PREFACE have maintained with Mr Baker and Mr Groves while they have been at work in the New Territories,I have been able to settle a ao以m CONTENTS 货 by Mr Baker's criticism of a late draft of this book.My wife went over the last two drafts in detail,helping me to remove a I VILLAGE,LINEAGE,AND CLAN I mbr giving without which this would have been even less of a book than it is. 2.FAMILY 为 The frontispiece(redrawn from an illustration in George Smith. A Narrative of an E Exploratory Visit to Each of the Consular Cities of 3.SOCIAL STATUS,POWER,AND GOVERNMENT China,and to the Islands of Hong Kong and Chusan,London,1847 4.RELATIONS BETWEEN LINEAGES 9 I wish to thank them warmly for this and for some preliminary 5.GEOMANCY AND ANCESTOR WORSHIP II8 work on the photographs from which the plates have been made. 6.LINEAGES IN CHINA London School of Economics M.F. 多 and Political Science BIBLIOGRAPHICAL POSTSCRIPT 85 August 1965 LIST OF WORKS CITED 191 INDEX 201 PLATES Annual Worshipping at the Tombs of Ancestors frontispiece I.A Geomantic Prospect facing page 13 20.Geomancer and Compass 131 b.Gate of a Walled Village 3a.Ancestor Worship in a Lineage Hall b.Firing Crackers at Ch'ing Ming 48 4.Ancestral Hall Altar 47 MAPS 1.South-Eastern China 2 2.Hong Kong and the New Territories
I Village,Lineage,and Clan With the exception of the county of Shun-te and perhaps a few scattered pockets in other counties (of which the Wun Yiu area of the Tai Po District in the New Territories is an example),th villages of the provinces of Fukien and Kwangtung are compact. Many of them are communities composed of the male agnatic descendants of a single ancestor together with their umaried sisters and their wives.To begin with,the chief problem to be discussed is the relationship between settlement pattern and patrilineal grouping. The literature published since 7can be made to serve as a point of departure.C.K.Yang has given us the results of the last village study to be made in mainland China (it concerns a com- munity near the capital of Kwangtung province)before Com- munism had come upon the face of Chinese society.2 And we have been afforded glimpses of two other villa ge studies relev to southeastern China,one of them being carried out in a Hakka community in the New Territories,3 the other in a Hokkien- speaking village in Taiwan.4 1Chinese place names in Hong Kong have official s proncin),nIhave thoutwisefollowo n form ized versions Mass. Jean A.Pratt,'Emigration and Unilineal Descent Gro Bernard Gallin,'Matrilateral and Affinal Relationships of a Taiwanese 02,no.4.August 1960;A Case for
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VILLAGE,LINEAGE,AND CLAN VILLAGE,LINEAGE,AND CLAN 5 Yang's sociological field study was begun before the village of nced to consider later as a close approximation to the theoretical Nanching came under Communist government,and continued model A discussed at pp.131 f.of Lineage Organization.The during the first phase of the new regime.The remarkablechoice of time at whi ch to make observations of modern village life in China gives the book one ofits major interests,but for the moment When we come to Gallin's Taiwan village we arc dealing with with the data in the first part of the study where a community of very heterogeneous lineage elements. The the traditional organization is described.In 1948 Nanching had a opulation of some 1,1oo and was dominated b ytwo‘clans',as but there are in fact more than twelve lineages (if indeed we may ang calls them,which accounted for the overwhelming majority legitimately use the term in this context)for families bearinga of the inhabitants.The two main'clans'and the three minor ones single surname are not all members of one lineage.Despite the Severalled distinct parts of the village.s heterogencity,pcople bearing four of the surnames account for of the larger also spatially separated branch within a clan also had its own the physical plan of the village was blocked out into many individual cells on a kin- village',and the genealogies of such units are of course very shal- low.In this village 'with its relatively short history,almost all One of the main 'clans'had ancestor tablets for members of tsu [lineage]relatives in the village are related through a grand- the forty-second generation;the first ances tor had made his home father or at most a great-grandfather which they have in com- in the village in The most recently dead of the other main cteristic of the area of Taiwan in which this 'clan'were members of the thirty-seventh generation.It would ge issitared the wcst-ccntral coastal plain)thate are lacking.* These new cases raise again the problem of the emergence of As many as forty-two gen single-lineage communities.One of the three villages isa single- wider than that of the lineage community:the small Hakka community in the New 、czC2inA多encalogica framework、 as we shall Territories.Nanchin g is in an area where single-lineage settle- gewas evidendly involved a the cnd of the ments are common,but is not itself one.The Taiwan village is was at the time it was studieda mixed and fairly recent.Now,people have tended to interpret scatered lineage.Yang genealogy relating to this multilineage villa ges and shallow li cage clan',but he does not discuss its contents or its significance. as bcing the result of a breakdown of single-lincage commun The village community studied by Miss Pratt in the New by migration,the southern part of the country displaying a higher a small Hakka lineage of some forty families.This is degree of deep and single-lineage be cause of its relative a relatively isolated and poor hill community which we shall immunity from invasion.Van der Sprenkel,for example,in a recent re-appraisal of Max Weber's work on China,writes: and The evidence shows that lineage organizations were more num- Proceedings of the erous,better organized and more influential in South China than in the North.This may be partly due to southward population op.cit.,pp.11,14.8I.The larger o wrote his book abouortye down the ear. ver o ct and p.(note) gegeCgi2aio,p
6 VILLAGE,LINEAGE,AND CLAN VILLAGE,LINEAGE,AND CLAN 7 mo vements of the Han Chinese under barbarian”pressure. Weaker and less prosperous lineages may'die'.Their numbers Such internal migrations were important as carly as the Six may fall away by sickness and failure (aain through sicknessor Dynasties period,and notably after the fall of the Northern Sung ause of poverty)to reproduce. The sad remnants depart. (Declining natural population will not by itself account for the ment as the disappearance of a lineage,for gaps in the ranks of a rich lineage historically prior form and mixed settlements as evidence of a could always be filled by stockir ing up with adopted sons.Chen Ta, later disturbance of the primordial pattern. It must be true that migration and the different conditions in Wng ot rural Fukien,says that formerly,when fcuds betwe clans'were frequent,sons were sometimes adopted as a means which it took place account in some measure for the pattern of increasing manpower for defence.There was,incidentally distribution of large localized lineages in China;the problem will much more buying of sons in southeastern China than the legal need to be dealt with later.But it would be a grear mistake to rules governing adoption might lead one to suppose.Merchant think that the only direction of change is that in which what were venturers in Fukien, for example,sometimes adopted sons to originally in lineage terms homogeneous local settlements became send out on their trading expeditions overseas.The law was in heterogeneous.On the contrary,the process is reversible,single- fact concerned with adoption aimed at continuing the line succession in the ancestor cult-whence the stress on the need for the adopted sontobe of the and generation status- some evident relish)of earlier ncighbours in the village territory and did not affect the adoption of sons taken only to swell I the (their surnames are usually given) now thrust into oblivion by ranks of the family;they could be got from any convenient those who have supplanted them,and. ore surely and convin- source.)The happy survivors might attribute the ill fortune of cingly,in the abandoned ancestral halls belonging surname their lost neighbours to disaster springing from geomancy,but it now no longer represented what have become single-lineage settlements. Some of these derelict halls,to judge by their appear- and its lon aud N.Y 1939,p.131 ance,must have been in use in fairly recent times (say,even tw or the lawyers putit,su three generations ago),and we have no reason to suppose that hemm of heto the process of elimination has come to a stop There is of course nothing specialabout the New n this respect.Evidence by custom and of extinct lineages is to be md everywhere.Of Nanching.Yang in the dim past there was a ynasty the duty of says that,according to old villagers, 。 was concentrated in Hua clan and a Fang clan who inhabited the northern end of the the wit present village site.Apparently both of them were crowded ou To sho by the late comers,and there were no descendants of either clan departed from,McAleavy in the village. ation of the private Otto B.van sage continues: here are also v.The ecially in For ce are in ch e of all the chuan,Rural Ch ol in the Nineteenth Century, to adopt on the correlation betwcen strong to the ut The distin e in th nterests of successio c prosperity. I p of the sons is crucial to 0B9 f