Five
Ch'ing Imperial Marriage and Problems of Rulership

Evelyn S. Rawski

The marriage patterns of the Ch'ing emperors who ruled China from 1644 to 1911 were fundamentally shaped by rulership strategies that influenced the stratification system in several distinctive ways. By limiting marital alliances to the elite of the Manchu, Mongol, and Chinese banner forces, the Ch'ing created a form of political endogamy that excluded ties between the ruling house and the Han Chinese bureaucrats. Imperial marriage patterns were closely tied to Ch'ing succession practices, which rejected eldest-son succession and delayed designation of the heir-apparent until the death of the emperor. This policy stimulated competition among the emperor's sons, weakened the position of the empress, who was not necessarily the most powerful of the emperor's consorts,^[1] and minimized status differences between the wife (empress) and concubines. The fluidity of the actual power hierarchy among an emperor's consorts was reflected in the ritual and other privileges held by imperial concubines and in their social origins, which were frequently as elevated as those of empresses. The Ch'ing succession policy helped to support a marriage model that deviated significantly from the one found among commoners.

The Manchus who conquered China in the seventeenth century were descended from the Jurchen, a tribal people living in northeast Asia.^[2] In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Nurgaci (1559-1626), a petty chieftain, and his son Hung Taiji (1592-1643) united the loosely organized Jurchen tribes to create the Manchu confederation. They formed alliances with Mongol tribes and Chinese transfrontiersmen and organized their Manchu, Mongol, and Han allies into disciplined units, called "banners," to fight against the Ming state. These multiethnic banner forces were the key to the Manchu conquest of China and the establishment of the Ch'ing dynasty.

A conquest dynasty, the Ch'ing confronted major problems in controlling

a Chinese population that outnumbered them forty-nine to one. While maintaining military primacy, the first rulers won over the Chinese literati by adopting the Confucian framework for government. Ch'ing emperors learned Chinese, patronized Chinese art and scholarship, issued hortatory edicts supporting Confucian values, continued the sacrifices in the state religion, and performed Chinese rituals at marriage and death. But, like the other non-Han dynasties analyzed by Jennifer Holmgren in this volume, the Manchus did not adopt the entire Chinese model. Their marriage system was substantially influenced by the political conditions they faced.

Like earlier non-Han dynasties, the Ch'ing used marriage exchange as an important tool for foreign alliances, both during and after the crucial conquest period. The stable circle of marriage partners for the Ch'ing ruling family was confined to the conquest elite and their peers in the steppe society. The multiethnic makeup of the victorious banner forces and the imperative need to maintain military supremacy shaped the policy allowing Manchus to marry Manchu, Mongol, or Chinese bannermen, but not Chinese in the civilian population.

One of the key problems of rulership—succession—heavily influenced Ch'ing marriage. Although the Manchus gradually shifted from their tribal custom of rule by council to one-man rule and father-son succession during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries,^[3] they did not adopt the succession customs of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). The Ming, a Han Chinese ruling house, publicly installed the empress's first son as heir-apparent while he was still a child; if the empress were barren, the eldest son inherited the throne. In eleven of the fifteen cases of imperial succession in the Ming, a first son inherited the throne from his father. By contrast, there was only one instance, in the nineteenth century, of an empress's son actually mounting the Ch'ing throne, and two other instances, that same century, of the throne passing to the eldest son (table 5.1).^[4]

The Ch'ing rejection of eldest-son succession was initially dictated by political struggles accompanying the emergence of one-man rule. The group leadership that seems to have been intended by Nurgaci broke down when his eighth son, Hung Taiji, became the undisputed supreme leader after his father's death. When Hung Taiji died in 1643, his brother Dorgon dominated the government as regent by selecting Hung Taiji's ninth son, an infant, to succeed over his older brothers. The next heir, chosen in 1661 as the emperor lay dying of smallpox, was preferred over an older brother partly because he had already had the disease.^[5] The K'ang-hsi emperor did install his first son by the empress as heir, but found his heir-apparent grievously unfit for office and demoted him. By the early eighteenth century the Ch'ing rulers had substituted a system of secret succession in place of the Ming custom. The emperor would seal the name of his choice in a coffer to be opened only upon his death (Huang 1974:95-96).

The Ch'ing rejection of the eldest-son succession principle, coupled with the secret and delayed designation of the heir, produced intense succession struggles. The contest for succession—which one scholar (Fletcher 1979) has likened to the "bloody tanistry" of successions in the Ottoman Empire—divided brother from brother, with the victor exterminating his rivals. To this day scholars write about the "usurpation" of the Yung-cheng emperor, who is said to have forged his father's will. It is perhaps no accident that this emperor was one of the most ruthless rulers in the history of the dynasty.

The Ch'ing abandonment of eldest-son succession was a destabilizing force on the imperial family. With succession a wide-open competition whose outcome was determined only on an emperor's deathbed, there could be no spatial and social separation of the heir from his siblings, as occurred in the Ming (for discussion of different succession regimes in Chinese history see Holmgren's chapter in this volume). There could be no discrimination in the education or marriage of one son as opposed to another, and sons were not barred from political participation. Unlike the Ming, which sought to exclude imperial agnates from governance, the Ch'ing emperor's sons, grandsons, and other agnates were assigned to carry out ritual, military, and diplomatic tasks, with their fitness for the throne evaluated by their performance.

The commoner norm dictating that sons of concubines ritually and legally regard the first wife (here the empress) as mother was not fully followed in the Ch'ing palace. Although an emperor had only one empress at a time, he could be survived by several empresses dowager because the first act of most

Ch'ing emperors was to promote their natural mothers to this status. As the mother of the emperor, such a woman could wield enormous power at court, greater than that of the empress: the most notorious example is Empress Dowager Tz'u-hsi, who easily manipulated her nominal superior Empress Tz'u-an to dominate Ch'ing politics from the 1860s until her death in 1908. Although the Ch'ing did not have a truly polygynous system of marriage, we shall argue that the system of imperial concubinage was distinctive, being neither strictly monogamous nor polygamous. In the Ch'ing imperial system, concubines enjoyed access to the ritual, legal, and social privileges accorded to the first wife or empress. Status differences among the consorts of an emperor were differences of degree, not of kind.

The sources for studying Ch'ing imperial marriage patterns are exceptionally rich. The ritual procedures are described in detail in the Ta Ch'ing hui-tien (Administrative Regulations of the Ch'ing Dynasty); the Ch'in-ting ta-Ch'ing t'ung-li (Comprehensive Rituals of the Ch'ing), produced in the eighteenth century; and in archival documents held by the Number One Historical Archives in Peking. These archival materials indicate that those planning the weddings of the T'ung-chih and Kuang-hsu emperors in the nineteenth century relied heavily on the hui-tien (KCTC no. 2379; P. Li 1983:80). The marriage partners (including concubines) of the imperial line are recorded in the genealogy of the Ch'ing imperial house, printed in the twentieth century, which is supplemented by the more comprehensive manuscript copy (Ta Ch'ing yü-tieh ). The Number One Historical Archives also has abundant supplementary documentation on the personnel of the Inner Quarters in the records of the Imperial Household Department.

The emperor was the head of the Aisin Gioro lineage,^[6] which was regulated by the Imperial Clan Court (tsung-jen fu ). All marriages (along with births and deaths) were recorded in the imperial genealogy (Ta Ch'ing yü-tieh ), which was periodically revised (TJFTL , 1.10a). Moreover, the marriages of all members of the main line (tsung-shih , consisting of the descendants of Taksi, the great-grandfather of the first Ch'ing emperor, Shun-chih), initially required the emperor's approval (TCHTSL , c. 1; TJFTL , 2. la-9b). In the course of the dynasty, the growth of the lineage forced emperors to narrow the circle of kin whose marriages they arranged.^[7] But even in the late nineteenth century the emperor retained the right to select brides for the sons of princes in his father's and his own generation, and grooms for the daughters of princes of the first six ranks (for the Sung, see Chaffee's chapter in this volume). In this paper, however, I focus on a much smaller subgroup; namely, the sons and daughters of emperors, and emperors themselves.

The Influence of Manchu Customs

Like the Mongols (Holmgren 1986:144-45), the Jurchens seem to have had a tradition of marriage by seizure (S. Yang 1984; Shirokogoroff 1973) and to

have practiced clan exogamy,^[8] but they placed no restrictions on cross-generational marriage. Hung Taiji's empress, Hsiao-tuan, was joined in the emperor's harem by her two nieces. Shun-chih's (1638-61) second empress was a first collateral niece of his first empress, whom he had deposed in 1653. Imperial unions continued to disregard the generational principle into the nineteenth century, when one of the T'ung-chih (1856-75) emperor's concubines was the paternal aunt of his empress.

Worse (from the Chinese perspective), Manchu society originally practiced the levirate; that is, men were encouraged to marry their brothers' widows, sons to marry their father's widows (but never their birth mothers), and nephews the widows of their paternal uncles (Tao 1976:12; H. Li 1985). One assumes they practiced the levirate for the same reasons Mongols did: to maintain "the viability of the family patrimony" by keeping widows from leaving and taking their property with them (Holmgren 1986:153). Among Han Chinese, the senior levirate (marriage with an older brother's wife) was treated as incest. Some poor Chinese practiced the junior levirate, but from T'ang times at least such marriages were legally prohibited, punishable by strangulation, and according to Feng, "even in the few places where it is practiced, it is not considered respectable" (1967:51).

In 1631 and 1636 Hung Taiji publicly banned the senior levirate, along with marrying a father's widow and the widows of a father's brothers, as part of the Manchu adoption of Han Chinese customs. The new marriage rules were not always obeyed. Princess Mukushih, fourth daughter of Nurgaci, was divorced from her first husband, then married to Eidu, the famous hero of the Niohuru clan.^[9] After Eidu's death, Mukushih married Turgei, his son by another woman (Li Feng-min 1984; Huang 1986:638). Although one scholar (Li Feng-min 1984) asserts that the couple was punished for this transgression, we should note that Mukushih lived to the ripe age of sixty-five, and Turgei, "highly regarded" by Hung Taiji (Hummel 1943 1:222), was rewarded for his military prowess after his marriage to Mukushih.

The Manchu rulers continued to observe Han Chinese generational rules with laxity, but in other respects their marriages came to comply with Chinese taboos. The marriage of a widow to her former husband's son or to her husband's brother is not found after 1648 in the imperial genealogy. Marriage to sisters, which was consonant with Chinese and Mongol traditions, was practiced by Manchu rulers (Feng 1967:46-48; Holmgren 1986:142-43). Hung, Taiji K'ang-hsi (1654-1722), and Hsien-feng (1831-61) all had sisters in their harems (K'ang-hsi had four sororal pairs), and the Kuang-hsu emperor (1871-1908) took two sisters as concubines when he married his empress in 1888.

Matrilateral cross-cousin marriages (marrying the mother's brother's daughter), practiced in some parts of China (Gallin 1963), was also favored by the Mongols (Krader 1963:24) and practiced by the Manchu rulers.

K'ang-hsi and Kuang-hsu both had concubines who were related to them in this way, and Nurgaci married at least two of his daughters to his sisters' sons.^[10]

As in other non-Han dynasties (see Holmgren's chapter in this volume), after 1655 all Manchus were forbidden to marry Han Chinese who were not enrolled in the Eight Banners (Wang Tao-ch'eng 1985a:305-6; P'u 1982: 124). This prohibition was spelled out in the regulations of the Imperial Clan Court (TJFTL 31.19ab); those who disobeyed were punished, and any offspring expelled from the lineage. As we shall see, this rule, which permitted marriage within a group of long-term political followers, constituted a form of political endogamy.

Marriage and Politics

In the critical years before 1683, when the Manchu rulers were creating their empire, marriage exchanges functioned as an important means of winning new allies and stabilizing military coalitions. Rival Manchu tribal leaders, Mongol princes, Chinese frontiersmen, and Chinese generals were rewarded for their support with Aisin Gioro wives and enrolled in the Manchu, Mongol, and Chinese banners created during the early seventeenth century.

The banners were large civil-military units created in the early seventeenth century that replaced the small hunting groups of Nurgaci's early campaigns. Composed of companies, each with three hundred households of warriors and headed by a hereditary leader (Wakeman 1985:54-55), the banners became administrative units for registration, conscription, taxation, and mobilization of the tribes and peoples who joined the Manchu cause before 1644. To the eight Manchu banners were added, by 1635, eight Mongol (Ch'en 1984:114) and by 1642 eight Chinese banners (Wakeman 1985: 200-201). The conquest of China was achieved by these combined banner forces, in which less than 16 percent of the soldiers by 1648 were actually of Manchu origin (An 1983).

Table 5.2 summarizes the ethnic origins of the principal spouses of emperors, princes, and princesses. For the moment, we will focus only on the first wives of emperors and princes and the marriages of princesses, who were all first wives. Because later marriages followed the patterns begun by Nurgaci and his successor, Hung Taiji, they are included in the table, which ends with the children of the Hsien-feng emperor (1831-61).^[11]

Empresses, ti fujin (wives of princes), and efu (husbands of princesses) came from a relatively small number of favored houses (see table 5.2). Of the 641 Manchu clans listed in the Pa-ch'i Man-chou shih-tsu t'ung-p'u compiled in 1745, only 31 were favored by the Aisin Gioro lineage with marriage. Among the Manchu clans, the Niohuru descended from Eidu supplied almost half of the empresses for the entire dynasty. Their bonds with the Aisin Gioro were

exceptionally close. The Niohuru genealogy analyzed by Huang P'ei records seventy-seven of Eidu's male descendants and seventy-two Niohuru daughters marrying into the Aisin Gioro main line (Huang 1986:638). The Manchus also displayed a strong preference for Mongol spouses: 25 percent of empresses, 16 percent of princes' wives, and 55 percent of princesses' husbands were Mongol. The Khorchins, who were the earliest Mongol allies of the Manchus, were especially favored: twelve sons-in-law, an empress, and one prince's wife were Khorchin. There were no Hun Chinese empresses, and the Chinese princely wives and husbands either date from the period of conquest or belonged to the Chinese banners.

Manchu Affines

The favored marriage partners among the Manchu clans were those who had allied themselves with the Aisin Gioro lineage. The exchange of wives had long been an accepted mode of cementing tribal alliances. The Manchus

interspersed such alliances with the use of force to unify the Jurchen tribes. Of the Guwalgiya, Niohuru, Sumuru, Nara, Donggo, Hoifa, Ula, Irgen Gioro, and Magiya clans that formed the so-called Eight Great Houses,^[12] only the Hoifa is missing from the list of imperial affines presented in table 5.2. "Heroes" of the conquest period were often rewarded with Aisin Gioro brides. Hohori (1561-1624), of the Donggo clan (Hummel 1943 1:291), wed Nurgaci's eldest daughter. Fiongdon (1564-1620), of the Suwan Guwalgiya clan (ibid., 247), distinguished himself in Nurgaci's military campaigns and obtained noble titles and wives for his sons.

Mongol Affines

Manchu marriages with Mongol nobles also increased as the Ch'ing armies expanded into central Asia in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Earlier Chinese dynasties had given princesses to Mongol princes and other "barbarian" tribal leaders, but the Manchus conducted a bilateral exchange of wives on an unprecedented scale. The frequency of Manchu marriage exchanges with Mongol princes underlines the crucial importance of the Mongols in the Manchu conquest of Ming China.

From 1612 the Manchus wooed the Khorchin Mongols of western Manchuria and Inner Mongolia away from adherence to the Ming. Mongols who "came over" were showered with gifts and presented with Aisin Gioro wives. They in turn wed their daughters to the Manchu rulers. Nurgaci is said to have proclaimed: "The Manchus and Mongols have different speech [languages] but their clothing comes from the same origin, and they are brother states" (Lü 1985:18). Resisting the Chahar Mongol leader Ligdan Khan's attempts (supported by the Ming) to unify the Mongol tribes, the Khorchin allied with the Manchus to defeat Ligdan Khan in 1634. Once defeated, the Chahar Mongols were also wooed by the Manchus, who presented a Manchu princess to Ligdan Khan's heir in 1635. The Qalqa Mongols, who lived further west in what is now Outer Mongolia, were also courted: in 1617, for example, Nurgaci gave one of his nieces to Enggeder, son of a Qalqa khan who came over to the Manchu cause, and accepted another Qalqa prince's daughter as a daughter-in-law. By 1691 the Qalqa Mongols were absorbed into the Manchu state and reorganized into Mongol banners (Bawden 1968; Lattimore 1934).

Ch'ing marriage networks grew with the Manchu penetration of central and north Asia. The Tüshiyetü Khan exercised sovereignty over the Mongol tribes in east-central Outer Mongolia; their primary regional center, Urga (modern-day Ulan Bator), had been captured by Galdan, leader of the Zunghars, in 1688. In 1697, a year after the Ch'ing troops had defeated Galdan, a grandson of the Tüshiyetü Khan married K'ang-hsi's sixth daughter; several years later (1702) an alliance with the Jasaghtu Khan, who ruled over the Mongol tribes further west, was cemented by his marriage to the daughter of

a Manchu prince. In 1706 a descendant of the Sayin Noyan Khan, who held the territory between the Jasaghtu and Tüshiyetü Khans, was married to K'ang-hsi's tenth daughter (Bawden 1968).

The Ch'ing subjugation of the Western Mongols was achieved with the aid of their Mongol allies; as Lattimore (1934:60) notes, "Manchu sovereignty was not achieved by outright conquest but was always based on alliance with some one group of Mongols against another group and the status of Mongols within the empire was different from, and higher than, the Chinese." By the nineteenth century the previously mighty Mongol domains were supervised by Ch'ing appointees, the Mongol nobility held Ch'ing titles, the once powerful tribes had been reorganized into banners, and the khans "were little more than distinguished banner princes" (Fletcher 1978:51).

From 1636 onward Mongols were given Manchu titles of nobility. Mongol nobles from 1614 on exchanged daughters and sisters with the Manchu rulers, and were tied to the Aisin Gioro lineage by a complex network of affinal exchanges. Manjusri (1599-1649), a Khorchin Mongol noble, was the nephew of Empress Hsiao-tuan, Hung Taiji's wife. Two of Manjusri's daughters married two of Hung Taiji's sons; in 1636 he was given the title "Baturu chün-wang," designating leadership of one of the six political units into which the Manchus divided the Khorchins. Empress Hsiao-tuan was herself related to four of the six princes who ruled the Khorchins under the Ch'ing (Hummel 1943 1:304). Moreover, her three daughters, and those of her niece, Empress Hsiao-chuang (mother of the Shun-chih emperor), half-Khorchin in descent, were all married to Mongol nobles. Other Mongols also participated in these sustained marriage exchanges. For example, marriage ties between the Aisin Gioro and the descendants of Bandi, son-in-law of Hung Taiji and leader of the Aokhan Mongols, lasted for five generations (Hua 1983:52).

The cultivation of ties extended beyond marriage. From 1659 onward, sons of Manchu princesses could be reared in Peking at court (Chao 1984), and from K'ang-hsi's reign, some Mongol boys of noble descent were invited to Peking, where they were raised in the palace and attended school with the Manchu princes (Hua 1983). The Shang-shu-fang, founded by the Yung-cheng emperor (1678-1735) to educate imperial sons, grandsons, and other princes (including sons-in-law), taught Mongol as well as Manchu and Chinese (Kahn 1971:117-20). When they came of age, these Mongols were married to princesses and frequently served the Ch'ing. Tsereng, the Qalqa noble (Hummel 1944 2:756-57) who married K'ang-hsi's fourth daughter (1706), performed exceptional military service in the Ch'ing campaigns against Galdan and won commemoration in the Ch'ing imperial ancestral temple in Peking. Septen Baljur, a Khorchin noble who married Ch'ien-lung's third daughter, had a similar background (Hua 1983). Many Mongols

became an integral part of Ch'ing society: Ch'ung Ch'i, father of T'ung-chih's empress and a member of the Mongol Plain Blue Banner, was the son of a grand councillor and grand secretary, a chuang-yuan in the 1865 chin-shih examinations, and a Ch'ing official (Hummel 1944 1:208-9).

Marriages with Mongols did not end with the stabilization of China's Inner Asian frontiers in the mid-eighteenth century. By this period, the Ch'ien-lung emperor (1711-99) called the pattern of marrying Ch'ing princesses to Mongols a tradition that should be maintained (TCHTSL c. 1), although he also permitted (in 1751) princesses to marry into distinguished banner families (TJFTL 2.6a). Through the nineteenth century, successive emperors tried to preserve this marriage pattern by reiterating that the names of eligible young Mongols (and information on three generations of their forebears) must be sent to the Li fan yuan (Court of Colonial Affairs) for selection as sons-in-law (TCHTSL c.1; TJFTL 2.la; Chao 1984; Hua 1983). The marriages between the Aisin Gioro lineage and the Mongol aristocracy continued into the nineteenth century; by the 1820s-1840s more than three thousand such marriages were recorded (Hua 1983:52). If we ignore the tribal designations, Mongol nobles were the single largest group with whom the imperial house exchanged marriage partners.

Chinese Bannermen

Chinese who came over to the Manchu cause in the years before 1644 were also showered with rank, honors, and Aisin Gioro wives. This policy was clearly expressed in a letter sent by Nurgaci to the commander of the Fu-shun garrison, Li Yung-fang, in 1618 during his first major campaign against the Ming (Wakeman 1985 1:60): "If you submit without fighting . . . I will let you live just as you did before. I will promote . . . the people with great knowledge and foresight . . . give them daughters in marriage and care for them. I will give you a higher position than you have and treat you .like one of my officials of the first degree." Li Yung-fang surrendered the city and was treated "as a Chinese frontiersman admitted into the ranks of the Jin aristocracy" (ibid., 61); he married one of Nurgaci's granddaughters, fought alongside Nurgaci, and died a viscount. His nine sons continued to serve the Manchus and were enrolled in the Chinese Plain Blue Banner after 1642. At least one of them—the second son, Shuai-t'ai—also married into the Aisin Gioro lineage (Hummel 1943 1:499).

Sun Ssu-k'o, the son of a Ming officer who surrendered to Nurgaci in 1622, was enrolled in the Chinese Plain White Banner and helped to lead the Manchu troops in defeating the Eleuths at the battle of Jao Modo (1695); he was rewarded with a title, and his son was married to K'ang-hsi's fourth daughter (ibid. 2:682). Wu San-kuei, Shang K'o-hsi, and Keng Chi-mao, the three Han Chinese generals who were instrumental in the Manchu conquest of

south China, were each granted princely titles otherwise reserved only for Manchus and Mongols, and were linked by marriage with the imperial house (TCYT ; Hummel 1943 1:415-16; T'ang 1923:192-93).^[13]

These Chinese bannermen—the term derives from the designation (Han-chün ) used in 1642 when the Chinese banners were organized—served the: Manchu rulers as advisers, generals, and officials in the crucial conquest period. Especially in the seventeenth century, their language and cultural knowledge made them favored appointees for local government posts in China. Chinese bannermen dominated the posts of governor and governor-general during the late seventeenth century (Wakeman 1985 2:1021-23, 1024, 1029, 1031-33). Wakeman concludes that the Shun-chih reign "saw the transformation of Han bannermen into a new supra-elite, acting almost like provincial janissaries for the throne," and even replacing Chinese degree holders in posts (ibid., 1020). Like other Manchu adherents, their loyalty and service to the throne frequently continued over many generations (ibid., 1018-20). The T'ungs of Fu-shun, sinicized Jurchen who joined the Manchu cause from 1618 to 1645, are an outstanding example of the rewards, which included promotion into a Manchu banner, heaped upon loyal Chinese bannermen (Crossley 1983; Hou 1982).

Chinese bannermen were sharply distinguished from Chinese captured in the early phases of the Manchu conquest, who became bondservants, a hereditary servile status. Mongol, Korean, and Chinese bondservants were used to till the estates created in north China for imperial kinsmen, banner officials, and bannermen (Wei, Wu, and Lu 1982). Organized according to the Eight Banner system, bondservants in the upper three banners (the Bordered Yellow, the Plain Yellow, and the Plain White) came under the direct personal control of the emperor in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and were appointed to positions within the Imperial Household Department (Torbert 1977). Their servile status did not prevent some bond-servants from becoming rich and powerful; they were used for delicate and confidential tasks by the emperors, and some attained provincial and even central government posts (Spence 1966:13-15). And, as we shall see, daughters of Chinese bondservants could also enter the imperial harem.

The differentiation between Chinese bannermen and Chinese civilians was primarily a political one, but there is also evidence that "culturally the important distinctions of the early Qing period lay not between the Manchus and the Chinese-martial Bannermen but between the Bannermen of all origins and the conquered Chinese" (Crossley 1987:779). In the early stages the designation of Chinese bannermen had been applied to persons who were not necessarily racially Chinese, but who had been subjects of the Ming (ibid.). Many were in fact northeast Asians who had settled in Liaotung: sinicized Jurchens, Mongols, Koreans were thus called nikan , the Manchu word for persons who lived in the manner of Chinese. In fact, the early Mongol and

the Chinese banners both enrolled descendants of Jurchen (ibid.). By the 1660s many Chinese bannermen were second- and third-generation descendants of officers who had joined the Manchu cause and were "barely distinguishable from the Manchu nobility" (Wakeman 1985 2:1017). Many had been "transfrontiersmen" who through long residence in Liaoning had become accustomed to Manchu ways and took on Manchu identity with Nurgaci's acquiescence (ibid., 1:45). Nurgaci classified "individuals on the basis of their culture primarily"; the K'ang-hsi emperor displayed his relaxed attitude toward ethnicity in his willingness to transfer whole Mongol tribes and Chinese lineages from the Mongol and Chinese banners to the Manchu banners (Crossley 1987:779). Indeed, K'ang-hsi's willingness to incorporate other ethnic groups into the banner system extended even to Russian prisoners of war, who were enrolled as a company in the Bordered Yellow Banner in 1685 (Wu 1987).

Support for the argument that the Manchus emphasized political rather than ethnic boundaries in their marriage patterns can be found in analysis of the circumstances surrounding the 1648 decision of the "Imperial Father Regent," Dorgon, to permit Manchu-Han marriages. In 1648 the Manchu conquest of China was far from assured, and Dorgon used various measures to try to obtain the voluntary compliance of Chinese to Manchu rule. Bannermen were prohibited (after 1644) from plundering civilians; from 1647 onward imperial pronouncements repeated the theme that "Manchu and Han are one family." The subject set for the palace examinations in 1649 was how Manchus and Han could be brought to live together (Kessler 1976:15-17; Chou and Chao 1986:408-9). In reality, this policy could not be implemented. Ethnic strife in Peking forced Dorgon to rule (October 5, 1648) that the two races should be separated so that each could "live in peace." The bannermen were eventually housed in separate walled garrison quarters in thirty-four cities across north China (Wakeman 1985 1:480).

The edict ordering the removal of all Chinese from the northern imperial city to the southern city in Peking was followed a day later by an edict permitting intermarriage to promote friendship between Manchus and Han. Details implementing this policy were announced on October 14 (TCSL 40.9ab, Ila, 14ab). In what can be interpreted as an effort to win over the Han populace, the edict specified that Manchus marrying Han women were required to take them as wives and not concubines.

We do not know how many individuals availed themselves of the opportunity offered by the 1648 edict;^[14] what we do know is that the policy permitting intermarriage ended abruptly in 1655. Dorgon was dead; the young emperor responded angrily to a memorial from a Chinese official who criticized an expedition to Yangchow to buy Chinese women for the palace. The memorialist, Li K'ai-sheng, touched on the delicate ethnic situation, reminded the emperor that Yangchow had the "bandit spirit" (it had forcibly

resisted the Ch'ing armies), and warned of the adverse public reaction to such activities. The emperor, who punished Li for his memorial, indignantly denied the truth of the charges and reiterated the Manchu tradition that excluded Chinese women from the imperial harem (TCSL 92.13b-15b, 20b).

The 1648 edict removing Chinese from the imperial city in Peking specifically exempted Chinese bannermen. Nor were the Manchus alone in thus separating Chinese bannermen from the rest of the Chinese population. Contemporary Han Chinese looked down on them as "racial renegades and no better than Manchus" (Kessler 1976:18) because they had betrayed the Ming cause. The distinction between Chinese bannermen and Han Chinese is clear in a 1651 complaint by a Han Chinese censor, who urged the emperor to stop relying so heavily on bannermen in top provincial posts (ibid., 17-18)—as we have already noted, Chinese bannermen dominated provincial posts during this period.

The early Manchu laxity toward "ethnic purity" was replaced in the mid-eighteenth century by a heightened concern with the maintenance of Manchu separateness. The empire was secured, the frontiers stabilized. The Ch'ien-lung emperor, who saw himself as the ruler of a multicultural empire, desired that "there should be orderly congruence of race to custom"; during his reign, oral genealogies were written down, every Manchu was fixed within a clan, and the major clans were traced back to the Chin dynasty that had ruled north China during the twelfth century. Concern for the preservation of Manchu identity was expressed in strictures on the maintenance of Manchu dress and the perpetuation of shamanism, the traditional Manchu religion. The prohibition against intermarriage with Han Chinese was no doubt strengthened by these new attitudes, and prevailed until the end of the dynasty.

In its emphasis on the military segment of society, Ch'ing imperial marriages greatly resembled those of the Northern Sung (Chung 1981), when virtually none of the imperial concubines came from the prominent scholar-official families. In the Ming, as in the Northern Sung, imperial marriage partners tended to be drawn from hereditary military families (Soullière 1988). Scholar-officials might consider themselves the sine qua non of the dynasty; that the imperial perception differed is suggested by the consistent priority given to wu (the military) over wen (the civilian officials) in imperial marriage.

The Recruitment of Women for Emperors and Princes

The number of acknowledged empresses and concubines varied greatly by emperor, ranging from K'ang-hsi with 40 to Kuang-hsu with only 3. With 9 emperors (excluding the last emperor, P'u-i) claiming a total of 155 wives and concubines, the Ch'ing harems were relatively large.^[15] Unlike the T'ang

dynasty, with its elaborate structure for the imperial harem (Chung 1981:18-20), the Ch'ing hierarchy, defined in 1636, was relatively simple. Concubines were differentiated into seven ranks: the highest was huang-kuei-fei , then, in descending order, kuei-fei, fei, pin, kuei-jen, ch'ang-tsai , and ta-ying .^[16] Rank determined the allotments of food, clothing, jewelry, etc., as well as cash stipends and maids, that a woman received (KCTL c. 3). The highest rank (empress dowager) received 300,000 taels a year (Lu 1982).^[17]

The Ch'ing procedure for the selection of imperial and princely consorts was narrower than those of earlier dynasties.^[18] The Ch'ing modified the Ming and Northern Sung practice of drafting women from the civilian population for palace service and selecting consorts from the palace maids (Chung 1981:9-11; Shan 1960). Beginning with Shun-chih's second empress in 1653 (Wei 1984:20), brides for the Aisin Gioro line were selected from the triennial draft of hsiu-nü (beautiful women) who were daughters of officials in the banners (TCHTSL c. 1114; HPTL 1.14a-23a). With the exception of specified individuals who became exempt in the course of the dynasty, the emperors enforced the requirement that every eligible girl had to appear in Peking in the draft before her betrothal, beginning from the age of thirteen to fourteen sui .

The hsiu-nü inspection was held in the capital. In Peking, the girls entered the Inner Quarters of the palace grouped by banner (Manchu, Mongol, and Chinese) and within each by age. The emperor and empress who personally inspected the girls to select brides for their sons and imperial agnates were furnished with the particulars of their family backgrounds and birthdates (the latter were used to compare the "eight characters" of the prospective couple); those passing the first draft were inspected by the senior empress dowager, who was provided with the ranks and names of the girl's maternal grandfather and her paternal forebears for three generations. Choices could thus be based not only on a girl's personal appearance but also on her family's status. The Yung-cheng emperor emphasized the latter: he ruled that the selection of empresses and concubines of ranks one through five should be made only from the families of hereditary banner officials above a certain rank (Wang Tao-ch'eng 1985a:306). The notion that father's rank determined that of his daughter in the imperial harem is supported by a blank form from the mid-nineteenth century, which equates a hereditary duke to a fei , a prefect to a pin , and so on (ibid., 311).

Some hsiu-nü were immediately selected as wives or concubines for princes, or for the emperor himself. The empresses of the K'ang-hsi, T'ung-chih, and Kuang-hsu emperors were selected from the hsiu-nü draft (CTKTSH illus. 225, 226, p. 165; Sun 1985:52). Empress Dowager Tz'u-hsi was chosen in the hsiu-nü draft of March 28, 1852, designated a sixth-rank concubine, and introduced into the palace on June 26, 1852 (Yü 1985a:130).

Hsiu-nü who did not enter the imperial or princely harems probably be-

came ladies-in-waiting, serving for a five-year term and provided with stipends according to their rank. At the end of five years they were permitted to leave with a grant of twenty taels of silver. These hsiu-nü who caught the emperor's eye could still be promoted into the harem. This seems to have been the way Te fei, one of K'ang-hsi's favorite concubines, entered the palace. Te fei, who produced six children, was "originally a lady-in-waiting from the Uya clan" whose father was an officer in the banners (S. Wu 1979:36).

The other way to enter a princely or imperial household was through the draft for palace maids (kung-nü ), who were selected from the daughters of bondservant officials in the upper three banners who were serving in the Imperial Household Department (Shan 1960; TCHTSL c. 1,218). Palace serving women were occasionally plucked out of the ranks; a not inconsiderable 16 percent of concubines entered the harem through this means.^[19] Many were probably from humble backgrounds: in 1700 the emperor ordered that, "since the girls coming to the palace for . . . selection as palace maids were mainly from poor families, they be taken to warm quarters and fed with hot soup and rice when the weather was cold" (Torbert 1977:75).

Unlike the triennial hsiu-nü draft, the recruitment of palace maids took place once a year and was managed by the Imperial Household Department. Girls aged thirteen sui were brought to the palace for inspection and selection by the emperor. Most were assigned to the different palaces to fill the quota of maids assigned to the emperor, empress dowager, empress, and ranked' concubines. Four hundred to five hundred palace maids and eunuchs were said to have staffed the palace during the K'ang-hsi reign; by Tz'u-hsi's time, there were eleven hundred maids alone (Shan 1960:97). Each maid was allocated a daily food ration, and received bolts of silk and cotton. Some received up to six taels of silver a year for their service (Lu 1982). Palace maids could be married off with dowries at age twenty-five if in general service, and at age thirty-five if they served imperial persons (KTCL 3.2a-3a).

In contrast to the lax policies concerning intermarriage with bondservants in the early Ch'ing, regulations preventing their selection as concubines or wives of males in the main line were put in place by the late nineteenth century. The Yung-cheng emperor himself noted in 1727 that the Manchus (unlike the Chinese) observed "strict separation and distinction between master and bondservant" (Torbert 1977:56-57). Intermarriage of regular bannermen and bondservants was forbidden (ibid., 68), and there were stringent rules against Aisin Gioro marrying bondservants from the lower five banners, that is, those banners not directly controlled by the emperor (TJFTL 31.20a-21a).

Imperial consorts of bondservant background, who had probably begun as palace maids, included Ch'ien-lung's third empress, the daughter of a palace overseer, and Chia-ch'ing's (1760-1820) first empress, the daughter

of an Imperial Household Department manager (Torbert 1977:76). Two of Ch'ien-lung's concubines probably also came from bondservant families; the father of another was a Korean bondservant (ibid.). Two of Chia-ch'ing's concubines were initially palace maids (ibid., 75). One of K'ang-hsi's favorites was in fact of still lower status: her father was a state slave (sin jeku jetere aha ) (ibid., 75; Yeh 1984:45). Information in the imperial genealogy on the fathers of two other imperial concubines—K'ang-hsi's Cheng fei and Chia-ch'ing's Shun-pin—suggests that they too may have come from bondservant backgrounds.

The hsiu-nü and palace maid drafts enabled the emperors to exercise the right of first choice over the daughters of officials in the regular Manchu, Mongol, and Han banners as well as in the upper three bondservant banners linked to the Imperial Household Department. The social status of the emperor's affines was mixed; it included aristocrats and slaves (the bond-servants). The inclusion of the latter, in direct contravention of rules forbidding intermarriage between bannermen and bondservants (HPTL 1.29a:-30a), is a most striking aspect of the Ch'ing marriage system.

Unlike the native Chinese dynasties studied by Holmgren, the Ch'ing tried to regulate the access of both affinal/maternal and sororal kin. By the early eighteenth century girls closely related to the empress or descended through their mothers from the Aisin Gioro line had to be explicitly identified as such in the hsiu-nü inspections. From 1800 the throne began issuing exemptions from the hsiu-nü draft to daughters of imperial princesses married to Mongols, sisters of the empress, empress dowager, and concubines of the first through fourth ranks. These regulations did not bar girls born to brothers of the empress and concubines of the first four ranks from the draft, and, as we have seen, imperial consorts were frequently related to one another. In the final analysis, it was not the policy governing selection of wives but the rejection of eldest-son (or empress's son) succession and the inclusion of low-status bondservant daughters in the harem that served as a check on the emergence of powerful affinal or sororal relatives.

The Status of Wives and Concubines

Ebrey (1986) and Rubie Watson (see her chapter in this volume) have argued that commoners in Sung and contemporary China have not had polygynous unions because stringent ritual, legal, and social distinctions separated the wife ("first wife" in this chapter) from all other sexual partners. Holmgren (in this volume) has called the Chinese system "serial monogamy." According to Watson, concubines were sharply differentiated from wives in three critical aspects: their mode of entry into the household, their ritual obligations and privileges, and their social status. Wives entered their husbands'

households with dowries; concubines did not. Concubines were purchased. The marriage rite was performed only for the wife; there could be serial marriages, but a man could have only one wife at a time. All children called the first wife "mother," and their filial obligations were directed to her and not to their natural mothers. Concubines were usually not commemorated after death, unlike wives. Wives came from respectable families with standing in their community, and marriage created a sustained relationship between the wife-givers and wife-takers, as contrasted to the complete absence of such relationships with a concubine's natal family, which was by definition of low status.

The Ch'ing imperial marriage system was not fully polygamous. As 'we have noted earlier, the concubines in the imperial harem were graded into a seven-rank hierarchy differentiated with respect to privilege and living allowances. Nowhere in the Ch'ing annals do we have true polygamy as described by Holmgren in her characterization of non-Han regimes in this volume, where all wives, or a group of senior wives, enjoyed equal status.

In other important respects, however, the Ch'ing system did not conform to the Chinese imperial system, described by Holmgren. Unlike the sons of Han Chinese rulers, the sons of the empress and of concubines were not clearly distinguished. And we shall see that the Ch'ing system also differed significantly from the system of monogamy practiced in Western Europe in permitting concubines' sons to be legitimate heirs to the throne. Furthermore, in contrast to the marriage system of native Chinese states (see Holmgren's essay in this volume), the Ch'ing allowed concubines to be promoted to empress.

Unlike the marriage system of Chinese commoners cited by Watson, the imperial system failed to sharply distinguish between the mode of entry, social status, and ritual obligations and privileges of the wife and concubines. Many empresses (seven of the eighteen women who held the status of empress during the dynasty, either during their lives or posthumously) entered the imperial harem as concubines, yet they (as empresses) received the same ritual investiture, emoluments, and privileges granted to the women who had entered as wives. This was also true for the six other concubines who were promoted to empress dowager only after the death of their spouse.

We have earlier noted that the Ch'ing rejection of the principle of eldest-son succession and the refusal to announce the heir until the emperor lay dying produced bitter succession struggles. The Ch'ing did not honor the principle, found in both the Ming and the Mongol dynasties, of favoring the sons of the first wife as heir. Did the status of the mother affect the choice of the heir? Historians cite the case of Yin-ssu, the K'ang-hsi emperor's eighth son by a woman of slave background (Liang fei). When Yin-jeng, K'ang-hsi's son by his empress, proved to be unfit for the throne, factions began to form around other potential contenders for the succession. Silas Wu

notes that Yin-ssu's mother's low birth counted against him (1979:163), but apparently not sufficiently to disqualify him from consideration.

The Yung-cheng emperor was himself the son of a Manchu "maidservant in the palace" (Hummel 1944 2:916). Despite producing six children for the emperor, Yung-cheng's mother was ranked by K'ang-hsi only as a fei ; her promotion to empress dowager came at her son's hands. Ch'ien-lung's mother, a Niohuru, was nonetheless the daughter of a middle-level servant (assistant majordomo) in Yung-cheng's princely household; she entered his establishment in 1704, gave birth to the future emperor in 1711, but was not promoted to the third rank (fei ) until 1723-24, about the time her son was secretly designated heir-apparent (Kahn 1971:88). A kuei-fei when Yung-cheng died, she was named empress dowager by her son. The mother of the Chia-ch'ing emperor was from a bondservant family who entered the Ch'ien-lung emperor's harem as a concubine of the fourth rank. In the course of producing six children, she was gradually promoted to concubine of the first rank before her death in 1775 and was posthumously elevated to empress in 1795 when her son was designated heir-apparent. In fact, of the ten emperors who reigned in the Ch'ing dynasty, only one (Tao-kuang) was the son of a first wife or empress. In short, contrary to the Yin-ssu example, the imperial succession did not exclude sons of concubines; it did not prohibit the succession of sons from low-status mothers.

Mode of Entry and Social Status

No imperial concubines were purchased. In contrast to the customary Han Chinese practice, many imperial concubines entered the harem through the same hsiu-nü draft that selected empresses (see table 5.3 for ranks of entering consorts). As noted earlier, empresses and concubines of the first five ranks (C1-C6 in the table) were most likely selected through the hsiu-nü draft, while the lower-ranking concubines tended to have entered the palace as maidservants through the kung-nü recruitment process discussed earlier. Of the 155 women in the harems of the ten Ch'ing emperors, 76 percent entered as concubines through the hsiu-nü draft; i.e., they were chosen in the same way as were empresses (see table 5.3).

Many concubines came from the Manchu aristocratic lines that also provided empresses. When Shun-chih's second empress was installed in 1654, her younger sister also entered his harem as a concubine of the third rank. The younger sister of K'ang-hsi's empress entered K'ang-hsi's harem some decades later, gave him a son (1691), and was posthumously made a consort of the third rank after she died in 1696. K'ang-hsi's second empress was a daughter of Ebilun, a major personage of his day and son of Eidu, founder of the Niohuru clan; yet she entered the harem as a concubine of the third rank and was not made empress until 1677, less than a year before her death. The daughter of T'ung Kuo-wei, a major military leader, entered K'ang-hsi's

harem as a concubine of the second rank and was made empress in 1689, only one day before her death. The Kuang-hsu emperor's Tatara concubines were the granddaughters of a prominent provincial official, Yü-t'ai (TCYT ; Hummel 1943 1:158-59).

Our discussion of the social backgrounds of concubines' families can be expanded. Table 5.4, which presents the clan affiliations of all imperial and princely consorts, includes 465 women, more than five times the number of imperial and princely first wives (cf. table 5.2). Again, the clustering of affines indicates that emperors and princes took their wives from a common pool (cf. table 5.2). This must of course be the case when the heir-apparent is not announced at an early age. Many of the bondservant women were concubines of low rank: among imperial concubines, for example, four of the seven Ch'en women never rose above the fifth rank, and only one, who had begun as a household servant, rose to the first rank. Miss Chang, who 'remained a lowly shu-fei despite giving birth to two daughters, and one each of the Lius and Wangs also entered as palace maids. Most had low rank; only two attained the title of concubine of the first rank.

What is equally striking, however, is the dominance of Manchu aristocratic clans like the Nara, the Niohuru, the Fuca, and the Guwalgiya in this larger group of concubines. A finding that indirectly supports our argument that imperial concubines were not sharply differentiated from first wives lies in the varied ranks achieved by the women given by the Niohuru to the

imperial house: they ranged from empress (seven) down to shu-fei (two). The Fuca daughters in the imperial harems included one empress and four concubines, none of whom was below the fourth rank. In contrast, the ranks achieved by the Nara women did not rise above the third-ranking fei and included some with the rank of shu-fei .

Entry into the imperial harem marked the onset of sustained relations between the concubine's family and the emperor, just as in the case of families providing a wife. It was the immediate gains, not the long-term rewards, of being related to a future emperor that induced respectable, even powerful families to give their daughters as concubines or ladies-in-waiting to princes and emperors. If the girl won the emperor's favor, her father's and brothers' careers would be transformed. Osi, father of the Shun-chih emperor's favorite concubine, was promoted from viscount to third-class earl "as a favor to his daughter" (Hummel 1943 1:301). Fiyanggu, the father of Yung-cheng's empress, was posthumously made a first-rank duke (PCTC 151.106). Chin Chien, the brother of Shu chia huang-kuei-fei, rose to become president of the Board of Works and the Board of Civil Appointments after his sister became Ch'ien-lung's favorite. Imperial favor raised A-pu-nai, the father of

K'ang-hsi's Liang fei, from slave to bondservant; it freed Kao Pin, the father of Ch'ien-lung's Hui-hsien huang-kuei-fei, from bondservitude, and Kao eventually became a grand secretary (Torbert 1977:75-76).

Imperial favor could transfer bannermen to the prestigious upper three banners—the Bordered Yellow, Plain Yellow, and Plain White—which had come under the emperor's control in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In addition to T'ung Kuo-kang and T'ung Kuo-wei—who with their descendants were moved from the Chinese Plain Blue Banner to the Manchu Bordered Yellow Banner in 1688 (their sister was the K'ang-hsi emperor's mother)—we have the example of Ch'ung Ch'i, father of T'ung-chih's empress, who was shifted with his descendants from the Mongol Plain Blue Banner to the Manchu Bordered Yellow Banner after his daughter's marriage. Ch'ung Ch'i was also promoted to third-class duke as a sign of favor (Hummel 1943 1:208-9). Tz'u-hsi's branch of the Yehe Nara was also shifted from the Bordered Blue to the Bordered Yellow Banner after she became empress dowager in 1862 (Yü 1985b:127). Best of all, the imperial favor could wipe out career failure. Tz'u-hsi's father, Hui-cheng, died in official disgrace during the Taiping rebellion (1853); when Tz'u-hsi became empress dowager, she posthumously made him a third-grade duke (ibid., 133).

Ritual Incorporation

Whereas concubines in Han Chinese commoner households were purchased and entered without dowries or the wedding ritual, upper-ranking imperial concubines entered with dowries through the same process that selected empresses. Following precedents set by earlier dynasties (Soullière 1987: 179-85), the rituals of investiture for concubines of the upper four ranks were graded variations of the rituals that accompanied the taking of an empress. Although we shall focus on these rites of incorporation, we should note that postmortem commemoration in the Temple of the Ancestors and empirewide observance of their death days (Rawski 1988:236, 247) were accorded to all empresses and empress dowagers, regardless of their original status.

The model for all ranks was the "great wedding" (ta-hun ), carried out when a reigning monarch took an empress, which followed the Chinese imperial tradition concerning wedding rituals. During the entire dynasty, this ritual was carried out only five times. Marriage, the event that marked the coming of age, was a necessary prelude to the end of a regency for a child emperor. The Shun-chih emperor, six sui when he was put on the throne in 1643, was married with the full rites in 1651 at the age of fourteen sui ; K'ang-hsi, who ascended the throne at eight sui , was married at the age of twelve sui in 1665; T'ung-chih, who became emperor at six sui , was married at seventeen sui ; and Kuang-hsu, who was four sui when he ascended the throne, was married at age nineteen (TCYT ; also Hsin 1985).

The celebration of the imperial nuptials was an empirewide event that involved every citizen. During a "great wedding" (in 1888 lasting a total of twenty days) no punishments could be meted out. Officials wore special robes to mark the auspicious event; on the actual wedding day, everyone in the empire was required to wear red and green, the streets through which the wedding procession passed were cleaned, and the palace was decorated and refurbished. Of course, the state altars of Heaven and Earth as well as the ancestors were notified (with sacrifices) of the event, which was thus part of state as well as family ritual.

The sequence of events that comprised an imperial wedding began when the empress dowager, in consultation with the imperial princes, chose a bride (Wang Shu-ch'ing 1980; TCHTSL c. 324) and "ordered" the emperor to marry. To fix the betrothal (na-ts'ai li ), two emissaries went with gifts (prescribed in the regulations)^[20] and the imperial edict announced the betrothal to the mansion of the bride's father. Here the chief emissary read the edict aloud before the bride's father, who performed the full ritual obeisance (three prostrations, nine kowtows) in acknowledgment of the imperial grace. This betrothal ceremony was followed by a second, the ta-cheng li, when items to be used in the wedding itself were delivered to the bride's house by the emissaries, who announced the wedding date selected by the Board of Astronomy.

The dowry, normally given by the bride's family, was in this case prepared by the Imperial Household Department. Large quantities of court clothing, jewelry, gold and silver utensils, and furniture were presented to the bride several days before the wedding day, then ceremonially carried back to the palace.^[21] The core of the wedding ceremony was the conferral of the title of empress on the bride (ts'e-li ). The "gold seal" and "gold tablets" conferring the title of empress were presented to the bride at her father's house; the bride, dressed in the robes and accessories of an empress, was then carried to the palace in a sedan chair with the empress's regalia: she was the only female who (unescorted by the emperor) was permitted to enter through the Wu-men, the main gate to the palace (Shan 1960:100). The traditional nuptial chambers, in the east wing of the K'un-ning palace, were decorated with "double happiness" and other auspicious symbols (Yen Min 1980:13). The wedding ceremony was completed in the nuptial chambers, where the bride and groom sipped from the nuptial wine cup. On the next day the emperor and his bride paid their respects to the gods, immediate ancestors, and to his mother (the empress dowager). Several days later the couple received the congratulations of the court and officials; the empress dowager received congratulations; and the emperor and the empress dowager hosted banquets for the parents and relatives of the bride and bridegroom and for officials.

The "great wedding" parallels the ritual sequence found among Han

Chinese families. The betrothal, formalized with the presentation of gifts from the groom's family, is followed by the public transfer of the bride from her natal home to the palace, her appearance before her mother-in-law, and by banquets held to celebrate the event. But at critical points the ceremony modifies commoner practice to indicate the preeminent status of the groom. The bride's family members are his subjects; the bride's father must acknowledge the unequal relationship between wife-giver and emperor through obeisances; the rituals do not include the visit home by the bride, which was customary after a commoner wedding.

Gift exchanges also reflect the inequality of status between bride and groom. Here, as in the marriages of princes and princesses, the betrothal ceremony and the ta-cheng li are marked by presentations of gold, silver, livestock, furs, textiles, court clothing, and court accessories (including jewels) from the emperor to the bride, her mother, her father, her grandfather, and even her brothers. The banquet, held at the bride's father's house after the na-ts'ai rite, is provided by the Imperial Household Department and not by the bride's father. The Imperial Household Department provides all of the "dowry" as well as the bridewealth (Li P'eng-nien 1983) in a deliberate inversion of the commoner custom, which had the bride's family providing a dowry.

Archival documents concerning the "great weddings" of the T'ung-chih and Kuang-hsu emperors and information on the wedding of P'u-i, which was closely modeled on these historical precedents, provide evidence that imperial concubines entered the harem with rituals that resembled the taking of an empress. In the two "great weddings" of the nineteenth century, the empress's entry into the palace was preceded by the entry of concubines from highly ranked families. Four concubines, one of whom was the paternal aunt of the empress, entered the palace during the T'ung-chih emperor's "great wedding"; two sisters became the Kuang-hsu emperor's concubines during his "great wedding." And we know that the runner-up among the girls considered for empress was selected as his concubine during P'u-i's "great wedding" (P'u 1982).

A concubine also entered the palace with a "dowry" provided by the Imperial Household Department (KCTC nos. 2381, 2385; PAPS no. 2102). Unlike commoner women, whose namelessness reflected their subordinate status in Chinese society (R. Watson 1986), concubines of the upper four ranks, like empresses, were granted individual titles in life, and occasionally in death. The ritual for installation of concubines in the first three ranks, like the ceremonies for the installation of the empress, was also held in the T'ai-ho tien, the hall that was the center for court and state ritual (KCTL c. 2; TCHTSL c. 306). The patents of rank (a seal and tablets inscribed with the concubine's rank and name similar to those made for empresses and empresses dowager) were created whenever a woman was named to the first three

ranks of concubines; concubines of the fourth rank were installed with a gold tablet but no seal. The investiture of concubines of the first three ranks was marked by sacrifices at the Temple of the Ancestors and the Feng-hsien-tien on the day preceding the ceremony to notify the ancestors about the event; this was omitted for the investiture of a fourth-ranking concubine.

Concubines selected for a "great wedding" received these symbols of rank in their father's house before they were conveyed to the palace (P'u 1982: 129). In 1872 the two fourth-ranking and one fifth-ranking concubines entered the palace two days before the empress. The third-ranking concubine joined them the next day. After entering the palace, all concubines worshiped before the ancestral portraits, paid their respects to the empresses dowager, and lit incense before the Buddhist altar in the palace in which they were to reside in a ritual that the new empress would herself perform the day after the nuptials (KCTC nos. 2379, 2381, 2383; P'u 1982:129).

The archival materials indicate that the ritual distinctions between the wife and concubines found in commoner households were not present in the Ch'ing system of imperial marriage. The rituals accompanying installation of imperial concubines of the first through fourth ranks resembled those for the installation of an empress: patents of ranks were conferred with prior notification of the ancestors, and the newcomer performed domestic rituals before the palace equivalent of the domestic altar. The only ritual distinction enjoyed solely by the empress in a "great wedding" was her entry through the main gate;^[22] concubines entered the palace through the Shen-wu, or back door. In a "great wedding," the newly installed concubines served as ladies-in-waiting for the empress on her wedding day and participated in the rites that took place on that occasion. They were also included in the major domestic court rituals that involved the empress during the course of the year (KTCL c. 2).

Not all concubines were so thoroughly integrated into the imperial family, however. The rituals show a clear distinction between the four highest ranks and lower-ranking concubines, who received no patents and who entered the palace without prior sacrifice at the ancestral altars (TCHTSL :306). These lower-ranking concubines were also the women most vulnerable to omission from the imperial genealogy.^[23] At the same time, as we have already observed, it was entirely possible for even these low-ranking concubines to be promoted and even to attain the rank of empress.

Conclusion

The marriage patterns of the Ch'ing imperial house had a direct effect on the structure of power within Ch'ing society. Marriage exchange with banner allies was a vital element in the supraethnic policies of the early Manchu rulers during the conquest period. Later emperors confronted a different

issue: how to prevent. the Manchus from being completely assimilated into the Han Chinese population that they ruled. Although banner troops were stationed in separate garrisoned quarters in major cities in China, there were clear signs in the mid-eighteenth century of the loss of Manchu language skills among bannermen and indications that Manchu dress and other customs were being supplanted by Chinese norms. It is no accident that this was precisely the period that Manchu tradition and social structure were "fixed" by being written down; the concern with preservation of Manchu ethnicity voiced by the Ch'ien-lung emperor and his successors undoubtedly helped to perpetuate the prohibition against intermarriage with Han Chinese.

As Jennifer Holmgren points out in her chapter in this volume, the relation between marriage and politics is highly complex and variable. The Ch'ing system of political endogamy reinforced the historical master-servant tie of the Aisin Gioro with bannermen. The Ch'ing prohibition on marriage with Han Chinese outside the banner system removed Chinese officials from using this avenue to heighten their power: in contrast to the Chinese traditional historiography, which placed Chinese at the heart of the Ch'ing political system, our study suggests that they were only peripheral players in marriage politics.

The Ch'ing pattern of intermarriage with bannermen can be contrasted with the Northern Sung imperial house studied by Chaffee in this volume. Northern Sung emperors forged marriage alliances with the civil elite—or, more precisely, the civil elite residing in or near the Northern Sung capital—as a means of winning over potential rivals. The Ch'ing, like the Ming rulers (Soullière 1988), deliberately avoided marriages with the civil elite in an effort to prevent imperial consorts and their relatives from obtaining access to political power. At the same time, as we noted earlier, the Northern Sung, Ming, and Ch'ing rulers all used marriage as a means of reinforcing their bonds with the military elite.

The Ch'ing succession system also altered the structure of power within the harem. By rejecting the Ming principle of eldest-son succession, the Ch'ing made the sons of all consorts eligible to become emperor. As we have seen, the Ch'ing (like the Ming) took consorts from both the very top and the very bottom of the banner hierarchy: daughters of noble households mingled and competed for the emperor's favor with maids from bondservant families. Recruitment policies allowed distant sororal and maternal relations to enter the harem, where each served as a check on the others. The deliberate social fluidity among consorts and the possibility of having an "upstart" triumph over her social betters served as an institutionalized check on the political ambitions of any particular group among the banner elite.

The Ch'ing tried to make usurpation more difficult by widening the circle of potential competitors for imperial favor. We have been at some pains to demonstrate that on critical questions like succession, the sons of lower-

ranking concubines could and frequently did win out over rivals with mothers of higher rank. The fluidity of succession subverted the hierarchical order of the harem and served to check the emergence of powerful imperial affines. When we survey the history of the dynasty, the problem of powerful affines is conspicuously absent.

In this chapter we have argued that the criteria used to determine the absence of polygyny among Chinese commoner families reveal that Ch'ing imperial marriage practices differ so markedly as to constitute a separate marriage model—one that is neither monogamy nor polygyny. Why then did the Ch'ing so emphasize hierarchy and gradations of rank in the ritual installation and living allowances of concubines?

Maurice Bloch has noted that rituals are not necessarily faithful reflections of social reality; rather, "the roles that people act in rituals do not reflect or define social status. . . . These roles are part of a drama that creates an image . . . that needs to be created because in many ways it contradicts what everybody knows" (1986:45). Chinese commoner families emphasize the primacy of the first wife precisely because in many cases it is not the first wife but a younger concubine who wins the master's affections and threatens to disrupt family harmony by her power to obtain an unfair share of the family's resources. The institutionalized emphasis on the primacy of the first wife aims to keep family tensions under control so that the patriline can be perpetuated. The vulnerability of the Ch'ing empress, who was frequently chosen without regard for the emperor's personal wishes, is compounded by her rivals' powerful relatives and elite social backgrounds. Nor, as the case of Tz'u-hsi demonstrates, did the empress installed during her husband's lifetime have more power because of her ritual superiority than the mother promoted to empress dowager by her son. The ritual acknowledgment of the empress as the head of the harem preserved the illusion of order in a situation that was in reality extremely fluid and dependent on the whims of the ruler.

If empresses were frequently only nominal heads of imperial harems, there could be no doubt that in the Ch'ing, as in virtually every dynasty, the emperor's mother, the empress dowager, did exercise real authority and power. Her legitimacy was firmly grounded in Confucian teachings: the highly publicized exercises in filial piety of the K'ang-hsi and Ch'ien-lung emperors may have been politically manipulative (S. Wu 1979; Kahn 1971), but the affection these rulers bore their grandmothers and mothers was no less real for all that.

Empresses dowager were frequently joined in the inner court councils by imperial princes, the agnates of the collateral branches of the ruling house. The Ch'ing succession system permitted younger sons to participate in government and to vie for the ultimate prize, the throne. The Ch'ing thus differs from native Chinese regimes, which barred nonheirs from politics and power. Throughout the dynasty, we find both imperial agnates and emperors' sons

being appointed to carry out substantive tasks. These assignments continued even after the emperors had successfully overcome the collegial traditions of rule that had characterized most of the seventeenth century. The K'ang-hsi emperor tested his eldest son by making him regent while he himself led troops against the Western Mongols; he sent another son to command the Ch'ing banners in another campaign (S. Wu 1979). Imperial princes took civil service positions in the ministries; they also served as administrators in the banners and the Imperial Clan Court.

In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the political activities of imperial agnates were never a threat to the throne because of the strong leadership provided by the emperors. During the late nineteenth century, however, with a succession of infant-emperors, imperial agnates played leading roles in national politics. Prince Kung, son of the Tao-kuang emperor, was designated to handle negotiations with the foreign powers in 1860 when his half brother the Hsien-feng emperor fled Peking; of the four adjutants-general who were in charge in the capital in the last months of the Hsien-feng reign, three were imperial agnates and one was an imperial affine (Hummel 1944 2:666, 668, 924).

In the period from 1862 to 1897 China's government was dominated by the empress dowager Tz'u-hsi, who ruled not so much with the help of her natal kin as with the support of her husband's half brothers. The struggle for power that followed the Hsien-feng emperor's death was between two factions dominated by imperial agnates: the empress dowagers Tz'u-an and Tz'u-hsi (the biological mother of the T'ung-chih emperor) won this contest with the help of their brother-in-law, Prince Kung (Wright 1966:16-17). This alliance of imperial princes and the empresses dowager continued in the subsequent Kuang-hsu reign (Kwong 1984; Hummel 1943:384-86), when Prince Ch'un, father of the emperor and Tz'u-hsi's brother-in-law, enjoyed great influence at court. The marriage and succession practices of the Ch'ing had succeeded in preventing substantive political challenges to the throne from affines, but could not guard against challenges from agnates. The Manchu traditions of collegial rule by imperial agnates reemerged during the last decades of Ch'ing governance.

Glossary

ch'ang-tsai

chi-fu

chin-pao

chin-shih

chin-ts'e

ch'u-ting

chuang-lien

chuang-yuan

efu

fei

feng-ying

ho-ch'in

hsiu-nü

huang-kuei-fei

ko-ko

kuei-fei

kuei-jen

Ku-lun kung-chu

kung-nü

Li fan yuan

na-ts'ai li

pin

Shang-shu-fang

shih-nü

shu-fei

shu fujin

sui

ta-cheng li

ta-hun

ta-ying

ti fujin

ts'e-feng

ts'e fujin

ts'e-li

tsung-jen fu

tsung-shih

wen

wu

ying-ch'ieh

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