Prerevolutionary Marital Transfers in Nanxi

The Pearl River delta is a complex, ever-expanding social landscape. As the river continues to flow along a southeastern direction and forms marshes at its lower reaches, it attracts migrants who come to settle from different parts of south China. This process has given rise at various periods to communities with vastly different economic resources and cultural configurations. Nanxi town is one of a line of market towns situated between a well-populated part of the delta and these vast river marshes. Known locally as sands (sha ), the marshes were reclaimed and converted to rice fields by lineage and merchant estates based in the town. In this way, Nanxi grew from an outpost in the sands during the Ming to a dominating center of wealth, power, and ritual by the late eighteenth century. At the turn of the present century, the residents consisted of a dynamic commercial class, together with its functionaries, who controlled the landed estates in the sands and the trading of grain, mulberry, silk cocoons, wine, fruit, and vegetables.^[17]

Although the economies of Nanxi town and the villages have been interlocked, they are worlds apart in many ways. The inhabitants of the sands were mobile, boat-dwelling farmers and fishermen who were treated as an underclass by town dwellers. Generally referred to as the Dan, the sands people worked as hired hands and tenants when lineages reclaimed river marshes, and they engaged in the meaner trades, such as carrying coffins and digging graves. Prejudice against them was reinforced during the years of bad harvests when they fled the area in their boats with whatever they could glean from the fields. When they had gathered strength in numbers, they were portrayed as bandits and pirates.^[18] Until the 1940s there were

[16] The survey covers all fifteen of the town's residential neighborhoods and three villages at different distances from the town.

[17] See Helen Siu, "Recycling Tradition: Culture, History and Political Economy in the Chrysanthemum Festivals of South China," Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, no. 4 (1990): 765-94.

[18] See Dian Murray, Pirates of the South China Coast, 1790-1810 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987). See Helen Siu, Agents and Victims in South China: Accomplices in Rural Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), chaps. 2 and 3, on the historical development of the sands in the Pearl River delta.

seldom any real villages. The occasional straw huts on the dikes were in sharp contrast to the 393 ancestral halls and the 139 temples in the town before the 1949 revolution. Even today, the sands consists only of small villages between which lie extensive fields.

Nanxi was a place of residence for an unusual concentration of the wealthy and upwardly mobile until the land reform. An official document of 1971 records that the town then had 482 persons labeled as landlords and 57 as rich peasants. Most of them belonged to the town's four major lineages, whose members married each other. Before 1949 they and their families constituted a significant social group among the town's some 12,000 residents. For the women in these families, there was little extradomestic employment and no need for it. In fact, a married daughter of the wealthy might not touch the food of her husband's household for at least a year, being supplied with foodstuffs from her natal home. The women were also provided with lavish dowries, which might include elaborate jewelry, double sets of suanzhi furniture, delicate porcelain dishes and vases, silverware, together with annual provisions of grain and large tracts of river marshes.^[19] Brideprice was negligible. In 1986, older women whom I interviewed generally agreed that before the war the brideprice for a "respectable family" was about a hundred silver dollars, a few hundred wedding cakes, and banquet food. Whatever was received was largely consumed in the wedding feast. Both the bride's and the groom's family would hold a dinner for friends and relatives, each making up ten or more banquet tables. They insisted that except for the very poor, families accepted without argument whatever the bridegroom's family would offer. That custom remains unchanged today. Negotiating brideprice would have been a tremendous loss of face. "Only the sands people would act in such a manner," I was told.

To attribute this emphasis on dowry only to a strategy for status acquisition among rich families is to neglect the fact that a similar situation of low brideprice in relation to dowry existed in ordinary town families. It might be suggested that the terms of marriage had different meanings for households in various circumstances. But the life-styles of members of the wealthy lineages and what they provided for their daughters represented the cultural ideal in the area.^[20] The smallness of brideprice might also be

[19] I refer to those that controlled the development of the sands from the Ming dynasty on. See the genealogies of the Zhao of Sanjiang in Xinhui county, the Long and Luo of Shunde county, the Huo of Foshan. See Siu, "Where Were the Women? Rethinking Marriage Resistance and Regional Culture in South China," Late Imperial China 11, no. 2 (December 1990): 32-62, for details of marriage customs in the area.

[20] The same was true for Shawan in Panyu county, another center of wealth and power at the edge of the sands. A large percentage of the town households in Shawan literally lived off the focal ancestral estate, Liugeng Tang, which owned 60,000 mu of the sands. As in Nanxi, women learned sewing and helped with family chores until they settled with their husbands. For the historical evolution of lineages in Shawan, see Liu Zhiwei, "Lineage on the Sands: The Case of Shawan," a paper presented at the panel "Lineage Power and Community Change in Republican South China," annual meetings of the Association for Asian Studies, April 1990.

related to the practice of buluojia , the delayed removal of the bride to her husband's house.^[21] The richer the families, the longer their daughters stayed at home. Ties with a married daughter continued to be important in various ways. As long as she remained at her home, the fruits of her labor were shared with her natal family. The significant break with her parents came when she was about to have a child, not when wedding gifts were negotiated and exchanged. When she joined her husband, provisions for continuing support were often made. If brideprice was used at all for acquiring the rights to a woman's labor, the custom of buluojia would have kept the payment low.

Town residents, whether from families that were formerly rich or poor, insisted that their terms of marriage and those of the sands were very different. The inhabitants of the sands did not practice buluojia ; a woman settled with her husband's family immediately after the wedding. Among the fishermen, the mobility of their boat-dwellings made it difficult to do otherwise, since it was not a question of husband and wife being in adjacent villages. At the same time, their dowries were modest, consisting of several sets of clothes, a blanket, a mosquito net, washbasins, bowls, and plates; but the brideprice was large, usually twice that of the town. In my 1986 interviews I came across old men in Zhixi, a village in the sands, who had been married in the late 1920s and early 1930s. They quoted brideprice amounts of one hundred to two hundred silver dollars, which seemed extraordinarily high given the standard of living in the sands at the time. One part of the brideprice consisted of banquet food for the relatives and friends of the bride. In the town only selected members of households (other than those of close relatives) were invited to attend wedding banquets, but in the sands such occasions involved every aquaintance far and near, young and old. Feasting lasted for three whole days. Meals were served for those guests who had moored their boats the night before. They were feasted again on the wedding day, and on the third day meals were served before the guests left the area. As in Africa, the remainder of the brideprice was

[21] Historical documents through the Qing recorded it as common in parts of the Pearl River delta both among the elites and commoners. It involved women marrying at an early age but continuing for a few years to reside at their natal home. They would briefly visit their husband's home for important ritual occasions and festivals, but not until they were about to give birth to their first child would they settle there permanently. See Siu, "Where Were the Women?" for a summary of the relevant literature.

often used as a marriage fund for brothers,^[22] a use that was scorned by town residents, who asserted that the sands people were "shamelessly aggressive" in negotiating brideprice and that "they had to marry off a daughter in order to get a daughter-in-law."^[23] It seems that their strategy for coping with life at the bottom of a social hierarchy was regarded as a stigma in the eyes of the townsfolk, who used it as a way of dissociating themselves from the people of the sands.