Liu house in their attempts to impose their will on the bureaucracy. Thus, Emperor Wu sought to increase his personal authority by transferring the conduct of business to the private chambers where his women dwelled, and he often employed relatives by marriage in important posts, particularly in the military. He established the precedent of making the highest military officer the chief of the inner court, and he filled this post with a relative by marriage.
Guangwu similarly filled his inner court with “outer relatives” and used them as a private government staff at the beginning of the Eastern Han. Most of the political history of the Eastern Han consists of the struggle between eunuch factions and imperial affines for control of the inner court where actual authority resided.
One key female role in early imperial China was that of the concubine or secondary wife. Men could have only one legal wife, but those with money could keep other women in their households, who provided sexual services and cared for children. The role of concubine does not figure prominently in ritual texts, and it seems to have been largely a concession to conventional practice, although the emperor had a legal harem of hundreds or thousands of women. However, one Eastern Han stele from Sichuan is dedicated to a concubine who died at the age of fourteen. This provides our best account of the secondary wife.
"When she entered the household,
She was diligent in care and earnest in attention.
She nourished and ordered our familial Way,
Treating all our ancestors as lofty.
She sought good fortune without straying,
Her conduct omitting or adding nothing.
Keeping herself frugal, she spun thread,
And planted profitable crops in the orchards and gardens.
She respected the legal wife and instructed the children,
Rejecting arrogance, never boasting of her kindnesses.
The three boys and two girls
Kept quiet within the women’s apartments.
She made the girls submissive to rituals,
While giving the boys power.
Her chastity exceeded that of ancient times,
And her guidance was not oppressive.
All our kin were harmonious and close,
Like leaves attached to the tree."30
Allowing for a level of hyperbole that was already criticized in Eastern Han times, we have here a useful sketch of what was hoped for in a secondary wife. It stresses spinning and the sale of garden crops. Even more important is the insistence on her adoption of the practices of her new clan (their “Way”), her reverence for the clan’s ancestors, and her obedience to the legal wife. This lasted even into death. Another stele mourns the loss of a wife who, instead of being interred with the three sons who tragically preceded her in death, was buried instead with her mother-in-law to forever serve her in the afterlife.31
Early ritual handbooks depict a lineage in which women are subordinate and the eldest male member of the senior branch exerts considerable power. Likewise, the husband was to be master of his house. He was entitled to punish household members, but—theoretically at least—was not allowed to mutilate or kill them. Capital punishment, even for slaves, was reserved for the magistrate. The Qin code also privileged seniority within a family, effectively writing filial piety into law. An adult son’s accusation of a parent could not be accepted as evidence, and the accuser himself could be punished. If a son beat his grandparents, he was tattooed and assigned to forced menial labor. The mere accusation of unfilial conduct might be punishable by death. A father was legally privileged in relation to his children: “A father stealing from his children is not a case of theft. Now a foster father steals from his foster children. How is he to be sentenced? It is warranted to be considered a case of theft.” A father could also arrange to have the government banish, beat, or even execute his children.32
The power and position of a lineage chief derived from the accumulated force of his ancestors. The founder of an empire or a fief created a store of potency that passed to his successors but declined over time. One rich in potency enjoyed a long and brilliant posterity, while the posterity of one poor in potency soon faded. The clearest example of this was again the Liu house. The failure of the last threeWestern Han emperors to produce heirs proved to many that the potency of the line was exhausted, so it would soon be replaced. This argument was invoked to support Wang Mang’s attempt to establish a new imperial lineage. Guangwu’s restoration of the Han revived the dynasty in midcourse and gave it a new store of potency. At lower levels of society, potency, instead of dissipating, could accumulate over the generations, ultimately bearing fruit in successful offspring who lifted the whole line to empire-wide glory. The dynastic histories suggest that most men who attained prominence came from families that had been locally eminent for several generations.33
One expression of this belief that immediate ancestors assured success was the increasing emphasis in the Eastern Han on lavish burials for parents. A debate over elaborate versus moderate funerals had raged since at least the fourth century b.c., but in the Eastern Han the pendulum swung decisively in favor of great expenditure. Families sought to outdo one another in ostentatious spending on parents’ funerals, along with protracted periods of mourning marked by severe austerities, and then used these displays to claim office on the basis of filial piety. Critics complained that many families spent little money on elderly parents when they were still alive, only to squander fortunes on their burials. Offspring erected stones and shrines inscribed with florid eulogies, absurdly exaggerating the greatness of the deceased father.34 While these conspicuously wasteful funerals certainly were a contest for prestige, they may also have aimed to repay the ancestor for the material blessings gained through his potency, to secure the future support of ancestral spirits, and to assure the current generation of the excellence of the stock from which they sprang.
Not everyone agreed that a lineage could generate potency that resulted in virtuous and successful offspring. In debates on the value and purpose of education, some argued that learning and attainments depended on individual effort or endowment. Descended from a line of merchants and with a father and grandfather known for unruly behavior, the first-century Eastern Han scholar Wang Chong argued that brilliant men appeared individually and not as members of prominent families. Forty or fifty years later Wang Fu likewise denounced reliance on good connections and clan renown.35 However, he and Wang Chong agreed that most people of their day attributed worth and attainments to clan background, and the biographies in the dynastic histories confirm that few men in the Eastern Han rose to high government office without an impressive pedigree.
Elders and Ancestors
To some extent in early imperial China, potency was measured by longevity. Confucius said that the benevolent lived long, and some Han thinkers held this to be literally true, while acknowledging inexplicable exceptions.36 Thus, the endurance of both a lineage and an individual were traced back to a common source in the virtuous potency generated by correct and effective action. Veneration of the aged was a value in Chinese society that long antedated the Han.
The importance of caring for the elderly was suggested in the Mencius’s account of an ideal realm: “If mulberry is planted in every homestead of five mu of land, then those who are fifty can wear silk. If chickens, pigs, and dogs do not miss their breeding season, then those who are seventy can eat meat . . . Exercise care over education in the village schools, and discipline the people by teaching them the duties proper to sons and younger brothers, and those whose hair has turned grey will not carry loads on the roads.”37 While the last sentence suggests that respect for the aged might have been more common in ritual manuals than among the common people of the Mencius’s day, by the Han period reverence and care for elders were fundamental virtues.
Respect for elders took several forms. Regular awards of titles resulted in a rough association between rank and age, so that seating arrangements and distribution of food at state ceremonies tended to honor age. The laws also granted certain rights to the aged. In the Eastern Han a celebration was held each autumn at the Old Man Star Shrine south of the capital. During this feast those who had reached the age of seventy were given imperial staffs and fed by hand with rice gruel (on the assumption that they had lost their teeth). The staff had a model of a dove perched on its top, because the dove was said to never choke, a blessing to be imparted upon the staff’s recipient. These staffs, as gifts from the emperor, granted the holder prestige and protection.
In one case found on a set of bamboo strips, an official struck an old man, thus causing him to drop his staff and break the dove. Since the object was the emperor’s gift, the official was executed for breaking it. Han decrees asserted that villages gave precedence to elders, and they equated status based on age with status at court. The Eastern Han state-sponsored ritual compendia Comprehensive Discourses of the White Tiger Hall (Bo hu tong) also stated that the elderly were exempt from punishments, stressful mourning obligations, and compulsory labor service.38
The ideal life-span was seventy years. Confucius had reached seventy-two, Liu Xiang and Yang Xiong seventy-one. Stelae often recorded that those who died in their fifties had experienced an early death. But living out one’s full span was a mixed blessing, for Han people were fully aware of the physical horrors of old age:
"The essential spirit dissipates,
And the body’s frame is ugly and vile.
Irregular teeth rise and fall in cadence,
While the bones are withered, the flesh grubby.
Declining into old age, in desperate straits,
No teeth to eat.
Sick with piles, parched and tubercular,
They go to dwell in darkness.
The aged become hump-backed.
The teeth have gaps and are loose.
Nearing earth and far from Heaven,
They descend to enter the Yellow Springs."39
The transience of youth and its pleasures was also a theme in the poetry of the period, especially the Nineteen Old Poems:
"Turning my carriage, I yoke the horses and go,
On and on I travel down the long road.
How desolate on every side,
As an eastern wind rocks the grasses.
Nothing I meet is familiar,
How could this not hasten old age?
Prosperity and decline each has its season,
I grieve that I did not make a name for myself earlier.
Human life lacks the permanence of metal and stone.
How could we lengthen its years?
We suddenly transform, in the way of all matter,
But a glorious name is a lasting treasure."40
Another key element of early imperial kin structure was the memory of ancestors and their preservation in cult. The further back one could trace ancestry, the larger number of kin one could claim, and the more people one might appeal to in times of need. A family that could remember no further than one or two generations was linked to only a few households, but a lineage that traced its ancestry through multiple generations could bring together hundreds of households. Thus remembering and honoring ancestors was essential to structuring present-day society.
Because kin ties were defined by shared links to dead ancestors, ritual handbooks state that the shrine had two purposes: to remember one’s ancestry and to determine how closely related each member of the lineage was. The system of ordering the lineage was known as the “Five Degrees of Mourning Attire.” If a son mourned his father, he wore the most humble clothes (an unhemmed, coarse hemp garment) for the longest time (into the third year following death). If he mourned a paternal great grandfather’s brother’s wife, then he wore the least humble clothing (the finest hemp) for the shortest time (three months). The five degrees thus formed a system that was highly complex and totally inclusive. Someone who did not fit into any category was not a relative. The Record of Ritual states that if you are related to the deceased even by the fifth degree of mourning, then you must go vast distances to attend the funeral, but you should not attend the funeral of an unrelated person, even your nearby neighbor.41
This is an extreme formulation, and we cannot know how closely such precepts were followed. The recent discovery at Mawangdui of a chart of kin ties inscribed with the mourning system suggests that lineage structure was taken seriously.
This ritual remembrance of the dead was reflected in Chinese depictions of human life span and survival across time. The Chinese term for longevity is shou, and its most common simile (as in the poem above) is “longevity like metal and stone.” However, shou was not limited to physical life but also referred to descendants remembering an individual and preserving him in sacrificial cult. This is the longevity of a social identity made possible by the survival of a kin group, or in exceptional cases of literary works. Worshippers wished shou upon the spirit of Gaozu in services at his shrine, and the Canon of Filial Piety defines shrines as places where supreme reverence prevents forgetting ancestors. The Canon of the Way and Its Power (Dao de jing) likewise states, “Those who die but are remembered possess shou.”42 The poem cited above concludes that while the physical body will invariably “transform” and pass away, a glorious name is a treasure that may endure across the ages in cult or literature.
In Han ancestral cult, the soul of the deceased survived as long as the living cherished and cared for it. When the soul ceased to receive offerings, then it faded away. This fading was not left to chance. Ritual texts described a process of “structured amnesia” in which the oldest shrines were sequentially discarded. On the imperial level, the four most recent ancestors had shrines where they received offerings. When a new generation was added, the fourth shrine was discarded and the others were each moved back one place. As Kuang Heng, the chancellor under Emperor Yuan, said: “Setting up the four ancestral shrines marks your closeness to recent ancestors. As closeness fades, the shrines are eliminated in turn. The decline from near to far demonstrates that there is an ultimate end.”43
The sole exception to the process of fading was the founder of the empire or fief, who could not be forgotten. So, ideally, there were five shrines to receive seasonal sacrifices. The Zhou dynasty is said to have had seven shrines—the four shrines of the immediate ancestors, one for the mythic creator of agriculture, Houji, who had founded the Zhou in receiving a fief, and one each for Kings Wen and Wu whose conquest of the Shang transformed the Zhou from a fief into a kingdom. Thus, the longevity of the spirit was directly tied to its contribution to the longevity of the line in having established a kingdom or other lasting form.
At the end of the Western Han, it was argued that the founder was not the only emperor who deserved perpetual remembrance. The first arguments were made in favor of Emperor Wu, who had attacked the Xiongnu, reformed the calendar, and established the sacrificial cults. Since his descendants still felt his influence generations after his death, it was proper that they should still worship at his altar.44 The argument was accepted, and Emperor Wu was made a permanent ancestor, like Gaozu.
This move set a precedent. Western Han officials debated who should receive permanent remembrance in a cult, but in the Eastern Han they only debated who should not receive it. By the time of the penultimate ruler, Emperor Ling (r. 168–189), all seven previous adult emperors plus another emperor from theWestern Han had been granted permanent cult status. None of them had founded an empire or gained land, and few had made any contribution at all, but it proved difficult to offer permanent worship to some and deny it to others.45
Below the imperial level, permanent remembrance of the dead was also fostered by the placement of inscribed stone stelae at the graveside. These were the public equivalent of the tablets kept in ancestral shrines. One inscription boasted: “By engraving the stone and erecting the stele, the inscription of merit is made vastly illustrious. It will be radiant for a hundred thousand years, never to be extinguished . . . Establishing one’s words so that they do not decay is what our ancestors treasured. Recording one’s name on metal and stone hands it down to infinity.”46
Thus, in the course of the Han, ancestral remembrance that faded over time was replaced by a search for the permanence of metal and stone. Eternal ancestors secured permanent lineages and an undying state, but in the end everything perished nonetheless.
Notes
1. Li ji zhu shu, ch. 37, “Yue ji,” pp. 11b–12a; Shi ji 24, p. 1187. See also Li ji zhu shu, ch. 37, pp. 14a, 19a. For a more detailed discussion of the kin system of early imperial China, with fuller documentation, see Lewis, Construction of Space, ch. 2 and pp. 105–106.
2. Lie nü zhuan, ch. 1, p. 10a–p. 11b. On the three obediences, see Li ji zhu shu, ch. 26, p. 19b; Da Dai li ji jie gu, ch. 13, p. 254.
3. Bret Hinsch, “Women, Kinship, and Property as Seen in a Han Dynasty Will,” pp. 1–21; Li shi, ch. 15, pp. 10b–11b. Certain details of the account of the will in Hinsch’s article are based on readings which have since been corrected.
4. Xian Qin Han Wei Jin Nanbeichao shi, pp. 256, 283–286, 270–271.
5. Yan shi jia xun hui zhu, pp. 8b–10a. Wu Hung, “Private Love and Public Duty: Images of Children in Early Chinese Art,” pp. 79–110; Wu, The Wu Liang Shrine, pp. 256–258, 264–266, 278–280, 291–292.
6. Lie nü zhuan, ch. 5, pp. 6a–6b.
7. Lie nü zhuan, ch. 5, pp. 5a, 9a–9b.
8. Shi ji 6, p. 262.
9. Li ji zhu shu, ch. 26, pp. 18b–19a. notes to pages 147–159 281
10. Lie nü zhuan, ch. 4, p. 9a.
11. Yan shi jia xun hui zhu, ch. 4, pp. 9a–9b. Li ji zhu shu, ch. 63, p. 12b; Da Dai li ji jie gu, ch. 13, p. 253. Lie nü zhuan, ch. 5, p. 5a.
12. Wu, “Private Love and Public Duty,” pp. 86, 90–91, 94. Lewis, Sanctioned Violence, pp. 70–78.
13. Han shu 40, p. 2038; Hou Han shu 81, p. 2684, 2685–2686. Yan shi jia xun hui zhu, ch. 3, pp. 6b–7b; ch. 3, pp. 6b–7b.
14. Ch’ü, Han Social Structure, pp. 57–62, 77–83, 168–174, 210–229, 237– 240.
15. Wang, “An Outline of the Central Government of the Former Han Dynasty,” pp. 166–173; Ch’ü, Han Social Structure, pp. 179–171, 216–217, 234–235.
16. Boyd, Chinese Architecture and Town Planning, p. 48; Bray, Technology and Gender, pp. 52–53.
17. Thorp, “Origins of Chinese Architectural Style,” pp. 26–31; Hsu and Linduff, Western Zhou Civilization, pp. 289–296; Chang, The Archaeology of Ancient China, pp. 353–357; Rawson, “Western Zhou Archaeology,” pp. 390–393; Knapp, China’s Old Dwellings, pp. 30–32.
18. Wu, Monumentality, pp. 84–88; von Falkenhausen, “Issues in Western Zhou Studies,” pp. 148–150, 157–158, 162, 166, 170–171.
19. Finsterbusch, Verzeichnis und Motivindex der Han-Darstellungen, vol. 2, figs. 34, 311, 508s-t, 593, 594; Lim, Stories from China’s Past, pp. 104–105. Lewis, Construction of Space, pp. 116–117. Li ji zhu shu, ch. 24, pp. 12a, 17b; ch. 26, p. 22a; Lun yu zheng yi, ch. 22, p. 409. Harper, “Warring States Natural Philosophy and Occult Thought,” pp. 841, 847–852; Kalinowski, “The Xingde Text from Mawangdui,” pp. 125–202; Yates, “The Yin-Yang Texts from Yinqueshan, pp. 82–84, 88–90, 93; Major, “The Meaning of Hsing-te [Xingde],” pp. 281–291; Major, Heaven and Earth in Early Han Thought, pp. 86–88. Huainanzi, ch. 3, p. 40.
20. Lun yu zheng yi, ch. 20, pp. 363–364.
21. Lewis, Construction of Space, pp. 114–115.
22. Kinney, Representations of Childhood and Youth in Early China, ch. 1; Kinney, “Dyed Silk,” pp. 17–44.
23. DeWoskin, “Famous Chinese Childhoods,” pp. 57–76.
24. Kinney, Representations of Childhood and Youth, ch. 2.
25. Lun heng ji jie, ch. 30, pp. 579–580; Kinney, “Dyed Silk,” pp. 37–38.
26. Han shu 24a, p. 1122; Bo hu tong, ch. 4, p. 16b.
27. Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, p. 139. Hou Han shu 7, pp. 301, 319. Gao, Han bei ji shi, p. 227; Hertz, Death and the Right Hand, p. 84.
28. Yi li zhu shu, ch. 31, pp. 14a–14b; Li ji zhu shu, ch. 19, pp. 14b–20b; ch. 32, p. 9b; ch. 43, p. 2b. Wu, “Private Love and Public Duty,” p. 80.
29. Xiao jing zhu shu, ch. 5, pp. 4b–6a. Kinney, Representations of Childhood and Youth, p. 15, 25; Han shu 7, p. 223; 12, p. 299; 71, p. 3039; Hou Han shu 32, pp. 11225–11226.
30. Li shi, ch. 12, p. 16a.
31. Cai, Cai Zhonglang wen ji, ch. 4, p. 11b.
32. Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, pp. 125, 141, 147, 148–149, 195–197.
33. Guliang zhuan zhu shu, ch. 8, Xi year 15, p. 12b; Han shu 22, p. 1050. Ebrey, “The Economic and Social History of Later Han,” pp. 633–635.
34. Wang, Qian fu lun jian, ch. 12, pp. 120, 130, 133–134; Han shu 67, p. 2908; Hou Han shu 39, p. 1314; Guanzi jiao zheng, ch. 17, p. 290; Poo, “Ideas Concerning Death and Burial in Pre-Han China,” pp. 25–62; Nylan, “Confucian Piety and Individualism in Han China,” pp. 1–27; Powers, Art and Political Expression,
pp. 136–141; Loewe, “The Conduct of Government and the Issues at Stake,” pp. 300–301; Ch’en, “Confucian, Legalist, and Taoist Thought in Later Han,” pp. 802–804. On the actual techniques and costs of producing funerary monuments, and the distances from which workers and materials might be brought, see Barbieri-Low, Artisans in Early Imperial China, ch. 2, sec. 5, “Stone Funerary Workshops”; and ch. 3, sec. 2, “Marketing Territory.”
35. Ebrey, “The Economic and Social History of Later Han,” pp. 633–635.
36. Lun yu zheng yi, ch. 6, p. 127.
37. Mengzi zheng yi IA, ch. 1, pp. 33–35.
38. Bodde, Festivals in Classical China, pp. 361–380; Loewe, “The Wooden and Bamboo Strips Found at Mo-chü-tzu (Kansu),” pp. 13–26. Han shu 6, p. 156; Bo hu tong shu zheng, pp. 208, 314, 520; Hulsewé, Remnants of Han Law, pp. 298–302.
39. Jiao, Jiao shi yi lin, ch. 1, p. 38. On the physical decay of old age, see also Wang, Lun heng ji jie, ch. 2, p. 32.
40. Xian Qin Han Wei Jin Nanbeichao shi, pp. 331–332.
41. Li ji zhu shu, ch. 8, pp. 21a–21b.
42. Han shu 22, p. 1043; Laozi dao de jing, ch. 1, #33, p. 19; Xiao jing zhu shu, ch. 8, p. 2a; Yü, “Life and Immortality in the Mind of Han China,” pp. 83, 87, 111, 121–122; Brashier, “Longevity like Metal and Stone,” pp. 214–217.
43. Han shu 73, p. 3118; Keightley, “The Quest for Eternity in China,” pp. 18–21.
44. Han shu 73, p. 3126. For an opposing position, see Han shu 75, pp. 3156–3157.
45. Hou Han shu, zhi 9, p. 3197; Cai, Cai Zhonglang wen ji, ch. 8, pp. 5a–5b.
46. Li shi, ch. 7, p. 16b.
By Mark Edward Lewis in "The Early Chinese Empires Qin and Han", The Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, USA, excerpts pp. 155-177. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.