Introduction
A set of Ming lineage instructions that includes both kin and non-kin experts offers one way to raise and address questions about the relationship of expert ability, social status, and authority. Huo Tao (1487–1540), who became a powerful official in the Ministries of Rites and of Personnel, composed instructions for a co-habiting lineage of about one hundred members in his native place, Foshan in Guangdong.Footnote 1 The Family Admonitions of Huo Weiya has attracted scholarly attention, in part because of its intriguing two-color diagram of the communal domestic compound. But its full complexity has yet to be explored. I will show, first, that complications emerge from a close consideration of daily work that follows historian Susan Mann’s method of visualizing people’s interactions in space, playing out the scene.Footnote 2 Second, I will show that the Admonitions combines five different approaches to lineage management, approaches that might seem to be at odds with one another. Third, I will delineate the expertise and authority of specialists, including owned and hired servants, in managing the lineage. My overall message for historians is that raising questions about how Huo’s utopian plan could have functioned challenges the concept of “social status” in ways that apply more broadly.
The Family Admonitions, only one of a number of Ming lineage instructions, is well-embedded in Chinese history and deserves study. It is unclear exactly when Huo wrote the Admonitions, but his service as Minister of Rites (1528–30) and Minister of Personnel (1533–1536) undoubtedly added to the text’s cachet.Footnote 3 Historian and fieldwork proponent David Faure has argued that Huo played a major role in knitting Guangdong into the Ming empire and Chinese culture, by winning the emperor’s permission to extend the right to ancestral halls down the rank ladder and dissolving monasteries to profit powerful families.Footnote 4 His Admonitions attracted praise and imitation in his time.Footnote 5 In this attempt to build up his lineage and hold it together—no easy ventureFootnote 6—Huo could draw on earlier guidelines for family rituals by the Song scholars Sima Guang (1019–1086) and Zhu Xi (1130–1200), and on well-publicized guidelines for the Zheng family, which by early Ming times had lived communally for ten generations and had over one hundred living members.Footnote 7 But he diverged from them significantly to include Foshan’s industries, and reliance on non-kin. Even fieldwork has failed to determine whether the Huo lineage implemented the utopian vision of the Admonitions, as Faure’s self-contradictory judgements show: he writes that Huo’s text “aspired to a perfection in social relationships that was quite unattainable,” and that
The map … remains valuable as a confirmation that the village plan as seen in recent times has descended from the Ming, but the text shows that in actual fact, undivided households on the scale indicated by this plan could not have been common.Footnote 8
Whether or not the Huos carried out the plan, as lineages multiplied in Ming and Qing times, they often included Huo’s text in their own compilations.Footnote 9
This popular model presents a vision of the interactions of the people in the compound or village with four different legal standings. Moving from top to bottom in terms of “social status,” some Huo lineage members (or their husbands) had earned legal privileges, salary, and social perquisites by passing examinations or holding office; call them “gentry.” Most lineage members, like most Ming people, were respectable subjects (liang min 良民).Footnote 10 In Huo’s model, the lineage hires on contract some paid workers; such workers, as historian Claude Chevaleyre explains, were legally base with respect to the employer’s family, but respectable vis-à-vis others.Footnote 11 Working for and living with the lineage members are bondservants (pu 僕), who were legally categorized as polluted “base subjects” (jian min 賤民).Footnote 12 Often those who had fallen into poverty, bondservants in Ming were sold and bought, forced to labor without pay, and beaten by their masters, which was legal when not excessive.Footnote 13 Although the lineage members are the masters, I will show that Huo’s plan gives bondservants and hired laborers authority over lineage members, putting them in the position of mediating their masters’ primary, Confucian relationships. The choreography and relations I suggest are only hypotheses, but that is true of much that is widely accepted in historiography: here, however, the findings speak of and for the voiceless.Footnote 14
Low-ranking hired and owned workers supply labor and abilities the lineage needed to manage people, space, and resources. The Family Admonitions envisions a lineage organization centered on family ritual. By considering in detail the diagram of the house it includes, I will show that non-lineage members are necessary for the family to carry out Confucian norms. Faure writes that since the forms of the rituals of capping, marriage, funerals, and sacrifices were already “taken for granted” (Zhu Xi’s Family Rituals was incorporated into Ming law), Ming family manuals “moved on to practical management” of property and propriety.Footnote 15 I show that “practical management,” in this text, adds to Confucian propriety four further logics, sometimes complementary but sometimes contradictory.
One of those, bureaucratic deployment and control of personnel, supports the three further logics of punitive patriarchy, subsistence agriculture, and mercantile-industrial wealth creation. As slaves/bondservants and hired experts play their work roles, they are, of course, carrying out the general instructions of their owners or employers. But instructions cannot cover the specific judgement calls and detailed decisions they have to make in the course of the workday. To gain any benefit from delegation, the Lineage Head has to trust his employees.Footnote 16 These lowly experts, therefore, do not merely exercise agency or illicit power over lineage members such as historians have been finding in the hands of exploited and even enslaved workers. In addition to that kind of power, which an elite mindset might figure as “corrupt,” in Huo’s vision they exercise authority—legitimate power.
Confucian Propriety in Architecture and Work
The map or diagram at the start of the Admonitions, “Diagram of differentiating paths for men and women sharing a stove,” appears at first sight to afford architectural regulation of Confucian propriety, the first logic in Huo’s text (Figure 1).Footnote 17 But visualizing movement through it suggests that only continual human choice, and the work of lesser humans, can assure propriety.Footnote 18
Figure 1. “Hecuan nannü yilu tu” 合爨男女異路圖 (Chart of Different Passageways for Men and Women [for a Lineage] Sharing a Stove), from Huo Tao, Jiaxun, edition cited, n.p. The full title does not appear on the diagram because of a tear that is replicated in all editions, but Huo’s explanation of the diagram is headed “Hecuan nannü yilu tu shuo,” so the title is clear.
The floor plan embodies the focus of the Family Admonitions on Confucian ritual and propriety in three ways. (For ease of explanation, I follow the convention placing North at the top.) First, on the central axis, to the north of the center, lies the ancestral shrine: a large main room with four smaller niches or rooms on its north side for the four preceding generations.Footnote 19 The ancestral shrine straddles the inner/female and outer/male portions of the compound. That makes sense, because both “sons and nephews” (as Huo Tao refers to lineage men) and their primary wives must participate in ancestral worship.Footnote 20 Second, arrangements in the compound segregate men and women.Footnote 21 A line just south of the midpoint of the shrine divides the compound into the front, men’s portion, and the rear, women’s portion, with the complementary instructions “Men stop here” and (written upside down to indicate the direction of walking) “Women stop here.”Footnote 22 The diagram’s approximately one hundred doors hammer home the message that propriety requires separation, as Confucians going back to ancient times had argued. Huo marks in red (and mentions the color in the text) the men’s doors, “men’s passageways,” and main hall; the women have separate “women’s passageways.”Footnote 23 Ostensibly, men and women in different nuclear families need never meet except at ritual events.
A third element of Confucian propriety is the eating arrangements, which add age and rank hierarchy to gender separation. In the northwest quadrant of the compound is the kitchen. Directly south of the kitchen are three “urine barrels” as toilets for men. Directly across from there, double doors lead into the dining halls for lineage men over forty sui (years of age) and over sixty, with a small stretch of “men’s path” permitting access. To the south again are dining halls for men under forty and for all the junior men, apparently including bondservants.Footnote 24 Likewise, north of the kitchen stands the women’s dining hall. It has a main room and four smaller rooms with abbreviated labels comprehensible by reference to the men’s categories: [wives over] sixty; [wives over] forty; [female] slaves and concubines; and “all the [junior female] members of the family”—presumably unmarried daughters, but perhaps also very young sons, and female bondservants. The largest room, then, must be for the wives under forty. The rectangle does not divide up neatly, because there are five categories, to allow for the two sorts of wives; whereas in the men’s dining area there are only four categories because there is only one sort of husband. Gender, age, and the distinction between primary and secondary wives are all properly assured by the dining arrangements. The centrality of the ancestral hall, the many doors, and the separate paths and dining halls facilitate propriety.
But the crisp precision of the two-color diagram hides the fact that gender segregation relies on the ethical choices of its residents as they go about their daily work. For instance, married couples with their children live in sixteen contiguous two-room dwellings. Each dwelling has three doors: one leads directly from the men’s path into the front (southern) room; two lead into the back room from the women’s path. The women’s doors are offset from each other on the left and right of a tiny courtyard, screening the view from the passageway into the back, north, room of the dwelling. But only women are supposed to be on that path anyway. Offset doors in the south would have made more sense, to screen wives serving their husbands from the men’s pathway. Likewise, each of the dwellings for the old can be entered directly through one door from the south, from a passageway labelled “Sons visiting their parents enter via this men’s path;” and through two offset doors from the back (north), from a passageway labelled “wives visiting their parents-in-law enter via this path.” Again, screening at the front would have permitted a daughter-in-law to serve her parents-in-law without being seen from the men’s passageway. —Huo decreed that Confucian norms be taught in the community school and through family banquets.Footnote 25 That was necessary, because the floorplan could not assure propriety; propriety still depends on the residents’ choices.
But choice, too, could achieve only so much. Work necessitates movement through the house that challenges gender segregation. Since the kitchen lies in the inner quarters, the women’s part of the house, presumably women cook. How does food get from the kitchen to the old men’s dining rooms? Surely it does not go through the toilets (see Figure 2).
Figure 2. Detail showing kitchen and dining rooms.
If wives and daughters were cooking, they would have to bring the food as far as the line and then pass it over: men and women would see each other, or even touch hands, which they were not supposed to do.Footnote 26 Huo Tao does not mention this work problem, but one can easily imagine his solution, based on how he proposed to solve a similar problem in Ming court ritual. The Jiajing emperor wished to revive the old ritual in which the empress and other palace women went out to a suburban altar to initiate the year’s silk production. Huo Tao had several objections to the plan, but for one objection—that palace women would be seen by outsiders, including security guards—he noted that the solution would be to hire female sedan-chair bearers.Footnote 27 Likewise, lineage wives and daughters could delegate the work of serving to male and female bondservants. Serving women carrying food from the kitchen to the men’s side could facilitate the high-status and ethical gender separation of the lineage members. Other aspects of lineage management also rely on servants, but grant them more authority.
The Lineage Head and his Bureaucracy
The Zheng communal family had carried out Sima Guang’s and Zhu Xi’s call for dividing tasks among lineage men so thoroughly as to constitute, in John W. Dardess’s words, “a rationalized bureaucracy, in that the rules carefully outlined the duties inherent in each post, established criteria for the selection of office-holders, and specified their terms in office.”Footnote 28 At its high point, the Zheng family bureaucracy included twenty-five posts, nearly one for every grown man living at home, as well as posts for women.Footnote 29 Huo Tao’s instruction, too, as its second logic assigns tasks to lineage members (men only, I think) in a bureaucratic fashion. As Faure and Chevaleyre both mention, however, and in contrast to the Zheng family, Huo’s lineage also relies on non-kin.Footnote 30 Of the eighteen posts Huo describes, lineage men hold ten, bondservants six, and hired workers two. The Lineage Head, directly or through subordinates, oversees them all. Some posts rotate, and others are permanent (see Table 1).
Table 1. Management structure of the Huo family, compiled from Huo Tao, Jiaxun
The linkage of ability and authority appears immediately in the rules for lineage posts. To begin with the Confucian ritual aspect of the lineage, the key person to bridge the gap between past and present, between the ancestors as authorities and living lineage members, should be the Ritual Heir, by birth the senior man of the senior branch.Footnote 31 Unless he is wise enough to be made Lineage Head (or “Family Manager”), he works like everyone else and only presides at sacrifices.Footnote 32 Talent and wisdom determine who is Lineage Head, but Huo does not say who selects him. The Lineage Head need not plough, nor undergo the annual assessment that others do, but his good and bad deeds are recorded like everyone else’s.Footnote 33 His ability, not seniority or rank, leads to him being granted authority over everyone else.
The Lineage Head relies on two lineage specialists for his ritual and ethical work. One mature and upright man records the good and bad deeds of lineage men and women between ages six and sixty in the Registers of Recording Transgressions and Displaying Virtue.Footnote 34 His knowledge probably rests on reports from other lineage members.Footnote 35 At a banquet after a ceremony in the ancestral shrine, the Lineage Head consults these registers, then orders the Master of Ceremonies to announce to everyone else those who have done good and bad deeds. (Women’s good deeds and transgressions are announced in the inner quarters.) Those who fail to mend their ways after three years are barred from the banquet.Footnote 36 The Registrar’s position does not rotate, but that of the Master of Ceremonies does, although the term of office is not specified.Footnote 37 I take no rotation or unspecified terms as a signal that these lineage members developed useful expertise in ritual and in judging reports of behavior, respectively. That ability meant they were granted some authority over their kin.
The Lineage Head, in teaching and guiding the lineage ethically and ritually, relies on the Ritual Heir, the Registrar of Behavior, and the Master of Ceremonies. Two further positions help him manage the subsistence and acquisitive sides of lineage life. These two positions rotate annually among experienced men, whose performance the Lineage Head appraises at the end of the year. The Fieldwork Regulator manages agricultural production, and the Wealth Manager manages commodity production and trade. In return, the two are excused from ploughing.Footnote 38 Each, as I will explain, exerts considerable authority over his kinfolk, and has a staff of assistants; Huo’s overriding concern with competence means that the staff members must also have been chosen or kept for their competence. As in our imaginary walk through the house for work, imagining the concrete aspects of their work will show that, despite their lowly status as bondservants, they held power and even authority over lineage members.
Subsistence Agriculture and the Fieldwork Regulator
Along with Confucian propriety, producing food is a central element in Huo’s utopia: a third logic. While all lineage boys attend the lineage’s so-called “community school” from the age of seven, between the ages of ten and fifteen they also work at ploughing and weeding to learn diligence and frugality. If by twenty-five they have failed to place into a county or prefectural school, they return to farm labor.Footnote 39 As Huo writes:
For managing the livelihood of the lineage, food and other goods are of the greatest urgency. With a hundred people living together, how could it be permitted that they look to others for their resources?Footnote 40
From their pooled production, children between one and nine get six pecks (dou 斗) of grain per month, and each person older than nine, regardless of sex, gets eight pecks: certified students, provincial degree holders, bondservants, and hired workers get eight pecks; only those who are working extra hard in the fields get twelve pecks. Here the Admonitions lays out a vision of the lineage as founded on egalitarian subsistence agriculture: “Those who don’t work at the plough don’t get food.”Footnote 41
For not only does everyone eat the same amount, the first article in the section “Fields and Gardens” stipulates that all the members of the family—men, women, and children—must garden. Adults are to work a garden plot of two mou, children one mou. Footnote 42 (This outside work conflicts with the careful gender separation inside.)Footnote 43 In addition, every married adult lineage man between the ages of twenty-five and fifty is responsible for cultivating thirty mou of grain fields. Each is given specified inputs and a team consisting of an unmarried boy or man, a servant-boy (童), an (adult) bondservant, and an ox. At the end of each year (encompassing a summer and a winter season), the lineage man reports what his team brought in—they should be able to produce fifteen bushels of grain per year, says Huo, and this grain is what the lineage eats. On the one hand, therefore, Huo Tao’s Admonitions does embody the ideal of working directly to feed oneself and one’s family that powered, according to Chevaleyre, the idea that working for hire was demeaning.Footnote 44
Yet on the other hand, this is not simple subsistence agriculture; rather, it incorporates exceptions, collective property, and specialized oversight. First, if a man has higher ambitions (presumably meaning that he has been admitted to a government school or is serving in office), he is permitted to hire someone from outside to take his place in the fields.Footnote 45 Second, plough oxen live together in one paddock and pigs in one sty, and lineage men rotate through a post that regulates the deployment of these animals.Footnote 46 And third, all the work is coordinated by one lineage official, the Fieldwork Regulator.Footnote 47 The model is not one of subsistence agriculture in which a husband–wife couple feed their family.
The Admonitions grants the Fieldwork Regulator considerable authority over his brothers, uncles, sons, and nephews. At the beginning of spring, he figures out which fields are fertile and which barren, then parcels out responsibility for each field.Footnote 48 Huo gives no guidelines, but if one thinks about it, the Fieldwork Regulator, in assigning fields, would have had to consider questions like: Would lineage member A waste the good seed given him, as he did last year? Would lineage member B apply his fertilizer so wisely that he would not need so much? And so on. At harvest time, Huo writes, the Fieldwork Regulator tracks what each team has brought in, then reports to the Lineage Head about each lineage man’s diligence or laziness. Barring natural disasters, if a team produces at least ten bushels (two-thirds of the possible fifteen bushels per thirty mou) the lineage man in charge earns a top ranking; if seven bushels, a middle ranking; if only five, the lowest ranking.Footnote 49 By determining the ratings, the Fieldwork Regulator mediates between each production team and the Lineage Head.
Like any bureaucrat, the Fieldwork Regulator himself is also evaluated, as emerges in section two, “Granaries and Coffers.” The Fieldwork Regulator gathers all the produce of the plough, as well as grain payments from tenants, into a series of granaries to feed the lineage, pay taxes, stockpile against disaster, sell on the market, and supply ritual offerings.Footnote 50 He calculates the total, how much was expended, how much is surplus, and how much will be needed for planting and, again, reports all that to the Lineage Head. On New Year’s Day, everyone gathers, and the accounting is announced. The Lineage Head rewards or punishes the Regulator according to his diligence and his success, based on expenditures and receipts and on whether his work assignments properly considered experience and ability.Footnote 51 The Regulator then returns to being a regular ploughman.Footnote 52 Having the position rotate limits the Fieldwork Regulator’s power and may suggest that his expertise is also limited.
The Fieldwork Regulator “rears” or “fosters” two bondservants/slaves: his staff.Footnote 53 One bondservant manages the peck and ten-peck measures critical to the Regulator’s judgement of lineage members’ contributions, amounts collected in rent, amounts set aside for various purposes, etc. The other doles out fairly (jun 均) the manure and seeds for cultivation.Footnote 54 Along with their labor and the quality of the assigned fields, these inputs determine a team’s harvest output, on which lineage members are judged. And these positions do not rotate.Footnote 55 Rather, as with yamen staff who stayed in place while county magistrates came and went, the measures and manure regulators stay in office. The continuity allows the rotating Fieldwork Regulators to rely on these bondservants’ knowledge both of measures and inputs, and of the individual lineage men: how they were likely to behave with respect to requesting their inputs, turning in their output, etc. When Ming gazetteers speak of magistrates who equalize (jun 均) tax burdens to make them fairer, they do not mean a mathematical equal apportionment, but rather taking into account the differing fertility of fields. Likewise, although Huo does not explain, for the staff of the Fieldwork regulator to “equalize” inputs must mean deciding who needs more or less fertilizer and seed, or who will make the most of such inputs. The need to judge lineage members objectively is presumably one reason to have non-kin bondservants in these positions. These judgements required expert ability and meant authority over lineage men. Furthermore, the Lineage Head may even rely on the Agricultural Inputs Equalizer and Measures Manager to evaluate the Fieldwork Manager as described above, unless he himself has the expertise to assess the Manager’s diligence, success, and ability to make an appropriate field assignment.
In other words, the real ability in and authority over this aspect of lineage estate management lay with base subjects: bondservants. Outside of the workspace, if one of these bondservants presumed to give instructions to a lineage member or to withhold from him lineage property, he might well get a beating. But within the workspace of the granaries and storehouses, his word counts, although it passes through the Fieldwork Regulator. The Measures Regulator’s and Manure Regulators’ legal status was that of a bondservant, but their occupation mitigated the subordination required by that status.Footnote 56 Scholars have shown that some Ming bondservants worked as stewards of estates, giving them great power over tenants. Here, as staffers under a lineage member, they exercise authority over members of the master lineage.
The Wealth Manager and the Imperative to Earn
Alongside ritual propriety and subsistence agriculture, and the bureaucracy managing them all, a fourth logic in Huo’s vision appears in his insistence that “increasing wealth” is a key duty for every male member of the lineage.Footnote 57 The third section in the Admonitions, “Increasing Wealth,” explains: “For cappings, marriages, funerals, and sacrifices, all the things needful for proper rituals, if there is no increase in wealth they cannot be supplied.”Footnote 58 Huo Tao’s great-grandfather had come south with just a carrying pole.Footnote 59 Huo Tao and his four brothers began with no more than forty mou of land among them.Footnote 60 Increasing wealth was an urgent task in Huo’s eyes. He sets specific annual financial targets for each man in increasing wealth lineage through industrial production and commerce. They are punished for falling short, and praised and rewarded for excelling, including with the right to own privately a certain percentage of their earnings.Footnote 61
This aspect of the lineage is handled by the Wealth Manager. What are his responsibilities, and who are his staff? Once the year has ended and rents have come in, whatever is left over from the yearly expenditures should be stored in a storehouse (two appear on the floor plan); the Wealth Manager “controls” these resources. He makes an accounting of them to know whether the lineage is “empty or substantial.”Footnote 62 The family’s real, solid existence rests on its wealth. Huo Tao instructs, referring to industries in the area:
Shiwan’s pottery, Foshan’s steel, and Dengzhou’s timber can make life easier for people and simultaneously yield profit. The Wealth Manager controls them. Every year, one person is in charge of pottery, one in charge of carbon-iron, one of timber. They report the annual profits from selling on the market to the Wealth Manager. He reports everything at the end of the year to the Lineage Head, so he will know who got the best results.Footnote 63
Managing investments in these three key local industries are three lineage members whom I dub “industrialists.” They must be overseeing and coordinating all the lineage members who work in this industry as producers or investors—Huo does not clarify which. These men are still required to plough,Footnote 64 but their positions do not rotate.Footnote 65 It makes sense to cherish expertise and commercial contacts in these fields.
Apart from their work in the industries, the Wealth Manager and the subordinate industrialists further exercise authority over other lineage men. After the sacrifice to the ancestors at the New Year in the Ancestral Shrine Hall, all the lineage men line up in order of seniority along the Central Hall, where the Lineage Head is standing. In order, each goes to the front of the room and reports his results. Those who added either five mou or thirty taels of silver to the lineage’s holdings rank “tops,” and are honored with wine and a congratulatory message to the ancestors from the Lineage Head. In addition, if they earned more than five mou, one-tenth of the excess becomes the personal property of their marital unit. The middle and lowest ranks as measured in mou or taels earned are neither punished nor rewarded in the annual ceremony.Footnote 66 It must be the Wealth Manager and his subordinate lineage specialists, the pottery, wood, and iron industrialists, who vouch for the earnings of each man. For most men, most years, the results are not very significant, and some are exempt from this performance assessment.Footnote 67 But every third year, as discussed below, when punishments are meted out, the wealth assessment does matter.
Further, the wealth assessment gives the Wealth Manager a ritual role, putting him and his staff between lineage men and their ancestors. While the lineage men are reporting to the ancestors in the annual ceremony, the Wealth Manager takes hold of those who earned neither a single mou of land nor a single tael of silver, and thus are designated “useless” or “without merit,” and makes them kneel in front of the ancestral tablets. The Wealth Manager announces to the ancestors that “so-and-so contributed nothing. Please punish him.” The Lineage Head kneels and says to the ancestors, “Please forgive him.” The useless one kowtows and apologizes to the ancestors and then retires. For a second year of no contributions, the Lineage Head says, “Please forgive him again.” The third year, however, the Lineage Head says, “Please [consider him] a criminal.” The useless one is punished with twenty blows and a scolding, and the loss of the privilege of having private bondservants (if he had it).Footnote 68 In Huo’s design—even if men had worked hard at farming and even though he states that lineage members must farm and may choose to be assessed only on their agricultural output, rather than on cash incomeFootnote 69—the specter of this humiliation hangs over most lineage men.
That becomes especially clear in the following passage. In additional to this annual accounting, just as in the imperial bureaucracy, every three years there is a grand accounting of merit, with all the facts about wealth laid out in the hall for verification.Footnote 70 Now, those whose performance has been lackluster rather than terrible, that is, they have failed to reach the top assessment, are punished.Footnote 71 Before turning to the rewards for the Lineage Head, Huo stipulates that the Wealth Manager and his staff of lineage industrialists play an important role in judging and certifying the achievements of their kinsmen every year. They mediate between them and the Lineage Head, who in turn approaches their ancestors.
But like the Fieldwork Regulator, the Wealth Manager also has non-kin staff members. He has two physically fit men under him: one in charge of the books and calculations and one in charge of urgent errands, each to receive eight pecks a month of grain.Footnote 72 Who are they? If they were bondservants, that would be stated as for the Measures Manager and Inputs Equalizer. If they were lineage men, Huo would not need to specify their pay of eight pecks per month, standard for lineage adults. Rather, they seem to be a hired accountant and a hired messenger or agent. These employees not only manage lineage resources, but also keep records, manage relations with business partners outside the lineage, and make reports about lineage members. Those reports can bring punishments and rewards to lineage members, and the reports of the hired specialists also mediate between the lineage members and their superiors, the Wealth Manager and Lineage Head, and between them and their ancestors, including their own fathers and grandfathers.
Moreover, the Fieldwork Regulator and the Wealth Manager mediate between the lineage and the state by preparing tax payments and corvee assignment. When all is ready, the Wealth Manager tells the Lineage Head, and he reports to the ancestral shrine. If the lineage faces accusations of under-paying taxes, the Lineage Head first holds the Accountant and Messenger responsible. But if there is a second violation he blames the Wealth Manager, and if there is a third violation the lineage turns the Wealth Manager over to the state for punishment.Footnote 73 The hired accountant and messenger are part of the team mediating not only between lineage men and their ancestors, but between the lineage and the state. As with the bondservants on the Fieldwork Regulator’s team, their ability gives them some authority over their social superiors.
Punitive Patriarchy and the Team on the Door
The fifth and final logic in Huo Tao’s Admonitions is a punitive style of patriarchal control. Zhu Xi’s Family Instructions includes reports to the ancestors, but no rewards or violent punishments.Footnote 74 The Zheng communal family rules include both.Footnote 75 So does Huo. Some transgressions by women are harshly punished; for example, married daughters of the lineage who have been divorced, if guilty, are locked up in separate rooms, their food passed in through a hole.Footnote 76 In the main, however, it is the lineage men for whom the Admonitions specifies prohibitions and punishments.
For instance, the lineage men may not visit wineshops or wear showy clothing. Before coming of age (capping), they may not wear boots; if not yet married, they may not spend the night away from home. If they act disrespectfully in the village (i.e., to neighbors), they are to be beaten twenty blows—a painful and humiliating but not disabling punishment, depending on how it is carried out. If they privately invite guests over without informing the Lineage Head, beat twenty blows. If they go to a banquet without informing the Lineage Head, twenty blows. If they privately amass goods or grain without informing the Lineage Head, twenty blows. If they oppose or are rude to seniors whom they should respect, twenty blows; the senior should personally report the offense. If a senior passes and they don’t stand up, beat ten blows. If they curse at a senior, beat twenty blows; someone who personally saw it should make the report.Footnote 77 Huo Tao does not, unlike Yuan Cai in Song times, discuss how to discipline bondservants.Footnote 78 Patriarchy appears less as violence against women or servants than as violence against lineage men.
In addition to the lineage bureaucrats who help him and have their own staffs, the Lineage Head, for his staff, “rears bondservants”—four of them. They make up a team of doormen. The positions do not rotate. If one accepts that family members held non-rotating positions because they developed expertise, the same could be true of bondservants. The team of four monitors and manages the main entrance and approximately one hundred interior doors: who goes in and out, and how that affects the family’s respectability and reputation. It could be that the concern is with the hard-won grain and commodities of the family going in and out, but that is not what Huo Tao says, as discussed below. All the symbolic power invested in the compound’s surrounding wall, pierced only by the main gate, essentially rests on these bondservants.
One of these bondservants is to receive and protect, or dry, imperial communications (hang/kang yu shu 炕御書).Footnote 79 His tasks are not described, but it must be that he accepts and perhaps archives the lineage’s patents of appointment and honors, and maybe other official documents, like tax receipts. A second member of the door team is “in charge of dawn and dusk.” His responsibilities take him throughout the compound, managing time. Huo Tao explains,
The Dawn and Dusk Manager [uses] bell and drums to wake everyone up and get them out of bed [in the morning] and settle everyone in bed [at night]. He should beat [the drum] and ring [the bell] with a loud sound and call outside each family’s door [presumably the south-side doors on the men’s passageways], saying, ‘Do not listen to women’s words!’ When the first and fifteenth of each month come around, the sons and nephews call out/sing in the ancestral temple ‘Do not listen to women’s words!’Footnote 80
Huo Tao’s stress on production for the lineage means that it is worth investing in a bondservant to assure that every member goes early to bed and rises early. The use of drums and bells echoes normal timekeeping practice in Ming cities. The Zheng communal family had woken everyone (except one person, logically) with twenty-four strokes of a gong, but they also had a daily morning assembly.Footnote 81 Since Huo Tao requires no such assembly, he duns this patriarchal warning into the ears of lineage husbands just before they climb into bed with their wives, and as they start the day with last night’s pillow talk still in their ears. The women’s words to be feared, as we know from the work of Margery Wolf and others, are primarily those urging the husband to work on behalf of her and her children rather than his brothers or the lineage as a whole.Footnote 82 The person bossing everyone around—on behalf of the Lineage Head—is a bondservant: a base person whose substance (qi 氣) is theoretically inferior to that of the respectable members of the clan.
The job of the third member of the door team is to “receive guests.”Footnote 83 In the diagram (Figure 1), directly behind the main entrance, to the north, is a lobby. This is an initial holding pen for anyone admitted through the gate. Marked doors out of the lobby lead sideways, east and west, onto the relatively public, male passages that go up the central axis. Across from each of those doors is a skywell flanked north and south by two waiting rooms. The northern ones are labelled “Peaceful Waiting Hall” and the southern ones are labeled “Always Vigilant [about one’s one conduct] Porch,” with the explanation: “Capped ones rest here.” The “Always Vigilant Porch” must be for examination degree holders or officials, or perhaps men of gentry families. These spaces may be waiting rooms, or business might be transacted there; except for the main hall, the compound has no other office space. Further along the main eastern passageway, but accessible by the women’s pathways on the north, are reception rooms where wives and girls can meet with their brothers. The Guest Receptionist must be able to assess accurately who a guest is and deposit him or her, with the appropriate level of respect, in the right room, where he or she will wait obediently.
The fourth bondservant on the door team is the doorman proper. Huo gives him four tasks: “To watch out for, examine, and restrain various people from coming in or going out; to watch out for, examine, and restrain women from privately buying wine and meat for their licentious mouths and stomachs; to watch out for, examine, and restrain witches and shamans from coming and going out; and to watch out for, examine, and restrain sons and nephews from going out to spend the night elsewhere.”Footnote 84 I will study Ming doormen at length elsewhere, so here I make only three points. First, if the Lineage Head is to derive any utility from the doorman, he must authorize him to make and enforce decisions on the spot about who and what fall into these categories. Otherwise—that is, if the doorman runs in to ask about each would-be visitor—the door is left unguarded and the Lineage Head will get no peace. If he does not authorize the doorman to make decisions, the Lineage Head might as well stand at the door himself.
Second, in addition to authorizing the doorman to turn away various visitors, the Lineage Head is also delegating some authority over lineage members. As a first approximation, “various people” and “witches and shamans” probably refers to non-literati healers, Buddhist clergy, fortune-tellers, peddlers, and so on, questionable sorts called in (supposedly) mainly by women, as many scholars have discussed.Footnote 85 That means that the first three tasks give the doorman authority to interfere with the business of lineage women who are commoners or gentry and legally outrank the doorman or even own him. The doorman is following instructions, but again, he must exercise his judgement about who is who.
Third, what about lineage men? Huo’s rules as laid out in the eleventh section forbid lineage men to attend banquets without informing the Lineage Head, nor may they ever visit wineshops; before marriage they are forbidden to spend the night away from home, while married men may stay in hotels as needed, but may not accept private invitations.Footnote 86 The doorman’s knowledge and the threat of punishment for lineage men give him authority as a mediator between lineage men and the Lineage Head and ancestors. The doorman would know, and is authorized by the Admonitions to know, whether a man had been out, for how long, and whether he had come home drunk or so late that the gate was closed, and he had to wake up the doorman and beg for admittance. What does it mean that Huo Tao licenses the doorman to “restrain lineage men from going out to spend the night somewhere”? Is the doorman physically restraining men of the lineage from going in or out, especially during the day (when Ming gates were normally kept open)? Unlikely. Elsewhere, Huo specifies that if a junior is rude to or curses a senior, only the senior in question or a witness may report, presumably to the Recorder of Behavior.Footnote 87 Otherwise, Huo Tao does not specify the reporting process. So, it must be that the way the doorman acts on his “watching and examining” duty is to “restrain” the men by deciding whether they have misbehaved and reporting them to the Lineage Head, a parent, or the Recorder of Behavior. That puts the bondservant doorman and his own, authorized judgement of a man’s behavior squarely in the middle of a primary Confucian relationship, between a member of the lineage and his seniors and ancestors. And Minister of Rites Huo Tao has designed it that way.
Conclusion
Huo Tao’s lineage plan—admired in its own time and copied into later genealogies by other lineages—is not a simple “practical” working out of rites and values already fully understood, but a complex document revealing five different conceptions of family values: Confucian propriety, bureaucratic division of responsibility, subsistence agriculture as a necessity and a virtuous practice, wealth acquisition through local industry, and a punitive patriarchy that comes down hard on lineage men. In the plan, responsibility for Confucian ritual and ethics rests primarily with lineage members, including the Ritual Heir, the Registrar tracking good and bad behavior, and the Master of Ceremonies. Bondservants doing the menial work of serving food must have buffered the lineage men and women so they could practice high-status Confucian ritual gender segregation. This mediation underlines the bondservants’ lesser humanity. But other tasks Huo requires of bondservants and hired workers give them authority over lineage members.
As staffers for the lineage man in the post of Fieldwork Regulator, bondservants help determine who gets which plots of land to work and which agricultural inputs; and they measure how much grain each lineage man brings in. The output determines rankings of individual productivity, which, along with the success of the Regulator himself, are reported to the Lineage Head and the ancestors. Legal inferiors not only mediate between family members and the Lineage Head and between family members and their ancestors, but do so based on understanding the strengths and weaknesses of their legal betters—just as, say, the Minister of Personnel and his staff must understand which officials are best-suited to which positions across the empire. As staffers for the lineage men in the posts of Wealth Manager and industrial specialists, hired workers run messages to business partners and keep the books. Their calculations, again, evince the industrial productivity of each lineage man, which in turn determines his rewards and punishments, including his relations with his ancestors. The staffers’ power is acknowledged by the provision that holds them accountable first when the government lays an accusation that taxes have been underpaid.
This is the only mention in Huo’s Admonitions of punishment for bondservants and hired workers. By law, masters could beat servants, and in social practice they did. But Huo institutes harsh punishments of twenty blows for many rule violations by lineage men. And the team on the door would be the ones reporting some of those violations. The four members of the door team also control time in the compound, pass patriarchal warnings on to every lineage man, manage important documents coming in from outside, and sort visitors: turning them away or stowing them in the appropriate reception room with instructions to wait. Here, the lowly serve as mediators, not only for outward-facing presentation of rank as in the ceremonial entourages,Footnote 88 but for interactions with visitors of all kinds, as well as, again, among family members living and dead. Finally, the doorman proper, standing at the main gate to the compound, keeps tabs on and even restricts who is going in and out, and when, and why; and Huo Tao explicitly authorizes him to.
Tina Lu has suggested, in considering rules in genealogies, that boundaries between slaves and masters were fraught with anxiety.Footnote 89 Indeed, in decreeing that only those lineage members who ranked at least as shengyuan and those over forty were allowed to have a bondservant hold a parasol over them, Huo warned lineage members: “You are lucky not to be a servant, and that should be enough in itself! As for daring to use a servant [to carry your parasol for vanity], this is truly something to beware of!”Footnote 90 The fate of becoming a bondservant was too close for comfort. But even when status lines were clear, owned and hired laborers were authorized by Huo Tao to apportion resources, manage measurements, archive communications with the state, tell lineage members when to sleep and when to rise, receive guests, keep the books, run business errands, and manage the gate. Perhaps tolerating the authority of lowly persons required an emotional power play on the part of the lineage members. The already lowly legal status, impoverished condition, and fractured or non-existent kin connections of bondservants, combined with existing legal and social discourse on “respectable” and “mean” people, made it easy to ratchet up disdainful rhetoric, and smear servants as “polluted.”
But historians can and should question simple status claims and consider daily experiences by thinking about everyone who was present and envisioning or mapping out their interactions. Doing so in this case raises questions about what the lineage structure—if implemented—really meant for members, and how Huo and those who adopted his plan saw the interaction of the disparate logics of ethical propriety, punitive patriarchy, subsistence agriculture, and business, all under the umbrella of a bureaucratic scheme. Historians should visualize concrete small-scale human interactions as people have created them – continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and in specific places – before talking about systems on a larger scale. Here, lowly hired and owned workers legitimately affected outcomes and directed actions of respectable and even gentry lineage members in specific interactions in the workspace. They may have experienced themselves as expert authorities in the workplace. Because most people spend most of their waking time working, therefore, “social status” is too blunt a tool to delineate daily relations in the workplace.
Competing interest
The author declares none.
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