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The Traditional Chinese Family & Lineage
Arguably there has never been a stable human society in which any institution has been more important to the participants than the family. Thus China is by no means unique in considering the family important, and scholars of Chinese life are well served by focusing attention upon it.
I. The Family
Definition: The traditional Chinese family, or jiÄ å®¶ (colloquial: jiÄtÃng 家åº), called a "chia" by a few English writers, was a patrilineal, patriarchal, prescriptively virilocal kinship group sharing a common household budget and normatively extended in form.
(It was not the same thing as a descent line, lineage, or clan, all of which also existed in China.)
This means:
Patrilineal
The term means that descent was calculated through men.
A person was descended from both a mother and a father, of course, but one inherited one's family membership from one's father. China was extreme in that a woman was quite explicitly removed from the family of her birth (her niángjiÄ å¨˜å®¶) and affiliated to her husband's family (her pójiÄ å©†å®¶), a transition always very clearly symbolized in local marriage customs, despite their variation from one region to another.
Reverence was paid to ancestors (zÇ”xiÄn 祖先). For a man this referred to his male ancestors and their wives. For a woman it referred to her male ancestors and their wives only a couple of generations up, but was extended also to all of her husband's male ancestors and their wives.
In popular belief ancestors depended upon the living for this reverence (usually seen as provisioning them with sacrificial food, literally feeding them), and therefore the failure to produce (or, if necessary, adopt) male offspring was considered an immoral behavior or, if accidental, a great misfortune. In popular religion, dead people without male descendants to look after them tended to be thought of as potentially dangerous ghosts. Among the living, people of age to be parents but without children tended to be looked down upon.
Patriarchal
The term means that the family is hierarchically organized, with the prime institutionalized authority being vested in the senior-most male, who was considered to be responsible for the orderly management of the family. (A fascinating late Imperial text of instructions to family heads is available on this web site [Link is http://weber.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/chtxts/JuBorlu.html])
No two members of a Chinese family were equal in authority. "A state cannot have two monarchs," a widely cited proverb held, "or a family two heads" (Guó wú èr jÅ«n, jiÄ wú èr zhÅ å›½æ— äºŒå›ï¼Œå®¶æ— 二主.) Officially at least, (1) senior generations were superior to junior generations, (2) older people were superior to younger ones, and (3) men were superior to women. ("Men are high, women low" — nán zÅ«n, nÇš bÄ“ 男尊女呗 said another old proverb.)
Normatively (that is, in what most people thought of as the ideal form), a family would be headed by a man who was older and/or of more senior generation than anybody else. However, whatever the deference due to older people or older generations, if it was a choice between an adult man and his widowed mother, say, it was the man who became the household head.
{Further Note:
A woman was said to engage in "three followings" (sÄncóng ): "At home to follow her father, at marriage to follow her husband, after marriage to follow her son" (zà i jiÄ cóng fù, chÅ« jià cóng fÅ«, hÅ«n hòu cóng zÇ åœ¨å®¶è¦ä»Žçˆ¶, 出家è¦ä»Žå¤«, å©šåŽä»Žå).
Dozens —probably hundreds, perhaps thousands— of traditional jingles, proverbs, and pithy folk expressions refer to "overweighting males and underweighting females" (zhòng nán qÄ«ng nÇš é‡ç”·è½»å¥³). They range from the blunt (like referring to a daughter as "goods on which one loses money" (shÃbÄ›nhuò 蚀本货) to the fatalistic (like the little girls' plaintive jingle, "Marry a chicken, follow a chicken; marry a dog, follow a dog" (jià jÄ« suà jÄ«, jià gÅu, suà gÅu å«é¸¡éšé¸¡ï¼Œå«ç‹—éšç‹—).
Now and then one catches a passing glimpse of some strategizing in them, however: "Cold house? Get married! You'll have clothes to wear and rice to eat!" (JiÄ hán? Jià hà n! ChuÄn yÄ« chÄ« fà n! 家寒å«æ±‰,ç©¿è¡£åƒé¥).}
In actual practice, there is no known family system in which members do not contribute to the collective welfare and decision making, with their differential knowledge, perspectives, and skills. Thus patriarchy is a "jural norm," but is differentially salient in different families. Obviously, personality has much to do with how the members of a family actually behave. In China there were always families dominated by women, old people whose lives were run by their children, and so on, just as elsewhere.
Family hierarchy was very emphatically symbolized in the concept of xià o å (colloquial: xià oshùn å顺 / åé †), which is usually translated "filial piety," but is more accurately rendered "filial subordination." When wills clashed, it was expected (and legally enforced) that the will of a family superior should prevail over the will of a family inferior. Traditional law held a child's insubordination to a parent to be a capital offense, and a daughter-in-law's insubordination to her parents-in-law grounds for divorce. (The picture shows a son, lower right, begging a court to allow him to suffer the punishment for his father's crime.)
Grief over the death of a parent was considered the deepest kind of grief, calling for the longest period of mourning. (In contrast, in some regions it was considered inappropriate to mourn the death of a child, since the child had proven its unfiliality by dying first.)
Acts of heroic sacrifice in the support of one's parents were the commonest and most important genre of Chinese moral tales, and were considered especially fit material for the education of children. (The most important group of such tales is a collection called the Twenty-Four Filial Examplars, available elsewhere on this web site. Link The 24 Filial Exemplars)
Prescriptively Virilocal
The term means that there was a strongly held preference and expectation that a newly married couple should live with the groom's family.
It was considered ideal for all men in a family to marry and bring their wives to live on the family estate, and for all women born to a family to marry and go out to live with their husbands. The change of families was of course a defining event in the life of a woman, and the traditional, even prescriptive, sentiment was great sorrow at leaving her girlhood home, only sometimes mitigated by a sense of adventure or excitement about assuming her new status as married woman. In some parts of western China there is a tradition of women's musical lamentations on this theme, and the days leading up to marriage may be celebrated with carefully structured sessions of ritualized sobbing involving the bride-to-be and her unmarried friends or younger sisters.
n actual fact, sometimes a family lacked the resources to support additional personnel. A man with two daughters whose income derived from carting goods in a wheelbarrow had little chance of becoming the head of a unit with sons and married-in daughters-in-law, after all. Thus many other arrangements in fact were found.
Sometimes —probably in about twenty percent of all marriages— the groom in fact went to live with the wife's family. (This practice is called "uxorilocality," from the Latin word uxor "wife.") Sometimes this was merely a matter of economic convenience, but often it was because the wife's family had no son, and the son-in-law was accepted in lieu of a son, sometimes changing his surname (which was an act of disgraceful unfiliality towards his own parents, if living) or more often promising that the first son born to the marriage would take the name of the wife's father.
Because uxorilocality broke the cultural prescription for virilocality, it was considered a last resort, and uxorilocal husbands were viewed with suspicion and scorn. An uxorilocal marriage was disparaged as a "backward-growing sprout" (dÇŽozhù miáo 倒ä½è‹—), and a man who married uxorilocally was (and is) referred to as a "superfluous husband" (zhuìxù 赘婿 / è´…å©¿), even though he was, obviously, considered necessary.
Kinship Group
The "kinship" part of this means that members of the family were related genealogically, i.e. either by having common ancestors or by being married. The "group" part means that they had known boundaries and shared activities or resources with each other that they did not share with outsiders.
A family is not a household. A household included whoever lived in the same building, which might mean tenants, servants, apprentices, sometimes a resident priest, or whoever. Although a household is a useful census unit, and can be used as a proxy for families if one has data on households and not on families, it is not the same thing.
Just as a household can incorporate people who are not part of the family, the family can incorporate people who are not part of the household. Many Chinese throughout history have lived for longer or shorter periods away from the families. Shorter separations might involve living during the summer in a small shed to protect fields from the theft of irrigation water, for example, or traveling over the countryside as a peddler. Longer separations might occur if a member went away to serve in the army or to study or to set up a business in another location.
Despite this close and rather legalistic definition of a family as a kinship group, the word could also be extended metaphorically, as in English, to refer to all relatives.
Membership in a family was sometimes accorded people by adoption. In cases where a couple had no son, an "extra" son of a close relative might be adopted, although there was wide variation between families in the extent to which the child was actually assimilated into family life. Less often a son might be adopted from a distant relative. In most regions at most periods, it was considered undesirable to adopt a son from an unrelated family, but the practice was in fact by no means uncommon, even when it was considered unfortunate.
It was not unusual for friends of roughly the same age to swear oaths of fidelity to each other that brought them into a relationship of sworn brotherhood (or less frequently sworn sisterhood). In theory, and occasionally in practice, such alliances were honored by families as creating family ties, although never, to my knowledge, was the assimilation of sworn siblings actually complete enough to change official genealogies.
Sharing a Common Household Budget
This means that the possessions, income, and expenses of all family members were pooled, and decisions about resource distribution were the legitimate business of all family members, and were ultimately taken through the patriarchal authority structure of the family.
It has been convincingly argued that the common budget is one of the most important defining characteristics of Chinese families. One effect of this custom is to define who is in or out of a family by means other than kinship. Kinship makes one a potential member of a family. But close kinsmen can be in different families if the family has decided to stop sharing a budget.
It is possible for the same family budget to be shared by a family that crosses several households. One can imagine a family with some members living in a farming village and others living over their shop in a small town, for example. In modern times, Chinese families have been studied that have had members living in several different countries, but all sharing a common budget.
Sharing a budget is a strictly economic way of viewing what families shared, but sharing went beyond that. In the religious sphere, families tended to share luck. A family in which one member was chronically sick while another had bad habits and a third tended to make bad investments might seek to treat all of these as symptoms of a single ill, the inharmony of the family as a whole. (For more on this, see my book, Gods, Ghosts, & Ancestors. The full text is available on this web site.)
Family division (fÄ“njiÄ åˆ†å®¶) is therefore a critical event. When family members decided that their union had become economically or socially unviable, they would agree to a division of the family's resources and the creation of financially separate new families. Typically this occurred after the death of a senior generation had left two brothers and their wives and children as a common economic unit. Although there might be natural affection between the brothers, differences in their economic productivity and differences in the numbers of their children often led to arguments that were most easily solved by family division. A usual mediator would be a sympathetic but disinterested third party, traditionally the brother of one of the older married-in women, and usually a contract would commit the agreements to writing. While memory of the old, united family was still fresh, each of the new units tended to be called a "segment" (fèn 份).
Because of the cultural value placed on family unity, size, cooperation, and mutual support, family division was always considered an unfortunate event.
The family as an economic unit was symbolized by the stove, and at division the new units would always maintain separate stoves, even if it meant somebody cooked on a small charcoal burner in the courtyard while everyone continued to occupy the same house.
Members of the same family might occasionally live apart, sometimes for decades at a time. (An example might be a family member away at school, or working in a different region.) Married couples also might live apart. When marriage is defined by its attendant duties rather than its emotions, this is perhaps easier than in societies with a strong stress upon romantic love in marriage, and even today Chinese couples sometimes endure separations so long as to seem heroic (or bizarre) to people in some other societies.
Since the family was the unit of ownership (even down to the level of sharing toothbrushes), there was nothing that quite corresponded to inheritance. An important debate emerged early in the XXth century as western-inspired law sought to guarantee inheritance for women as well as for men. This was strongly resisted by many tradition-minded Chinese, who argued that there was no such thing as inheritance, and that women were provided for in the traditional scheme in that they were members of the families and segments to which their husbands belonged. One effect of switching from corporate ownership to individual inheritance and of including married daughters as legitimate inheritors from their parents would logically be the greater segmentation of land into ever smaller fields with different ownership. (As events actually unfolded, land was subject to other redistributive schemes throughout the XXth century, so that the issue of inheritance tended to recede into the background.)
Ancestor veneration was a fundamental duty of every Chinese, and this followed genealogical lines. Accordingly family division had no effect on the need to engage in ancestor worship. At family division a slightly larger share of property was accorded one party (traditionally the oldest son if there was one) to cover the costs of ancestral sacrifices and of housing the shared ancestral tablets. When possible, cadet lines would assemble at the altar of the senior line on occasions requiring ancestor worship. Occasionally (and controversially) cadet lines unable to send representatives to the senior altar would make copies of the tablets for worship off-site.
Ancestor veneration was also practiced at grave sites, and the solar (!) festival of QÄ«ngmÃng 清明 (usually falling on April 5) is associated with tomb "sweeping" followed by presentation of incense and sacrificial foods or other gifts to the dead. (The sacrificial food was often then consumed in a graveside "feast," as shown here.)
Although individual ancestor worship was more or less inevitable for ancestors actually remembered, it tended to become more casual for those who had faded from memory. Importantly, ancestors from whom one had not inherited economic goods were soon forgotten, and their cult folded into the general sacrifices offered to ancestors in general on a calendrical schedule that varied from place to place and period to period.
Normatively Extended in Form
This means that it ideally included a descent line of men and their wives and children. The usual Chinese term was simply "big family" (dà jiÄ å¤§å®¶, colloquial: dà jiÄtÃng 大家åº). This is more precise than the popular usage of the term "extended family" in English, but somewhat less precise than the English term "extended family" as used by sociologists, which is sometimes placed in contrast to "stem family" to provide a technical term for cross-cultural application.)
As envisioned by those inclined to sentimentalize about it, the ideal Chinese family might be headed by an elderly patriarch and his wife, and include their five sons and their wives, and the children of all these people, including perhaps some adult grandsons who already had wives, but excluding any daughters who had married out and become members of other families.
Since the population of China was increasing only very slightly or not at all through most of Chinese history, the average number of sons that a married couple had was in fact only slightly more than one. When there was a second son, there was tremendous pressure to make the lad available to a relative who had no son at all or to provide him as an uxorilocal husband (and heir) to a friend who had no son. Thus in most cases, a family could not in fact include two adult brothers.
Throughout most of Chinese history the mean age at death was quite low, and one's sixtieth birthday was an event of awe and celebration. Accordingly, it was unusual for elderly people to live to see their grandchildren grow to adulthood. For this reason, although three-generation families were common, four-generation families were rare, and five-generation families truly remarkable. (In funerals of elderly people, it was conventional to write the number of generations they had spawned on funeral lanterns, usually adding a couple of generations to make it sound better. Five was a common number.)
Hence, although Chinese families were normatively extended, and although many Chinese spent at least some years living in families of considerable complexity, it was unusual for a family to conform to the ideal image of a truly large group of relatives living together and sharing a budget. Mean family size in most villages was between four and five people.
Jordan: Traditional Chinese Family and Lineage
Arguably there has never been a stable human society in which any institution has been more important to the participants than the family. Thus China is by no means unique in considering the family important, and scholars of Chinese life are well served by focusing attention upon it.
I. The Family
Definition: The traditional Chinese family, or jiÄ å®¶ (colloquial: jiÄtÃng 家åº), called a "chia" by a few English writers, was a patrilineal, patriarchal, prescriptively virilocal kinship group sharing a common household budget and normatively extended in form.
(It was not the same thing as a descent line, lineage, or clan, all of which also existed in China.)
This means:
Patrilineal
The term means that descent was calculated through men.
A person was descended from both a mother and a father, of course, but one inherited one's family membership from one's father. China was extreme in that a woman was quite explicitly removed from the family of her birth (her niángjiÄ å¨˜å®¶) and affiliated to her husband's family (her pójiÄ å©†å®¶), a transition always very clearly symbolized in local marriage customs, despite their variation from one region to another.
Reverence was paid to ancestors (zÇ”xiÄn 祖先). For a man this referred to his male ancestors and their wives. For a woman it referred to her male ancestors and their wives only a couple of generations up, but was extended also to all of her husband's male ancestors and their wives.
In popular belief ancestors depended upon the living for this reverence (usually seen as provisioning them with sacrificial food, literally feeding them), and therefore the failure to produce (or, if necessary, adopt) male offspring was considered an immoral behavior or, if accidental, a great misfortune. In popular religion, dead people without male descendants to look after them tended to be thought of as potentially dangerous ghosts. Among the living, people of age to be parents but without children tended to be looked down upon.
Patriarchal
The term means that the family is hierarchically organized, with the prime institutionalized authority being vested in the senior-most male, who was considered to be responsible for the orderly management of the family. (A fascinating late Imperial text of instructions to family heads is available on this web site [Link is http://weber.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/chtxts/JuBorlu.html])
No two members of a Chinese family were equal in authority. "A state cannot have two monarchs," a widely cited proverb held, "or a family two heads" (Guó wú èr jÅ«n, jiÄ wú èr zhÅ å›½æ— äºŒå›ï¼Œå®¶æ— 二主.) Officially at least, (1) senior generations were superior to junior generations, (2) older people were superior to younger ones, and (3) men were superior to women. ("Men are high, women low" — nán zÅ«n, nÇš bÄ“ 男尊女呗 said another old proverb.)
Normatively (that is, in what most people thought of as the ideal form), a family would be headed by a man who was older and/or of more senior generation than anybody else. However, whatever the deference due to older people or older generations, if it was a choice between an adult man and his widowed mother, say, it was the man who became the household head.
{Further Note:
A woman was said to engage in "three followings" (sÄncóng ): "At home to follow her father, at marriage to follow her husband, after marriage to follow her son" (zà i jiÄ cóng fù, chÅ« jià cóng fÅ«, hÅ«n hòu cóng zÇ åœ¨å®¶è¦ä»Žçˆ¶, 出家è¦ä»Žå¤«, å©šåŽä»Žå).
Dozens —probably hundreds, perhaps thousands— of traditional jingles, proverbs, and pithy folk expressions refer to "overweighting males and underweighting females" (zhòng nán qÄ«ng nÇš é‡ç”·è½»å¥³). They range from the blunt (like referring to a daughter as "goods on which one loses money" (shÃbÄ›nhuò 蚀本货) to the fatalistic (like the little girls' plaintive jingle, "Marry a chicken, follow a chicken; marry a dog, follow a dog" (jià jÄ« suà jÄ«, jià gÅu, suà gÅu å«é¸¡éšé¸¡ï¼Œå«ç‹—éšç‹—).
Now and then one catches a passing glimpse of some strategizing in them, however: "Cold house? Get married! You'll have clothes to wear and rice to eat!" (JiÄ hán? Jià hà n! ChuÄn yÄ« chÄ« fà n! 家寒å«æ±‰,ç©¿è¡£åƒé¥).}
In actual practice, there is no known family system in which members do not contribute to the collective welfare and decision making, with their differential knowledge, perspectives, and skills. Thus patriarchy is a "jural norm," but is differentially salient in different families. Obviously, personality has much to do with how the members of a family actually behave. In China there were always families dominated by women, old people whose lives were run by their children, and so on, just as elsewhere.
Family hierarchy was very emphatically symbolized in the concept of xià o å (colloquial: xià oshùn å顺 / åé †), which is usually translated "filial piety," but is more accurately rendered "filial subordination." When wills clashed, it was expected (and legally enforced) that the will of a family superior should prevail over the will of a family inferior. Traditional law held a child's insubordination to a parent to be a capital offense, and a daughter-in-law's insubordination to her parents-in-law grounds for divorce. (The picture shows a son, lower right, begging a court to allow him to suffer the punishment for his father's crime.)
Grief over the death of a parent was considered the deepest kind of grief, calling for the longest period of mourning. (In contrast, in some regions it was considered inappropriate to mourn the death of a child, since the child had proven its unfiliality by dying first.)
Acts of heroic sacrifice in the support of one's parents were the commonest and most important genre of Chinese moral tales, and were considered especially fit material for the education of children. (The most important group of such tales is a collection called the Twenty-Four Filial Examplars, available elsewhere on this web site. Link The 24 Filial Exemplars)
Prescriptively Virilocal
The term means that there was a strongly held preference and expectation that a newly married couple should live with the groom's family.
It was considered ideal for all men in a family to marry and bring their wives to live on the family estate, and for all women born to a family to marry and go out to live with their husbands. The change of families was of course a defining event in the life of a woman, and the traditional, even prescriptive, sentiment was great sorrow at leaving her girlhood home, only sometimes mitigated by a sense of adventure or excitement about assuming her new status as married woman. In some parts of western China there is a tradition of women's musical lamentations on this theme, and the days leading up to marriage may be celebrated with carefully structured sessions of ritualized sobbing involving the bride-to-be and her unmarried friends or younger sisters.
n actual fact, sometimes a family lacked the resources to support additional personnel. A man with two daughters whose income derived from carting goods in a wheelbarrow had little chance of becoming the head of a unit with sons and married-in daughters-in-law, after all. Thus many other arrangements in fact were found.
Sometimes —probably in about twenty percent of all marriages— the groom in fact went to live with the wife's family. (This practice is called "uxorilocality," from the Latin word uxor "wife.") Sometimes this was merely a matter of economic convenience, but often it was because the wife's family had no son, and the son-in-law was accepted in lieu of a son, sometimes changing his surname (which was an act of disgraceful unfiliality towards his own parents, if living) or more often promising that the first son born to the marriage would take the name of the wife's father.
Because uxorilocality broke the cultural prescription for virilocality, it was considered a last resort, and uxorilocal husbands were viewed with suspicion and scorn. An uxorilocal marriage was disparaged as a "backward-growing sprout" (dÇŽozhù miáo 倒ä½è‹—), and a man who married uxorilocally was (and is) referred to as a "superfluous husband" (zhuìxù 赘婿 / è´…å©¿), even though he was, obviously, considered necessary.
Kinship Group
The "kinship" part of this means that members of the family were related genealogically, i.e. either by having common ancestors or by being married. The "group" part means that they had known boundaries and shared activities or resources with each other that they did not share with outsiders.
A family is not a household. A household included whoever lived in the same building, which might mean tenants, servants, apprentices, sometimes a resident priest, or whoever. Although a household is a useful census unit, and can be used as a proxy for families if one has data on households and not on families, it is not the same thing.
Just as a household can incorporate people who are not part of the family, the family can incorporate people who are not part of the household. Many Chinese throughout history have lived for longer or shorter periods away from the families. Shorter separations might involve living during the summer in a small shed to protect fields from the theft of irrigation water, for example, or traveling over the countryside as a peddler. Longer separations might occur if a member went away to serve in the army or to study or to set up a business in another location.
Despite this close and rather legalistic definition of a family as a kinship group, the word could also be extended metaphorically, as in English, to refer to all relatives.
Membership in a family was sometimes accorded people by adoption. In cases where a couple had no son, an "extra" son of a close relative might be adopted, although there was wide variation between families in the extent to which the child was actually assimilated into family life. Less often a son might be adopted from a distant relative. In most regions at most periods, it was considered undesirable to adopt a son from an unrelated family, but the practice was in fact by no means uncommon, even when it was considered unfortunate.
It was not unusual for friends of roughly the same age to swear oaths of fidelity to each other that brought them into a relationship of sworn brotherhood (or less frequently sworn sisterhood). In theory, and occasionally in practice, such alliances were honored by families as creating family ties, although never, to my knowledge, was the assimilation of sworn siblings actually complete enough to change official genealogies.
Sharing a Common Household Budget
This means that the possessions, income, and expenses of all family members were pooled, and decisions about resource distribution were the legitimate business of all family members, and were ultimately taken through the patriarchal authority structure of the family.
It has been convincingly argued that the common budget is one of the most important defining characteristics of Chinese families. One effect of this custom is to define who is in or out of a family by means other than kinship. Kinship makes one a potential member of a family. But close kinsmen can be in different families if the family has decided to stop sharing a budget.
It is possible for the same family budget to be shared by a family that crosses several households. One can imagine a family with some members living in a farming village and others living over their shop in a small town, for example. In modern times, Chinese families have been studied that have had members living in several different countries, but all sharing a common budget.
Sharing a budget is a strictly economic way of viewing what families shared, but sharing went beyond that. In the religious sphere, families tended to share luck. A family in which one member was chronically sick while another had bad habits and a third tended to make bad investments might seek to treat all of these as symptoms of a single ill, the inharmony of the family as a whole. (For more on this, see my book, Gods, Ghosts, & Ancestors. The full text is available on this web site.)
Family division (fÄ“njiÄ åˆ†å®¶) is therefore a critical event. When family members decided that their union had become economically or socially unviable, they would agree to a division of the family's resources and the creation of financially separate new families. Typically this occurred after the death of a senior generation had left two brothers and their wives and children as a common economic unit. Although there might be natural affection between the brothers, differences in their economic productivity and differences in the numbers of their children often led to arguments that were most easily solved by family division. A usual mediator would be a sympathetic but disinterested third party, traditionally the brother of one of the older married-in women, and usually a contract would commit the agreements to writing. While memory of the old, united family was still fresh, each of the new units tended to be called a "segment" (fèn 份).
Because of the cultural value placed on family unity, size, cooperation, and mutual support, family division was always considered an unfortunate event.
The family as an economic unit was symbolized by the stove, and at division the new units would always maintain separate stoves, even if it meant somebody cooked on a small charcoal burner in the courtyard while everyone continued to occupy the same house.
Members of the same family might occasionally live apart, sometimes for decades at a time. (An example might be a family member away at school, or working in a different region.) Married couples also might live apart. When marriage is defined by its attendant duties rather than its emotions, this is perhaps easier than in societies with a strong stress upon romantic love in marriage, and even today Chinese couples sometimes endure separations so long as to seem heroic (or bizarre) to people in some other societies.
Since the family was the unit of ownership (even down to the level of sharing toothbrushes), there was nothing that quite corresponded to inheritance. An important debate emerged early in the XXth century as western-inspired law sought to guarantee inheritance for women as well as for men. This was strongly resisted by many tradition-minded Chinese, who argued that there was no such thing as inheritance, and that women were provided for in the traditional scheme in that they were members of the families and segments to which their husbands belonged. One effect of switching from corporate ownership to individual inheritance and of including married daughters as legitimate inheritors from their parents would logically be the greater segmentation of land into ever smaller fields with different ownership. (As events actually unfolded, land was subject to other redistributive schemes throughout the XXth century, so that the issue of inheritance tended to recede into the background.)
Ancestor veneration was a fundamental duty of every Chinese, and this followed genealogical lines. Accordingly family division had no effect on the need to engage in ancestor worship. At family division a slightly larger share of property was accorded one party (traditionally the oldest son if there was one) to cover the costs of ancestral sacrifices and of housing the shared ancestral tablets. When possible, cadet lines would assemble at the altar of the senior line on occasions requiring ancestor worship. Occasionally (and controversially) cadet lines unable to send representatives to the senior altar would make copies of the tablets for worship off-site.
Ancestor veneration was also practiced at grave sites, and the solar (!) festival of QÄ«ngmÃng 清明 (usually falling on April 5) is associated with tomb "sweeping" followed by presentation of incense and sacrificial foods or other gifts to the dead. (The sacrificial food was often then consumed in a graveside "feast," as shown here.)
Although individual ancestor worship was more or less inevitable for ancestors actually remembered, it tended to become more casual for those who had faded from memory. Importantly, ancestors from whom one had not inherited economic goods were soon forgotten, and their cult folded into the general sacrifices offered to ancestors in general on a calendrical schedule that varied from place to place and period to period.
Normatively Extended in Form
This means that it ideally included a descent line of men and their wives and children. The usual Chinese term was simply "big family" (dà jiÄ å¤§å®¶, colloquial: dà jiÄtÃng 大家åº). This is more precise than the popular usage of the term "extended family" in English, but somewhat less precise than the English term "extended family" as used by sociologists, which is sometimes placed in contrast to "stem family" to provide a technical term for cross-cultural application.)
As envisioned by those inclined to sentimentalize about it, the ideal Chinese family might be headed by an elderly patriarch and his wife, and include their five sons and their wives, and the children of all these people, including perhaps some adult grandsons who already had wives, but excluding any daughters who had married out and become members of other families.
Since the population of China was increasing only very slightly or not at all through most of Chinese history, the average number of sons that a married couple had was in fact only slightly more than one. When there was a second son, there was tremendous pressure to make the lad available to a relative who had no son at all or to provide him as an uxorilocal husband (and heir) to a friend who had no son. Thus in most cases, a family could not in fact include two adult brothers.
Throughout most of Chinese history the mean age at death was quite low, and one's sixtieth birthday was an event of awe and celebration. Accordingly, it was unusual for elderly people to live to see their grandchildren grow to adulthood. For this reason, although three-generation families were common, four-generation families were rare, and five-generation families truly remarkable. (In funerals of elderly people, it was conventional to write the number of generations they had spawned on funeral lanterns, usually adding a couple of generations to make it sound better. Five was a common number.)
Hence, although Chinese families were normatively extended, and although many Chinese spent at least some years living in families of considerable complexity, it was unusual for a family to conform to the ideal image of a truly large group of relatives living together and sharing a budget. Mean family size in most villages was between four and five people.
Jordan: Traditional Chinese Family and Lineage