As with other realms of culture, social customs during the Qing period varied—sometimes dramatically—from region to region, time to time, and class to class. They also differed among the Chinese, the Manchus, the Mongols, and other non-Han peoples. Once again, then, we encounter the sticky issue of generalizing. We also face the difficulty of reconciling theory and practice—negotiating the distance between what people said and what they actually did. These are particular problems when we look at daily life in Qing dynasty China, for every family in the empire was different, just as every person was. Nonetheless, as I have indicated previously, we have to generalize in order to make meaning, so let us see what can comfortably be said.
As noted in previous chapters, a significant gap separated the Manchu, Mongol, and Chinese Bannermen from the non-Banner Han majority in China Proper. The Banners lived in isolated compounds with distinctive architectural features; they often had Manchu-style decorations in their homes (for example, bows and arrows on display); they celebrated their own martial traditions and common legends; they engaged in their own shamanistic religious practices; they socialized primarily among themselves; and, for much of the Qing period, many of them spoke a non-Han language. They observed different forms of greeting, called themselves by their personal names rather than their family names, and wore distinctive clothing. Elite Manchu women were especially unlike their Han counterparts: they did not generally bind their feet, they wore their hair differently, and they had different styles of attire and jewelry. They enjoyed more substantial property rights than Han women, and they had a generally higher status in the Banner world than Han women had in theirs. Manchu policy toward the remarriage of women was also more forgiving than in the dominant Han culture.1
Nonetheless, prolonged interaction with the Chinese had an effect on many Manchus, both men and women—particularly after the Qianlong emperor sanctioned the policy of allowing permanent Banner residence in the provinces (1756). By stages, first in Beijing and then later in the provinces, the Manchus succumbed to certain so-called evil Chinese habits. Apparently, Chinese Bannermen often took the lead in these activities, which included an early attraction to Chinese-style entertainments and a growing neglect of their military heritage. The process also involved the increasing use of the Chinese language as opposed to Manchu; by 1800 at the latest, the Qing court had lost its battle to preserve Manchu as the spoken language among the majority of Bannermen. From that time onward, even the “jottings” (biji) designed to celebrate Manchu culture “were written, not in workaday Manchu, but in elegant literary Chinese.”2
In other ways, too, Chinese culture proved alluring. As we have seen, many Manchus, and certainly all of the Qing emperors from Kangxi onward, found Chinese art and literature attractive. In terms of lifecycle rituals, the Manchus at all levels celebrated a number of Han Chinese festivals, including the lunar New Year. Manchu cities, although clearly distinguishable from their Chinese counterparts, had Chinese-style religious temples, such as those for the City God, the God of Literature, the God of War, and the Gods of Wealth and Fire (see chapter 7). Although foot binding was discouraged among Banner women, some engaged in the practice, and a large number surrendered to the idea that a “horse-hoof” extension on their shoes (mati xie) might look as if their feet had been bound, or at least produce an apparently attractive foot bound gait (see figure 4.3). An additional problem over time was declining financial support for the Banner garrisons, which encouraged Banner families to interact more substantially with Han Chinese in an effort to enhance their economic prospects—increasingly by investing in Chinese commercial enterprises.3
Let us assume, then, that to greater or lesser degrees, Manchu, Mongol, and Chinese Banner families found some aspects of Han culture attractive or at least expedient to adopt. But beyond the generalizations offered above, we still know too little about exactly how, where, when, and why this happened. To be sure, in recent years there has been a surge of Chinese-language scholarship on the beliefs, customs, and institutions of the Manchus, both before and after the Qing conquest of China in 1644.4 But much more work needs to be done on primary sources such as the Baqi tongzhi (Comprehensive history of the Eight Banners; 1796)—not to mention diaries, memoirs, and the observations of “outside” observers—before we can speak confidently about the processes of culture change in individual Banner communities at particular times. Somewhat surprisingly, Chinese provincial and local gazetteers seldom mention the Manchus, and the otherwise invaluable account of Qing customs written by a late eighteenth-century Japanese sojourner named Nakagawa Tadahide says virtually nothing about the Manchus as a distinct ethnic group. In 1900, a decade before the collapse of the dynasty, Dun Lichen, a Manchu Bannerman, wrote a book in Chinese titled Yanjing suishi ji (Record of a year’s time in Yanjing [Beijing]), but it reveals very little about Manchu customs. The same is true of M. L. C. Bogan’s Manchu Customs and Superstitions (1928), which was reportedly compiled with the assistance of a “Manchu scholar” named Zhou Qixian.5 These latter two works seem to suggest the rapid “sinicization” of the Manchus in the first decades of the twentieth century, but they tell us nothing about earlier periods.
Another feature of Qing social life that has proved vexing to scholars for different reasons is the question of how women were viewed and treated in traditional Chinese society. As we have seen in previous chapters, China had no shortage of talented women. But there is comparatively little recognition of this fact in most official sources. On first glance, the large amount of space devoted to women (guiyuan, lit. beauties of the female living quarters) in the TSJC (376 juan) might seem encouraging. But in the main, the individuals discussed in this section of the encyclopedia are distinguished less by their personal accomplishments than by their exemplary Confucian virtues—notably female chastity. Of all the various subsections on women in the TSJC, by far the largest is “Widows Who Would Not Remarry” (guijie, 210 juan). By contrast, only seven juan are devoted to women writers (guizao), four to wise women (guizhi), and only one each to artistic women (guiqiao) and witty women (guihui).
According to the so-called cult of chastity in Qing China, Chinese women were expected not to remarry upon the death of their husbands, and they were often ritually rewarded if they committed suicide to join their husbands in the afterlife. They were also rewarded if they took their own lives to preserve their “reputation.” During the Qianlong period in particular, the Qing government sought to encourage such forms of female chastity by issuing edicts, passing laws, and building monuments to heroines and martyrs. These efforts were part of a combined state-elite attempt to “tighten control in many areas of gender relations: more rigid rape laws, bans on pornography, legislative attacks on homosexuality, statutory support for patriarchal authority, the virtuous widow cult, and so on.”6 But were these attempts to link theory and practice successful? In some respects yes, and in others no. The variables included differences in class as well as differences in time periods, local mores, and the relative strength of families and lineages.
Overall, at least on my reading of the evidence, it appears that imperial policy and social pressures combined to create a situation that placed inordinate burdens on women for most of the Qing period. It has become unfashionable in scholarly circles to dwell on the difficulties that women faced in the late imperial era. In an insightful review article titled “Women in Late Imperial China” (1994), Paul Ropp noted that
recent scholarship has moved increasingly away from the framework of asking whether “women’s status” was rising or falling, and has begun instead to analyze the ambiguities and subtleties of the many ways that gender worked in Ming and Qing society. Recent scholarship has also begun to move away from “victimization” studies, and to emphasize instead that Chinese women’s lives have been shaped by many factors, including their own active choices and participation in social, economic, and family life. Finally, many scholars have begun to question the assumption that dominated early twentieth-century analyses (and that still dominates some work in the People’s Republic of China), namely that the suffering of women in Chinese society was primarily a function of conservative patriarchal Neo-Confucianism.7
More recent work on women in late imperial China by scholars such as Dorothy Ko, Susan Mann, and Harriet Zurndorfer—to name only three of many—also reflects this important scholarly trend.
It is clear, of course, that gender issues in traditional China cannot, or at least should not, be reduced to simple themes of subordination, oppression, and victimization. For example, foot binding was undeniably a painful and debilitating practice, yet it was also a distinctive Chinese marker of status, ethnicity, and personal pride.8 It is also important to note that even in the Qing dynasty, a period known for the prevalence of “conservative” attitudes toward women, official policy varied over time, and the opinions of individuals—both women and men—varied even more (see below).
Still, it would be misleading in my view to suggest that women in Qing China, like women in most earlier periods (and in most other societies at almost any time), were not disadvantaged in certain significant ways. In fact, a careful reading of Ropp’s review article reveals several of them. Women in Qing China generally had few property rights. Chinese men could divorce their wives for seven reasons, including loquaciousness; Chinese women could not divorce their husbands for any reason except severe physical mutilation or the husband’s attempt to sell his wife into prostitution. Chastity was expected of women, not of men. Infanticide overwhelmingly involved baby girls, not baby boys. Traditional Chinese rituals underscored at every turn the subordination of women to men. Moreover, demeaning expressions about women could be found everywhere, from the Confucian classics and ritual handbooks to popular proverbs.
The Classic of Poetry notes, for example, that when a son is born, he is placed on a bed, clothed in robes, and given a jade scepter because he is destined to be the “lord of the household”; but when a girl is born, she is placed on the floor, wrapped in swaddling clothes, and given a loom weight made of clay, with the hope that she will “neither do wrong nor good, take care of food and drink, and cause no sorrow to her parents.” The Jinsi lu cites Zhou Dunyi’s remark, based on the Kui (“Contrariety” #38) and Jiaren (“Family” #37) hexagrams of the Yijing, that “If members of the family are separated, the cause surely lies with women.” Popular proverbs from the Qing period include the following: “The absence of virtue in women is manifest in threes: egotism (du), envy (du) and maliciousness (du)”; “The humaneness of women is like a petty person’s courage”; and “A woman’s mouth is like a measure without limits; truth and lies issue from it [without discrimination].”9
Despite such negative stereotypes, there was no general agreement in Qing times about the place and purpose of women in Chinese society. Debates continued throughout the life of the dynasty, often in the context of a larger but closely connected question: the relationship between ancient “ritual teachings” (lijiao) and “current social practices” (shisu). The most visible participants in the gender debate, overwhelmingly male for most of the Qing era, cut across the intellectual spectrum of the day. They included “libertine aesthetes” like Yuan Mei, kaozheng philologists like Qian Daxin, orthodox Cheng-Zhu moralists like Zhang Xuecheng, and practical-minded Confucian activists like Chen Hongmou. Few of them held entirely consistent opinions. Yuan, for instance, argued for (and contributed to) the literary education of women, yet defended concubinage as a reflection of the inherent inferiority of females to males. Zhang believed that men and women had the same innate intellectual gifts (he castigated Yuan for treating women as sex objects), but insisted that literate women should remain at home and have no public voice. Even Chen, for all of his well-intentioned egalitarian impulses, openly defended the so-called female chastity cult as a “civilizing mechanism.” But, as we shall see in chapter 11, the parameters of debate would change significantly in the late nineteenth century.
As a general rule, the higher the social class in China, the more rigid the adherence to ritual as a matter of both Confucian responsibility and public prestige. Another factor was financial: most elites had the advantage of indulging in costly ceremonies without undue financial hardship. An ancient Chinese proverb tells us: “Ritual and righteousness are born of adequate wealth.” Another states: “When one is wealthy, one loves the rites.” Nonetheless, a powerful and persistent feature of ritual life in traditional China was the effort on the part of all classes of society to put on the most impressive ceremonial displays possible, regardless of cost. One mid-nineteenth-century account of rural life in south China explains:
Poverty and death are haunting spectres of the poor. They roam through the village and inspire fear that is not physical but social. It is not that the villager fears death; his belief in Fate relieves him of that worry. But to think of his parent drawing near to the time of departure without funds for proper rites and burial—this is a real fear. To fail in the provision of rites, feasts, coffin, and funeral would be conduct most unfilial and condemned by social opinion.10
Other works, both Western and Chinese, confirm this view. John L. Buck indicates that as late as 1930, nearly 80 percent of rural credit in some areas of China was used for non-economic purposes—primarily birth, marriage, funeral, and other ceremonies. Undoubtedly the costs were at least as high in Qing times, when, according to early Republican-era ceremonial handbooks, ritual requirements were even more rigid and elaborate.11
All aspects of Chinese family life were highly structured, at least in principle. Ritual handbooks, encyclopedias for daily use, “family instructions” (jiaxun), and other such sources offered meticulous guidance for proper behavior in every domestic situation. Husbands and wives were expected to live in harmony, without jealousy or rancor, and children were socialized at a very early age to be filial and obedient (see below). This was the theory, but what was the practice? Research by Jonathan Ocko, Janet Theiss, and others has shown that despite an “ideological” commitment to harmony at all levels of Chinese society, and notwithstanding a fundamental aversion to the court system on the part of most Chinese subjects, legal cases from the Qing period indicate a great deal of conflict within Chinese families. The quarrels that found their way to the magistrate’s yamen generally involved parents and daughters-in-law and widowed or remarried mothers and their sons. Sexual misconduct, jealousy, problems with adopted children, and property disputes were major sources of family disharmony. Women were usually blamed for conflicts, but as Ocko notes, “the fault was not in the women per se, but rather the role assigned to them in Chinese society.” The hierarchical nature of the Chinese family system, with its conflicting roles and responsibilities, “shaped the disharmony within it.”12
In addition to handbooks, encyclopedias, and other forms of guidance, popular almanacs (huangli, lishu, tongshu, etc.) were considered essential to the conduct of daily affairs in Qing China. By virtue of their wide distribution and practical utility, almanacs were probably the most frequently used book of any kind in late imperial times. Virtually every household had one. In addition to providing basic calendrical information (like official state calendars), they supplied medical and agricultural advice, educational material for children (in the form of morality tales), and various charms and divination techniques. Virtually all sectors of society employed almanacs in some way, whether for protection against evil spirits, for ethical guidance, or for advice on propitious times to undertake various domestic ritual activities such as sacrifices, prayers, marriages, and funerals. Almanacs (again, like state calendars) even offered information on the best times to undertake such mundane activities as bathing, sewing, sweeping, meeting friends, taking medicine, embarking on journeys, doing business, and entering school.13
As indicated briefly in chapter 7, the divinatory systems of Chinese almanacs were based on a set of interrelated cosmic variables: yinyang/wuxing correlations, the twenty-four directions of the compass, the twenty-eight asterisms, and so forth. Individuals fit into the cosmic order according to their date of birth, which was always carefully recorded in the form of eight characters (bazi), two each for the year, month, day, and hour. In the popular mind—and among many members of the elite as well—birth in a certain year identified an individual with one of twelve symbolic animals associated with the system of “earthly branches.” Each of these animals, in turn, was linked with certain character traits, the qualities of yin or yang, one of the five agents, and certain stars or constellations. Quite naturally, such natal information had to be taken into account by both fortune tellers and matchmakers.
The ceremonies connected with birth in traditional China varied tremendously, but a few common denominators may be identified. Because infant mortality was so high, measures had to be taken to protect newborn children through the use of charms, prayers, and offerings. Many Chinese believed that boy babies were the special prey of evil spirits, but that these spirits might be dissuaded if the child had an unattractive “milk name” (naiming). Sometimes the strategy was to give the boy a girl’s name. In general, milk names were bestowed at feasts known as “full-month” (manyue) ceremonies, which marked the first month of life and underscored the uncertainty surrounding a child’s early existence.14
Life was especially precarious for newborn girls because the practice of infanticide involved them primarily. A number of astute Western observers in the late Qing period considered infanticide to be no more common in China than in Europe, but other nineteenth-century accounts—both Western and Chinese—indicate that the outlawed practice was often quite widespread, especially in times of economic hardship. Listen to You Zhi, gentry organizer of an infant protection society in his home village near Wuxi, Jiangsu, during the mid-nineteenth century:
[When] poor families have too many children, they are often forced by practical considerations to drown the newborn infants, a practice which has already become so widespread that no one thinks it unusual. . . . Not only are female infants drowned, at times even males are; not only do the poor drown their children; even the well-to-do do it. People follow each other’s example, and the custom becomes more widespread day by day. There is a case where one family drowned more than ten girls in a row; there are villages where scores of girls are drowned each year. We who dwell in the country witness the crime with our own eyes—a scene too brutal to be described.15
Girls were considered a poor social investment in traditional China because after years of nurture the majority of them would simply marry to become members of other households. Hard-pressed families might sell their female children into slavery or prostitution, but infants brought a low price, and many believed that it was better to destroy the child than to doom it to a life of poverty and shame. Hence such common euphemisms for infanticide as “giving [the child] away to be married” and “transmigrating [the soul of the child] to the body of someone else.” Furthermore, the demands of Confucian filial piety were such that the death of a baby girl might be morally justifiable if the choice for the future was between providing for one’s parents and providing for one’s children. A famous story in Chinese popular lore explicitly condoned and rewarded the impulse of a man prepared to sacrifice his child for the sake of a parent (see below).
Filial piety had other dimensions and ramifications. While a girl child was essentially irrelevant to the question of patrilinear kinship, a boy was considered crucial for the continuation of the family line and the maintenance of ancestral sacrifices. Mencius had male children in mind when he remarked, “Of the three most unfilial things, the worst is to have no posterity.” In the absence of heirs, matrilocal (uxorilocal) marriage was an option, though not a very attractive one (see below). The other possibility was adoption. As with marriage, intermediaries of various sorts facilitated the process.
Of the several forms of adoption, the most regular and esteemed was kin related. According to the Qing Code, an adopted heir to the family ancestral sacrifices had to have the same surname as the head of the household, and specific stipulations existed regarding preferential succession from various classes of nephews and grandnephews on the paternal side. In practice, however, individuals often purchased and adopted individuals outside their lineage, changing their surnames and acquiring heirs with comparatively few complications. This was particularly common in south China. The ceremony of adoption usually entailed a contract, a feast, and ancestral sacrifices in which the adopted son took part. Such ceremonies stood somewhere in significance between the rituals of birth and those of marriage.16
The stages of growth in traditional China were viewed in a variety of ways. As noted in chapter 6, Confucius placed special stress on the ages fifteen, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, and seventy. The “Family Regulations” chapter of the Record of Ritual discusses child-rearing practices for young males, emphasizing the ages six, ten, and thirteen and then the adult years of twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, and seventy. Predictably, females are treated in a much more cursory way, with an emphasis placed on the ages ten, fifteen, and twenty. The subcategory on human affairs in the TSJC includes separate sections for every year of life from birth to age twenty and for each decade thereafter from the twenties, thirties, forties, and so on up to “one hundred and above.” But perhaps the most common periodization in traditional times consisted of six major stages: (1) infancy, (2) the juvenile period, (3) young adulthood, (4) adulthood, (5) middle age, and (6) old age.17
A number of reference works in late imperial China, including popular encyclopedias such as the WBQS, gave advice to parents on “educating children within the womb” (taijiao). This was the pedagogical byproduct of a cosmologically based theory that the senses perceive external phenomena and then transmit them inside the body (waixiang neigan). Most editions of the WBQS that I have seen include illustrations of the growth of embryos/fetuses from month to month, providing information in both verse and prose intended to educate parents and to encourage prenatal care. Many almanacs did the same. There were also several widely distributed works on pediatric medicine, such as the Yingtong baiwen (One hundred questions on infants and children), the Yingtong leicui (Essentials in looking after infants and children), and the Youyou jicheng (Complete compendium on the care of children).18
Infancy generally lasted from birth to about three or four years old (four or five sui in Chinese reckoning), depending on the presence or absence of siblings and/or nursemaids. The first two years of life were a time of great indulgence; babies were fed whenever hungry, day or night, played with by the entire family, especially grandparents, and only gradually toilet trained and weaned. Elementary discipline began at about age three or four, with an effort to teach respect and obedience and a special emphasis on status distinctions and filial devotion. At this time children were exposed to songs and didactic stories, the content of which they would later memorize. The texts of these stories included the Ershisi xiao (Twenty-four examples of filial piety), the Xiaojing (Classic of filial piety), and the Sanzi jing (Three-character classic). Male children were the principal targets for these works, but, as with the Confucian Analects and several other foundational documents, there were similar versions of these tracts designed specifically for girls. Such young women also received counsel from Ban Zhao’s time-honored Nüjie (Admonitions for women).19
The anecdotes in the Twenty Four Examples of Filial Piety, which commonly appeared in Qing almanacs, illustrate the extremes to which Chinese children were expected to go in the service of their parents. In addition to the story mentioned above, in which a man named Guo Ju demonstrates a willingness to kill his male child in order to have resources enough to feed his aged mother, we hear of a prince (later to become an emperor) who attended his ailing mother relentlessly, day and night, for three years, “during which time his eyelids did not close”; a man who, even at the age of seventy, dressed up and frolicked around like a child in order to amuse his parents; a man who decided to sell himself into slavery so that he might give his father a proper burial; a child who warmed the ice over a river with his own body in order to procure fresh fish for his stepmother; a young boy who invited mosquitoes to feed on his body so that they would not disturb his sleeping parents; and a woman who nourished her toothless mother-in-law with milk from her own breast. In some versions, a young man cuts flesh from his leg to use as medicine for his ailing father.20 This last story explains the surprisingly common practice known as gegu (lit. “cutting the thigh [for one’s parents]”), which was institutionally rewarded by the Qing state.21
In the Nü ershisi xiao (Women’s twenty-four examples of filial piety), most of the stories revolve around similar themes of heroism and self-sacrifice. One of the stories, for example, involves a young girl who removes part of her liver to feed her ailing mother-in-law. Another features a woman who emulates Wang Xiang, the young man who warmed an ice-covered river with his body in order to procure fresh fish for his stepmother. Among the several stories in this collection emphasizing the heroism of women is the famous tale of Hua Mulan, who, despite her father’s objections, dons men’s clothing and takes his place in a twelve-year military campaign against the Turks. In battle, she distinguishes herself as a skilled and brave warrior, winning the admiration of the emperor and the eventual respect of her family.22
The Classic of Filial Piety, which, like the Twenty-Four Examples and other such works might be illustrated, focused for the most part on broad themes—filial piety as the principle of Heaven and Earth; as the “root of virtue and the wellspring of instruction”; as the way to govern all under Heaven; as the foundation of imperial rule; as a means of protecting the state and making the people harmonious; and as a way of honoring the ancestors and avoiding shame to “those who have given you birth.” At the same time, however, it mandated particular forms of filial behavior, such as carrying out the proper mourning rituals and, significantly, taking care of one’s body (on the grounds that it is the legacy of one’s ancestors; see below). Patricia Ebrey offers a revealing side-by-side comparative translation of the “original” version of this work and an early version of the Nü xiaojing (Women’s classic of filial piety).23 The major difference between the two is the emphasis placed in the latter on the positive transformative effect women can have on the men in their lives.
The Three-Character Classic, rhymed in three-character phrases and designed for easy memorization, repeatedly emphasizes the value of education, the sacrifices necessary to be a successful student, and the terrible consequences of failure (for a translation, see appendix G). It also provides a wealth of information about fundamental cultural concerns, focusing in particular on time-honored numerical categories such as the Three Powers, the Three Bonds, the Four Seasons, the Four Books, the Five Classics, the Five Constant Virtues, the Five Agents, the Five Directions, the Six Grains, the Six Animals, the Seven Emotions, the Eight Musical Sounds, the Nine [Agnatic] Family Relationships, and the Ten Duties. In addition, this work introduces children to a chronological overview of Chinese history, highlighting heroes and villains and patterns of dynastic rise and fall. Most significantly, it identifies various paragons of learning, including two highly accomplished women—Cai Wenji from the Han dynasty and Xie Daoyun from the Eastern Jin (317–420). The text concerning these two women reads: “They were girls [but] they were also intelligent and perceptive (congmin). You boys ought to alert yourselves [to this sort of challenge].”
The discipline of Chinese children began in earnest during the juvenile period, which lasted from three or four to about fifteen or sixteen. This was a period of intense formal education for young men in elite households, and less formal instruction for young women. Generally speaking, where schooling was available for peasant children—for example in the so-called charitable schools (yixue) of the Ming-Qing period—the emphasis was not on mass literacy but rather on moral education. The same was true of efforts to educate non-Han ethnic groups in southwest China.24
Limin Bai’s book Shaping the Ideal Child: Children and Their Primers in Late Imperial China (2005) places particular emphasis on the role of ritual in Chinese childhood education. In fact, she points out that the primary object of educators in the Ming and Qing periods was to “ritualize the body”—that is, to “control the external” and “nourish the internal.” To this end, primers taught children how to hold their bodies, how to walk, how to bow, and how to fix their gaze and speak. They also provided advice on how to dress and even how to breathe. Classrooms were sometimes adorned with pictures that illustrated important rituals. In one school, for example, a series of pictures depicted the protocols for welcoming new babies into a home, the proper posture for youths, the way scholars greet one another, a wedding ceremony, sons serving parents, women serving parents-in-law, and ancestor worship.25
In elite households, all males received early training in the recitation of verse and the memorization of Chinese characters, followed by instruction in calligraphy and painting, and finally by schooling in the techniques of chess and the playing of musical instruments. Elite girls might also acquire these skills, but they were usually expected to learn the “womanly” work of embroidery and weaving first.26 Well-educated women often played a prominent part in the education of both sons and daughters, balancing their domestic chores and their own scholarly and artistic interests with their roles as teachers. Naturally this process was somewhat easier for women in households that could afford to hire servants and maids.
By the age of five or six, the binding of young girls’ feet usually began in households that could afford the loss of labor in the fields. This crippling practice—which was far more widespread than generally recognized—brought both status and suffering to Chinese women. Sexual segregation also began at this time, and although never complete, the cultural ideal in China remained the isolation of women in the inner apartments. Young men, for their part, began to experience the disciplinary tyranny of their fathers who, in order to abide by explicit Confucian admonitions in the Analects to remain “distant” and “severe,” became increasingly aloof and often harsh as they trained their sons in family ritual roles and proper social conduct. By contrast, the relationship between mothers and their daughters (and often their sons as well) was warm and close.27
Parental power was nearly absolute in traditional China, depicted graphically in literature by the treatment of Jia Baoyu at the hands of his father in Dream of the Red Chamber. In fact, unfilial behavior was a capital crime—one of the “Ten Great Wrongs” in the Qing Code (see chapter 3 and below).28 At an early age, therefore, Chinese children learned total submission to parents, grandparents, teachers, masters of trades, and other authority figures. This produced what has been described as a strong “dependency orientation” in youths of both sexes.29 In peasant households, however, there was sometimes greater equality between parents and children (and between males and females) because all members of the family lived in close quarters and worked together in the fields as a single cooperative economic unit.
The stage of development known as young adulthood was by and large an elite phenomenon. It was a time of transition that occurred during the teenage years but before marriage. By the mid-teens, the worst of parental discipline and educational rigor had passed. Chinese males began to experience considerable freedom and to have their first sexual contacts with prostitutes or servant girls. Their sisters, however, remained confined within the home and bound by a double standard of rigid chastity. In some families, the rituals of capping males and binding up the hair of females marked the formal transition to adulthood, but for the most part these ceremonies, if they took place at all, were associated in late imperial times with marriage, which normally occurred from about eighteen to twenty-one years of age in the case of boys and from sixteen to eighteen with girls.
The formal ceremonies of marriage brought adulthood regardless of age. Marriage was expected of every normal man and woman in Chinese society, including slaves. Indeed, the Qing Code stipulated that slave owners were subject to criminal punishment if they neglected to find husbands for their female slaves. The purpose of marriage was explicitly to continue the male line of descent. In the words of the Record of Ritual: “The rites of marriage unite two [different] surnames in love, in order to maintain services in the ancestral temple and to ensure the continuation of the family line.”30 Marriage was thus primarily an alliance between two different families, not a matter of individual choice and mutual affection. By law, two people of the same surname could not be married, even if unrelated, and the legal principals in the match were the heads of the respective households, not the individuals to be joined in wedlock. In some cases, the wishes of the prospective bride and groom might be taken into account, but very often the choice of a marriage partner by parents or elders was arbitrary and unilateral. Baoyu’s arranged marriage to Xue Baochai rather than to Lin Daiyu in the novel Dream of the Red Chamber provides a fine literary example of how family interests could, and often did, override personal feelings.
Marriage was always a contractual affair in Qing China—by far the most important contractual relationship in traditional times. Marriage contracts might be oral or written, general or detailed, but elaborate rituals that enhanced them, gave them public visibility, and symbolized their social and cosmological significance surrounded them all. Contracts were also associated with divorce and adoption procedures. As a rule, the smaller the economic or ritual investment in such contracts, the greater the likelihood that they would be breached.
Several different forms of marriage existed in traditional China, each a product of different social or economic circumstances. The most prestigious was the standard, or major, marriage. It involved the transfer of an “adult” bride from her natal home and her ritual rebirth in the home of her husband. This form of marriage, to be discussed in some detail below, was considered the norm, the social standard. Minor marriages followed the basic ritual pattern of major marriages, except that the bride lived in the home of her prospective husband for ten or fifteen years as a “daughter-in-law reared from childhood” (tongyang xi or miaoxi) before the actual marriage date. This arrangement was particularly common among the poor in China, but by no means limited to them. Another less common and less esteemed variety of marriage was uxorilocal (matrilocal), involving the transfer of a male into the household of a female as a son-in-law, reversing the pattern of major and minor marriages. The males involved in such matches usually came from families with several sons and entered families in which there were none. The period of residence in the bride’s home was variable, from a few years to a lifetime, always carefully spelled out by contract.31
The distribution of major, minor, and matrilocal marriages throughout China hinged on several factors: family status, wealth, social organization (especially lineage ties), and geography. Major marriages dominated the social landscape of north China, but in many southern areas the alternative forms predominated. Arthur Wolf and Chieh-shan Huang write:
Viewing China’s marriage and adoption customs as from an earth satellite, we would probably see that minor marriages were concentrated in a continuous area along the South China coast, reaching their highest density in southern Jiangxi southwestern Fujian, and northern Guangdong. Uxorilocal marriages would probably appear common in the same region but would achieve their highest density on the Lower Yangzi Delta and in a second area of concentration on China’s Western frontier. But as soon as we moved closer to our subject, we would soon discover that this view from on high concealed a great deal of local variation, variation even more marked than that between the country’s major regions.32
A distinctive feature of family life in traditional China was the institution of concubinage. Theoretically, this ancient practice was justified by the filial imperative of producing sons to continue the male line. Often concubines (qie) were purchased outright from poor families by the more well-to-do, and ordinarily they did not enjoy the same status as the principal wife (qi).33 As a matter of fact, on entering her new family, a concubine usually had to participate in ceremonies designed to show her subservience to the principal wife. Qing law prohibited the degradation of a principal wife to the position of concubine or the elevation of a concubine to the position of principal wife. As further testimony to her inferiority, a concubine was required to observe the same degree of mourning for her master’s wife as she was for his parents, his sons (by the principal wife or other concubines), and her own sons. Her sons were expected to treat the principal wife as their own mother, and by custom they were entitled to equal rights of inheritance along with the sons of the wife. Paternity was what mattered in Chinese marriages, and in divorce, the husband almost always received custody of the children.34
The practices of concubinage and infanticide, together with the strong social pressure on widows not to remarry as a matter of Confucian propriety, created a large pool of surplus men looking for wives—a situation that matrilocal marriage helped to reduce only in part. From 10 to 20 percent of Chinese men in Qing times probably never married.35 This was one reason why a major marriage carried with it so much prestige and required so much public display. Although the specific customs surrounding major marriages often differed from place to place, certain practices were nearly universal, at least among elites.36
One prominent feature in virtually all Chinese marriages—major, minor, and matrilocal alike—was the employment of a go-between, or matchmaker. Intermediaries of this sort were essential to a great many aspects of Chinese social life, especially those involving delicate matters of prestige or “face.” The responsibilities of the matchmaker were extremely weighty. He or she had to take into account not only the relative social positions of the two families involved, but also certain important economic and personal factors such as family wealth and individual character. Ideally, the match was expected to benefit both parties, which generally meant that the families had to be of approximately equal status and means, or that one family might contribute greater status while the other contributed greater wealth. Some Qing officials, notably Chen Hongmou, deplored “viewing women as commodities” (shi wei qihuo) in this way, but financial considerations almost always loomed large in marriage calculations.37
All stages of marriage ritual were full of elaborate symbolism, either positive or protective. Red—the color of happiness and good fortune—was prominent in dress and decorations, including candles and lanterns, which were used even in the daytime.38 Firecrackers served as purifiers and signs of joy, and charms were often employed to provide additional protection for the bride. Food played an important role at various stages of the marriage ritual (as it did in most other aspects of Chinese ritual life) in the form of symbolic gifts, offerings, and ceremonial meals. “Longevity noodles,” fruits, and other food items denoted marital harmony, happiness, and prosperity. Presents such as paired geese symbolized marital fidelity, and felicitous inscriptions of various sorts appeared everywhere.
The first of the standard six rites of marriage (liuli) was the selection of the match (nacai), engineered by the go-between after consultation with the families involved. In this and most other matters, the family of the groom normally took the initiative on advice from the matchmaker. After making discreet investigations and compiling preliminary information on all marriageable males and females in a given locality, the matchmaker was in a position to propose a partnership, usually to the male’s family. The match-maker was also responsible for negotiating matters such as the amount of the betrothal gifts (pinli) and betrothal money (pinjin) to be given by the groom’s family to the wife’s. The family of the bride, for its part, had to decide on the proper dowry and trousseau (jiazhuang) to send along at the time of transfer for exhibition at the groom’s home. All these calculations were of tremendous importance to the prestige and material interests of each of the families concerned.
The next step was the formal exchange of astrological information on the bride and groom (wenming). The third stage, called naji, required the ritual test of the match by means of divination. Fortune tellers were usually employed, but the ancestors and other spirits might also be consulted by means of devices such as “moonblocks” (beijiao or jiaobei). The fourth and crucial step was the betrothal (nazheng), for acceptance of the betrothal gifts (often termed the “bride price”) by the family of the bride sealed the match. As with the previous stage, elaborate ceremonies accompanied the transfer of gifts, which were dictated by rank at the higher levels of society. Again, ancestral sacrifices usually accompanied these ceremonies.
The fifth stage, qingji, involved the selection of propitious times for the transfer of the bride and related ritual activities. Here, decisions might rest with fortune tellers or other sources of supernatural authority, including temple oracles. Almanacs also provided guidance on the proper times to undertake various marriage-related rituals. The transfer itself, known as “welcoming the bride” (qinying), was the final stage of the formal marriage process. On the day preceding this ceremony, the groom was supposed to be “capped” and given an adult name, and the bride’s hair was put up in ritual fashion. Meanwhile, the groom’s family had arranged to send the brightly decorated wedding chair to the wife’s home, and the wife’s family had her trousseau sent to his.
On the day of the transfer, the bride paid solemn obeisance to her parents and ancestors, received a brief lecture on her wifely duties, and entered the gaudy red sedan chair that would take her on a noisy, ostentatious, and circuitous journey to her husband’s home. There, the bride performed various acts designed to show subservience to her husband and his family, and for the first time, perhaps—at least in most elite matches—the bride and groom actually saw each other’s faces. After these ceremonies, the bridal pair reverently worshipped tablets representing Heaven and Earth, the ancestors of the groom, and the major household deities of the groom’s family, especially the God of the Hearth. These activities highlighted the cosmological and familial dimensions of the match.
The transfer was, of course, marked by a banquet, which, like the wedding procession and display of dowry and trousseau, might well be a measure of a family’s financial status. Often, however, the guests contributed shares (fenzi) to help defray costs. Local custom dictated whether or not the bride’s family would be invited to the transfer feast, but at some point in almost all major marriages the bride’s parents were treated to a banquet and given additional gifts.
When the bride visited her parents after the formal transfer, she generally did so as a guest, not as kin. Although still emotionally tied to her parents and relatives, she was now by law and custom a full-fledged member of her husband’s family and bound to devote far more ritual attention to that family than to her natal family.39 It was a difficult existence, especially at first. Except in the case of minor or matrilocal marriages, the new bride found herself in a house full of virtual strangers. In this environment, the mother-in-law wielded tremendous power over her daughter-in-law because a filial son was bound to respect his mother’s wishes. Mothers were sometimes known to force sons to divorce their wives. Small wonder, then, that in the period preceding the marriage transfer, brides sometimes wept and sang sad songs together with their friends and family.40
There were seven grounds for divorce in traditional China: (1) lack of offspring, (2) adultery, (3) jealousy, (4) thievery, (5) disobedience to the husband’s parents, (6) incurable disease, and (7) being too talkative. In principle, a husband could not be divorced by his wife, but this was not the main reason that divorce was comparatively rare in Qing times. In the first place, there were three circumstances under which a woman could not be divorced (except in the case of adultery): (1) if she had mourned as a daughter for her husband’s deceased parents, (2) if she had no family to go to, or (3) if her husband had been poor when they were married and was now rich. Often one or more of these conditions prevailed. In addition, the perennial glut of men looking for wives made the task of acquiring another virgin bride rather difficult, especially if the grounds for an earlier divorce were not very substantial. Furthermore, at least to a degree, her biological parents and former kinsmen protected the interests of the wife because marriage was a family affair. Nonetheless, we know that many women found married life intolerable and either ran away or committed suicide. Others made a conscious choice never to marry.41
Aside from the domination of mothers-in-law, another common frustration for Chinese wives, at least in elite families, was the introduction of concubines. Unlike principal spouses, concubines were usually chosen by the husband rather than his parents, and often they were selected for their beauty or their artistic, literary, and musical talents rather than their moral character and/or family connections. Although ostensibly brought into the household for the purpose of producing sons to assure continuation of the line, concubines often served as little more than symbols of elite conspicuous consumption. Despite their social inferiority to the principal wife, they were often the primary object of the husband’s sexual attention and thus a potential source of jealousy—one of the seven grounds for divorce.
We should not assume, however, that arranged marriages were devoid of romance. There is abundant evidence to indicate that in the Qing, as in earlier periods of Chinese history, companionate love often grew out of arranged marriages. We even know of instances when husbands refused to remarry or committed suicide upon the death of their wives.42 Such actions on the part of women appear somewhat more problematical, however. As already indicated, devotion to one’s husband after his death was not only encouraged by neo-Confucianism, but also ritually rewarded by the state. Thus, powerful social pressures that had nothing to do with conjugal love or mutual affection might influence a wife’s decision to “honor” her husband’s memory.
On the other hand, there was great countervailing pressure on widows to remarry. For all the orthodox emphasis on women remaining “faithful” to their deceased husbands, many families did not want to provide financial support for the women who returned to them. Some, in effect, callously auctioned their youthful widowed daughters off to the highest bidder. In poor families, the economics of survival, coupled with high mortality rates, often made remarriage a necessity. A good deal of demographic data indicates that many women who were widowed before the age of thirty did, in fact, remarry, and that “chaste wives” (jiefu), widowed early in life and honored with plaques, arches, and official biographies, “were clearly a small minority of all widowed women.”43
Chinese sexual life is seldom discussed but certainly important to an understanding of traditional Chinese culture, including marriage.44 The pioneering research of R. H. Van Gulik indicates that the Chinese have long had a remarkably “healthy” attitude toward sex. Despite the rigid standards of Confucian propriety—which went so far as to condemn a husband and wife for accidentally touching hands in public (and which naturally eliminated the possibility of a Chinese tradition of social dancing on the part of couples)—Van Gulik argues that on the whole, sexual life in traditional China was full, rich, and remarkably free from the prejudices and “perversions” of the West.45 At the same time, however, “illicit sex,” variously defined by the Qing authorities, was vigorously condemned by intellectuals and the state as a threat to Confucian family values and therefore a mortal danger to China’s family-centered social and political order.46
The Chinese drew a sharp distinction between inner (nei) and outer (wai), between what was public and what was private. In public, men were unquestionably superior to their wives, who were expected to be passive, submissive, and satisfied with few rights and privileges. In the privacy of the bedchamber, however, women often seem to have enjoyed relative sexual equality. One of the female characters in Li Yu’s popular novel Carnal Prayer Mat articulates the idea of a woman’s “sexual rights” within the framework of orthodox Confucian values (and Buddhist concepts of reincarnation):
We behaved improperly in our previous existence and now, having been born female, we must spend all our lives in the women’s quarters. Unlike men, we can’t go out sightseeing or visiting friends. Sex is the one diversion we have in our lives. Surely we can’t be forbidden to enjoy that! Still, we are created by Heaven and Earth for marriage, and matched with a husband by our parents; naturally it is right and proper for us to enjoy ourselves with him. . . . [If] a woman does not have sex, fine, but if she is going to have sex, she should at least see that she suits herself.47
Detailed handbooks on sex (fangshu), dating from at least the Han dynasty, demonstrate a longstanding concern on the part of Chinese men with techniques explicitly designed to satisfy the sexual needs of women. Chinese erotic novels do the same. Even the popular medical tracts of late imperial times seem to have encouraged the sexual satisfaction of women—at least insofar as the aim of intercourse was to produce male children. Some of these works, for instance, emphasize that female orgasm is essential to fertility, and that the party who has an organism last determines the gender of a child. Although men may simply have had their own reproductive or medical interests in mind, some of their beliefs seem to have worked to the sexual advantage of women.48
As is well known (although often overemphasized), the bound foot was an object of erotic appeal for many men in traditional China, and even women took pride in their so-called golden lilies. Historically, foot binding began in the Tang-Song period, an ironic outgrowth of the practice of wrapping the feet of dancers with colorful ribbons. During the Yuan dynasty it gradually spread from north China to the south, where it took hold primarily among the upper classes. By Qing times, the crippling practice had become widespread not only among the Chinese gentry class, but also among commoners, who sought the social status that foot binding implied. As we have seen, even the Manchus succumbed in a sense to the fashion by wearing small attachments on the bottoms of their shoes to give the appearance and gait of bound feet. Although foot binding was a painful process, its appeal was neither sadistic nor masochistic. Instead, it was justified by men as a means of keeping women at home and was admired by them for the style of walking it produced and the alleged effect this gait had on female sexual performance. Many passages in Chinese erotic literature dwell on the shape and mystery of the bound foot.49
Beyond the psychology of sexual attraction was the idea of sex as a form of physical therapy. This notion can be traced back for centuries in China. The principles were essentially the same as those of Daoist alchemy and traditional Chinese medicine. Harmony between interacting yin (female) and yang (male) influences brought physical well-being and longevity. Normally, the two essences nourished one another other, except in the case of male intercourse with an older woman, which was commonly thought to take away yang essence without benefit to the man. Undoubtedly this was one reason for the traditional preference among Chinese men for youthful wives and concubines. Homosexuality was frowned upon by the state—particularly in Qing times when it was actually outlawed—but often tolerated, perhaps in part because of the medical/sexual assumption that the exchange of the same “essence” entailed no net loss.50
The Chinese preoccupation with good health and longevity can be seen not only in sexual practices and related therapeutic techniques (including Daoist “inner alchemy”), but also in medical tracts, encyclopedias, almanacs, popular proverbs, religious practices, and secular symbolism. As one striking indication of this interest, the section on medicine in the TSJC contains 520 juan—more than any other single section in this massive work. Popular encyclopedias such as the WBQS also devote a great amount of attention to matters of health and well-being under categories such as “nourishing life” (yangsheng), “medicine” (yixue), “managing illness” (fabing), and “dispelling illness” (qubing) (see appendix E).
During the last two decades or so there has been a burst of excellent scholarship on Chinese medical theories and practices, which has both enriched and complicated our understanding of medicine in late imperial China. One productive area of research has focused on women—from the work of female doctors (some scholars prefer the term “medical practitioners” for both men and women) and conceptions of the female body to specific health-related issues such as gynecology, birth control, childbirth, breast maladies (although men also had such problems), and even what came to be described as female “sexual madness.” Another emphasis in recent research has been on doctors and learning traditions, including the practice of monastic medicine. Yet a third area of intense scholarly interest has been the evaluation of medical texts, from “classic” works such as the Shanghan lun (Treatise on cold damage disorders) and the Huangdi neijing suwen (Basic questions on the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon [of Medicine]) to the great Qing compilation known as the Yuzuan yizong jinjian (Imperially sponsored golden mirror of medical orthodoxy).51
The Yuzuan yizong jinjian is a particularly revealing object of study because it represents an effort on the part of the Qing Imperial Medical Bureau to assert a unified “orthodox” tradition of Chinese medicine against an eighteenth-century challenge from medical practitioners living in the Jiangnan region. The basic struggle was between two different etiological theories—a monolithic “orthodox” one that had prevailed in China from the Han dynasty through the Ming, emphasizing “harm from the cold” (shanghan), and another “revived” theory that emphasized “harm from the heat” (wenbing). Despite a growth of interest in the latter theory during the nineteenth century, abbreviated versions of the Yuzuan yizong jinjian circulated widely among the Chinese population.52
Many different clinical approaches were available to doctors in late imperial China. Some practitioners favored preventive techniques associated with “nourishing life”; others favored herbal medicines; still others preferred techniques such as acupuncture, acupressure, and moxibustion; and some relied on religious traditions of shamanism, magic, and exorcism.53 But most conventional medical remedies had as their primary therapeutic goal the restoration of yinyang/five agents balance in the body. As one version of the Huangdi neijing suwen states, yin and yang and the five agents “are the way of Heaven and Earth, the parents of change, the origin of life and death and the abode of the spiritual and the bright.”54
Naturally there were professional rivalries—for example, competition between so-called Confucian doctors (Ruyi), who tended to emphasize textual traditions in their practice, and hereditary doctors (shiyi), who were more inclined to emphasize their own medical lineages. The Qing period boasted a number of famous and able medical practitioners, including such well-known individuals as Ye Gui (1666–1745) and Xu Dachun (1693–1771).55 But we should remember that the vast majority of individuals who practiced the medical arts in China were low-status individuals, “artisans” who were viewed by Chinese society as mere technicians. To the degree that they were well educated, they might enjoy considerable status, but their occupation itself was not socially esteemed.
In this respect, doctors were like fortune tellers. In fact, there were many similarities between the two professions. A comparison of Florence Bretelle-Establet’s study of the biographies of more than four hundred medical practitioners in the Qing dynasty with my own research on approximately 1,200 diviners during the same period reveals that the two groups were represented in much the same way by the compilers of local gazetteers.56 Moreover, at least 15 percent of the biographies I have examined for the Qing period refer to individuals who knew both medicine and divination (yibu). A Qianlong period gazetteer from Shandong explicitly links medicine and divination as arts of prognostication that “understand yin and yang, investigate li and qi, know the way of transformation [bianhua] and have efficacy in everyday affairs.”57 Doctors and fortune tellers embraced the same cosmological principles and used several of the same evaluative techniques with their clients.
Yet for all this concern with health and medicine, average life expectancy in Qing China was probably not much more than thirty-five. Mark Elvin provides the following estimates based on data from the Lower Yangzi valley during the mid-Qing period. Note that these estimates are not broken down by social class and that they apply to the most prosperous region in China, at the height of the dynasty.
Female expectancy of life at birth: 27.2 years
Female expectancy of life at age ten: 41.1 years
Male expectancy of life at birth: 28.4 years
Male expectancy of life at age ten: 42.2 years.58
Small wonder, then, that the last two stages of Chinese life—middle age and old age—were times of special significance and cause for great celebration.
For most members of the Chinese elite, middle age, lasting from about forty to fifty-five, brought many satisfactions: career success, material security, and grandchildren. By the end of this period, the majority of wives had escaped domination by their mothers-in-law, only to become in some cases domineering mothers-in-law themselves. Middle age for the lower classes of Chinese society may have been somewhat less satisfying than for the elite, but a bit of property and a male heir probably provided a sufficient sense of accomplishment and security for aging commoners.
Old age elicited respect and esteem from all sectors of Chinese society. Village elders in rural areas often wielded substantial power, and, as mentioned in chapter 4, some were officially recognized as longevous commoners or longevous officials. The state-sponsored community drinking ritual known as xiangyin jiu, although not always regularly or properly performed, also provided a means of officially acknowledging and rewarding old age. According to statute, this ritual was supposed to be performed twice a year in various counties and departments of each province. At a particular point in the proceedings, a local scholar would state: “The object of xiangyin jiu is to show proper respect for the aged and consideration for the virtuous, and to keep away the unrighteous and the perverse. Persons of advanced age and outstanding virtue are to occupy seats of honor, and others are to have places proper to their ages.” Although this ceremony did not always appeal to the local scholarly elite, it was certainly tempting to “obscure townsmen and villagers who aspired to local eminence.”59
At home, the elderly were pampered and accorded maximum deference. As Dream of the Red Chamber indicates, older women often enjoyed substantial power within the family, despite the pervasive notion of the “three types of womanly obedience” (sancong)—first to the father, then to the husband, and eventually to the son. Major birthday celebrations for men and women usually began at about age fifty or so. From this point onward, such celebrations increased in size and significance, especially at the beginning of each new decade. The sixtieth birthday held special meaning because it marked the completion of one full sexegenary cycle (see chapter 6). Naturally enough, the concrete symbolism of birthday ceremonies centered on longevity: longevity candles, the longevity star, longevity noodles, longevity peaches or peach cakes, and the stylized character shou (longevity). Ancestral sacrifices were often closely associated with such birthday celebrations.
Longevity was also a prominent theme in funeral ceremonies. Grave clothes were designated longevity clothes, the coffin was composed of longevity boards, and the principal mourner ate longevity noodles. A “longevity portrait” of the deceased might also be displayed near the coffin, serving as an object of worship. As with the use of the auspicious color red in funerals for all that was not white (the color of mourning), the self-conscious employment of the term longevity in the midst of death underscores the themes of “fear-propitiation and hope supplication” that ran through so much of traditional Chinese religious life.60
Looking back on these Chinese lifecycle rituals, we see a striking cohesiveness and continuity. Patricia Ebrey’s study of family ritual notes, for example, that by the end of the imperial period, ceremonial practices
across the country bore many general resemblances to the steps described in Confucian texts. Ancestral rites included periodic offerings of food and drink at domestic altars . . . and on death-day anniversaries and major festivals. Continuities in wedding ceremonies included negotiations by matchmakers, exchanges of gifts, the highly ceremonial transfer of the bride to her husband’s homes where the new couple consumed wine and food together and the bride was introduced to her husband’s parents, relatives, and ancestors. For funerals and burials, major continuities included ritualized wailing, mourning garments that visibly indicated the proximity of kinship to the deceased, setting food and drink near the coffin until burial, postponing burial days, weeks or months to prolong mourning, restrictions on social activities during deepest mourning, use of heavy coffins, ceremonial funeral processions to the graveyard, and post burial sacrifices to the deceased.61
According to Ebrey, the narrowing of class distinctions in these ritual performances was “a significant factor in creating cultural cohesion within the enormous expanse of China.” It allowed people who “spoke mutually unintelligible dialects and knew very little of each other’s daily work lives to see each other as Han Chinese.” Throughout the imperial era, then, the performance of lifecycle rituals was a marker not only of family solidarity, but also of ethnic boundaries. As Ebrey puts the matter, “Every time a family hired a sedan chair for a wedding or paraded to the grave in mourning garments, it was acting out of allegiance to both Han Chinese identity and the Confucian moral order.”62
Notwithstanding the relentless demands of ritual at all levels of Qing society, there was also time for recreation, ranging from simple domestic games to huge community festivals. Despite the endless variety of Chinese amusements, certain patterns of play seem typical of late imperial China as a whole. Many of these reflect elite values and preoccupations. The general lack of physically demanding sports, for instance, can be attributed both to a concern for maintaining proper decorum and to a real fear of harming the body—an unfilial act, for the physical self was a gift of the ancestors. Far better were games and other diversions that suggested scholarly refinement. Encyclopedias for daily use such as the WBQS provide an especially valuable indication of the leisure activities of Chinese elites, presented in the form of guidelines for people who aspired to be just like them (see appendix E).63
On the other hand, the attractiveness of active public exhibitions of acrobatics and martial arts (wushu), like the tradition of Chinese knight-errant literature, may be explained as a form of vicarious release in what was predominantly—for the Han people outside the Banners at least—a civil-oriented, “non-military culture” (wubing di wenhua). To be sure, even within the gentry class there were some individuals who gravitated to various types of “boxing” as a means of cultivating their “vital force” (qi). The category of Military Preparedness (Wubei men) in encyclopedias such as the WBQS includes information of precisely this sort. Like the graceful and therapeutic posturing known as Taiji quan, these more vigorous martial arts were predicated on the principle of yinyang harmonization of body and mind. But the people who displayed their strength and swordsmanship in public places were almost invariably of low social status, more likely to be linked with secret societies than with the literati.64
Perhaps the traditional Chinese preference for individual competition over team games reflects a form of recreational escape from the constraints of conventional society, since so much of Chinese social life demanded subordination of the self to the larger group and placed no real premium on individualism. The popularity of raucous festivals and risqué dramatic performances, as well as the widespread practice of teasing the bride and groom after the wedding transfer (nao xinfang), also suggests the periodic need to break loose, even if only temporarily, from the rigid constraints of Confucian propriety and social control.
Aside from a general reluctance to engage in roughhouse and team play, there is little remarkable about most traditional Chinese games. Chinese youths ran; skipped; threw rocks; pitched coins; played with balls, shuttlecocks, tops, dolls, and other toys; kept pets (fish, birds, rabbits, kittens, etc.); and so forth. Older children and adults enjoyed watching activities such as rooster or cricket fights. Gambling of all kinds—from cards and dice to mahjong (majiang)—was popular, although often outlawed. More refined pastimes, all nature oriented, included the enjoyment of gardens, leisurely strolls (often with a caged bird), boating, swinging, and flying kites.65 Recreational activities for women were restricted somewhat by social isolation and the practice of foot binding, but, as we have seen, in many gentry households the women received a satisfying education in poetry and the arts. In these households, as Dream of the Red Chamber indicates, much leisure time was spent on refinements such as the so-called Four Noble Recreations—calligraphy, painting, playing the qin, and playing weiqi.
Because painting and calligraphy have already been discussed at length in chapter 8, only the latter two recreations need be mentioned here. The qin or guqin (often translated “zither”) had a long and distinguished pedigree in China. For over two thousand years it stood as the most revered Chinese musical instrument, celebrated in verse, art, and popular literature, and inextricably linked with both friendship and moral cultivation. The term qin came to be associated etymologically with the similar-sounding word jin (to prohibit) because the instrument was believed to check evil passions; and it also served as a general metaphor for marital happiness and social harmony. The rounded top and flat bottom of the qin symbolized the unity of Heaven and Earth, and its melodies, which pleased the ear and soothed the mind, were often descriptive of nature.66
Originally composed of five strings (according to tradition) and later seven, the qin illustrates the tremendous value attached to rhythm in classical Chinese music, as well as the versatility of its five tone core (wusheng). The qin was, however, only one of a great many sophisticated musical instruments employed for ritual or recreational purposes in traditional China. S. W. Williams, a perceptive long-time resident of the “Middle Kingdom,” observed in the nineteenth century that no people on earth made more use of music than the Chinese.67
Weiqi, known as go in Japanese, was (and is) a popular game played on a board with nineteen vertical and nineteen horizontal lines intersecting to form 361 tactical positions. It remained a favorite pastime of Chinese generals, statesmen, and literati from early Han times through the Qing. Each player had about 180 men or pieces. The object of the game was to control territory and capture, or “kill,” enemy men. At first glance one might wonder why weiqi was included as one of the Four Noble Recreations of a Confucian gentleman. Painting, calligraphy, and music were, after all, aesthetically satisfying and morally uplifting, while weiqi was war on a game board, attack and defense, killing and capture.
Perhaps the appeal of weiqi can be explained in part by the Confucian scholar’s yearning for identification with ancient China’s martial heritage and with the lost tradition of the feudal knight. But another explanation can be found in the structure and assumptions of the game itself. In the first place, like the Chinese scholar, the game of weiqi valued both intellect and intuition. Second, in weiqi, victory and defeat were relative, not absolute. “Victory” was based on the number of intersections dominated at the end of the game, but “defeat” was never total; a player could always save face. Furthermore, the style of play involved dispersed, yet related, non-geometric configurations rather than a single decisive tactical engagement. This emphasis on a total pattern of seemingly aimless interrelationships has been described as an “efficient, almost aesthetic, balance of forces.”68 As a creative form of competition, weiqi held much the same artistic attraction as a landscape painting, garden, poem, musical composition, or even a good novel.
Other board games were also popular in Qing times. One of these, xiangqi (“elephant chess”), resembled Western chess in its basic structure. Reputedly invented by King Wu of the Zhou, xiangqi had enduring appeal to scholars and commoners alike in China. Qing editions of the WBQS regularly include instructions on playing xiangqi, just as they do for playing weiqi and the qin (see appendix E). Another game, shengguan tu (lit. “advancing in officialdom”) enjoyed less popularity, but it is somewhat more revealing from a cultural standpoint. Leo Stover has perceptively contrasted it with the famous Parker Brothers game Monopoly, observing that the point of the latter is the control of property and services to gain wealth, while the object of the former is to acquire rank and prestige in order to achieve financial advantage.69 The game “board” (usually a paper chart) approximates the opportunity structure of the Qing bureaucratic hierarchy. It has dozens of separate compartments (from 63 to 117) for positions ranging from lowly student to grand councilor. The higher a player climbs on the official ladder (by throws of six dice), the more money can be collected from those below him. In Qing times, and probably well before, this was a gambling game, and apparently the great Qing scholar Ji Yun (1724–1805) was deeply addicted to it.
Social intercourse in Qing China was almost invariably a status game, played out at all levels of society. In elite circles, extraordinary attention was paid to matters of dress, salutation, demeanor, conversation, written communications (including invitations and responses), the giving of gifts, seating arrangements, food, and so forth. Novels such as Dream of the Red Chamber and Flowers in the Mirror devote an enormous amount of space to discussions of ritually correct behavior, prompting Mark Elvin to observe, “it is close to impossible for a reader who has not spent years of self-induction into pre-modern ways of [Chinese] thought to share . . . [a concern] for the almost countless specific details [of ritual and ceremony in works of this sort].”70
The vocabulary of Chinese social relations, like that of kinship and family protocol, was extraordinarily complex, with social distinctions that would not even occur to most non-Chinese. There were, for instance, several different kinds of bowing, each designated by a different name and all dutifully illustrated in ritual handbooks. On formal occasions, the guest of honor always sat on the left (yang) side of the host, and his actions dictated the responses of the other guests. At the lower levels of society, and in relatively informal circumstances, less explicit attention was paid to status distinctions, but the distinctions were seldom forgotten. An astute mid-nineteenth-century Western observer remarked, for example, “When a number of individuals are walking together, you may generally infer their age or rank or position by the order in which they naturally and almost unconsciously range themselves.”71
Many other longtime Western residents in late Qing China have commented on the extraordinary attention given to etiquette in all facets of Chinese social intercourse. J. H. Gray informs us, “A Chinese is seldom at a loss to know what polite observances must regulate his behaviour. Etiquette is an essential part of his education.” R. F. Johnston’s observations are worth quoting at length:
[Chinese] rules of ceremony may seem, from the foreigner’s point of view, too stiff and artificial, or exasperating in their pedantic minuteness. The European is inclined to laugh at social laws which indicate with preciseness when and how a mourner should wail at a funeral, what expressions a man must use when paying visits of condolence or congratulation, what clothes must be worn on different occasions, how a visitor must be greeted, how farewells are to be said, how modes of salutation are to be differentiated, and how chairs are to be sat on. . . . [These] rules of Chinese etiquette may be stiff, but there is no stiffness about the Chinese gentleman—or about the illiterate Chinese peasant—when he is acting in accordance with these rules.72
Chinese social ritual may often have been restrictive, but to most Qing subjects it was also probably reassuring.
Food had enormous social importance in traditional China. Although in all societies food is used to create and maintain interpersonal bonds, the Chinese employed it in a particularly sophisticated way as “a marker and communicator in social transactions.” The bigoted but otherwise observant missionary Arthur Smith wrote just before the turn of the century, “If there is anything which the Chinese have reduced to an exact science, it is the business of eating.”73 Elaborate meals were required of all major social occasions, just as sacrificial dishes were essential to the proper performance of all major forms of religious ritual.
The social significance of food can be measured in a variety of ways. As is often noted, a common greeting in traditional China was “Have you eaten?” Food was always a fit topic for genteel conversation, as well as the subject of personal correspondence, poetry, and classical prose. A number of famous Qing scholars wrote essays on food, and much information on it appears in local gazetteers, government documents, and encyclopedias such as the TSJC. Vernacular literature abounds with descriptions of food, and writers such as Li Yu, Wu Jingzi, and Cao Xueqin are acknowledged masters in the use of food to describe characters, develop or define social situations, and even link subplots within their works. Dream of the Red Chamber is especially noteworthy for its elaborate descriptions of food and feasts.
Food was always a good index of status in Chinese society for both gods and humans. Qing statutes specified in extraordinary detail the type, amount, and style of food for official sacrifices, just as local custom dictated the requirements for popular offerings to gods, ghosts, and ancestors. Similarly, in the human world, official regulations and popular practice indicated the proper kinds and amounts of dishes appropriate to persons of different rank and station, from the emperor down to commoners. Many Qing emperors had quite simple preferences, but, as Jonathan Spence reminds us, “the personal tastes of the emperor had little to do with the scale of culinary operations or their costs. The regulations were firm about the exact content of all major meals, which were carefully graded in accordance with their level of ritual significance.”74
On formal occasions at the lower levels of elite society, the type and number of dishes had to be pegged to the status of the participants and the importance of the meal. Clan rules sometimes specified the number of dishes to be offered by lineage members to guests, but most commoners could not indulge in formal and elaborate meals except on special ritual occasions such as births, marriages, and funerals. Dream of the Red Chamber provides several indications of the gap between the eating habits of commoners and those of the elite. In discussing the price of certain dishes for a relatively small gentry party, Liu Laolao, an old countrywoman, exclaims, “It couldn’t have cost less than twenty taels in all. Bless and save us! That’d keep a farmer and his family for a year.”75 And so it might have in the early or mid-eighteenth century. Naturally enough, most peasant fare was simple and monotonous, but it was still prepared with special care. In the words of a Scottish sojourner to China in the 1850s, “the poorest classes in China seem to understand the art of preparing their food much better than the same classes at home.”76
Despite the sharp difference between rich and poor in eating habits and the existence of a plethora of regional cooking styles, Chinese attitudes toward food were remarkably similar. The most fundamental distinction was between grains and other starches (fan) and vegetable or meat dishes (cai). A proper balance between the two was deemed necessary to a good meal—although fragrance, flavor, color, and texture also had to be harmoniously blended. Fan was primary; cai secondary. This concern with balance had a classical foundation. The Record of Ritual states: “In feasting and at the vernal sacrifice in the ancestral temple they had music; but in feeding the aged and at the autumnal sacrifice they had no music: these were based on the yin and yang. All drinking serves to nourish the yang; all eating to nourish the yin. . . . The number of ding and zu [vessels] was odd [yang], and that of [the vessels] bian and dou was even [yin].”77
Foods and cooking styles were usually designated yin or yang, cold or hot, “military” or “civil.” Given the holistic approach of the Chinese to good health, we should not be surprised to find that eating certain foods affected the balance of yin and yang in the body. A sore on the skin or an inexplicable fever, for example, might be blamed on overeating “hot” foods (oily, fried, or peppery items, fatty meat, and oily plants), while “cold” foods (water plants, crustaceans, and certain beans) could be blamed for producing or exacerbating a common cold. Complicating matters was the classification of Chinese food according to the five flavors—sweet, sour, bitter, pungent, and salty—which were, in turn, correlated with the five viscera, the five agents, the five seasons, and so forth. As with other aspects of traditional Chinese medicine, the variables were nearly infinite.
Tea had both medicinal and gastronomical appeal. During the Qing dynasty teahouses were popular centers of recreation for males, and a number of individuals considered themselves connoisseurs of the national beverage. Most of the best teas were grown in south China, and although certain types were believed to be especially valuable in digesting some types of foods and ameliorating certain kinds of physical distress, the principal medical benefit of tea seems to have been the fact that it was made with boiling (and therefore sterile) water.
Some alcoholic beverages had explicitly medicinal purposes, but most were valued primarily as social lubricants, closely associated with the joys of good food, friendship, and the composition of verse. The Chinese did not distinguish between true wines and starch-based spirits—both were designated jiu (“liquor”). As with tea, there were many different varieties of jiu, most of which were identified with locations in south China. The amount of alcohol might vary from as little as 10 percent (twenty proof) to as much as 80 percent (160 proof), and although moderation was encouraged in drinking as well as eating, the Chinese periodically threw caution to the wind. Drinking games were extremely popular at parties (note the category Youshang in the WBQS, appendix E), and many members of the elite belonged to drinking clubs. The poet Yu Huai (1616–1696) describes marathon binges that went on in the brothel quarter of Nanjing until “all the guests vomited and fell asleep on the ground.” But even in more refined circumstances there were numerous instances of heavy drinking by members of the elite. The lower classes of Chinese society do not seem to have acquired a special fondness for liquor, but they did prove susceptible to the curse of opium in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.78
Parties in traditional China often involved entertainment other than eating and drinking, composing verse, or cavorting with prostitutes. Among the elite, exhibitions of singing and dancing were popular, as were dramatic performances. Plays proved particularly appealing to the women of elite households, as we can see from a reading of Dream of the Red Chamber. Performances also might be staged for family and friends on festive occasions such as marriages, birthdays for the elderly, or examination successes. Apparently, the actors engaged by individual households did not always know what play they would be performing until an honored guest made a request. The troupe thus had to have a repertoire of several dozen plays, and some groups were known to have command of nearly a hundred.
Plays were also staged in villages and towns. These performances might be sponsored by the whole community through subscription, by a segment of that community such as merchants, by a local temple, or by a private individual. In contrast to the more frequent dramatic performances of major cities, community plays were usually associated with periodic religious fairs or local festivals, which brought families and friends together for a few days of colorful and exciting entertainment, punctuated by noise and the smell of burning firecrackers and incense. Temples often sponsored plays because they were one of the few places in traditional China that were well equipped to stage them. These performances were often held on the “birthday” of the temple’s major deity and intended explicitly for the entertainment of that deity. Sacrifices usually attended the dramatic event. As Barbara Ward and others have emphasized, the cumulative impact of such plays exerted a powerful influence in “the dissemination and standardization of [Chinese] culture, particularly in the sphere of ideas and values.”79
Like local fairs and community celebrations, pilgrimages proved to be extremely popular in Qing China. The Chinese term for this sort of activity is chaoshan jinxiang: literally “to pay respects to a mountain.” Most pilgrimage sites were located in mountainous regions, and most pilgrimages involved making contact with a resident deity enshrined in a mountain temple. Pilgrims came from all social classes. In the words of Susan Naquin and Chün-fang Yu, “Differentiated literati, imperial, clerical, and lay traditions existed together with a continuously growing set of shrines to a variety of local, regional, and national deities.” With increasing ease of travel and greater political and economic integration, pilgrimage flourished in Qing times. In many parts of China, associations developed that “promoted these journeys and cared for the growing numbers of pilgrims.”80
Countrywide annual festivals, always highlighted in popular almanacs and liturgical calendars, played an especially important role in unifying traditional Chinese culture and in educating people about their social roles and responsibilities. Almost every month a major festival occurred throughout the land, touching all classes of Chinese society directly and even cutting across ethnic lines. Banner families, for example, celebrated most of these major festivals in garrison cities, as did the Manchu nobility at the capital.81 Many of these occasions were marked by official sacrifices and/or ancestor worship. They also generally involved feasts, firecrackers, dramatic performances, and music. Unfortunately, the brief descriptions below convey very little of the color and pageantry surrounding such events.82
The most important annual festival in traditional China was the month-long celebration of the New Year (Yuandan). This observance began in the twelfth lunar month. On about the twentieth day, Qing officials at every level commenced the ritual of “sealing the seals” of their yamens, in effect closing down government for a total of about four weeks. This action paralleled the shutdown of most commercial establishments during the same period. A week or so before the turn of the year, households throughout the country paid obeisance to the God of the Hearth, who, according to popular belief, ascended to Heaven to report to the Jade Emperor on the family’s activities during the past year. This ceremony was taken seriously but often celebrated lightly, with sweet substances smeared on the mouth of the god’s image to ensure a favorable report.
On New Year’s eve, the family again sacrificed to the God of the Hearth, as well as to other household deities and, of course, the ancestors. These ceremonies paralleled aspects of marriage ritual in symbolic significance. A family feast reaffirmed kinship ties, and the ritual of paying respect to the heads of the household in order of precedence through bowing and kowtowing served as a vivid reminder of status relationships within the family. The next day—brought in with fireworks, incense, and bursts of color—entailed visits in proper dress to friends, neighbors, relations, and superiors; gift giving; and general merriment. Auspicious “spring couplets,” written by local calligraphers on red paper, adorned residences and other buildings, bringing blessings and prosperity to families and businesses for the coming year.
The first two weeks of the New Year were devoted to various amusements, celebrations, and religious sacrifices. Ancestors and domestic gods were usually worshipped again, along with deities such as the popular God of Wealth. Officials throughout the country welcomed spring (yingchun) in elaborate public ceremonies designed to indicate, through the symbolism of color, what the agricultural prospects were for the coming year and to assure the best results under the circumstances. The Lantern Festival (Dengjie) on the fifteenth day of the first month marked the end of the New Year’s celebration. It was a happy time, devoted largely to the display of colorful lanterns in homes and businesses and to the entertainment of women and children. About a week later, Qing officials “opened their seals” and resumed government business.
The next major festival, Qingming (lit. “Pure and Bright”), took place in the third month, 106 days after the winter solstice. It was one of three important “ghost festivals” (guijie) in traditional China. Qingming was a time of family reunion, celebration, and devoted ancestor worship—including the sweeping of graves and offerings of food for the dead. Large-scale lineage sacrifices might also take place at this time. An important transformation during the Qianlong period was that public ceremonies associated with the ancestral cult began to grow ever more elaborate—at least in the provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, where powerful lineages predominated. During the late Ming and early Qing, the rites of grave worship had been confined to “recent” ancestors (up to twelve generations after death), and involved gatherings of fewer than one hundred people. But by the mid-Qing, entire lineages of hundreds and even thousands of individuals began visiting the graves of even their remote founders (up to thirty generations back).
The Chinese Repository of 1832 carried an absorbing account of one such sacrifice, involving more than two thousand clan members. The prayer offered at the tomb of the founding father, taken directly from a famous ritual handbook, illustrates the purposes of the ceremony:
Revolving years have brought again the season of Spring. Cherishing sentiments of veneration, I look up and sweep your tomb. Prostrate, I pray that you will come and be present; that you will grant to your posterity that they may be prosperous and illustrious; at this season of genial showers and gentle breezes, I desire to recompense the root of my existence, and exert myself sincerely. Always grant your safe protection. My trust is in your divine spirit. Reverently I present the fivefold sacrifice of a pig, a chicken, a duck, a goose, and a fish; also an offering of five plates of fruit; with oblations of spirituous liquors; earnestly entreating that you will come and view them.83
The elaborate ceremonies concluded with a massive feast in which the participants in time-honored fashion shared the sacrificial foods. Although most Qingming devotions were far more personal and casual, all had the effect of establishing a close bond between the living and the dead.
The so-called Dragon Boat Festival (Duanyang jie, lit. Festival of the Upright Sun) took place early in the fifth month. Although celebrated countrywide, it was especially popular in south China, where colorful and exciting boat races took place on rivers and lakes. These races, and the festival generally, commemorated the death by drowning of the famous but ill-fated Zhou dynasty scholar and poet Qu Yuan, who committed suicide in despair after losing the favor of his ruler through slander. Although a joyous occasion, the Dragon Boat Festival was surrounded by rituals designed to protect the population from evil and unhealthy influences that were believed to be especially prevalent in the fifth month. A late Ming account of the festival in Qu Yuan’s home province of Hunan states:
The current popular belief is that the boat race is held to avert misfortunes. At the end of the race, the boats carry sacrificial animals, wine, and paper coins and row straight downstream, where the animals and wine are cast into the water, the paper coins are burned, and spells are recited. The purpose of these acts is to make pestilence and premature death flow away with the water.84
On the seventh day of the seventh month unmarried Chinese women celebrated the Double Seventh festival, an occasion that valorized women in their local communities and beyond. It was, by all accounts, “a central event in women’s culture [that cut] across class boundaries throughout China.”85 It commemorated the one time during the year when the Weaving Maiden (Zhinü) of Chinese mythology could join her husband, the Herdsman (Niulang), across the Milky Way. A play based on the Zhinü legend was usually performed and young women made offerings to the patron deity of needlework. Preparations for the festival naturally involved sewing and embroidering. Because the Double Seventh was considered a particularly propitious day to look into the future, young girls tried to predict, through a lighthearted form of divination called “dropping the needle,” whether they would be dexterous or clumsy in their work. Needle-threading competitions also took place as part of the festivities.
On the fifteenth day of the seventh month, various ceremonies were undertaken to honor the ancestors and placate “hungry ghosts.” Graves were swept and ancestral sacrifices performed. The great Buddhist religious service known as All Soul’s Day (Yulan hui) also took place at this time. It involved the reading of sutras by the clergy to “lead those [souls] deeply engulfed in the lower world [across the sea of suffering].” Significantly, the theme of these devotions was the filial piety of Mu Lian (Maudgalyayana), a disciple of the Buddha who offered sacrifices to save his deceased mother from the torments of Hell.86
Exactly a month later, the Mid-Autumn Festival (Zhongqiu jie) occurred. Among the most popular of all Chinese festivals, it involved family gatherings and feasts, the exchange of “mooncakes,” offerings to the moon, ancestor worship, and the burning of incense to Heaven and Earth. Like the Lantern Festival, the Mid-Autumn Festival was especially popular with women and children. Men played a marginal role in the ceremonies because, in the words of a popular Beijing proverb, “Men do not worship the moon, [just as] women do not sacrifice to the God of the Hearth.”
The Chongyang (Double Yang) Festival on the ninth day of the ninth month was in many parts of the country a relatively minor celebration, with little overt religious significance. It was primarily a day of hill climbing, sight-seeing, kite flying, and feasting. Contemporary Western descriptions of the festival suggest a gala mood, echoed by Chinese accounts: “Reciting poetry and drinking wine, roasting meat and distributing cakes—truly this is a time of joy.” In some parts of the country, however, Chongyang was marked by large-scale lineage sacrifices of the sort that occurred during the Qingming festival. Even national celebrations were not carried out with perfect uniformity throughout the country, but the similarities appear far more striking than the differences.
On the first day of the tenth month, Chinese families again worshipped their ancestors in ceremonies paralleling those of the seventh month and the Qingming festival. This celebration was known popularly as the ceremony of Sending Winter Clothes (Song hanyi). Concern for the well-being of the ancestors was expressed at this time by inscriptions on colored paper garments or plain paper wrappers enclosing “spirit money.” It was also in the tenth month that the Qing officials prepared the ritual calendar for the coming year. From this time until the New Year’s preparations began in the twelfth month there were no national festivals of any consequence—only relatively minor celebrations and a few official sacrifices. Perhaps the most widely observed ritual of the period in Chinese households was the preparation of “eighth-day gruel” (laba zhou) in the twelfth month, a thanksgiving ceremony designed to show gratitude for good fortune during the year.
Although most Chinese festivals contributed to community solidarity and a shared sense of culture, they were not an unmixed blessing from the standpoint of either Chinese elites or the throne. This was particularly true of local religious festivals, village fairs, and pilgrimages. As crowds gathered in public places to watch entertainers, enjoy food and drink, and do business, men and women mingled more freely, fights sometimes erupted, and social discipline occasionally broke down. Gamblers, thieves, and swindlers naturally exploited the situation. Especially threatening to the government was the possibility that community celebrations would serve as the recruiting grounds for secret societies. An edict of 1724 expresses this fear:
[A] class of loafers, with neither a livelihood nor an abode, . . . has come forth to usurp the name of . . . [Buddhism and Daoism] and to corrupt the practical use of the same. The majority of them use [doctrines about] calamities and felicity, misfortune and happiness, to sell their foolish magic and baseless talk. They begin by cheating on goods and money to fatten themselves. Then they proceed to hold meetings for the burning of incense where males and females mingle promiscuously. Farmers and craftsmen forsake their business and trades, and engage . . . in talking about miracles. Worst of all, rebellious and subversive individuals and heretical miscreants glide in among them, establish parties and form leagues by taking membership oaths. They assemble at night and disperse in daytime. They thus transgress their proper status and sin against their duty, mislead mankind and deceive the people.87
For the most part, the Qing authorities relied on social pressures and the vast network of nongovernmental organs of local control to maintain or restore order in towns and villages. But penal law remained a powerful weapon in the state’s arsenal, to be used with ruthless severity whenever crimes occurred that threatened the Chinese social or political system. Among these crimes, the worst were the “Ten Great Wrongs,” discussed earlier and in chapter 3: (1) rebellion against the emperor and his ritual order; (2) subversion or destruction of imperial temples, tombs, or palaces; (3) desertion or treason; (4) parricide (including the murder of a father, mother, uncle, aunt, grandfather, or grandmother); (5) the murder of three or more persons in one family; (6) lack of respect for, or improper use of, the ritual articles and implements of the emperor; (7) unfilial conduct; (8) maltreatment of relatives; (9) insubordination by inferiors toward their superiors; and (10) incest. All of these crimes were potentially punishable by death from slicing (lingchi)—the most severe form of punishment in the Qing code.88
In especially serious cases, punishment went well beyond the perpetrator. The statute on rebellion and high treason, for example, not only stipulated death by slicing for the principal offender, but also the decapitation of all males in his household over the age of fifteen (including the offender’s father, grandfather, sons, grandsons, brothers, and brothers’ sons, as well as his maternal grandfather, father-in-law, and brothers-in-law). Further, the law provided that the rest of the family (all females and all males fifteen years of age and under) would be enslaved in the households of “meritorious ministers.” This statute illustrates both the traditional emphasis on ancestral concerns as a deterrent and the pervasive principle of collective responsibility in Chinese society.89
Unfortunately, such draconian legal measures did not prevent crimes against the state or crimes within the family. Throughout the Qing period, rebellions repeatedly broke out, despite the harsh treatment received by the leaders of such uprisings and their families. Heterodox ritual specialists found opportunities to usurp the prerogatives of the Qing elite, and secret societies flourished. And although the state dictated severe penalties for domestic crimes, we know that among the most common cases in the Qing dynasty’s Xing’an huilan (Conspectus of penal cases) were the killing of a wife’s par-amour; disobedience to parents or grandparents; incest; and assault by either wives or concubines on husbands, slaves or servants on masters, or offspring on parents or grandparents.90 Clearly, Chinese society was not all harmony and cooperation, even in the best of times.
Yet in all, the fabric of Confucian society wore remarkably well, strengthened by the interwoven strands of religion, law, education, and ritual. For all that divided China, much more united it: a centralized system of administration; shared social attitudes and practices; a similar cosmology and world view; a common repository of ethical principles, artistic symbols, historical heroes, and literary myths; a powerful sense of unparalleled cultural development; and a universal pride in simply being “Chinese.” It took the combined impact of unprecedented population pressure and Western imperialism in the nineteenth century to begin to tear this traditional garment apart, and even now it has not been completely destroyed.