PART TWO
THE PRESSURES OF CHANGE

Chapter 2
Managing the Local Wealth

It is next to impossible to talk about the "economy" of T'ai-ho; seldom does anything resembling conventional economic data emerge from the sources. Western-derived categories of thinking about production, consumption, and exchange soon shrivel for want of the right kinds of facts to flesh them out. And yet the Ming literati often discussed what one might call resource management—although never with some dehumanized goal of efficiency in mind. Instead, at least early on, resource management was viewed within a framework of aesthetic description and was structured by a deep concern for visible manifestations of ethical social behavior. Significantly, in the sixteenth century, the framework for discussing resources shifted toward statecraft and equity.

While the local "economy" is a topic impossible to pursue very far, it would not be out of place here to try to locate T'ai-ho County in the broader context of the rural socioeconomic order of later imperial China, as that issue is currently understood. The debate about how best to typify that order has moved away from characterizing it as "feudal" or "manorial" and seems to focus on a formula balancing "landlordism" with "gentry society." Landlordism, as an exploitive form of rural control, occurs with a free market in land and a partible inheritance system; whereas gentry society results from education and local engagements with the imperial examination system and entails a moral and social obligation to provide local services.^[1] However, China's "landlords" came in many sizes and shapes, and the labor they deployed

ranged from free tenants to land-bound serfs, from hired labor to indentured labor to slave labor, in a slithery and unstable variety of admixtures and combinations. It appears that interior Kiangsi generally was hospitable to large estates (of both the compact and scattered variety) in the Sung and, to a lesser extent, later and that the labor force consisted of a wide assortment of tenants, tenant serfs, and bondspeople. Some bondspeople worked in the household, others in the fields. Ming law explicitly recognized a status distinction between free people (liangjen ) and bondspeople.^[2] All that can be said of T'ai-ho in the Ming is that it surely contained some large estates—privately controlled early on and many of them lineage-controlled later—and that there were tenants and bondspeople at work on estates of various sizes throughout the Ming. In the absence of appropriate documentation (deeds and contracts, account books, intensive literati discussions of the issue as such), it is impossible to analyze rural socioeconomic relations in detail.

Another way to approach the problem of rural order in late imperial China is simply to label the locally dominant people as "elites" with a wide and flexible repertoire of strategies at their disposal, in which landowning, education, and degree holding were usual but not necessarily indispensable elements. Elites could also engage in such things as philanthropy, commerce, moneylending, managing, brokering, and militia leadership, as local conditions and broad historical change might dictate.^[3] In the case of T'ai-ho, this chapter will show that, indeed, local elites changed their strategies in the sixteenth century—from an earlier "baronial" style of landowning toward the duller, grayer, less picturable tasks of managing corporate lineage estates and moneylending, the latter often outside the province altogether. Ownership and management appear to have parted ways more and more.

As far as the "economic history" of T'ai-ho goes, suffice it to say that T'ai-ho seems to follow in broad outline the phases in the long growth curve that Robert Hartwell traced out for the whole peripheral zone of the middle Yangtze macroregion, in which zone T'ai-ho is to be found.^[4] Thus the peripheral zone underwent "frontier settlement" in the years 2-742 (the county dates back to the third century and was renamed T'ai-ho in the year 591). Then in the years 742-1170, it entered a boom phase of "rapid development" (T'ai-ho's largest irrigation work was built during the years 926-929. Native literati authored new works on agricultural plants and tools in 1094 and 1201, but no works appeared after that. The last big irrigation project was completed around 1348.)

After "rapid development," it entered an "equilibrium" phase that in theory lasted from 1170 to 1948-and, indeed, there is no evidence for any significant new growth spurts in the T'ai-ho economy from Ming times down to the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1149.^[5] But there were a series of reconstructions following civil wars (e.g., in the 1380s and 1390s, 1680s, 1870s 1950s) and incremental changes here and there (in population and in the increasing use of silver in the late Ming). These developments elicited local adaptations, and this chapter will show some of the responses occasioned by changing conditions in the early and mid-Ming.

Beyond question, the mainstay of the T'ai-ho economy in the Ming was rice production. Some 14 percent of the county's 1,028 square miles was devoted to that crop. Soils were on the whole poor, and total annual yields in good or excellent years were in the range of 600-700,000 piculs (1 picul equals 103 liters, or 2.84 bushels). A pauper's dote in the Ming was pretty much standardized at 3.5 piculs a year, so the county could, after taxes, feed a maximum of some 170-200,000 people on rice alone. Reasonably reliable population returns are few and scattered: 212,834 (1391); 583,759 (1851); 413,213 (1982).^[6] Evidently there was not always a great surplus of rice, and T'ai-ho people in the Ming indeed ate other starchy things grown locally, like wheat, millet gruel, buckwheat cakes, and taro.^[7] There are no data to show when, or how often, T'ai-ho was a net exporter of rice to other parts of China in Ming times.

Occasionally, local literati made sweeping comments about what might be styled the moral-political economy of their native county. Some time in the late fourteenth century, for instance, when the county was still suffering the effects of the late Yuan civil wars, Liu Sung (1321-81) remarked that despite its location on the great Kan River artery, T'ai-ho was an unattractive place. "The housing is crude, the fields idle or sterile, and the common people are poor and frugal," he stated. "There are no special products or food surpluses, and thus no way to amass commercial wealth. Officials and outsiders of high status consider us as beneath contempt; traveling merchants and envoys put up for the night here and then proceed immediately on." But the meagerness of the economy was, he asserted, compensated for by the sincerity, solid simplicity, and righteousness of the county's shih (Confucian literati), who judged people by moral standards, not by their wealth.^[8]

By the early fifteenth century, some decades later, things had im-

proved. Wang Chih asserted that the county was flourishing, that there were no more abandoned fields or idle people.^[9] He described his county glowingly to a Peking colleague (who had just learned he had been appointed magistrate in T'ai-ho), boasting how the gentlemen observed decorum and obeyed the laws, how the students diligently applied themselves to preparing for examinations, and how "the ordinary people work in the fields, ship goods upriver to the Yangtze, trade in the local markets for a 10 percent profit wherewith to support their parents, wives, and children, and enjoy the pleasure of having 'gotten it for themselves.' " T'ai-ho was scenic and not as unruly as the administrative guidebooks said, and it was self-sufficient in ("produced its own") horses, oxen, sheep, swine, tea, bamboo shoots, fish, turtles, fruit, vegetables, and kudzu and ramie cloth.^[10] The land easily supported the population, he remarked on a later occasion, and no one in T'ai-ho starved or froze except in a very bad year.^[11] Ch'en Hsun once compared his native T'ai-ho to all the other counties of Ming China: its population and tax yield were half or less of those of the "rich and busy" counties of the realm, but it had ten times the people and tax yield of "thinly populated and poor counties"; so, he wrote, "you can say that it isn't a small place at all."^[12]

But generalizations such as these are few, and the above statements (which I have not quoted in full) are mostly briefs on behalf of the local people's innate respect for law and fiscal obligations and their amenability to sound moral guidance. In order to proceed further with the topic of local resources and their exploitation, embedded as always in an ethical and social (or, later, administrative) matrix, it is necessary to descend to detail at ground level and look for descriptions of how different people in this and that part of the county managed their wealth. It turns out that there took place in sixteenth-century T'ai-ho something of a sea change in wealth managing, a phenomenon that coincides roughly in time with changes in aesthetic appreciation, as well as in demography, in modes of lineage formation, and in rates of bureaucratic recruitment, topics to be taken up in subsequent chapters.

Wealth Management In An Era Of Reconstruction (CA. 1360-1460)

I would like to turn first to rural livelihood and introduce some of the local descriptions of family-based farming operations. Some of these op-

erations appear to have been varied and complex. From a focal point of residence, some managerial families extended a wide span of control over several different types of landscape; and the mix of products from those landscapes was said to afford them self-sufficiency, perhaps even affluence.

The Kuo family of Kao-p'ing (High Flat Ward, township 61) are a case in point. Basic to their well-being was water control. Out of the Tiao-ch'i (Dock Creek) Hills and their scenic heights came a twisting, fast-flowing stream, splashing along a low diversion dike for about two-thirds of a mile until it poured into rock-edged T'ai-hsin (Great New) Reservoir, which also collected other streams and was several hundred mou in size. Edible bamboo grew nearby. "Their ponds and reservoirs are variously large and small, deep and shallow," wrote Liu Sung. "All of them are either rock-edged or bamboo-wattled to prevent leakage, so that the water level remains high even in drought years. They are also good for bream, tench, and other fish and [indecipherable] water birds, that hatch in spring and are plump by fall, when they are taken to the kitchen and prepared as food for guests." Next in the discussion come the Kuo fields. "Their fields wind about between two mountains, and so are narrow here and wide there. Some are high, and some low-lying. They are good for early and late rice, fragrant rice, glutinous millet, and wheat. From these they ferment beers and make cakes for the fall and winter sacrifices." From fields, the description jumps abruptly to the wild. "There are fine rabbit, fox, musk-deer, and wild [indecipherable] for hunting." Finally, the discussion turns to the settlement: "Where they live there are many field men and wood gatherers, but there are no merchants with their slick practices, nor do the customs feature fighting and aggression."^[13] These descriptive fragments, jumbled as they are, do portray an achieved ideal of self-sufficiency, apparently free of any significant engagement with the market economy.^[14]

Some years later, probably in the early 1420s, P'eng Ts'un-wen came to Peking on some business, perhaps a tax transport mission, and persuaded native son Wang Chih to write a description of the family estate in Ta-kuan Ward (township 25), about twenty miles southeast of the county seat, where the P'engs had been living some ten generations. As with the Kuo holdings in township 61, so here too water control was emphasized by Wang as essential to farm operations. P'eng Ts'un-wen was fortunate to have plenty of water. "Beside the creeks lie fine fields and fertile soil, suitable for glutinous and nonglutinous rice. Springs

pour out [from the hills] on all sides, and those fields that lie at the same elevation [as the creeks] never lack for irrigation water. Where the fields are high relative to the creeks, temporary earthen dams are built to make the creeks flow laterally, so that the rest of the fields get enough water, after which [the dams] are cut. So there is no worry about drought, and all the fields produce regularly." The rest of Wang's essay underlines the delights of life on this estate, the rites to the soil god, the harvest celebration (in which the bondspeople participate alongside the family members), and the abundance of fruits and vegetables and livestock and fish.^[15]

Water access, high-grade fields, and diversified production also created a base for self-sufficiency for some of the Liang people. Liang Lin (a contemporary of P'eng Ts'un-wen) managed a holding in Ch'ang-ch'i (Long Creek Ward, township 60), several miles west of the county seat. Streams from the hills fed White Rock Reservoir, and Long Creek was its effluent, which, before it emptied into the Kan River, irrigated "several thousand mou of fields." Liang Lin's fields lay along the upper part of Long Creek, where he supervised bondsmen (t'ung-nu ) in the cultivation of soybeans, wheat, millet, and rice. In the creek grew cattail, wild rice, and other esculent waterweeds. He also raised horses, asses, oxen, goats, fish, turtles, geese, and ducks.^[16]

The semitechnical term here used for Liang Lin's holding is pieh-yeh , literally "separate property," or "detached estate." In some current economic writing, the term is rather mechanically taken to mean an absentee estate, but it is clear in the T'ai-ho examples that it means only that the family's main base or original home lay somewhere else, no more.^[17] (Liang Lin was a grandnephew of Liang Lan, so the family's main base would have been Moat Head Lane in the western suburb of T'ai-ho.) Similarly, some members of the Yen family of T'ai-ho city had a pieh-yeh a few miles to the northwest in Lung-men (Dragon Gate Ward, township 57). There were "rich fields, rich soil, and gardens with waterways meandering all about. All this yields enough in grain, hemp, mulberry, fish, fruits, and vegetables to make for self-sufficiency in food and clothing."^[18] Neither of these was an absentee estate; both were founded and managed by heads of family branches.

Some of the above estates may have been compact in their layout, but certainly other holdings were scattered. Thus Liang Lan (1343-1410) built a detached house with five mou of garden plots in the Willow Creek neighborhood of T'ai-ho's western suburb, where he grew hemp and vegetables and hoed the weeds himself; but he also owned large

grain fields elsewhere, worked by bondsmen, and from time to time he took a horsecart out to those fields to supervise.^[19]

Liu Sung and Chou Shih-hsiu (1354-1402) were both landlords as well as scholar-officials with literary skills and pretensions, and their poems touch upon estate layout, wealth management, and rural class relations. Before becoming a Ming official in 1370 and after his retirement a few years later, Liu Sung was a minor landlord in Chu-lin Ward (township 38), near the south bank of the Kan. He lived in a flatland hamlet (ts'un ) with no access to semiwild space and thus had to have a peasant or tenant deliver firewood to his gate. He reportedly owned and managed fifty mou of fields, a holding that was small by the standards of the time.^[20] We know that Liu did grub about in his garden, but much of his land was out of his sight and immediate reach and was rented to rice-farming tenants.

Two mou of these fields, which he said he could not work himself, he "registered" (i.e., rented?) to a certain "farm father" (nung-fu ) in return for a "pint or peck" of grain payment. This fellow cheated him in good years. One year a bad drought struck; because Liu's granary was empty, he could not meet his tax payment, and so reluctantly he pressed the obstreperous tenant. Yet, he told himself, he should not hate the poor fellow; the tax collector was a better target for his anger.^[21]

Early one morning, Liu visited another peasant. The fellow swept out his yard, offered rice soup, and called out his sons to bow to the guest. It was a bad year, and the vegetables looked poorly; yet this family still managed a fine decorum that put Liu's mind at ease. Why, wondered Liu, did the "noble" despise such people and maintain a stern and distant attitude toward them, such as policemen had for thieves and bandits?^[22]

In the spring of some better year, Liu slept over at a tenant's house. He awoke early, when the fellow opened the door to go out and feed his cow. Through the open door, rice came into view, and Liu had a glimpse of "a field full of green sprouts, waving in white water." Then early one morning of a sixth month, Liu set out from his own home and proceeded some distance over the broad fields to the foot of some hills, where he spent the day watching and helping with the rice harvest. The peasants (presumably tenants) reaped the paddy and brought the sheaves to their yard. It was a good harvest; and rice-beer was brought out in happy celebration, and plans were made to make a report at the soil god's altar the next day.^[23]

Later a tenant came to visit, bearing a pot of the rice-beer he had just

brewed from no , the so-called glutinous rice harvested in the fall. Disarmed by this courtesy and mindful of the "twenty years of civil war" just past, during which field agriculture had ceased and people had been glad enough just to eat chaff, Liu found he did not have the heart to ask about "pints and pecks," i.e., his rent payment.^[24]

Liu stated that these rice-farming tenants had suffered grievously in the civil wars of the 1350s and 1360s; he had seen starving mothers throw infants they could not feed into the river, and much else. It was odd for him, therefore, to hear now at rice-transplanting time the newest generation of young peasants singing as though there had been no war at all: "North and south of the hamlet, there is plenty of spring rain; as the cuckoo with his thousand notes ignores the work of men, so too the youngsters, ignorant of the bitterness of war, sing songs redolent of peaceful times as they push in the rice seedlings."^[25]

Liu Sung never described his own home. Chou Shih-hsiu did. Chou's home was in Chü-kang (Hill of the Provincial Graduate, in township 55). It was a new construction, set up in what had been a remote and desolate place. His wife, Hu Shu-hsien (1358-1439), directed the building of the home and the purchase of nearby fields. She supervised the labor and budgeted the annual yield "to provide food, clothing, sacrificial supplies, and requirements for guests."^[26] Chou penned an elaborate description of the home base, with its studio, pool, bridge, ancestral temple, and pavilion for viewing the "rippling green" of all the surrounding scenery. These facilities were dispersed among creeks, springs, and hummocks, taking advantage of a natural topography that apparently needed little alteration, thus preserving an uncrowded and distinctly rural ambience.^[27]

What must have been some of the distant tenant hamlets attached to this estate were described by Chou in several poems. Chou's poems deliver an idyllic picture; yet Chou, like Liu Sung, placed peasant society at a social as well as spatial distance from himself. Both literati regarded peasantry as almost a separate social type.

"The field families," wrote Liu, "live in a nook by the mountains; they've built thatched huts there, two by two. Chickens and piglets wander about, but the hemp and mulberry prevent their escape. The people there talk and laugh with an even temper, they work and rest with utter reason. Surely they reflect the trueness of Heaven itself, and that's why they claim no personal ownership of things."^[28]

"Humble doorways loom by the dark path," wrote Chou,

and a crooked lane goes down to the inlet. Here ten families, two or three surnames, have been living side by side for generations. The smoke from their fires intermingles wherever you look; so too, in their routines, the people cooperate. One man's son heads the house on the west, while another's daughter is his neighbor's wife. A cold fall wind blows at the soil god's shrine, while piglets and rice-beer are sacrificed to the Ancestor of the Fields, to whom the old shaman burns paper money, while boys pound on a bronze drum. Mist drapes the sugarcane garden in silence, and drizzling rain falls on the taro field as the people come home after the rites, spread mats, and chat, half drunk.^[29]

In another hamlet of "three or four families by a bamboo grove," there were "bed after bed of long peppers [Piper longum , for market?] and trees all yellow with loquats." Uneducated, yet decorous in their behavior, the inhabitants "for untold generations have lived their entire lives here."^[30]

There is no ready explanation why the peasants and their homes and hamlets and their social behavior, described so vividly by Liu Sung and Chou Shih-hsiu, were never again described by the T'ai-ho literati. By the sixteenth century, however, the literati were beginning to lose interest in the natural world and the humanized landscape; perhaps the peasantry was an early victim of this changing outlook.

It is clear that Liu Sung and probably also Chou Shih-hsiu were but minor landlords. Far above them stood a class of very rich men and their families. Their great wealth was derived from their control over critical aspects of rice production (water, land, labor, storage, etc.).

That a small minority of big growers predominated here (as most elsewhere in south China) is obvious first of all in the very fiscal geography of the county. T'ai-ho's seventy townships (sixty-nine of them rural) each embraced from one to twelve wards. Each ward was understood by imperial government to comprise 110 taxpaying households (hu )—that is, fiscal families or family-like units that owned, or (to use a more appropriate, looser word) controlled, rice fields and grew, or rather managed the production of, rice. Early in the Ming, the heads of the ten wealthiest households in each ward were singled out to form a special pool among whose members rotated annually the duty of supervising rice-tax collections as li-chang , or "ward leaders." And above the ward leaders presided an even richer set of private citizens, the liang-chang , or "tax captains," who in the early Ming were collectively the

linchpin of the county tax-gathering apparatus. It was their job to gather the rice tax collected by the ward leaders, to store it, and eventually to direct its shipment to whatever depot the government specified.

Little is known of any of T'ai-ho's ward leaders. More is known of its tax captains. Yang Shih-ch'i gave details of the tax captaincy system as it operated in T'ai-ho in the early Ming:

For the managing of taxes, the central government has set up tax districts [ch'ü ], with a regular [tax captain] and two assistants in charge of each. Rich producers have been selected to fill these positions. For some twenty years, the captaincies changed every year, until in 1424, the Ministry of Revenue restored the older system of permanent captaincies, with the richest producers in charge. This was because [many of the small taxpayers] were taking advantage of the yearly changes to escape making their payments. But the result now is that the captains, taking advantage of their permanency, have willfully harmed the lesser people and have made them suffer.

Our T'ai-ho has twelve tax districts and thirty-six regular and assistant tax captains; and among them, scarcely one in ten does not harm the people.^[31]

Yang Shih-ch'i wrote this in an epitaph for Hsiao Ying (1379-1428), who had been one of the exceptions, a well-liked tax captain. Hsiao Ying had been a leading member of a common-descent group that utterly dominated T'ao-yuan (Peach Spring Ward), which was the only ward in township 12. The Peach Spring Hsiao are a prime example of what the literati of early Ming T'ai-ho meant when they said that great wealth derived principally from rice production. Their remarks about these Hsiao afford as good a look as can be had into the disposition and management of such an enterprise.

The founder was one Hsiao Po-yuan, originally from further north in Kiangsi, who was appointed vice magistrate of T'ai-ho in 1126. On leaving office, he decided to make his home in scenic Peach Spring Ward. Nothing is known about how he and his descendants managed to acquire so much land, but the civil wars of the mid-fourteenth century may have provided some opportunities. The brothers Hsiao Ssu-ho and Ssu-hsien led a militia and defended township 12 so well that not once was the place molested. Teachers and writers from elsewhere in T'ai-ho, fleeing war, found refuge in Peach Spring, and they left behind poems of appreciation that Yang Shih-ch'i later commented on in great detail.

The early Ming government appointed Hsiao Ssu-hsien a tax captain. His sons and nephews and their descendants continued to perform in

that office, either in annual rotation or on a permanent basis, until the system withered away, at some point now unknown, in the course of the sixteenth century.

Early in the Ming, the Hsiao maintained a primary school, called the Nan-hsun Academy, exclusively for the tutoring of their children. Several of T'ai-ho's promising junior literati taught there for short periods. Yang Shih-ch'i was one; he was a tutor from 1399 to 1400. He thoroughly enjoyed his stint. He later recalled his employer, Hsiao Lien (1340-1419), as well read, and a quipster as well: "at big gatherings of guests, whenever heated arguments arose, he would interrupt with a few words that convincingly settled the issue. But sometimes he would interrupt with a few words in jest: then everyone would fall over laughing, while Hsiao would just keep sitting there with a straight face." His son Hsiao Ying (who was a tax captain) used to put on a short coat and sun hat and take books, basket, and spade out to the rice fields; and when he got tired of weeding, he would sit on a balk and chant and sing until darkness fell. He named the house where he lived Plow and Study. He enjoyed consorting with literati, and he prided himself on his ability to make poems. "That was the sort of fellow he was," wrote Yang Shih-ch'i.

The Peach Spring Hsiao were at times managed as one big joint family, sharing a common kitchen and budget. Their seasonal ceremonies were impressive to onlookers. And Yang Shih-ch'i remembered sitting in the guest seat in their main hall while his employer, Hsiao Lien, sat in the east seat, and a hundred or more juniors lined up in two files, all well dressed and well behaved.^[32]

Indeed, the Hsiao common-descent group was undergoing a population explosion early in the Ming. Ch'en Hsun noted, in a detailed preface to their genealogy, an expansion of one segment, counting males only, from one to ten to thirty-one (the generation of Hsiao Ssu-ho and Ssu-hsien) to "nearly fifty" in Hsiao Lien's generation. Ch'en also described the Hsiao holdings in rice fields, but he placed his description in what was for him its appropriate sociomoral context:

There are quite a few common-descent groups of the Hsiao surname in T'ai-ho. It is only the Peach Spring Hsiao that are famous all over the county's six cantons for being able simultaneously to study the classics, to produce admired leaders, and to sustain ritual observances, as well as possess great wealth in gardens and fields. There are assuredly others with great wealth in gardens and fields, but they don't observe the rituals. There are many whose members study the classics, but they are not so rich. Some excel

in some areas and not in others; some in three of them, but not in the fourth. Only the Peach Spring Hsiao excel in all four . . .

These Hsiao live in houses packed right next to each other, a hundred this way and a thousand that, with the junior and senior branches all neighbors to each other. Recitations from the schoolroom can be heard from dawn to dark, with the senior males teaching, and the juniors learning . . .

South of the Kan River, half the landscape is taken up by mountains and rivers. Only 30 or 40 percent of the land is arable. Common people who can buy as much as several tens of ch'ing [several thousand mou ] of gardens and fields are doing very well indeed . . . There are usually one or two individuals among these Hsiao who have several tens of ch'ing of land, enough to put them in the top rank [of landowners] in our county. That is why these Hsiao [as a group] are ranked first in our county.

To some extent, rich Hsiao may have exploited poor ones. Some of the Hsiao fields were worked by bondspeople, who may or may not have been kin. Thus one finds Tax Captain Hsiao Tzu (1375-1432) assigning bondspeople their jobs at plowing and weeding.^[33]

One can find a dozen or more other men, from a dozen other common-descent groups of T'ai-ho, who served as tax captains in the early Ming years. For example, there were the unrelated Hsiao of South Creek Ward (township 59), where Hsiao Pao (1400-60) and his brothers for thirty years took turns serving as tax captains, so effectively that they incurred neither the hatred of the locals nor reproof from government.^[34] There was K'ang Wei-chin (1393-1460, of Hsiu-ch'i, on the west side of T'ai-ho city), whose duty as tax captain was onerous because there he had to collect from a large number of small taxpayers; but he got the local officials to petition the court to allow him to "consolidate" the payments in some way, thus easing the burdens for everyone.^[35] Tax Captain Lo Chi (1387-1459), from Hsia-ching (Summer Path), somewhere in Yun-t'ing Canton, dug into his own pockets to pay the taxes of people who were having difficulties.^[36] (Whether Lo Chi secured rights over their rice fields in return is not stated.)

Some of T'ai-ho's big rice growers who were appointed tax captains suffered grievously for failed performance. One of the Chang men of Sha-li Ward (township 66), late in making a delivery, was exiled to a military garrison and had his property confiscated as punishment.^[37] Hsiao Yen-ming of Chang-ch'i (Camphor Creek Ward, township 41) had trouble making collections, and his family's holdings too were confiscated.^[38] Wang T'ien-ti (1303-84, of Nan-fu Ward, township 61) was accused by neighbors of falsely reporting his holdings at the time fields were first surveyed for tax purposes in the 1370s, and his lands were

confiscated; but like the Chang and Hsiao, he soon either got back his lands or acquired new ones. As an overseer of some sort, he was put in charge of forwarding that part of the county rice tax that had to be deposited in Chi-an Prefecture, which task he acquitted well for a number of years.^[39]

It appears as though Tax Captain Hsiao Chi (1352-1422, of Wang-shan Ward, township 17) nominally avoided confiscation by donating his rice fields together with the tenants on them (tien ) as a gift to the Ming state. Why? These Hsiao (who were not related to any of the Hsiao mentioned above) had led a local defense militia in the 1350s and 1360s; and with the founding of the Ming, some of the family members not only were made tax captains but were made subject to permanent military service as well. Hsiao Chi and his two brothers thought the tax captaincy too heavy a burden. They agreed that they had no need of their huge income—that it was enough just to live in an era free of war—"so they offered all their ancestral fields to the government and gave up their shop in the market, so as to devote themselves to a life of rural leisure." Then one brother left to take a military post on the Chekiang coast, and the other for some unknown reason landed in prison. Hsiao Chi, the sole remaining brother, then worked hard to rebuild the old livelihood for the sake of his old mother and his many dependent kin. "He increased his animal herds, planted rice, and developed new fields on the north side of Mount Wang and also in Stone Inkslab Flat. He built a reservoir at Lung-t'an that was several tens of chang deep and irrigated several thousand mou . So as his fields expanded, his family prospered."^[40] If that meant he had to serve again as tax captain, his epitaph does not so indicate.

If one were to hazard a general profile of the big rice growers of T'ai-ho County in the early Ming, one might point out a few prominent features. The growers belonged to large common-descent groups that dominated one or another rural ward. Specifically, they were members of exceptionally rich families within those larger kinship groups. It was not the entire kinship group that was rich. It appears that T'ai-ho's rice plutocracy was a hereditary, small-family affair—in the cases at least of the Peach Spring Hsiao and the unrelated South Creek Hsiao, where the tax captaincies passed from father to sons and then rotated among the sons.

But wealth managing did not just involve unpaid local tax-administration. It also involved making large "charitable" donations of unhusked

rice to special granaries to alleviate scarcities and making loans available at low interest to prevent famine. Tax captains were among the donors because by giving they could relieve themselves and their families of the captaincies. The local gazetteers preserve what looks like a complete listing of major rice donors, and the local literati wrote about some of the donors in detail.

Public donations of rice began in earnest in the 1440s, in response to Grand Secretary Yang Shih-ch'i's nationwide famine insurance plan. Yang's plan may have been inspired in part by earlier voluntary action undertaken by his former employers, the Peach Spring Hsiao. In 1434, T'ai-ho had a bad drought, which was followed in 1435 by a rice shortage, and the fear was that yet another bad year might be disastrous. So Hsiao Hsiang built a "charitable granary" (i-lin ) in Peach Spring Ward and filled it with three thousand piculs of (unhusked) rice for the benefit of the "little people" (hsi-min ). Rather than bribe the local clerks, Hsiao managed the granary himself for a year, until 1437, when Yü Yao, assistant prefect of Chi-an and acting magistrate of T'ai-ho (and a protégé and personal appointee of Yang's), ascertained that the granary then held twelve hundred piculs, and took it under state management. In 1438, in reward for his efforts, Hsiao Hsiang was given official honors as a "philanthropic commoner" (i-min ), and his family was excused of services.^[41]

When Yang Shih-ch'i's plan for a national system of famine insurance granaries (yü-pei ts'ang ) was promulgated in July 1440, ten more T'ai-ho rice growers volunteered to build granaries and fill them with unhusked rice. Each man put two thousand piculs (after milling, about eight hundred) in a granary of his own making and agreed to let county government supervise the disbursements. In return, the donor's family was relieved of services, and the donor was officially designated a philanthropic commoner in a document issued by the court in Peking and sealed by the emperor himself. Several T'ai-ho donors went to Peking to thank the emperor in person, and in turn, they were given a banquet by the Court of Imperial Entertainments.^[42]

Droughts bad enough to occasion mention in the Veritable Records of the court continued through the summer of 1442. From 1447 to 1450 came a series of ruinous floods, which were followed again by droughts from 1452 to 1457. A prolonged subsistence crisis was the result. Civil disorder threatened. The rebellions of Yeh Tsung-mao and Teng Mao-ch'i, raging in Fukien and Chekiang Provinces to the east, spilled over into Kiangsi. The Veritable Records noted in March 1449

that some men in T'ai-ho, imitating the Fukien bandits, were organizing gangs to conduct looting.^[43] Ch'en Hsun noted in alarm how poor and shiftless people in the prefecture were beginning to raid the rice stores of the "big houses."^[44]

It was time to intervene. Grand Secretary Ch'en Hsun arranged for the appointment of a prefect capable of suppressing the looters. He also pushed the appointment of Han Yung (1422-78) as governor (hsun-fu ) of Kiangsi Province. Governor Han Yung came to Kiangsi and found the earlier rice reserves depleted; and, on his urging, the court authorized in 1452 more generous awards for smaller contributions: for twelve hundred piculs (unhusked) rice, each donor would be made an honorary official (i-kuan ), with the right to wear the cap and belt of an office holder.^[45] Eight T'ai-ho rice growers responded to that offer; the names of six of them are listed in a long national honor roll of donors copied into the Veritable Records . They also received service relief and imperial thank-you notes.^[46]

In 1455, the rice granaries were empty again. Poor harvests had left borrowers unable to repay. It was hard to encourage new contributions. Han Yung therefore increased the rewards: higher official emblems, in return for larger donations. The response in T'ai-ho was good: seventeen donors each set aside two thousand piculs.^[47]

Rice donations by big T'ai-ho growers continued until around the turn of the sixteenth century. Fifty donors are listed for the \ era (1465-87), and twenty-eight for the Hung-chih period (1488-1505). However, these later donations are no longer listed by amount. The contributors got official caps and belts for buying rice rather than for providing stipulated quantities in kind, as earlier. This change must reflect a growing prevalence of silver in the south China economy. It coincides with the emerging occupation of moneylending and the increasing use of silver to finance such things as the building of lineage temples.

Altogether, 106 T'ai-ho contributors are listed by name. Most are identified by local address (township or ward), which makes it possible to identify them further as members of no less than sixty-four different common-descent groups spread geographically over almost all of the county's rice-producing territory. Eleven common-descent groups had members who made three or more contributions (the Peach Spring Hsiao made the most—nine). Twelve groups contributed twice, and forty-two once. If these reserves were never enough to reach everyone in T'ai-ho, they seem at least to have deterred price gouging and dis-

pelled anxieties about food availability. Their wide geographical dispersion inside the county sufficed to dampen the social upheavals that had disturbed Kiangsi's neighbors to the east. In Peking, Grand Secretaries Yang Shih-ch'i and Ch'en Hsun (who were native sons of T'ai-ho) knew that food shortages created social chaos, and they devised plans and appointed officials to see that rice was made available. Still, it bears noting that the persistent subsistence crises that T'ai-ho underwent in the latter half of the fifteenth century coincide precisely in time with a significant decline in the growth rate of the upper class and with strong signs that increasing numbers of both upper and lower classes were beginning to emigrate from T'ai-ho altogether (see chapter 3).

It seems curious that the large quantities of rice indicated by the size of the donations of the fifteenth century could have been amassed by single individuals. (The contributions were never made in the name of common-descent groups acting collectively. They were always made in the name of rich individuals, who reaped the honors, and whose immediate families received the service exemptions; the individuals happened also to be members of larger common-descent groups.)

China's was a partible inheritance system, which in the light of the typically large families of T'ai-ho's upper class, should have quickly made the large-scale control (or ownership) of rice fields by any single person a rarity. Yet, evidently, that was not the case. The sources give certain hints as to why, within the families and common-descent groups of T'ai-ho, inequality in control of land occurred as often as it did.

First of all, a style of ruthless self-aggrandizement was at work in central Kiangsi, at least in the early Ming. Liu Ch'iu (1392-1443, of An-fu County) noted, with deep disgust, the existence of the young man of acquisitive instinct and managerial aptitude, who, even while his parents were still alive, created a personal fortune, never caring that his own living standards far exceeded theirs or that, while he prospered, the orphans of his brothers were fast descending into poverty and hunger. Some people admired such men: "As [the acquisitive man's] fortune grows and his lands expand," wrote Liu, "his power increases to the point that his neighbors are awed into according him admiration and respect."^[48]

In T'ai-ho, by means fair or foul, Grand Secretary Yang Shih-ch'i's entrepreneurial son Yang Chi acquired some substantial tracts of land; but in 1443, locals accused him of murder and other crimes, and he

was arrested and imprisoned. Yang Shih-ch'i, distraught, instructed his family to return all his son's acquisitions to their former owners and to divest themselves of all distant and low-yield fields. He insisted that the Yang estate be compact and small in size. "Confucian families like ours," he wrote, "should not be thinking about enrichment. The household should not have registered under it any more than 120 or 130 piculs [worth of] fields and thirty or forty piculs of [tax?] rice, which is just enough for a year's subsistence. Don't by any means acquire more, or you'll overburden your descendants. You as parents have to think ahead, so remember that if you have too many fields and too much rice [registered] to the household, your heirs will have an impossible time bearing the taxes and services." He repeated the point in another letter. "If you have too many fields you'll have a heavy burden of taxes and services, and you'll make your heirs go bankrupt trying to render them."^[49]

An ethos of selfish acquisitiveness surely helps explain the rise of a rice plutocracy in T'ai-ho, but rather than complain about that ethos, the T'ai-ho literati preferred to talk about such acts of generosity and altruism as their own rich men engaged in. For example, Kuo Yen-hui (1386-1458) contributed property that he had acquired personally to the estate of his deceased father so that enlarged and equalized shares might then be inherited by himself and all his brothers.^[50] That arrangement was presented as a praiseworthy act of personal unselfishness for the sake of family.

Second, the ideal of equal partition could not prevent free transfers or forcible seizures of property. For example, late in the fourteenth century, in Yung-chiang Ward (township 49), the brothers of Wang Ku-p'ing reportedly ganged together and took away his property. Wang Ku-p'ing did not protest; he had enough to live adequately and to educate his two sons, both of whom eventually became minor officials. "Working the fields is just an occupation for common people," Wang declared. "Working at education is for gentlemen."^[51]

In Yen-chuang Ward (township 64), Chiang Hsuan (1350-1404) gained esteem when he overcame the reluctance of his two older brothers and persuaded them to take his share of their father's estate. Of course, the brothers had to bear the tax and service burdens. Chiang Hsuan kept just enough to live on, but he went on to build a large estate of his own and to endow ritual and charitable institutions for all the Chiang kin, rich and poor. Yang Shih-ch'i thought well of him for that and married one of his daughters to one of Chiang's ten grandsons.^[52]

Civil war destruction created space for individual estate-building early in the Ming. A contemporary of Chiang Hsuan's was Lo An-tao (1346-1426). Because he was orphaned young, Lo's uncles seized his original inheritance in Tu-yuan Ward (township 57). Lo moved in with his father-in-law, in Hsiu-ch'i in T'ai-ho city, and went on to build a wholly new estate of his own in Hou-t'ang Ward (also in township 57). So big a landowner did he become that he was made a tax captain, reportedly a kind one who paid shortfalls out of his own pocket. (He also abetted T'ai-ho's early Ming population boom, with five sons, one daughter, fifteen grandsons, six granddaughters, thirty great-grandsons, and sixteen great-granddaughters.)^[53]

Prominent on the official lists of large grain donors were the Lung of Kan-chu Ward (township 54). (Five of them purchased famine insurance rice in return for the caps and belts of official status in the period 1465-1505.) The Lung had been rich and prominent in T'ai-ho for centuries, but the estate in question was one that had passed through the hands of Lung Chü (1366-1424), a one-time sheng-yuan (county student) who left school to take care of his parents. Wang Chih, a friend and frequent visitor, noted that Lung Chü "supervised the labor of the bondsmen" in the "fine and irrigated fields" at Kan-chu.^[54] The size of the estate is unknown, but the heirs cooperated to keep it intact. Lung Chü had five sons. The oldest and youngest were imperial officials, and they yielded their property shares. Of the remaining three brothers, Lung Shu-chao (1390-1445) doled charity and built a library and school; another, Lung Shu-hsuan (1393-1447), "managed the fields and gardens and supervised the farmwork and thus created a prosperous livelihood [for all]."^[55]

The next generation of Lungs consisted of fourteen males or more. Five of them were officials or government teachers; three others won caps and belts as large grain donors. The custom of fraternal property-sharing continued. Lung Wen (1408-59), an official, let his older brother Lung Kuang, who stayed home to manage the fields, take all his inherited property.^[56]

A good question is to what degree did the desire for education and elite social standing reduce competition among the Lung heirs for inheritance shares and so allow a large holding in rice fields to remain intact over several generations. At all events, these Lung were wealthy still at the time of Lung Tsung-wu (1542-1609), when they built and endowed a large lineage temple. (It may also be noted that the Peach

Spring Hsiao invested in education and also organized themselves into a lineage in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.) Official salaries, plus a certain Confucian disdain for crude acts of self-aggrandizement, may have softened property claims in a few cases, and so helped a few large holdings to persist beyond the point where the population growth of descendants would otherwise have reduced them to small bits.

But there is no reason to suppose that the Lung and Hsiao cases were typical. It was not just seizures and disclaimers but also the equal inheritance system itself that tended to work in favor of inequalities and thus in favor of a pattern of larger and smaller estates.

Liu Sung insisted that it was always essential to equalize inheritance shares to avoid strife among brothers. If one brother should die prematurely and without a male heir of his own, a nephew should be appointed to conduct the sacrifices in his memory, but that nephew should not inherit his dead uncle's property. That property must be divided among his surviving brothers. The nephew should be simply a ritual heir, without property claim.^[57]

However, Kuo Pien (1470-1542, of North Gate, T'ai-ho city) did not follow this rule. When his younger brother died without heir, the question was how to apportion shares among the three nephews of Kuo Pien (sons of his two older brothers) and his own five sons. Kuo Pien appointed his own youngest son his younger brother's heir, but he did not think it right for that son to get the whole share (tantamount to Kuo Pien's getting half his own father's property). So, Kuo Pien cut that share into four parts, with his youngest son receiving one, and his nephews the other three.

This was given as an equitable arrangement, but the arithmetic of it shows a strong skewing in favor of the oldest brother's son (.3125 of Kuo Pien's father's estate), followed by the two sons of the second brother (each .1875), and last of all Kuo Pien's own five sons (each with .0625).^[58]

Similarly, Liang Lan divided his estate evenly between his sons Liang Ch'ien (1366-1418) and Liang Hun (1370-1434). But Liang Ch'ien himself had four sons, and Liang Hun only one; so what was an equal partition for the first set of heirs was definitely not so for the second. (Liang Hun offered to redivide the estate to remedy that imbalance, but Liang Ch'ien modestly refused to agree to that.)^[59]

For reasons seldom made clear, T'ai-ho parents sometimes knowingly divided their estate into unequal shares, in effect ignoring the equal-

partition rule altogether. That practice, unquestionably, contributed to landowning inequalities. Favoritism of this kind seems often to have been practiced in families consisting of sets of stepchildren (brothers by different mothers).

For example, Ch'en Chu-i owned "less than a hundred mou of rice paddy" near the T'ai-ho city wall. He and his wife willed one-third to the older son, Ch'en Mo (ca. 1305-ca. 1389), and two-thirds to the younger, Ch'en Yung (1320-97). Ch'en Mo had three sons; Ch'en Yung had but two. The parents' motive is hard to fathom. It may be that Ch'en Chu-i's wife favored the younger son because he was hers. Ch'en Mo may have been her stepson. A Confucian tutor by trade, Ch'en Mo argued that because the estate was small, Ch'en Yung should get all of it; but his mother (or stepmother) refused to go as far as that, and Ch'en Mo was made to keep his third.^[60]

When Wang Lin-chao of Nan-fu Ward partitioned his estate, he gave the greater share to his younger son by his then current wife and slighted his older son, Wang Yen-jui (1378-1445), whose own mother had died. Dutifully, Wang Yen-jui accepted the smaller share and even shouldered his father's tax and service liabilities; but perhaps some resentment can be seen in his pointed insistence that his own four sons and their heirs share equally in his own estate.^[61]

Hsiao Chen (1432-1501, of Lung-p'o Ward, either in township 6 or in 32) found himself the unwilling beneficiary of an unequal partition. When his father died, his mother slighted his two older half-brothers and gave him "too many" fields. So when at length his mother died, Hsiao Chen destroyed the deed and returned to his half-brothers their fair share of the inheritance. Hsiao Chen achieved a chin-shih degree and ended his career as Nanking minister of works (civil service grade 2A); and instead of amassing personal property, he built a lineage temple and made an endowment, under the collective management of his kinsmen, of the rice fields that he had bought or inherited.^[62] Lands placed under lineage temple control could not be privatized or sold. This was a sign of changing patterns of rice field control in T'ai-ho.

A contemporary of Hsiao Chen's was Teng Ting (d. 1504). Teng was the son of his father's second wife, but his father favored his sons by his first and left him but a few "distant and unproductive mou " as his share. More spurred than soured by that treatment, Teng won his chin-shih degree in 1484, rose to the grade 5A position of director in the Ministry of Justice in Nanking, and later devoted much money and ef-

fort to lineage organization and to an unavailing attempt to create a communal lineage economy (ho tsu-jen kung-tsuan ).

The Ou-yang were a very large common-descent group of Shu-chiang Ward (township 61). In the early fifteenth century, they were a joint lineage of "several thousand fingers" (several hundred people) sharing a common budget. Later, one branch came under the leadership of Ou-yang Mien (1418-84), a full-time family manager, local leader, and benefactor (though never a major grain donor). He had five sons. Two or three survived him. The youngest survivor was Ou-yang Yung (1460-1539). In Ou-yang Mien's old age, "the older son managed the family, while [Ou-yang Yung] taught pupils and surrendered to [his older brother] all the several hundred hu he earned as tuition. When [Mien died and] the time came to divide the estate, the older brother got the best fields. [Ou-yang Yung] did not protest, and [in return for not protesting], whenever he found himself in need, [his brother] gave him relief."

Ou-yang Yung spent some years as a stipend student in Ch'ien-an County, on the frontier east of Peking, where kinsmen had been sent in military exile since early Ming; but after repeatedly failing examinations he gave up and returned to T'ai-ho, only to leave again and live the rest of his life in this or that official yamen with his famous son, Ou-yang Te.^[63]

Thus the rice fields that Ou-yang Mien had controlled passed largely intact to one of his older sons, and Ou-yang Yung was, in effect, disinherited, though he retained at least a moral right to occasional relief from the yield of the land he had declined to lay claim to. The unnamed older brother's four sons seem to have inherited all shares in the estate. Neither of Ou-yang Yung's two sons, Ou-yang Te (1496-1554) or Ou-yang Yü, got anything. Nonetheless, Ou-yang Te intimately involved himself in the difficulties his cousins had with the management of their properties. From 1532 to 1537, when he was an official in Nanking, he sent home some twenty-five dated family letters, in which he counseled his cousins and their heirs in such matters as handling disputes, managing the bondsmen, and monitoring finances. In the first letter, he remarked that the income from field rents (t'ien-tsu ) was enough to feed some thirty people altogether. Even though he corresponded with his family, later, when he came home on mourning leave, he boarded with his K'ang in-laws. He had no "home" of his own, and he scarcely visited his own kin.^[64]

Changes In The Sixteenth Century

Population regrowth in T'ai-ho in the century of peace following the founding of the Ming, accompanied by various indications that transactions in kind were being replaced by transactions in silver, lends an air of abstractness and grayness to the problems of local organization and management that the literati wrote about in the sixteenth century. Descriptions of the humanized landscape and personal character, common earlier, become rarer; personal authority and personal local relationships, though important, seem more limited or more diffused in their effect.

Take water control, for example. The early Ming literati loved to describe water, or talk about it in the context of the farming operations of some successful local magnate, often a grain donor or tax captain. But the writings of native son Ch'en Ch'ang-chi (ca. 1501-ca. 1570) look at local water control in the generalized context of imperial statecraft. Sometime during or after two successive drought years (1552-53), Ch'en prefaced a set of directives issued by the Kiangsi governor. In his preface, Ch'en remarked at length that most of Kiangsi's rice fields lay high above the rivers, so that farmers could seldom irrigate using river water directly. An elaborate infrastructure of dikes, channels, and reservoirs was, therefore, necessary to get water to high lying paddy. He noted that China's historical records, informative about irrigation elsewhere in the realm, were all but silent on Kiangsi, where, owing to the corrupt concealments of the landowners and the failure of local officials personally to investigate them, government records and gazetteers seriously undercounted irrigation works for tax purposes.

In Chi-an Prefecture, he pointed out, the paddies were very high, and they dried out very easily; but because the dikes and reservoirs were not recorded (and therefore not taxed), greedy estate builders eagerly acquired them in order to get rich. Sometimes the way to get even richer was not to release the water for irrigation at all but rather to impound it for powering mills and raising fish. Some water owners charged water-use fees to rice growers. Yet often, in the fifth and sixth lunar months, when rice sprouts reached a critical stage, the growers could only watch their crops shrivel and die because the landowners refused to release water. (It was thanks to the governor's orders that landowners were forced to release water in the severe drought of 1552-53.)

Ch'en also remarked favorably on efforts by the Chi-an prefect to register all irrigation works and to order water releases. Drought-

wracked rice growers in T'ai-ho County were at last empowered to take water for their fields without fear of landowner retaliation.^[65] In these instances, it is evident that Ch'en Ch'ang-chi's interest lay in devising effective procedures for state intervention in local water management, in the name of proportional equity as well as the local rice crop.

Take also the matter of handling famines, which Ch'en Ch'ang-chi also wrote about in detail. In the mid-sixteenth century, there was no more talk of large contributions in kind or in cash so as to ensure food supplies ahead of time. Instead, famines began striking the county with full severity, whereupon officials and local benefactors set up feeding stations and gave outright doles to the starving.

A case in point is a bad famine that dates to about the year 1545. Ch'en Ch'ang-chi wrote a long letter to the Kiangsi regional inspector about it:

In the hills and valleys, all you see is red earth, where many of the people have died of starvation. In fields near the mountains and ravines, the yields have been very thin, and many of the people there have died of disease.

In one of our townships, there lived little people of the Liu surname, only about two li [less than a mile] from my own house, where the husband and wife died of hunger, and their children not long after. I hadn't realized that. When I heard of it, I rushed over to help bury them, but their corpses were gone. And they lived so close by! If there can be casualties like that, and I didn't know about them, then I can guess there are many more casualties in places further away that I don't know about either.

The rest of Ch'en's long letter is a technical discussion of food relief. This time, unhusked grain to be distributed in T'ai-ho and elsewhere was going to come from provincial and other government sources. The hard part was actually putting food into the mouths of the truly needy. There were two matters to consider. One was dishonesty. Clerks, li-chia (ward service) personnel, and others in positions of access to relief grain were going to use various means to skim it. Some elite rural lineages would surely order their tenants (tien-hu ) to pose as famine victims or would even send their own villainous juniors out to steal grain. The other difficulty was logistic. How did you get grain out into the vast rural areas, where most of the famine victims lived? Ch'en told T'ai-ho Magistrate Liao Hsuan that he should be able to reach 80-90 percent of the starving people by boat. The neediest were to get ten tou (one picul) unhusked grain each, the "middle poor" six tou , and the rest three or four (these amounts fed an adult male for two weeks to a month). People who lived beyond the reach of boats were to be given

.33 taels silver to buy their own grain (.33 taels was the approximate price for one picul of milled rice).^[66]

The growing complexities of social and economic life in the sixteenth century prompted a range of responses in organization as well as m local statecraft. The formation of endowed lineage estates removed many of the best rice fields from the free market in land. Estates and individuals performed more and more of their transactions in silver rather than in kind. The tax captaincy system, based as it was on easily visible forms of personally owned wealth, faded out and was replaced by an organization of "county scribes" (hsien-tsung ) and "ward scribes" (li-shu ) and other appointees who were not necessarily owners of landed properties (some seem to have been agents acting on behalf of endowed lineages).

It is impossible to discuss wealth or resources in sixteenth-century T'ai-ho without mentioning silver, which was spreading long tentacles into the local rice-based economy.^[67] Rice sales earned silver, or silver earned by other means was invested in rice fields, or both. Rather than rice being lent at interest, as earlier, silver was lent at interest, often far away from T'ai-ho County itself. T'ai-ho moneylenders occasionally found themselves "elected" by their relatives and neighbors to take part in land surveys and tax assessments.

All the signs indicate that these were new developments. Earlier on, commerce and agriculture had been more distinct. T'ai-ho merchants of the fourteenth century exported goods in kind, generally northward. Liu Sung, for example, wrote of men of the Yuan surname of Hengkang (township 33) who were "big merchants traveling north and south with money and goods."^[68] Members of the Wang people of Mei-kang (township 8), based in the nearby commercial town of Yung-ho in Lu-ling County, made regular trips to Shantung in north China to buy fish, salt, lacquer, and silk.^[69] Lo T'ien-yü (1305-62, of Chiang-nan Ward, township 60) was inspired by the biographies of entrepreneurs he'd read about as a youth in Ssu-ma Ch'ien's Shih chi , and he resolved that he, too, would pursue a commercial career. "He became an expert speculator in wholesale goods . . . First he amassed agricultural products, then he shipped them downriver [toward the Yangtze] for sale."^[70]

But Ming-era sources make scarcely any reference at all to bulk commerce of that sort. The lending of silver, much of it apparently small-scale, becomes suddenly noticeable in the sixteenth century. The lenders focused their business not northward but southward, sojourning for long periods in southern Kiangsi and in Kwangtung.

For instance, there was Hsiao Ch'ao-shang (1510-77) of Huang-kang (Phoenix Hill Ward, township 25), who tutored and lent silver in Kan-chou Prefecture, in southern Kiangsi, and earned enough to retrieve his large family back home from imminent impoverishment. Though "simple-minded and humble-looking" at first glance, Hsiao was put in charge of the community compact of Yun-t'ing Canton by the T'ai-ho magistrates in the 1560s and 1570s after he had returned home from sojourning.^[71] Hu Hsi (1498-1580, of I-ho Ward, township 51), a former moneylender who had done business in Kwangtung, played a leading role in surveying local fields for tax purposes.^[72] There are further examples of such moneylenders.

But what business was Cosunhoa in? Cosunhoa (or Cuotomhoa or Cotonhoa) was a T'ai-ho merchant sojourning in Nan-hsiung in northern Kwangtung who, around 1591, came to the Jesuit mission in Shao-chou to receive the faith from Matteo Ricci. Whatever his business was, he was a man of wealth, with forty people in his employ. He was baptized Giuseppe, and he put Ricci up in his home in 1592 and helped the mission by publishing Christian tracts. (Co or Cuo looks like a rendering of Kuo, but it is impossible to determine which of several T'ai-ho Kuo lineages Cosunhoa belonged to.)^[73]

Reportedly the biggest entrepreneur of late Ming T'ai-ho was Wu Hsiang-shan of Heng-t'ang (a place about thirteen miles east of T'ai-ho city, probably in Jen-shan Canton). For his seventieth birthday celebration, an in-law wrote of him as follows:

Chi-an Prefecture has thin soil and a dense population. Many of its people sojourn in other provinces, but most of them are small-time merchants who lack the intelligence and honesty necessary to get rich.

Not so Wu Hsiang-shan of Hsia-ch'i [or Heng-t'ang] in T'ai-ho, who is a Chi Jan [a great merchant of the fifth century B.C. ]. In his youth Wu was a student, but illness forced him to quit study, and he went to Kwangtung to collect debts for his father. The debtors were making annual interest payments but were still obligated for the principal, even after ten or more years. When Wu arrived he studied the debt contracts, and decided to collect only on the recent loans and cancel the old ones. He said: "Once the paid interest more or less matches the amount of the original loan, it is enough. It is too much to demand [full] repayment in such cases." The Kwangtung people were happy about that, and in a few years, Wu was earning more interest than ever, as people were coming from all over Kwangtung to borrow from him.

[One day] Wu heard that prolonged rains had made the roads so slippery that rice peddlers from Shao-chou were wailing by the roadsides after falling and spilling their loads. He donated one hundred silver [taels] for food, so

that no one on the roads was ruined by the rains. The Kwangtung people then regarded Wu as they would a parent, and Wu's money loans spread everywhere in Kwangtung.

At home [in T'ai-ho], Wu dealt with his kinsmen and with the people of his canton in the same way, and earned the same gratitude. Wu would loan to everyone, and repeatedly, even when doing so exhausted his reserves. His idea was to lower the interest repayment rate and extend the life of the obligation. He made loans as though he were casting [seeds], and he took in the interest like one gathers a harvest. After a few decades, his family grew enormously rich.^[74]

Wu Hsiang-shan's strategy for local dominance thus included education and moneylending. It also included marriage arrangements with scholar-official families of the region and local philanthropy (free burials, famine and winter relief, and the upkeep of bridges and a ferry).^[75]

It is not known how, or whether, local government co-opted Wu Hsiang-shan into the sixteenth-century tax-collecting apparatus of county, township, and ward scribes. Generally, however, it was local elite strategy not to avoid but to preserve their fiscal registry as taxpaying households (hu ) and to perform willingly and in person (not necessarily honestly and in person) those unpaid service roles that involved supervision and management.^[76] The identity and nature of the local elites involved in tax supervision becomes clear in several sixteenth-century cases, some of them involving fraud.

An enormous shortfall in 1512 prompted the magistrate to encourage informers and to revise the registers to eliminate land ownership concealments. Native son Ou-yang To was on hand at the time, having just won his chin-shih degree, and he noted that such fraud could never have been perpetrated without the connivance of the county scribes.^[77]

But surely neither Chang Ssu nor Kuo Lan participated in fraud. Chang Ssu (1465-1542, of Hou-tung Ward, township 5), a local benefactor and major purchaser of famine rice, was on duty as a "township scribe" (tu-tsung ) in 1512. As such, his epitaph asserts, "he devoted his whole mind to the public good and rectified all cases of concealed ownership."^[78] Kuo Lan (1468-1515) was from T'ai-ho city, where some members of his family were moneylenders and prominent purchasers of famine rice. His father-in-law purchased the post of vice magistrate in Chien-yang County in Fukien, and Kuo Lan, then a very young man, accompanied him there. Perhaps that is where he learned Taoist alchemy and the mathematics of areal measurement (fang-t'ien ch'ü-hung chih shu ). Years later, in 1512, the magistrate appointed him a supervisor of

county registers in T'ai-ho, in which task he showed both competence and honesty.^[79]

In 1533, Magistrate Ch'en K'uei discovered a tax shortfall of nearly five thousand piculs, and so he consulted the ward scribes and checked their information against that in the county scribes' registers. Then he called in all the county scribes, showed them the discrepancies, gave them deadlines for revising their registers, and threatened penal sanctions if they failed to comply. They complied. Not trusting the county scribes any further, Magistrate Ch'en assigned the job of writing up the final revised master register to Kuo Yuan-ch'ang, a philanthropic commoner exempted from services and so not a member of the suspect upper-level tax-collecting corps.^[80] It is interesting that while biographies or epitaphs of lower-level township and ward scribes and of local elites at the highest level are available, no county scribe seems to have been so honored.

Later lower-level servitors (local elites) include Wang Hsiao-yuan (1478-1545) of T'ai-ho's western suburb, where members of his family were moneylenders and traveling merchants. Wang served three times as city ward leader and was said to have been well regarded by the common people. A magistrate had him rectify tax registers. Wang exposed all the frauds. "All the frauds tried to bribe Wang, in hope of avoiding [exposure], but Wang haughtily refused them, and none was able to get away with it."^[81] There was also Ou-yang Chieh (1493-1540) of Shu-chiang Ward. He was a family manager of sorts, not especially literate but "so very good at computation [suan-fa ] that specialists deferred to his skill." He also arbitrated local disputes. He was twice made a scribe and put in charge of the ward registers.^[82]

Also much involved in local tax matters was Yueh K'uei (1488-1568), once a promising sheng-yuan . After his ninth failed attempt at the provincial exams, he retired home to manage his family's rural estate in Ho-ch'i (Grain Creek Ward, township 65). The county magistrate appointed him "general overseer" of the people of the township and its wards (tu-li-jen tsung-ling ) so that a field survey might be made. Yueh drew up a ten-point plan (no details given), of which the aim was to ensure equity and deter fraud. Even after he died, it is said that the local people used his plan in making their own tax assessments.^[83] Chang Feng (1501-80+), who was Chang Ssu's son, retired from office in 1556 and lived at home in township 5, where he got the prefectural and censorial officials to accept his ten-point plan for use in making field sur-

veys (again, no details given). Because he was a former official, his plan got wider endorsement and circulation than Yueh K'uei's did.^[84]

In Lu-kang (Fortune Hill Ward, township 55), family manager and township scribe Hsiao Hsi (1502-1574) had charge of the field survey, and he was said to have acted justly, though he was not a man whom all his neighbors liked.^[85] Wang Hsu-yü (d. 1578), a moneylender and former sheng-yuan from Wang-chia-yuan (Wang Family Garden Ward, township 31), was "elected" (t'ui ) township scribe in response to the magistrate's request for nominations. Wang spent many days personally taking areal measurements of the fields, and the magistrate was well pleased with the quality of the register he turned in.^[86]

Thus those drawn into the tax-collecting service apparatus of sixteenth-century T'ai-ho County included personally wealthy men (Chang Ssu, Kuo Yuan-ch'ang), educated men (Yueh K'uei), former officials (Chang Feng), moneylenders (Hu Hsi, Wang Hsu-yü), computational experts (Kuo Lan, Ou-yang Chieh), and others whose personal circumstances are not clear. All of them, however, can be traced to some well-established local lineage and address. And the state services those men performed were "elite" in their nature, because it can be demonstrated that there existed in T'ai-ho (and certainly elsewhere in China) a system of upper- and lower-level service categories which reflected socioeconomic class structure.

To show this split, it is first necessary to provide the essential units of account for collecting taxes and assigning services. These were, in descending order, the township (tu ), the ward (li ), the fiscal household (hu ), and the serviceable male (ting ).

Through the Ming, the townships numbered a constant seventy. The wards were variously reported as numbering 250 or 260. The number of households, however, fell by more than 25 percent—from 44,772 in 1391 to 32,713 in 1585. The number of serviceable males fell by more than 60 percent—from some 150,000 in 1391 to 49,921 in 1585. Meanwhile, actual population surely rose. What was going on here?

The decline in households must have been real. At least, indirect evidence points in that direction. Wang Shih-hsing (1547-98), an official and something of a cultural geographer, noted of Kiangsi Province generally:

Kiangsi custom places great value on household status [men-ti ]. The tax registers are based on the Yellow Registers of the early Ming, and the names of the township and ward chiefs are still the names of the ancestors as written in the old registers. The descendants perform the services without chang-

ing the names. A family may be poor and owe back taxes; yet as long as any serviceable males survive, they will do everything to remedy the situation, because they fear the humiliation and shame that will follow if some other family, even a newly rich one, is assigned the service of ward chief.^[87]

If this pattern held true for T'ai-ho (and it may have, despite lack of direct testimony), then official registry as a fiscal household was a social honor for families to cling to as long as they could, not, as often with other assessments, a burden to escape or avoid. The decline in T'ai-ho's registered households would then have come about through real social processes of impoverishment and attrition. It is possible, too, that "the formal constituency [of the hu ] remained frozen after the early Ming, though its real membership increased as population rose . . . [A] nuclear household in early Ming could grow to be an entire village segment by the end of the dynasty," as happened in parts of Kwangtung Province.^[88]

It may, then, be hypothesized that a hu in T'ai-ho coincided with a localized lineage segment; indeed, that it was a lineage segment, in the fiscal domain.^[89]

Further, it is known that T'ai-ho's lineage leaders used ting as units of account when levying contributions upon their members—e.g., the Willow Creek Ch'en in the 1540s.^[90] These were, presumably, the same ting that the lineage leaders, when acting as household leaders, might assign state service responsibilities to.

That lineage leaders could impose, or excuse, state service responsibilities with some freedom of choice is shown in the case of the Yin of Hung-fu Ward (township 24), where Yin Chih (1427-1511) made such a decision about service responsibility. The case had to do with the widow of Yin Ch'ao-chi, a grandnephew of Yin Chih's and a former county clerk, who left one surviving son.

The family of the widow [née Hsiao] lacked for serviceable males [ting-nan ]. The bondsmen [t'ung-p'u ] had all run away, the fields were weedy and unworked, and her neighbors thought she had become too poor to survive. [When she proved determined to carry on], Yin Chih directed that she was not to be burdened with household service responsibilities [men-hu chu-i ]).^[91]

Thus here it was a lineage leader and former official, Yin Chih, who determined whether or not widow Hsiao's young son, who was all she had for support, was or was not liable as a ting for local government services.

This bit of data is virtually all there is about the actual assigning of ting in T'ai-ho in Ming times. The statement makes sense if (1) the ting

was not a real person in an actual census but an abstract unit of account in a township or ward quota and (2) it was lineage leaders generally that had the power to decide exactly who among their male memberships were personally liable for service in a given year, under the given ting quota.

The first assumption is supported by the extraordinary statement the T'ai-ho gazetteer of 1579 makes about "households and services" (hu-i ):

From [the period 1465-1505] to the present, the households never exceed forty thousand, and the ting-k'ou [serviceable males plus females subject to the salt tax] only amount to one hundred thousand or so. The present registers show no more than fifty thousand ting , which, even when measured against households and females, represent a decline from early Ming.

The county has seventy townships, and in each township live the lineages [that comprise as many as] a thousand ting . At a general ratio of seven males for every three females, there must actually exist several hundred thousand ting altogether. But the custom is to prize landowning and to despise people of dependent status [p'u ], so the numbers on the registers show few people of worth and many people of dependent status. Yet, even while taxes and services constantly increase, families of respected status study the classics generation after generation [and so win service exemptions], while those of dependent status refrain from protesting.

This is so because each lineage has a lineage head, each household has a household head, each township has an old quota of service assignments [ting-ch'ai ], and each [canton] has a compact and regulations for public security [pao-chia ]. As long as local officials follow custom in managing all this, and make only such periodic adjustments in the registers as are consistent with equity, then the people will not be overburdened with fiscal demands and will be able to preserve their wealth, while the state will have the people in reality, even if not in name. This is how to find equity in inequity, to the benefit of both the public and private spheres. It is definitely unnecessary to count and register every single item.^[92]

So there we have it. Officialdom openly acquiesced in what was conceded to be a serious undercount in the real population of serviceable males. This inequity was perpetrated at the expense of people of low status (presumably tenants and bondsmen), and the whole unfair arrangement was held in line through the authority of lineage and household leaders and the public security organs.

The T'ai-ho gazetteer notes that service exemptions (which were given to officials, sheng-yuan , and the like) did not include regular household services, that is, service as household, ward, or township leaders and scribes.^[93]

The specific service assignments mentioned in the quotation above,

for which the ting was the abstract unit of account, refer not to regular household services but to local variants of the standard four service categories of li-chia, chün-yao (equalized corvée), i-chuan (postal service), and min-chuang (militia service).^[94] Those were lower-class services performed by menials. Upper-class services were essentially managerial in nature. Local epitaphs show that, indeed, those services were performed by noted lineage representatives. Those who performed those services had some control over those who performed menial services, probably by way of designating which men should, as ting , actually serve as militiamen, postal workers, guards, messengers, and the like. Whoever the men were who did the jobs demanded of the low-ranking "four service categories" (ssu-ch'ai ), they never appear in the local epitaphs.

In compliance with a national trend, T'ai-ho County adopted the "Single Whip" tax-and-service system at some point in the Lung-ch'ing era (1567-72). The per-ting tax assessment was eliminated and replaced by an assessment on each picul of tax rice (in T'ai-ho, each picul of tax rice had .19094003 taels service silver added on).

Few local epitaphs are available for the late Ming, so the effect of the new system is difficult to gauge. There is some discussion for Kiangsi Province as a whole. Chang Huang (1527-1608) noted that making the land tax the sole assessment base drove down the value of land, forcing many people to give up landowning and seek other pursuits.^[95] Small taxpayers, who might have been able to afford one year's personal service in every ten, found that they could not meet the new annual service payments. Large landowners managed, through influence, concealment, and bribery, to reduce their liabilities. In short, the reform did not reduce chronic inequities. Describing T'ai-ho in the 1590s, native son Kuo Tzu-chang (1543-1618) wrote that "the rich occupy extended stretches of land and pay no tax, while those so poor they don't own enough land to stick an awl into are burdened with excessive obligations."^[96]

The ill effects of the Single Whip reform are probably part of the reason why, in 1598, some twenty years after its adoption, a meticulous resurvey of all agricultural land in T'ai-ho was at last conducted by the prefectural and county officials, with a view to ascertaining precisely who owned what. Native son Yang Yin-ch'iu (1547-1601), at the time surveillance commissioner (3A) of Kweichow Province, prevailed upon Tseng T'ung-heng, a respected scholar-official from Chi-shui County to

the north, to compose an account describing the stern and exacting survey procedures that were used, with the happy result that "there are no more hidden mou in the countryside, or hidden taxes on the mou . No one can complain of unequal burdens. The T'ai-ho people say that this is the first time in a century that the fields have been measured correctly.^[97]

In sum, it appears appropriate to Conclude (1) that there existed in T'ai-ho throughout the Ming era a strong and distinct rural class system, an upper class of elite landowners and managers of material resources, and a lower class of dependents or menials; (2) that within the elite itself, there were ways to create and perpetuate inequalities in land ownership, despite the custom of partible inheritance; (3) that the rural tax-and-service system of early Ming was based upon those inequalities and could not have been instituted without them; (4) that from the sixteenth century, taxes and services came more and more under the control of managers of corporate lineage estates, rather than individual landowners; and (5) that the increasing availability of silver in T'ai-ho coincided with (it may or may not have been directly connected to) the development of corporate lineage estates, with their own permanent and inalienable endowments of (taxable) rice fields, safe from either sale or partition through private inheritance.

The origin of T'ai-ho's lineages, the story of how they emerged in the sixteenth century from a looser set of common-descent groups, is the subject of chapter 4. Material resources and the changing ways in which they were regarded and managed play important parts in the story of T'ai-ho's kinship organizations and their evolution. But so did demography and family formation, and I take up those latter topics next.

Chapter 3
The Demography of Family and Class

The Data

The written works of the T'ai-ho literati are full of short pieces that fall generally under the category of obituary or necrology—that is, commemorative accounts of the lives of dead friends, relatives, and neighbors and their wives. I have found about five hundred obituaries written on behalf of T'ai-ho people. They come in several genres, most of them related to the funerary cult. Most common was the mu-chih ming , a life account chiseled in stone and placed underground near the grave of the deceased. A bit less common was the mu-piao , a life account, also engraved on stone, that was exhibited in the open air so that people could read it. (Many people were honored with both forms of inscription.) There are also available a number of hsing-chuang , or "draft necrologies," usually very detailed, done by family members or other intimates and given to writers of tomb inscriptions to use as source material. There are several minor genres, like eulogies (ai-tz'u ), appreciations (tsan ), and biographical accounts (chuan ). Many of these accounts state just how the necrology came to be written.^[1] Copies of all these documents were kept by their authors and were later included in their collected literary works (wen-chi ), which makes it possible to read them now. By this means, even a mu-chih ming , interred as stone, became quasi-public in its paper copy and thus available to interested readers.

Chinese necrologies are fairly rigid in their form, and as a rule they provide (1) a list of immediate ancestors; (2) a list of a man's wives and

concubines or the name of a woman's husband; (3) a list of children and grandchildren, usually by name; and (4) date of death and an age reckoning in sui , although many accounts give birth and death dates to the exact day.^[2]

All these sources constitute very interesting data with which to explore social questions—but how good are the data? They are surely useful, although there are errors and pitfalls to watch out for. Some errors and omissions can be corrected easily if, for example, two or more accounts exist for the same person or if several members of the same immediate family each have an account written for him or for her. A serious pitfall that can rarely be corrected for is the common habit of ascribing to the principal wife the children her husband sired by other women. Also, sui -ages are sometimes found to be wrong when compared against exact dates, when exact dates are given; but the sui -age is usually all there is, and one can do nothing but accept it.

There is also a problem with children, in that children who died in infancy or early childhood may not be listed in the epitaph of the mother or father. The word shang , meaning "to die in infancy," sometimes flags a given child in the necrology of its parent; and sometimes a child is noted merely as having "died early," a statement without exact meaning. Usually, however, children listed in their parents' epitaphs were only those who survived at least into early adulthood. Thus one cannot use the epitaphs, except in a few isolated cases, to get any idea about infant or child mortality. (For example, we happen to know that Liang Ch'ien [1366-1418] lost a son aged three and a little daughter who died at an age just short of two, because he wrote touching little epitaphs for them. Yet Liang Ch'ien's own epitaph, composed by Yang Shih-ch'i, omits them completely and lists only the four sons and two daughters who grew to adulthood.)^[3]

A hundred or so T'ai-ho men are credited with having authored literary collections—four of them in the Sung, four in the Yuan, eighty-eight in the Ming, and eleven in the Ch'ing. I have been able to gain access only to nineteen, all of Ming date. Most of the rest are probably now lost. So I have constructed a T'ai-ho population out of what I could find in the writings of the T'ai-ho authors of the Ming, plus everything I could find in the way of obituaries written for T'ai-ho people by non-native authors.^[4] The total comes to 508 men and women.

The appropriate first step is to arrange these 508 people in chronological order. The earliest known was born in 994, and the last known died in 1888; but most of the people lived in the Yuan after 1279 and

Ming (1368-1644). Table 1 places everyone in birth cohorts. Starting with the year 1250, when information starts to get plentiful, the people have been arranged in twenty-five-year groups based upon their year of birth.

Immediately evident from this breakdown is a strong clustering in the returns, with two peaks, a larger one for people born in the years 1350-74 and a smaller for people born a century later, 1450-74. These peaks reflect the active years of the more prolific T'ai-ho writers. I should like first to confine my discussion to those people born in the Yuan and Ming (1279-1644), next to profile a few features of the whole Yuan and Ming population, and last to give special attention to the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century maxima, because these coincide with known changes in bureaucratic recruitment rates and with stages in the development of formally organized lineage systems.

The obituaries give us natural families, not the complex households into which natural families were often enfolded or the fiscal households that appear in the tax-and-service registers. In the population in table 1, there are 353 men and 111 women whose obituaries give information about their children. The progeny of the men ranged in number from zero to thirteen, and that of the women from one to eight. The average father had 4.58 children, and the average mother, 3.93. The difference reflects, of course, the polygyny or remarriage of the fathers.

Sex Rations

The obituaries list sons and daughters. The ratio of sons to daughters is a topic crucial to explore because of its significance for population growth or decline and for social structure. What sort of ratio should one expect to find? Other things being equal, a random distribution of human births should approach 104:100, and since infant survival rates favor girls, an adult population should either favor females or show something close to parity.^[5] The T'ai-ho ratios show nothing of the sort. Counting up all the children of T'ai-ho fathers born 1279-1644 gives 985 boys and 555 girls (177:100). For T'ai-ho mothers, the total is 281 boys and 155 girls (181.100).

These ratios are so lopsided as to appear insane. Was female infanticide responsible? Kiangsi in the Ming and later was notorious for its practice of female infanticide. In 1526, it came to the attention of the court in Peking that "many female babies in Kiangsi are not raised"

(pu chü ), with the result that boys coming of age often failed to find mates and so resorted to litigation or to kidnapping widows. The court ordered the censorial authorities to "make strict the former prohibitions on infanticide."^[6] A casual comment by an outsider, Chu Kuo-chen (1557-1632), began with the phrase "Kiangsi people are fond of drowning girls," and then went on to relate a gruesome anecdote about a commoner who drowned four girls and buried them, only to have to keep reburying them because their arms and legs kept protruding from the soil.^[7] T'ai-ho writers were themselves extremely reticent about infanticide. The only mention of it I have found is in Ou-yang Te's epitaph for his in-law K'ang I-sung (1464-1524), which relates how K'ang's father urged him and his brothers to adhere to Chu Hsi's Family Rituals and not drown daughters, as a result of which seven daughters were saved.^[8] Female infanticide was still enough of a general problem, however, that in 1575 the Chi-an prefect issued a prohibition against it.^[9] It seems safe to conclude that female infanticide was practiced in T'ai-ho, but at what rates? How much of the lopsidedness of the local sex ratio can infanticide have been responsible for?

A number of estimates for sex ratios in pre-1949 south China popu-

lations practicing female infanticide are available. George W. Barclay gives 106:100 (106 males for every 100 females). Michael Marmé suggests 108.7:100. Edwin B. Moise offers 110.7:100.^[10] If one were able to make an actual head count of adults in Ming T'ai-ho, the ratio would, in all likelihood, be more like 110:100 than 176:100.

If the 176:100 ratio does not reflect a countable reality in a straightforward way, it may well reflect a social reality of a different kind. If one counts, say, all the sons and daughters of the sixteen Ming emperors, one finds a total of one hundred sons and seventy-six daughters, for a ratio of 132:100, which is also badly lopsided.^[11] Closer to home, the 1610 salt tax for T'ai-ho County was imposed upon a population of 49,921 males (ages 15-59, jen-ting ) and 26,452 females (fu-nü-k'ou , presumably of the same age range)—a sex ratio of 189:100, which is remarkably close to what the T'ai-ho obituaries show. Whatever was going on, it seems to have infected the Ming imperial house and those in T'ai-ho capable of paying salt tax.

One possibility is, of course, a simple failure to report girls, which would explain the shortage of daughters. How can one tell if that is the case? One way to check is to compare sex ratios to family size to see whether small and large families report their daughters differently. In fact, there is a big difference. When the entire population is considered, the sex ratio in fathers' families with one to five children is 200:100

(535 boys, 244 girls), and in families with six to thirteen children the ratio is 145:100 (499 boys, 343 girls). Simple negligence in reporting should have shown a more even distribution across family sizes. The larger T'ai-ho families had boy-to-girl ratios that approached those of the families of the Ming emperors.

Another way to check is to isolate and compare all families, irrespective of size, that report either all boys and no girls, or all girls and no boys. If girls are merely being omitted by the composers of the obituaries, then this exercise should help detect it. The expectation is that the number of zero-boy families should, other things being equal, be comparable to the number of zero-girl families. However, the data in table z clearly indicate that there are far fewer zero-boy families than zero-girl families: nearly thirteen times as many families report no daughters as report no sons.

Surely, some of this lopsidedness must be attributed to the simple neglect of the writers to list in the daughters (some epitaphs state that a man had no sons, but no epitaph ever states that he had no daughters). However, some of it must indicate that there were families that actually

had no daughters, or none they wished to report. One is tempted to throw out all these single-sex cases as flawed evidence, but the sex ratio derived from the gabelle leads one to suspect that many, if not all of them, must in some sense be genuine. The seven families without sons are probably reported correctly; in all but one case, the father in question adopted a male kinsman as his heir. I see no compelling reason to subtract all children from single-sex families from the grand total in table 1, so perhaps the evidence is best left just as it is, on the grounds that much of it may indeed represent something real, if not strictly demographic.

Unquestionably, there is a major problem of unaccounted for daughters here, but the practice of infanticide can explain only about 10 percent of it. If we accept the proposal that an actual Yuan-Ming head count, reflecting female infanticide, would show a real male:female sex ratio of 110:100, then to match 985 boys we need to find some 886 girls. But only 555 girls are reported. That leaves 331 missing daughters. Some, but not all, must have been omitted inadvertently. What can have happened to the rest? Plain-language evidence may offer some guidance.

Wives, Concubines, And Maids In T'al-Ho

There are available 114 epitaphs written for T'ai-ho women. All were written for principal wives, usually the husband's first wife. (Law and custom permitted only one wife at a time. A man could marry a sec-

ond wife only if the first died or was divorced. Concubines and maids ranked below wives and could be acquired at any time.)

The evidence from the epitaphs indicates that, while wives were expected to bear sons, it was even more important that they possess managerial and interpersonal skills and altruism and that they put these characteristics to use within the circle of the family.

It was hard going for a wife without sons, but such a wife could keep her status if, like Ch'en Tou (1369-1409), who lost her only son in infancy, her cooking and tailoring and service to her husband's parents were superior and if she helped buy a concubine for her husband so that his line might continue.^[12] Two of Ch'en Tou's brothers were imperial officials. Her common-descent group, the Willow Creek Ch'en, later prided itself on the excellence of its daughters. "Our family," boasted Ch'en Ch'ang-chi in the sixteenth century, "has produced many notable girls, who have married the great talents in the best families, and have had outstanding men as sons."^[13]

A good wife did some or all of the following things: gave her sons their first lessons in the Four Books; gave aid and counsel to her husband and sons; managed the family budget, including debts and loans; extended the fields and gardens and fixed and enlarged the housing; managed the household bondservants with efficiency; conciliated her sisters-in-law; managed banquets and funerals; arranged nursing for motherless infants; arranged marriages; supervised property division among heirs; and, if her husband died young, protected the property rights of her sons by resisting pressures to remarry.

Just what the better class of T'ai-ho men expected of their principal wives was spelled out by Wang Chih (1379-1462). Wang Chih edited a continuation (now lost) of a well-regarded reader for women, for which he wrote the following interesting preface:

The rise and fall of families is intimately connected to the presence or absence of virtue in the women [the men marry]. That is why we must have concern for how women are taught.

Chu Hsi [1130-1200] established the method for elementary texts when he collected examples of good words and fine actions of the great men of the past. In the Yuan era, Hsu Hsien-ch'en [Hsi-tsai] selected out of the classics and histories good examples for women, and he edited these into a text called the Book of Female Teachings . That text gives a good picture of how to be a proper daughter, wife, and mother. Wu Ch'eng [1249-1331] said that it deserved to rank with the elementary texts [edited by Chu Hsi] and should circulate right along with them.

So Hsu did a good job, but I have been impressed by the Book of Changes ,

where it says that superior men develop virtue by widening their knowledge of the words and deeds of the past. Superior men, as we know, are people who put prime value on such knowledge, but they have the advantage of teachers and classmates and intellectual exchange. Obviously, you can't develop virtue if you're isolated and knowledge-poor. Yet the women's quarters are isolated; what is said inside doesn't leak outside, and what is said outside doesn't get inside. Unless there is a text available, it is hard for women to broaden their horizons and increase their knowledge so that they can establish their virtue and refine their actions.

In moments when I have been free of official duties, I have copied extracts and brought together new material not to be found in Chu Hsi or Hsu Hsi-tsai. Of this I've made a book.

Scoffing at my effort, a friend said: "Women are supposed to be soft and yielding, not hard and assertive. It is a bad woman who makes a slave of her husband, defies her in-laws, and fights her neighbors. She will bring on disaster for sure. You can't let her live with you. Yet here you take the hexagram k'un [female] from the Book of Changes and you gloss it to mean 'hard and square.' Surely that's going too far."

"K'un is the opposite of ch'ien [male]," I replied. "It is the mother of all things. What is female virtue to model itself on if not the hexagram k'un ? Softness and yielding are correct as the 'substance,' but hardness and squareness define how that substance materializes as 'function.' Herein lies the key to handling things both in normal times and in times of crisis. With hardness, [women] can hold firm in the face of threat. With squareness, they can fix their determination and never waver. This is the fulfillment of the 'substance' of softness and yielding, because those words really mean that [women's] minds should be free of violence, that they should not inflict their anger on others, that they should be courteous and forbearing, and never vicious or abusive. Women must have the virtue of hardness and squareness, because when they are weak and swayable, others can control them. The ruin of men and the fall of families results when [women] go along with [bad schemes], or do nothing.

"You have the wrong idea of hardness in mind. The hardness I have in mind is a good hardness. Wise people know how to choose good and avoid evil; everyone is endowed with [the rudiments of] hardness and softness and resistance and compliance because everyone has received the same matter-energy of Heaven and Earth. So when I teach women these things, I'm just guiding them in the light of what they possess already. How can you say I'm going too far?"

My friend couldn't argue with that, so I have restated my point here, to serve as a preface to the book.^[14]

Wang Chih's text-writing project provides an important clue to the problem of the missing females. Whether Wang's educational effort was a success or not, it is clear that the role of principal wife was a demanding one. It was a challenging responsibility that not every daugh-

ter was prepared either by nature or by training to fulfill, no more than every son was equal to the demands of a career in bureaucracy. It is quite possible that many of the missing daughters were girls whom their parents or relatives, for one reason or another, were unable or unwilling to match to a suitable husband as his principal wife.

Indeed, when daughters are accounted for in the epitaphs, it was usual for the writers to give their husbands' name, or to say that they were promised to someone, or that they had married into "famous line-ages," or that they were young and still at home. That obituaries seem to list married or marriageable daughters Only and omit mention of any others is another clue.

Marrying off a daughter as a principal wife could prove difficult and expensive. For example, there was the case of Yang Tzu-p'ei (1391-1458), who had four sons and one (listed) daughter. A local man, though poor, had presented gifts with a view to marrying that daughter, and a marriage agreement had been made. Then later, for some reason, the suitor changed his mind and backed out. Outraged, Yang charged the fellow with breach of contract and took him before the magistrate. Yang won his case, but he ended up having to pay all the marriage costs himself.^[15]

There was also the case of Madame Tseng (1341-1422), who had a similar problem with one of her four daughters—a suitor who could not afford the customary bridal gifts. She had to give the fellow a subvention so that the marriage could go through in proper style.^[16] In another example, when Tseng Yü-hung (1521-88, no relation to Madame Tseng) was a rising star on the examination track, an unnamed powerful person tried to engage his daughter' to Tseng; however, Tseng was already engaged, and it was remembered as an excellent mark in the dossier of his life that he indignantly refused to break the earlier engagement. Later, he himself undertook to find mates for the sons and daughters of a deceased brother, fearing that the job would be too hard for his father to handle.^[17] In fact, a major family responsibility, often mentioned in the accounts, was finding marriage partners for orphaned relatives, male and female alike.

Although the above evidence could be extended by further examples, the point can simply be made here that a first-class marriage was not easily arranged, and the evidence shows how, generation after generation, pools of unmarried or unmarriageable women might have formed. But because no one wrote epitaphs for such women, or even discussed the issue in a general way, one has to imagine an invisible but

by no means small class of luckless T'ai-ho females spared the awful fate of infanticide but unable to become first-class wives because of the poverty of their parents, the inability of their parents to find mates for them, the death of their parents, broken engagements, or their own unsuitability for the role. What can have become of such women?

Some must surely have been sold into bondage as maidservants or concubines. Again, no one wrote obituaries for such women. And while maids and concubines, as did all women, kept the surnames of their fathers, no T'ai-ho maid or concubine can be traced to any specific family, common-descent group, or lineage. A few stories concerning the concubines of T'ai-ho men can be found, however. Yang Shih-ch'i's wife Yen Hsiu died in 1425 at the age of forty-seven, and her epitaph, composed by Yang himself, ascribes all his children, four sons and four daughters, to her (a fifth daughter, who died in infancy, is ignored by Yang here). While Yang was on duty in Peking as grand secretary, Mme Yen spent most of her time looking after things in T'ai-ho, and rumor had it that the third son, Yang Tao (later vice minister of the Court of Imperial Sacrifices, d. 1483), was actually the son of Yang Shih-ch'i's housemaid, a woman surnamed Kuo. Gossip has it that housemaid Kuo was an abused and beaten-looking creature:

When Yang Shih-ch'i was grand secretary, his wife had already died. He had but one maid to handle his sash and comb. One day the imperial palace women invited the wives of the high officials to come to court. When the empress heard that Yang had no regular wife, she ordered her servants to summon his maid. When she saw how lowly and ragged the maid was, she had her combed and rouged, dressed her in jewelry and robes, and sent her off, with the laughing remark: "Master Yang won't recognize her now!" The next day she had the authorities confer a title upon her, as per regulation [for the regular wife of a grand secretary].^[18]

Grand Secretary Ch'en Hsun's (1385-1463) principal wife was Tseng Chang (1387-1431). She gave birth to two boys, who, unfortunately, died as infants. Ch'en was a Han-lin compiler in Nanking at the time. Madame Tseng returned to T'ai-ho, and a few months later, in the fall of 1422, Ch'en acquired a concubine surnamed Mo, who was not a native of T'ai-ho but a young woman left stranded in Nanking by the sudden death there of her brother, an assistant instructor. Ch'en soon lathered one son by concubine Mo (and, immediately thereafter, another by wife Tseng). Reportedly, concubine Mo and wife Tseng got along well together. When wife Tseng died in 1431, however, Ch'en Hsun did not promote concubine Mo to the status of principal wife.

Instead, he kept her as concubine and married as second wife a T'ai-ho woman, Kuo Miao-chih (1413-49, of Kuan-ch'ao, township 31). She produced only a daughter, who died before she could be married. Thus even having produced a first son did little for concubine Mo.^[19] Ch'en Hsun never raised her to the rank of principal wife. In fact, aside from the empress's joke on Yang Shih-ch'i, there is not a single example of a concubine being promoted to wife in the available T'ai-ho data.

Ch'en Hsun is rumored to have had some strong feelings about wife-concubine relations. There is a vivid anecdote about that:

Kao Wen-i [Kao Ku, later a grand secretary] had no sons, and so he took on a concubine. But his wife was jealous, and she got between them and wouldn't let him approach her.

One day Academician Ch'en Hsun paid a visit, and while he and Kao were discussing this problem, Kao's wife, who was listening in behind a screen, suddenly burst forth, screaming and cursing. Feigning anger, Ch'en lifted the table and rose. He hit Kao's wife with a stick until she fell to the floor and couldn't get up, and he kept on hitting her, until finally Kao Ku interceded. Ch'en then admonished her: "You don't have a son, and you can be legally divorced. But Kao hasn't divorced you. He's set up a concubine. And you're cutting off his line of descent by getting between them. If you don't stop, I'll report this in a memorial to the court, where you'll be prosecuted without mercy!"

After that, the wife's jealousy abated. Thanks to Ch'en's anger, there was eventually born Kao Huan, who later became a secretariat drafter.^[20]

To come back to the problem at hand, it appears that T'ai-ho men of means and influence acquired maids and concubines, at least in some cases, in order to sire male heirs by them. In this connection, the suspicion arises that some proportion of the daughters unaccounted for in the parental obituaries—specifically those daughters who lived to become adults but never underwent formal marriage ceremonies, and so "disappeared" into the anonymity of the maid and concubine class—reappear in the obituaries of the men of the next generation, now listed among their consorts because they were the bearer of one or more of the men's children. (Some epitaphs make a clear distinction of rank between a man's wives and his concubines and carefully point out which women produced which of his children. Many epitaphs, however, simply list all the consorts without indicating rank and without assigning any of the children to any mother in particular, so that one is never certain whether a given extra consort is a second wife, a concubine, or an exconcubine promoted to wife.)

To conclude, then, social-class distinctions imposed upon each gen-

eration of T'ai-ho daughters must be considered an unquantifiable but major force, which acted in some powerful way to help produce T'ai-ho's terribly lopsided sex ratios. Of all the T'ai-ho women born into respectable station and spared infanticide, one may estimate that only some 60 percent ended up as principal wives, so managing to preserve their social station. Upwards of 30 percent could not stay in the station into which they were born and were pushed out, or socially downward, into concubinage or servitude.

The Problem Of Upper-Class Population Growth

At this point, I should like to make the assumption that any man or woman in T'ai-ho whose relatives or descendants went to all the trouble and expense of securing a written obituary to be engraved on stone from one or another high ranking scholar-official must in some sense have been socially respectable and, as such, a member of what I propose to define as T'ai-ho's upper class. This group included rich and poor people, people whose lives were serene, people whose lives were filled with distress, people with good educations, and people with only minimal educations; but they all shared some recognized genealogical identity, and they are all described as having performed effectively at some time in their lives some sort of management role—if not as officials then at least as landowners, teachers, family managers, or as parents of successful children. Not one was a servant, a clerk, a maid, a bondsman, a craftsman, a small trader, a tenant farmer, a porter, a hired worker, or anything that smacked of the proletarian, the menial, or the servile.

The first thing to be noted of this upper class, so defined, in connection with the question of its population growth, is that the men often had more than one consort, because they remarried on the death of a principal wife or because they bought concubines or both. (The sex ratio of upper-class parents in the Yuan and Ming was 68:100.)

Was it the case that the more consorts an upper-class male acquired, the more children he had? Surprisingly, perhaps, this is not quite what a study of the issue shows. The results are interesting. For 336 fathers and 1,540 children born in the Yuan and Ming periods, the proposition that having more consorts leads to having more children holds true—to a point (see table 3). However, the T'ai-ho data also bear out Gary Becker's axiom that the more wives a man has, the fewer children each

wife will produce.^[21] But there is more. It may be a quirk caused by the limitations of the T'ai-ho data, but there is a remarkable illustration here of the mutual behavior of not one but three productivity curves. The average productivity curve steadily declines as more consorts are added. The total productivity curve rises until it reaches the second consort, where completed family size achieves its maximum, and then it too declines. The marginal productivity curve (which rates each new consort's contribution to the completed family) shows the maximum impact of the first, the lesser impact of a second, and the increasingly negative contributions of the third and a fourth (the first consort contributes

4.15 children, the second 1.26, the third takes away .55, and the fourth takes away a further .19).^[22]

One might also ask whether, judging from the numbers and sex ratios of their children as supplied by their obituaries, T'ai-ho's upper class was capable of reproducing itself over time, and if so, at what rate? In other words, if everyone born in the Yuan and Ming (1279-1644) is considered and the absence of upper-class in-migration is assumed, did T'ai-ho's quality population expand in size? It is an important question.

To help answer it, I have modified the inputs to a simple equation used by Nathan Keyfitz to answer the related question of how one determines the annual rate of increase in a population with a given average family size.^[23] The procedure is to find the mean age of women at childbirth and use that as the nth root of that proportion of the aver-

age family represented by females who grow up to bear children. The result gives an annual average growth rate. As was noted earlier, however, there is a shortage of obituaries for T'ai-ho women (there are three times as many epitaphs for men as there are for women), and the obituaries suffer from the common custom of ascribing all children to the principal wife, whether they were really hers or not. Therefore it is preferable to identify families from the men's epitaphs, not the women's, and to calculate the reproduction rates of the men rather than of the women. The rephrased question, then, is whether annual reproduction rates, taken from the men's point of view, led to an expanding, a shrinking, or a stable upper class in T'ai-ho.^[24]

The great problem in the average father-centered T'ai-ho family was its large surplus of listed boys relative to listed girls (985 boys and 555 girls of the Yuan and Ming). Eighty-nine of the above boys are reported as having "died early." The exact meaning of this phrase is unclear from the sources, but let us assume arbitrarily that half (approximately 45) of them died before marriage, or before having children. That leaves 940 boys. Thirteen girls "died early." Making the same assumption for them leaves 548 girls.

The result is an excess of 392 boys, who could not have found quality mates in T'ai-ho (where almost all marriages were contracted) and must therefore have been unable to reproduce themselves, at least at the same social level into which they were born. (Elite genealogical identity and pride, and good family management, required upper-class wives; and, as stated earlier, there is no evidence that any concubine was ever promoted to the rank of wife.) Thus only 548 of the 940 boys can have married "good" wives, if they married at all. (Meanwhile, the proportion of the 548 girls who married "good" husbands and bore children must have been close to, if not exactly, 100 percent). For 336 fathers of the Yuan and Ming, the average family size was 4.58. Adapting Keyfitz's procedure, then, we should multiply 4.58 by -37 (the estimated proportion of all the children of the average family which consists of boys able to marry first-class wives). The result is 1.69.

The next step is to calculate a mean age of women at childbirth and use that as the nth root of 1.69. How old were T'ai-ho women at the time of the birth(s) of their children? The answer to that has to be painfully figured out by matching cases where epitaphs of mothers, fathers, and their children are available. I found fifty-five instances where a woman's age at childbirth was known; these ages range from 16 to 44, and the average age comes out to be 26.5. The 26.5th root of 1.69 is

1.0200, which means that, over the very long term (1279-1644), the elite, upper class of T'ai-ho people could have expanded at an annual rate of z percent, which is very high. It implies that the upper class was capable of doubling its size every seventy years at the least.

Given the patriarchal family order of T'ai-ho, it may be preferable to consider the growth rate from the men's point of view. The ages of 106 men are known as of the time one or more of their children were born. These ages range from 16 to 49, and the average is 30.9. That still gives 1.0171, meaning a growth rate of over 1.7 percent a year. (These rates are only somewhat less than recent total population growth rates in parts of the present-day developing world).^[25]

While capable of such growth rates, T'ai-ho's upper class could not have exploded at a rate of nearly z percent a year for very long. It is absurd even to suppose that a county of limited size and resources like T'ai-ho could have supported such growth. One remedy was, indeed, emigration, a topic I should like to address in a moment. But the function of two other remedies—infanticide and downward social mobility—should now be quite apparent. Every generation, the socially pedigreed class of T'ai-ho people engaged in behavior that had the effect of reducing excessive numbers, so that it did not, in fact, grow at a rate approaching 2. percent a year, even though in theory it was capable of doing so. For purposes of social reproduction at the elite level, the average elite family size of 4.58 was an illusion.

What was the purge rate? In spite of the risk of giving a false impression of numerical exactitude, the issue invites numerical exploration. Let us go back to the population of 940 boys and 548 girls, defined as those who survived long enough to marry and bear children. The sex ratio of this population is 172:100, which, as explained earlier, cannot reflect demographic reality in the strict sense. If, given female infanticide, the "real" sex ratio was 110:100, then the "real" population must have consisted of 940 boys and 855 girls. However, only 548 girls are accounted for, so the remainder (307) of them must have disappeared into the maid or concubine class, where their contribution of children to their masters' families was minimal, as indicated earlier.

The effect of this was to create a sizable population of unmarriageable males. Of the 940 males, 392. cannot have found first-class brides.^[26] As social detritus, these 392 males were joined by 307 luckless females, creating a total cast-off population of 699. If we divide that figure by the number of fathers, 336, the result is a "family" whose average number of children is 2.08.

It is, of course, a "ghost" family. It is the elite family that could have been but never was. It is impossible to say to what extent such ghost families were real at some lower social level. Some of the girls were re-absorbed into elite families as maids or concubines (however, only 33 of 289 extra consorts are specifically noted as having been concubines, and nothing at all definite is known of working maids). Some of the males must surely have joined the large army of Kiangsi sojourners and émigrés who plied their crafts and trades in many different parts of China in the Ming.^[27] At all events, the sex ratio of this notional family is 128:100, much more favorable to females than the elite sex ratio.

The ghost family is an offscouring of the elite families. Its creation, generation after generation, is one major reason why the T'ai-ho upper class did not, in fact, expand at a z percent annual rate through the Yuan and Ming periods, a rate that in theory it was quite capable of achieving.

Because of the drag it exerted, the latent demographic power of the ghost family should somehow be subtracted from that of its elite parent. One possibility might be to subtract its potential growth rate. The total of cast-off (or émigré) children comes to 699; .78 of the boys "marry" all the girls (multiplying 2.08 by .78 gives 1.62); and, again using 30.9 as the nth root, the annual rate of increase comes to 1.0157. This "ghostly" rate, subtracted from the elite rate of 1.0171 obtained above, leaves a remainder of .0014, or .14 percent. Indeed, something that low may well have represented the real rate of increase of the pedigreed class of T'ai-ho over the very long run, that is, for the whole period 1279-1644.

The Demographic Behavior Of The T'al-Ho Elite In The Ming

To return once again to table 1, there are two periods a century apart where the obituaries bunch up. One is the quarter century 1350-1374. The other is the quarter century 1450-1474.

These two cohorts lived and reproduced in periods of Ming history that were different both in the constraints they imposed and in the opportunities they provided. The first cohort helped rebuild and repopulate T'ai-ho after its devastation in the civil wars of the 1350s and 1360s. A few of its children reached the very highest positions in Ming imperial government. Hundreds more availed themselves of unusually favorable opportunities to become officials and government teachers at

every level. (As the next chapter will note, this cohort was also heavily involved in researching and compiling the genealogies that became the founding documents, so to speak, of T'ai-ho's pedigreed common-descent groups.)

The second cohort faced new challenges. The rate of bureaucratic recruitment declined by half. Opportunities for local estate-building, available earlier, shrank as well. This cohort's children contributed to the social anomie that people said infected T'ai-ho, as well as Kiangsi generally, in the Hung-chih period (1488-1505) and later. People emigrated in some number. They also spearheaded the founding of organized, property-holding lineages, which were an evolutionary step beyond the more loosely ordered common-descent groups of a century earlier. Did these cohorts share the same "demography," as outlined above? Or did demographic change accompany changing general conditions?

I would propose to enlarge both groups by adding birth cohorts on either side, thus creating seventy-five-year groups, 1325-1399 and 1425-1499 (see table 4). These correspond roughly to early Ming and mid-Ming. Men whose obituaries provide information about children number 179 for the first group, and 82 for the second. The numbers in parentheses in table 4 are those said to have "died early."

Subtracting half the "died early" cases as before and calculating in the same way as was done above for the whole Yuan and Ming population, we find that there were indeed measurable differences between these historically distinct cohorts. While the early Ming cohort, born in a time of opportunity, was nominally capable of expanding at a yearly rate of 2.2 percent, the later cohort, born in a time of reduced opportunity, had a nominal rate of growth of only .7 percent, a dramatic decline.

A comparison of the sex ratios of the children of the two cohorts

(154:100 for the early cohort and 219:100 for the second) shows that while both groups pruned excess children, the elite families of the fifteenth century acted in such a way as to push their children down the social ladder, or encourage them to emigrate, at a significantly higher rate.

In the early Ming, female reproduction rates were comparatively high; on average, each consort produced 3.51 accounted-for sons and daughters who lived to become adults. The fifteenth century witnessed a dramatic decline, as each consort produced only 2.63. Meanwhile the fathers acquired consorts at about the same rate in the fifteenth century as they had in the fourteenth (1.42 in the earlier period, 1.52 in the later).

The above computations relating to elite family formation and its inevitable by-product, social downloading, help explain a number of instances of family behavior discussed in plain language in the obituaries. Whether elite society was expanding, as in the fourteenth century, or shrinking its size, as in the fifteenth, it still extruded, or was forced to extrude, great numbers of its children. The experience was not pleasant. In the fourteenth century, good people sometimes intervened to try to prevent its happening.

For example, there was Liu O (1295-1352), of the Chu-lin Liu of township 38. It was said that a malignant ghost was spreading disease. The parents of one of the Chu-lin Liu families died of the disease, leaving three orphans and unpaid taxes. The tax collectors decided that proceeds from the sale of the three orphans into bondage should be used to clear the account. Liu O went before the T'ai-ho magistrate and made a dramatic plea:

Long ago, our ancestors held the highest positions at court. But now some descendants have fallen into difficulties. They have no food or shelter. They are destitute. They've become slaves to others. This distresses me no end.

It is up to the magistrates to ensure that abuses are stopped, that social custom is restrained, and that compassion is extended. As we know, righteousness means suppressing abuse, decorum means restraining custom, and benevolence means extending compassion. All three are fundamental principles of imperial administration, and those who rule the people cannot ignore those principles. We common folk are no more than baby birds trying to fly without feathers when the magistrates don't give us protection!

Liu O then burst into tears, and the magistrate was moved to compassion. He remanded the three enslaved orphans to Liu O's care, and Liu O raised them and arranged marriages for them.^[28]

Things did not turn out this well for Ch'en Meng-hsing of the Willow Creek Ch'en of T'ai-ho city. A one-time sheng-yuan (county student) expelled for a rules violation, Ch'en died a depressed and broken man in Nanking in 1390, when he was thirty-four. His only son, orphaned young, could not study. He became a small tradesman of some kind and eventually died without heir.^[29] Such for him was the cost of downward social mobility.

Servitude was certainly a possible fate for the downwardly mobile. Escape from servitude is the theme of the celebrated story of P'eng Hsu (1381-1430) and his mother, Liu Ling (1365-1432). She was from neighboring Wan-an County, and her husband's family were Moon Pond P'engs of township 56 in T'ai-ho.

Pieced together from several sources, the story goes like this. Liu Ling's husband died in 1390. He had been a li-chia (tax community) chief for his part of T'ai-ho, and he died in serious arrears with his tax payments, for which his kinsmen became responsible. Accordingly, little P'eng Hsu's uncle, a man who "ran after the properties of widows and orphans," seized the child's inherited property and, at least for a time, placed him in bondage as a household slave (p'u-li ). At length Liu Ling fled with her little son to her father's house, and there she personally supervised the child's primary education. Later she sent him to live with his paternal cousin and her husband, Hsiao Yung-tao (1359-1412), a minor official and an expert in the Book of Documents . P'eng Hsu went on to have a minor career of his own. He entered government through the recommendation channel and ended up as an archivist (9B) in the northern imperial college. P'eng Hsu's gratitude to his mother knew no bounds. Eventually, he moved her back to the P'eng settlement in T'ai-ho and saw to it that she was honored and well cared for in her old age.

It is interesting to see in this example that, while some family-centered institutions and values speeded downward mobility, a countervailing set of institutions and values were sometimes activated to create a rescue net. Here, the indebtedness and early death of P'eng Hsu's father set the conditions in motion that propelled the little fellow right down the social slide. Liu Ling could perhaps have made things easier for herself if she had simply abandoned her son and remarried. Instead,

she chose to protect her son. She wove and sold cloth to help pay off her husband's debts, while she and her child resigned themselves to "living in a bare room, with a ragged coverlet and a tile lamp [as their only possessions]." Her father's family, the Liu of Wan-an County, played an important role in the rescue, as they put up or "boarded" (kuan ) P'eng Hsu and later hired him as a primary tutor. It was said that P'eng Hsu could have earned more as a tradesman or accountant than as a tutor, but his mother made him study and teach the Confucian classics. She knew the Analects and the Classic of Filial Piety and taught these orally to her son.^[30]

It may be noted that the Moon Pond P'eng, who tried to enslave one of their own, were not a poor and obscure bunch but one of the most prominent common-descent groups of T'ai-ho. One can also see the value in one's marrying not just any girl, but a girl of quality, partly as insurance against the ever present possibility that social disaster might engulf one's sons.

However, to accept boarding (kuan-ku ) at someone else's expense, as P'eng Hsu did in his mother's family, was to accept a status of dependency, and that was not necessarily a good situation for a boy to be in. For example, when Ch'en Hsun was fifteen years old, he declined the kind offer of an uncle to accompany him as a student to the home of a certain K'ang family in the T'ai-ho countryside, where the uncle had accepted a teaching position. Ch'en Hsun declined because the K'ang would have had to feed him, and he did not want to be "treated lightly by people," as he would have been had he accepted the dole.^[31] Even hired tutors, like Ch'en's uncle, were in a socially delicate position because of a tendency on the part of their employers to treat them as though they were laborers or servants. As highly regarded a local teacher as he was, Hsiao Ch'i (1325-96) experienced this problem. When he taught in the Lo family school in T'ai-ho city, a matriarch, Madame Liu (1324-1400) had to warn her sons not to ignore or humiliate him. She gave Hsiao Ch'i some face by seeing personally, morning and night, to the preparation of his meals.^[32]

It is evident that T'ai-ho's patriarchal families were often torn between a practical desire to rid themselves of their weaker members and a moral obligation to go to all lengths to provide for their welfare. Yang Shih-ch'i and Wang Chih and the other epitaph writers were intent upon praising those few who acted on their moral duty to prevent the downward mobility that the statistics show to have been so very common.

Some of the writers, indeed, had personally experienced the threat of social extinction in their childhoods. Yang Shih-ch'i is a case in point.^[33] Another is Wang Chih, who gives interesting and detailed testimony about how his step-grandmother, Madame Li, intervened to save him (and his sister and brother) from the predatory designs of his male kinsmen, members of the socially prominent Ao-chieh (Hollow Street) Wangs of T'ai-ho's western suburb:

Madame Li certainly helped us Wang. She raised me and my brother long enough to let us continue the sacrifices to our ancestors, and thanks to her, our ancestors buried below can rest in peace. What she did for us can hardly be repaid. I cannot forget that. That is why I must now write about her, so our posterity will know.

Madame Ch'en was the first wife of my grandfather [Wang Chu-t'ing, 1317-83]. After she died, he married Madame Li. My mother, Madame Ou-yang [1349-84], served Madame Li faithfully, and they worked together harmoniously to manage the family, so that my grandfather and my father [Wang Po-chen, 1342-1416] were not burdened with domestic duties and could spend all their time in literary pursuits.

Then my grandfather died, and a year later my mother died. There were no maids in the house. My brother and I were young [Wang Chih was five], and Madame Li was the only person we could rely on to stay alive. She looked after us carefully, as though we were her own children. She fed and clothed us and kept us from doing foolish or dangerous things.

When I was five or six sui , she had me study under tutor Tseng Chung-chang. I used to shirk my studies, and she would cry angry tears and say: "The job of you Wangs has always been to study, but you shirk! Do you want to become a small man?" Every evening she would remind tutor Tseng to come by at daybreak to make sure we got to school. It was as though she felt she couldn't do enough to show her care and her worry for our futures.

Careful as she was of us, we still hadn't encountered serious troubles.

My father [at the time a bureau secretary (6A) in the Ministry of Works], after mourning leave, returned late to duty, and for that infraction he was ordered exiled to An-ch'ing [in present-day Anhwei Province, where he remained, ca. 1388-98]. A Wang kinsman then got the idea to seize his personal property, and suddenly Madame Li was faced with more trouble than it appeared she could handle. First the kinsman tried cajoling her.' she could stay and be fed in his house and live with his mother. But Madame Li replied: "I'll just stay in this poor house and raise my young grandchildren. I won't go, even though you say you'll take care of me." That was the end of that ploy.

Now it happened that there was a widow in our common-descent group who fell for that kinsman's false promises. He got hold of her dead husband's deed and sold all the property [she was holding in trust]. Finally, she died homeless, and her grandson fell victim to hunger and cold. People then came to see that my grandmother was extraordinarily farsighted.

When his first ploy failed, the kinsman seized the old home of my grandfather's younger brother and sold it. He also claimed that a certain garden of ours was partly his possession. He divided it up. Then he invited a bunch of bad people to buy cheaply [the topsoil rights?], and he had them bring their tools and come work it. Someone objected to all this, and he struck and killed him. But Madame Li spoke up and said: "I'm just an old Wang widow, but when your uncle and older brother were alive, you never said anything about that property, and yet now you and those slaves [nu-pei ] just seize it. I'm going to be buried there when I die, so if you want that land, you'd better kill me first. As long as I'm alive, I won't let you have it!" When they all heard that, they put out their tongues in shock, and in the end, they backed off. So the garden was saved.

Our ninth generation ancestor was buried in a safe place. Everybody considered the site geomantically good. The P'eng, a powerful common-descent group of our county, were trying to find a place to bury a father of theirs, and they were offering a high price for a site good enough to bring wealth and status to the dead man's descendants. At that time, my father was still in exile. My brother and I were in prison in the provincial capital, because of an accusation made against us. Our kinsmen, eager for the money, wanted to exhume [our ancestor] and sell the tomb site to the P'eng; but they were afraid of Madame Li, and so they made the argument that the tomb site was in fact no good, given that none of the Wang families was doing well, with three men presently in exile in army garrisons, and two grandsons under indictment, with who knows what disaster in store for them. But that argument did not impress our step-grandmother, who forbade them to sell the tomb site.

Finally they sent a dull-witted fellow to go to Madame Li, to tell her that everyone's mind was made up, that she had no sons or grandsons and had no business stopping the sale.

At that time, my son Wang Tzu [1397-1458] was born. Madame Li held him on her knee as she replied: "Four big Wang families [fang ] descend from that ancestor. Three of them want to sell. But that leaves us. If our sons and grandsons never return, there is this great-grandson here to serve as master of the tomb, and he'll never let it go. You people are violating the principle of Heaven!"

She placed the child on the floor, grabbed a stick, and drove the fellow away. When the P'eng heard about the dispute, they decided it would be wrong to continue to try to buy the site, and that is how the site continues to be ours to the present day. We Wang had declined in those days, and except for Madame Li, we could not have survived our troubles.^[34]

Wang Chih went on to make the very same point, about how important k was for women to be "hard and square," that he made in the preface to his sourcebook for women.

Wang did not mention here that when he was twelve years old, he was sent away to Lu-ling County to live with a maternal uncle, a pro-

fessional tutor, who "fed and taught" him for two years. Nor did he mention that when he was five and had just lost his mother, Madame Li needed help at once; and so a child-bride (Madame Ch'en, 1377-1458, of the Willow Creek Ch'en, and a relative of Wang's dead grandmother) was brought in nominally as a wife for Wang Chih but principally for her skills in weaving and tailoring.^[35]

Wang Chih spent most of his adult life as a high official far away in Peking, but even from that distance, he tried to redirect Wang family strategy—away from predation on the weak and toward a new goal of social welfare for all. His oldest son, Wang Tzu, grew up to become a government Confucian instructor, but Wang Chih had four other sons, who took turns living with him in Peking. Using those sons as agents, he was able to keep a hand in family management back in T'ai-ho. By 1450, that family was a large one; Wang guessed that it contained "over a hundred" people of high and low status.^[36]

In Peking, Wang lived with concubine Ch'iu. His wife Madame Ch'en stayed in T'ai-ho until her sons grew up. At one point, there were so many dependents that some of them were going to have to move out, but Madame Ch'en saved the day for them. In her epitaph, Wang Chih wrote that she "sold all her own jewelry and utensils to buy paddy at the west wall [of T'ai-ho], and then day and night she allotted farming tasks to the male and female slaves or bondservants [t'ung-pei ] and to the older sons who were capable of farm work, and with Heaven's help there was enough food [to keep the family together]. Thanks to her direction, my sons to this day provide for themselves by working at farming."

Another case from the early Ming era centers upon Liang Hun (1370-1434) and his wife, Madame Liu (1369-1432). In their case, cooperation among intermarried common-descent groups created a social safety net for as many as five weak orphans, who might otherwise not have survived. It must be emphasized that examples of this kind (there are many other early Ming instances of it) must have been exceptional and thus worthy of comment by the local literati. In view of the implications of the statistics, such cases cannot have been the rule. Yet they-serve to illustrate very dramatically the relentlessness of the pressures that created downward mobility in T'ai-ho.

In 1393 or 1394, Investigating Censor (7A) Ch'en Chung-shu, a Willow Creek Ch'en, died, unexpectedly and destitute of personal prop-

erty, in his early 40s in Kwangtung. His wife had already died several years before. Thus his son Ch'en Shang (aged fifteen or sixteen) and his daughter became orphans. His younger brother Ch'en Chung-heng (1354-1413) refused to concede them a share in his personal estate. He owned a nice house and substantial farm property near T'ai-ho city, but his own four sons wanted it all for themselves. So censor Ch'en's grieving orphans were placed "in a condition so wretched that few people could have borne it"—and it is left to the imagination whether that meant beggary or enslavement or what. Then fortune smiled. Ch'en Shun-chih (1344-1426) was the older sister of Ch'en Chung-shu and Ch'en Chung-heng, and she was Liang Hun's mother. She imposed it as a moral obligation upon her son to step in and help raise her brother's orphans.

The Liang also owned farm property near T'ai-ho city, so there was a resource base to help support their social work. (Liang Hun was no stingy manager. He rented some of that land to unnamed in-laws, who suffered some untimely deaths and so fell behind in their rent payments; but he forgave the debts, and even signed over some of the land because the renters were a Confucian [ju ] family that had fallen temporarily on hard times.)

Liang Hun was able to raise Ch'en Chung-shu's orphan daughter and eventually to marry her to a good boy of the Yen family. The other orphan, Ch'en Shang (1378-1413), soon proved a brilliant success. In 1:411 he achieved his chin-shih degree and had just begun his official career when he, like his father before him, died young, leaving behind, just as his father had done, two young orphans, a boy (Ch'en I) and a girl, and no property. Again, they and their mother faced beggary. Someone made an appeal on their behalf to investigating censors, who interrogated Ch'en Chung-heng about the matter and forced him to allot them "a tiny plot where they could stay." At some point Ch'en Shun-chih also stepped in and again got her son Liang Hun to help take care of them. Later she also arranged the orphans' marriages. She married Ch'en I to her own granddaughter, née Liang. So here were two generations of Ch'en orphans that Liang Hun and his wife and mother helped raise.

Liang Hun also took in and helped raise and teach an orphaned paternal cousin, Liang Chiung (1384-1429). In fact, Liang Hun's wife, Madame Liu, did most of the nurturing, and she also took care of her aging mother-in-law, Ch'en Shun-chih. She had a staff of maidservants (nu-pei ), whom she was recalled as having managed with skill. It was

her third daughter who was married to orphan Ch'en I. They all lived in T'ai-ho. As the male orphans grew old enough, the women sent them for their education to wherever Liang Hun happened to be at the time as an instructor in county schools in various far-flung parts of China.

In addition to Madame Liu, Liang Hun had another woman, probably a concubine, who lived with him when he was away from T'ai-ho. Between them, Liang Hun fathered four boys and four girls. The girls were given good marriages (although the youngest was married to Grand Secretary Yang Shih-ch'i's oldest son, a real estate entrepreneur who died in prison on charges of extortion and murder in 1444). One of Liang Hun's sons, Liang Li, was taken by recommendation into government teaching and ended his career as instructor second class in the imperial college. All the orphans did quite well. Liang Chiung went on to achieve a chin-shih degree and was a bureau director (5A) in the Ministry of Justice at the time of his death. Respectable marriages were arranged for all the girls. Ch'en I's son Ch'en Yen became a county Confucian instructor. Altogether, this was a very successful social rescue operation.^[37]

If the figures derived from obituaries of people born in the fifteenth century provide anything like an accurate view into elite social processes in T'ai-ho County, they show that while the rates of reproduction went down, the rates of downward or outward mobility went up. Moreover, the stories of social rescue that one often encounters in the epitaphs of people born in the fourteenth century are vanishingly scarce in the epitaphs of people born in the fifteenth. It was men born in the fifteenth century who took the lead in the founding of the organized lineages that became prominent features of the social landscape of T'ai-ho in the sixteenth century and later; and while lineages had welfare functions, it is impossible to tell whether they were more effective, or less, as inhibitors of social disaster than the informal interfamily networks that they seem to have replaced.

It is interesting that the few social rescue stories of this later era should center upon travelers and émigrés—upon people down on their luck and far from their native county.

Wang Ch'iu (1445-1507) was a grandson of Wang Chih, and his second wife was Jen Lien-chen (1454-1526), youngest daughter of Jen Heng (a provincial degree holder from T'ai-ho city who ended his career as a county magistrate in Fukien). Around 1500, Wang Ch'iu was

serving as an office director (6B) in the Court of Imperial Entertainments in Nanking, and Jen Lien-chen stretched his small salary to help pay for entertaining visitors from back home in T'ai-ho; for a tutor for their five sons; for board and school supplies for some other boys who came to study with her sons; and for charity to locals in straits. She helped poor Hsiao Jou. "Hsiao Jou had come [from T'ai-ho] to the Ministry [of Revenue in Nanking] accompanying a tax shipment," her epitaph reads. "But his comrades had abandoned him because he was sick, and so he came crawling [to Wang's house in Nanking]. Wang was away in Peking at the time, and the gatekeeper wouldn't let him in. But Madame Jen, when she was told, frowned and said: 'He's sick and so far from home, and he has nowhere else to go.' At once she had him housed nearby, and fed and medicated him until he got well and then gave him money enough to return home. People admired her for that."^[38]

There was also Lo Fu (1438-1507), a T'ai-ho man who also lived in Nanking, where he was registered with a naval guards unit and served as something of a one-man social welfare agency for failing elites from back home. The early deaths of his two brothers left him the task of supporting their widows and one orphan daughter. He also supported his sister and her husband, who lived with him. Plus there came indigent kin from back in T'ai-ho. People said his kitchen was always busy, with maids and servers constantly running about under his personal direction. His T'ai-ho neighbors in Nanking reported that he took in two generations of orphaned cousins, plus a distantly related orphan boy from back home, plus a destitute friend and his little daughter. The friend soon died, and Lo made it his responsibility to marry the daughter off. His neighbors also reported that a certain Hsiao Hsin owed him money that he could not repay by any means other than selling him his daughter; but Lo Fu indignantly refused and forgave the debt altogether.

Lo Fu was obviously well off. Where his income came from is a complete mystery because his grandfather had been exiled to Manchuria early in the Ming for the offense of "discussing national affairs as a mere commoner" and had returned home to T'ai-ho in his old age. His father moved to Nanking under military registry, but because he was a noted tutor in the Book of Changes , his commander excused him from duty. Lo Fu himself was no more than a sheng-yuan who had failed five times to get his provincial degree. Eventually his son, Lo

Feng, achieved his chin-shih degree in 1496 and went on to have a moderately successful official career.^[39]

Emigration

There is no doubt that emigration drew off some substantial percentage of the excess population of T'ai-ho. The numbers cannot be counted. It is possible, however, to catch certain glimpses of the process.

There are signs that T'ai-ho began to send out émigrés in early times, when it was still attracting new settlers. There were, for example, successive generations of Wus who moved from T'ai-ho to Kwangsi in the thirteenth century.^[40] In Kwangtung Province, five of forty Hakka surnames claimed ancestors who were T'ai-ho people in Sung, Yuan, or Ming times, and these include émigrés from such well-known common-descent groups as the Hsiao of Nan-ch'i and the Lo of Ch'ueh-ch'eng (which in T'ai-ho are never flagged as being Hakka).^[41]

Early in the Ming, three brothers of the Liu of K'an-ch'i Ward (township 63) moved away to make new homes for themselves in Yen-t'ing County, Szechwan.^[42] Wang Chih's distant kinsman, Wang Tsai (1314-90), was a government instructor in Kan-chou in southern Kiangsi, and he decided to settle there permanently. Wang Chih's maternal uncle, Ou-yang Huai (1357-1444), moved from T'ai-ho to the market town of Yung-ho across the border in Lu-ling County, where he was attracted by an offer to board as a live-in son-in-law to a local resident. Ou-yang made a career as a private tutor in classics and calligraphy.^[43] Yang Yun-wen died in office as magistrate of Ch'ang-yuan County, Honan, in the 1370s. His young son, rather than returning home, took up registry there, and two descendants of these ex-T'ai-ho Yang later became local government students in Ch'ang-yuan.^[44] Sometime during the Ming, various Chiangs, Ch'ens, and P'engs emigrated to Hunan Province, where they became founding ancestors of lineages that by Ch'ing times (1644-1912) had achieved national prominence.^[45] A study done long ago shows that, in fact, at least some fifty-four émigrés from T'ai-ho moved west to Hunan, as part of a large outflow of Kiangsi people, mainly in the early part of the Ming period.^[46]

Military exile created a certain amount of early Ming emigration. A few ragged original records remain of twenty-two T'ai-ho convicts who were exiled to garrisons in Manchuria in 1392; twenty-one of them died there.^[47] But some exiles found permanent homes in Manchuria—

the Liu at the Fu-chou guards, and the Hsiao at the T'ieh-ling guards, for example—and they are regularly referred to, even in the late Ming, as T'ai-ho people registered in Fu-chou or T'ieh-ling. Their T'ai-ho connections were never completely cut.^[48] Whether or not the rate of emigration increased in the middle years of the Ming dynasty is hard to say. In any event, it surely continued. The T'ai-ho County gazetteer, in its list of native sons who qualified themselves for official position, begins to note from the Ch'eng-hua era (1465-87) onwards significant (and increasing) numbers of one-time natives who achieved their provincial (chü-jen ) degrees in provinces other than Kiangsi, or who entered the imperial colleges as sui-kung (annual tribute) from county schools in various parts of China.

It is also clear that the T'ai-ho émigrés of the fifteenth century and later found two new and undeveloped frontier regions in China to settle in and exploit. One such region was the far south of Kiangsi where, earlier on, Wang Tsai had gone. An official report of around 1530 describes southern Kiangsi (Nan-Kan) as having long acted as a magnet for people from Chi-an Prefecture, because paddy and mountain land were available, and newcomers might reap profits from rice, indigo, timber, and charcoal production.^[49] "Kan-chou has a lot of high-grade fields and idle soil," wrote Ch'en Ch'ang-chi, probably sometime in the 1540s. "The taxes there are light, and the people are few; whereas in Chi-an the fields are low-grade and the imposts are heavy, and the population is thick, but production is thin. As a result, many poor people take their families and kin and find work in Kan-chou, and they never return."^[50]

From 1563 to 1564, Hai Jui (at the time magistrate of Hsing-kuo County, T'ai-ho's neighbor to the east) also noted that the population of Chi-an Prefecture was dense, that land and commercial opportunity were scarce, and that therefore many people were leaving the province altogether. He argued that more people would migrate within the province if it were not so hard to do so legally.^[51] Despite the difficulty, there were at least twenty-eight T'ai-ho men who emigrated to southern Kiangsi, entered county schools in that region as sheng-yuan , and qualified themselves as officials in the Hung-chih, Cheng-te, and Chia-ching eras (1488-1566). Around 1568, an official complaint was voiced that Hsin-feng County, about a hundred miles south of T'ai-ho, had in effect been seized and occupied by emigrants from Wan-an and T'ai-ho, even though they could not legally register there. It was asserted that most of the shopkeepers were outsiders and that 70-80 percent of the

land was in the hands of outsiders as well.^[52] Some Hsin-feng earnings were repatriated to T'ai-ho: the Kuo lineage temple in Ch'e-t'ien Ward (township 60) was funded in part from the proceeds of fields owned by kinsmen down in that county.^[53]

The other region that attracted T'ai-ho émigrés was extreme northwestern Hupei, about five hundred miles away, a turbulent and violent frontier zone in Ming times.^[54] A massive emigration of Kiangsi people into all parts of Hupei was underway in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.^[55] T'ai-ho émigrés concentrated in a few counties near the Shensi and Honan borders. Representatives of at least twenty-one T'ai-ho lineages settled in there, and soon at least fifty men from these émigré lineages achieved chü-jen degrees or entered the imperial colleges. By the 1570s, Liang Ju-hsiao and his son had organized in Yun-hsi County, near the Shensi border, a replica of the Liang lineage back in T'ai-ho, with its own endowed ancestral temple and school. Fourteen of these transplanted Liangs became sheng-yuan and eventually Ming officials.^[56] South of Yun-hsi, in Chu-shan County, Ou-yang Jen made similar kinds of arrangements, and the Ou-yang lineage there, like its parent back in T'ai-ho, came to be regarded as an unusually large one. Ou-yang Te (1496-1554) certainly considered these émigré Ou-yangs as kin; he once wrote them a letter congratulating eight of them for qualifying to take provincial examinations and scolding the others for their squabbling.^[57]

Bondage

While it can be stated with certainty that the sale of persons took place in T'ai-ho and that the upper class placed certain of its children in bondage, there is no way to tell whether these unfortunate males and females were then exported from their native county, or whether they were kept in family service somewhere in T'ai-ho itself. Was T'ai-ho's servile population a population of strangers? It is impossible to know. Judging from the few known surnames of individual bondsmen (Lin; Yang, meaning "sheep"), it appears that at least some were strangers to the county.

It is also unclear to what extent people in bondage reproduced. Nor is it clear whether bondage was hereditary, life-long, or for a stipulated term of years. It was surely a persistent institution, at least in a mild form, as witnessed by the "hereditary servants" of eighteenth-century T'ai-ho and the occasional field slaves observed there in the 1930s.^[58] In

Ming times, bondage was often mentioned in the obituaries of men and women of T'ai-ho's upper class as a troublesome issue in family management.

It was felt to be best when family servants were kept under benevolent but very strict control. It was stated, for example, of Hsiao Ch'uan (fl. 1540s, of Nan-ch'i, township 59) that "he didn't flog his slaves when they made sly excuses for their misbehavior; he would have them flogged for serious offenses, but then he would dismiss such incidents from his mind and forget that they had ever occurred."^[59] Yang Yin-ch'iu's wife, Madame Liang (1548-95), "carefully kept [the family quarters] locked and bolted. When she collected woven hemp cloth from the female slaves [nü-nu ], she would issue them raw hemp, grain, and vegetables. When [doling them food] from the jar, she would give them orders and examine them. 'Who in the world eats without working?' " she would ask. As manager of a large family in T'ai-ho (her husband, an official, was absent), Madame Liang "forbade the slaves to overstep the bounds and flout the family rules, but she would reward the hardworking ones and cherish those who showed a willingness to reform. Whenever the other wives thrashed the slaves too hard, she would weep and scream in an effort to stop the violence, on the grounds that slaves were, after all, human beings."^[60]

There existed a certain sense of moral responsibility for the welfare of faithful bondservants. For example, there came a point in the life of Liu Sui (1455-1533, of Liu-chia-kang, township 61) when he became poor. Yet despite his reduced circumstances, he "could not bear to abandon his slaves and have them go into the service of others"; and his servants were, reportedly, grateful for his determination to keep looking after them.^[61] Hu Chih's mother, poor as she was, kept two bonds-people, a man and a woman, both of whom were old and thin and had no other place to go.^[62]

Slaves in T'ai-ho were ordinarily assigned menial work as house servants and as field hands, but sometimes they, like eunuchs in the palace of the later Ming emperors, won the confidence of their masters and by degrees encroached upon matters of family government and made themselves "powerful" (hao ) in the process. The T'ai-ho gazetteer of 1579 issued a general warning about this matter. "Villainous slaves of the hereditary families are swallowing their masters and mistreating their helpless heirs," it stated. "This has created an atmosphere of growing insubordination and rebellion that numerous prosecutions and punishments have been unable to stop."^[63]

Indeed, sixteenth-century obituaries yield examples of what appears to have been an increasing aggressiveness on the part of T'ai-ho's bonds-men. In Kuan-ch'ao Ward (township 31), Kuo Ch'i-shih (1496-1573) was nearly ruined in some unspecified litigation in which "powerful slaves" brought "false" testimony against him.^[64]

For reasons unknown, one or more "powerful slaves" nearly beat to death the elder brother of Chang T'ing, a sixteenth-century T'ai-ho geomancer and physician. Chang T'ing was forced to sell personal property in order to finance legal prosecution of the offenders.^[65] On Hollow Street in T'ai-ho's western suburb lived Wang Jui, a sixteenth-century descendant of Wang Chih. Wang Jui was a merchant and part-time litigator. Among the component families of the Wang lineage, a "powerful slave" was bullying his young master. The young master complained to the lineage head (tsu-chang ), and when the head did nothing about it, Wang Jui took it upon himself to arrest the slave, flog him before the Wang ancestral temple, and charge him at the county yamen. "There is no need to thank me," said Wang Jui to the grateful young master. "My thought was to prevent the downfall of the Wang lineage, and that I succeeded in doing."^[66]

In Moon Hill Ward (township 32), Tseng I-ch'ing (1538-87) perceived that local custom had degenerated, with "sons selling their fathers' estates, slaves stealing their masters' properties, and the strong eating the flesh of the weak." He further noted that "in some of the old families of [T'ai-ho] city, the clothing of the slaves is as fine as that of the kinsmen themselves." Tseng thought the fault for that lay with the kinsmen. He enforced the appropriate status differences on his own estate and disciplined the menials, so that "none of them dared wield power, or disorder the family rules."^[67]

In the mid-seventeenth century, with the collapse of Ming rule in China, the upper class faced widespread and serious retaliation for the downward social mobility that its demographic behavior had for so long encouraged. For a long time, the elite people of T'ai-ho had exacerbated the situation by extending to their servile population a dangerously contradictory combination of privilege and repression, of empowerment and punishment. The same or worse was the case elsewhere in Chi-an Prefecture. In Yung-feng County, both slaves (nu-p'u ) and tenant farmers (tien-hu ) organized themselves into groups called "small compacts" (hsiao-yueh ) and revolted against their masters.^[68] In the period from 1645 to 1648, "tenants and powerful slaves" (tien-k'o hao-nu ) in Lu-ling, An-fu, and Yung-hsin Counties went on rampage under

the leadership of "leveler kings" (ch'an-p'ing wang ) who threatened to "level master and slave, noble and base, and rich and poor." They forced their way into the great residences, looted the storehouses, and put on finery. They tied and flogged the owners and then made servants of them. "We are all men," they reportedly said. "Why do you call us slaves? We'll reverse that from now on."^[69]

T'ai-ho County suffered the destruction of a murderous outlaw by the name of Liu Chin (or Ching), described as a former slave (p'u ) of an unnamed great local family. He was captured late in the Ming, and the magistrate was going to execute him; however, certain T'ai-ho men holding official status (shen-shih ) took bribes from Liu Chin and effectively interceded on his behalf. Some local people protested. The magistrate's answer to them was that Liu's followers would exact fearful revenge: "If he dies, there will be a rising and certain disaster for you T'ai-ho people. We don't want war out in there in the cantons."

In 1645, in the civil wars of the Ming-Ch'ing transition, "poor people" in the eastern cantons conducted food riots, and "powerful slaves [hao-nu han-p'u ] resisted their masters, formed gangs, and did bad things." In 1649, exslave Liu Chin and his forces seized and occupied the city of T'ai-ho for several months, until Ch'ing troops drove him out. In 1653, finally, Liu Chin was captured in the mountains along the Hunan border and executed.^[70]

It is time for a brief recapitulation. Just as the "economy" of T'ai-ho County in the Ming period is unknowable, its "demography" cannot be known either. What can be discussed are the changing styles of resource management by local elites and the demographic processes that affected those same elites. It is impossible to talk about T'ai-ho County in the Ming without becoming constantly aware of the presence of a robust two-class system there: an upper class of "managers" of various sorts who bore genealogical credentials and a lower class of menials, maids, concubines, bondservants, field families, laborers, small traders and the like who were without genealogical credentials. In the Ming, upward mobility from the lower class was unheard of. "Powerful slaves" were still slaves. (The lower-class revolts of the late Ming may have loosened things a little—they did elsewhere in China—but little is known of T'ai-ho County in the Ch'ing.) Downward mobility from the elite into the lower class was, however, a perennial possibility.

One may ask whether the demographic profile of the T'ai-ho elite can

be understood as a local example of a much wider phenomenon. It has recently been shown that the results of studies of Chinese microde-mography can in some respects be generalized to the region and nation and can lay groundwork for revising accepted notions of the larger trends of China's population history.^[71] Almost all of the work that has been done centers on the late Ming and Ch'ing, however, and uses line-age-kept genealogical records rather than county epitaphs as source material. In an earlier paper, I showed that T'ai-ho mortality rates (lower in the fifteenth century, higher in the sixteenth) mirror those given for south China generally in a 1973 study by Michel Cartier.^[72] But a great deal more work needs to be done in demographic study for the Sung, Yuan, and early Ming periods, and there is as yet little available on the regional or national scene to which to link the microdemography done in this chapter.

What can be emphasized here are connections between the demographic behavior of the upper class and other developments inside T'ai-ho over the course of the Ming. The expansion of the upper class (as shown in the male cohort born 1325-1399) coincides with a loving appreciation of the local landscape, the building or rebuilding of landed estates, the formation or reconstitution of common-descent groups, unusually high rates of recruitment into Ming government, and, as will be noted in part 3, a strong sense of county patriotism among T'ai-ho men inside Ming government itself. The contraction of the upper class (as seen in the cohort born 1425-1499) through increased rates of downward mobility and emigration coincides with a loss of interest in local landscape, the creation of powerful lineage institutions in place of the looser common-descent groups of the earlier period, an abrupt decline in the rates of bureaucratic recruitment, and, for the literati, the adoption of new intellectual orientations in which pride in one's native locality had no place.

Chapter 4
Patrilineal Groups and Their Transformation

Upper-class society in southern China, certainly in its T'ai-ho version, was not so much a society of individuals, or of families in the nuclear sense of that word, as a society thick with larger patrilineal structures. These structures did not emerge haphazardly. They were consciously and deliberately organized. Moreover, their history, which can be traced through the course of the Ming dynasty, clearly indicates that they underwent a qualitative evolutionary leap in nature and in function.

The majority of T'ai-ho's patrilineages were founded (or refounded) early in the Ming as "common-descent groups," as part of a determined effort to identify an upper class and to justify its existence in the light of the moral values of Confucianism. Later, in the sixteenth century, some of T'ai-ho's common-descent groups underwent a further transformation: into large and corporate "lineages," with special endowments of buildings and property, and institutions for the control and discipline of their memberships.^[1] The purpose of this chapter is to explore the questions how and why the people of T'ai-ho felt it essential to their identity and their welfare to make the exceptional efforts and pay the high costs necessary for the development of extrafamilial social organizations of the above kinds. What was the point of it all?

The Formation Of Common-Descent Groups

Patrilineal groups of one kind or another had long been a feature of the local social landscape. They had existed in T'ai-ho in the Sung (960-

1279) and Yuan (1279-1368). But T'ai-ho was very badly battered in the civil wars that engulfed south China in the 1350s and 1360s. After around 1370, when order was finally restored and Ming rule established, people began slowly to rebuild their homes and their lives. They also tried to reassemble what they could of the records of their genealogies. If the large quantity of early Ming testimony to these endeavors is any guide, creating (or re-creating) a genealogically credentialed society was for some reason a critically important component of local postwar social reconstruction. Local people were strongly encouraged to gather whatever they could of written evidence and oral tradition about their ancestors and to organize this information into books or files (p'u ). What was going on?

The evidence available to answer this question consists of a large number of detailed prefaces and colophons to genealogical books which have since been lost, or are unavailable. In addition, there is often considerable genealogical information to be found in the obituaries of individuals. Altogether, these references provide information about 141 genealogically distinct common-descent groups, large and small (not counting local branches).^[2]

The stories that these genealogies provide shed some light on the settlement history of T'ai-ho. It turns out that ninety-six common-descent groups considered themselves immigrants: forty-three from other parts of Kiangsi Province, and smaller numbers from the Nanking area (twenty-five) and from Hunan (twelve). The immigrants often arrived in T'ai-ho during times of national turmoil: thirty-four came in the tenth century, and forty-eight in the thirteenth. Only two came in the fourteenth century, at the time of the Yuan collapse; and it is clear that T'ai-ho was full in Ming times, no longer attractive to new settlers, and indeed it became an exporter of population rather than an importer.

The original immigrants, as recalled by their upper-class descendants many generations later, turn out to have been minor local officials in many instances (forty); they came to T'ai-ho, liked what they saw, and decided to stay. Six others were military officers; two were medical practitioners; two were geomancers; and two others moved to T'ai-ho as uxorilocal husbands in families already established there. A large number (thirty-two) of founding ancestors are known by name only, without any further description at all.

It would be inadvisable to accept any single founding story as historical fact. The reconstitution of common-descent groups in early Ming

T'ai-ho was undertaken in an atmosphere of competition for social prestige, even while it was part of a high-minded Confucian sociomoral crusade. And hard evidence about founding ancestors often proved vanishingly scarce. In twenty-one cases, the compiler asserted that the family genealogy had been lost or destroyed in the civil upheavals of the mid-fourteenth century; in another twenty-one cases, the compiler stated that his was the first attempt ever to draw up any kind of genealogy for his common-descent group.

Anecdotes show just how hard it could be to preserve or find any evidence at all about one's ancestors. In 1384, Lung Chih-yun showed Hsiao Ch'i six dedicatory poems and descriptions written by local literati, which were all that remained of what had been, before the wars, a large family library. Hsiao Ch'i knew something about five of the six writers, and he wrote down what he knew in a preface to the tiny file of papers.^[3] In 1366, Liu Sung (1321-81) happened to find in a wine-shop in the prefectural city of Chi-an an old official recommendation written ten years earlier for a friend, Kuo Yü-ch'ing, authorizing him to take the provincial civil service examinations—which he later failed. Liu retrieved the old paper and gave it to the Kuo family, as something they would surely cherish. In his colophon to this document, Hsiao Ch'i speculated that his own lost papers had probably been put to use somewhere as lids for medicine jars or as towels to wipe up dirty tables.^[4]

The Lo of Tung-ch'an Lane inside T'ai-ho city still treasured a deed for a sacrificial field, dating to the early twelfth century. The old deed was a chance possession and their only concrete link to the past.^[5] The rest of their past was reclaimed from an elder who recited from memory what he knew of the family's genealogy. The Tseng of Nan-ch'i Ward (township 4) also had nothing but the oral testimony of old people to rely on when they drew up their genealogy early in the Ming.^[6]

Chou Shih-hsiu recounted how when his family was forced to flee local violence in 1360, his father packed the family genealogy, together with an imperial patent of Sung date that had been issued to an ancestor, into a silk bag which he attached to a carrying pole.

His idea [wrote Chou] was that in case of emergency, he would abandon the pole, grab the bag, and hide. But the pole bearer knew nothing of this. Arriving at a place called Fen-shui, the bearer got tired of the weight. Guessing that the bag contained paintings, he said: "Our lives are in danger; why am I carrying paintings?" So he detached the silk bag and threw it away. Ten li further on, someone noticed that the bag was missing, and the bearer replied

truthfully when asked about it. At once they went back to get it, and though they searched for over a month, the bag was never found. My father got sick with grief and anger and died.^[7]

Early in the Ming era, fearing imminent confiscation of his properties by the local officials, Tax Captain Hsiao Yen-ming of Chang-ch'iao (Camphor Bridge Ward, township 41) hid the family genealogy in a monk's cell in a local Buddhist temple; but when the panic was over, the genealogy had disappeared. It seems someone had stupidly mistaken it for an old calendar and burned it. A nephew was later able to reconstruct seven generations using his father's recollection of what the genealogy had contained.^[8]

A sixteenth-century writer explained that throughout Chi-an Prefecture (of which T'ai-ho was a component county), big and old families treasured their genealogies as much as emperors treasured imperial seals; but he noted that few of those genealogies were deep, and people were considered fortunate if they had even one or two bits of hard evidence that linked them back to the Sung or Yuan.^[9] Indeed, all the Ts'ai family had by way of evidentiary link to its past was a very truncated genealogy inscribed on an uncle's tombstone.^[10] The Hu of Ho-ch'i Ward (township 65) had lost their genealogy in the late Yuan wars, but had better luck than the Ts'ai because they were able to reconstruct ten generations based on epitaphs and other evidence.^[11]

The doubtfulness of the evidence that some common-descent groups advanced to establish their ancestry is particularly striking in the case of the Liu of Sha-ch'i (Sand Creek Ward, township 22). One commentator states that Liu Ching-an hid the family genealogy behind a wall when Sha-ch'i Ward was overrun in the late Yuan wars. When he retrieved it, he found it had rotted, and so he had a student-boarder (kuan-jen ) reassemble and recopy it.^[12] The story sounds straightforward enough—but a later commentator contradicts it. He states that the original genealogy was lost altogether and that evidence of the Liu past was uncovered only in 1410, when a nephew of Liu Ching-an's unearthed several dated dedicatory inscriptions in the ruins of one of the family's old buildings.^[13]

It must be emphasized, however, that there was a crucial, almost essential, public dimension to the compiling of genealogies, which at first sight would appear to have been purely family-centered documents. Men who prepared their families' genealogies certainly felt some compulsion to show them to respected outsiders, and to secure their favor-

able comment and endorsement. Early in the Ming, the best way for the compilers to achieve this was to take their genealogies to the capital of Nanking (after 1421, Peking) and have one or more of the native sons of T'ai-ho who were serving there as high-ranking imperial officials write the endorsement. To have one's genealogy read and approved by one of these eminent native sons was, in effect, to be granted a kind of ticket of admission into an emerging T'ai-ho social elite. Wang Chih wrote endorsements for the genealogies of seventy-four common-de-scent groups of T'ai-ho; Yang Shih-ch'i wrote sixty-three, and Ch'en Hsun (1385-1462) forty-five (other writers wrote forty-seven). Some compilers secured endorsements from more than one of these high officials, so there is some overlap in the numbers.

What did it mean to be admitted into a T'ai-ho social elite? Why was an endorsed genealogy a requirement for admission? These questions evoked much discussion. Researching family history partly served practical and psychological needs. As Yang Shih-ch'i noted in his preface to the genealogy of the Lo of Shu-yuan (Academy Ward, township 1): "There is no descendant who does not desire to trace his origins, to discover where he came from, and record it, weaving in as he does so his thoughts for his own descendants."^[14] "Why compile a genealogy?" asked Yang in a preface to another genealogy.

The aim is to make clear one's roots and origins, and to discriminate between those close and those distant. It's like a tree, whose branches and twigs spread everywhere, even though all originate in the same main stem. Likewise the kinfolk in a family. They share the same matter-energy, but they become once and then twice removed, and then they fall outside the mourning grades, until finally they become as separate and distant as strangers. Yet they all descend from one man's body. So how can one not compile a genealogy that embraces everyone, from the original man to the strangers?^[15]

The arboreal metaphor was never far from the commentators' pens. According to Ch'en Hsun, a long family line "is like a tree on a great mountain, or in a broad valley. Its roots are deep. The trunk, limbs, branches, and leaves proliferate and spread, shading many a mound and gully."^[16] A good ancestor leaves behind him a legacy (tse ), which, wrote Yang Shih-ch'i, "is like a great tree on a high mountain, growing deeper the longer it is blasted by wind and sun and snow. The leaves, branches, and trunk may be battered to nothing, but if the roots survive, the tree will grow again with vigor when one day a milder climate returns."^[17] And how is it that the great junipers and southernwoods branch so densely, reaching the clouds and giving shade from the sun?

They have deep roots. "Now," continued Yang, "suddenly risen families prosper in the morning and wither by evening. They burst forth, and as rapidly decline, because they lack such roots. And what are those roots? Virtue and goodness, that is all."^[18]

History's painful lesson for T'ai-ho was that one could not place trust in material legacies like land or money to perpetuate one's line. The writers insisted that a family legacy had to be planted in different soil, soil whose main constituent was Confucian education. It was not wealth, not high office, but education that perpetuated a patriline. Without education, no one could write a genealogy, update it, or transmit it down the generations. Wang Chih insisted that as long as its members kept up a tradition of study, a descent line could survive financial ruin and continue forever.^[19] Yang Shih-ch'i wrote that a branch of his own line had survived the loss of its considerable wealth in the late Yuan wars because its true inheritance lay in education, not in property.^[20] He approved the pending marriage of a junior kinsman with a girl of the Wang of Shan-tung Ward (township 44) because those Wang, though undistinguished, were an old and good family. "In the future when my descendants discuss marriage," he counseled, "they need only seek out honest and dutiful families, no matter whether they are rich or poor. Marriages may be contracted with families of impoverished students or landowners, provided that they are virtuous and good people."^[21]

Confucian education helped encourage evidentiary honesty in genealogical research, which was in turn useful if one wanted one's pedigree endorsed. If a family could not trace its line of descent back any further than the great-great-grandfather, then, reluctantly, it had to begin the pedigree there. "It is the acme of unfiliality," wrote Wang Chih, "to make false assertions about the identities of one's ancestors."^[22]

Genealogy, then, afforded sure knowledge of personal identity. It was a form of psychic insurance against unpredictable personal tragedy. Yuan Pen-ch'ien lost both his parents when he was only a baby, and was raised by a grandmother. "What let him know where his ancestors came from, and who his kinsmen were, was the existence of a genealogy," wrote Yang Shih-ch'i. "So we see why a genealogy is essential."^[23]

A living man will one day become an ancestor himself and will do well to think how best to build the kind of legacy that will inspire his descendants to remember him. But an excellent thought like that can never arise unless a man lives already in a society where ancestral accomplishments are customarily recorded and are therefore known. And when a living man reads about his ancestors, "he will," wrote Yang

Shih-ch'i, "realize in shock how short he himself has come, and he will begin thinking about how to improve himself, so as not to leave shame to his own descendants. Any man's descendant who is eager to do good will understand this feeling . . . which is why the making of a genealogy is no small affair."^[24]

Such thoughts, guided by genealogy, helped generate good social or-tier through the whole county of T'ai-ho. Public virtue grew from seeds that germinated in the rich soil of private, family-centered descent lines. Ch'en Hsun argued that genealogical record keeping ignited generosity, filial piety, and fraternal submission in this and that family; and that these virtues then, by extension, engendered righteous commitments over larger and extrafamilial social fields.^[25] "Indeed," exclaimed Yang Shih-ch'i, "a genealogy is something the benevolent man puts his mind to. A shih [an aspiring leader] carries out benevolence first in his family, and when after that he extends it to his locale and on to the whole realm, it is by way of an extension from his family."^[26]

The honest and sincere endeavors of all the hundred or more pedigree compilers of early-fifteenth-century T'ai-ho thus had the cumulative aim of shaping a local social order whose fine qualities, in the testimony of its own native sons, stood second to none in Ming China. Yang Shih-ch'i had seen other parts of Ming China. When he compared them to his native T'ai-ho, their defects struck him forcefully. So he commented in an inscription he wrote on request for the Stone Hill Academy, a family school maintained by the Stone Hill Hsiao of township 10. Yang described the Hsiao genealogy and discussed the history of the school. Following that, he rejoiced in the T'ai-ho social order as a whole:

I venture to say that what is estimable about the customs of our prefecture, something that other prefectures cannot match, is that here people devote themselves to righteousness, observe propriety, and value a steadfast sense of honor. No matter how poor people become, they never cease studying the classics. No matter how low they fall, they can still recite from the Classic of Filial Piety and the Analects and grasp their general meaning. There is a school on every city street and in every rural valley. Whenever the rich and those of high status encounter a shih wearing the scholar's robe, they always greet him respectfully and don't dare slight him.

And it is here that hereditary patrilines are especially esteemed. If [a man whose] patriline is of low origin achieves wealth and status, people will not accept him as an equal; and that man, for his part, will not dare place himself above others on account of his wealth and status. That is how customs are in my home area.

How do I know these customs are rare? I have traveled up the Yangtze to Hunan. I have been to Hupei, and through the Huai region, several thousand li altogether. There have been times when I've gone several days without seeing any sign of a school at all. I've seen how people live in such places. The simple people fish and farm; the smart ones profit as merchants. The rich and powerful who are the local elites do not devote themselves to the classics or respect the robe-wearing shih or discriminate among the hereditary patrilines.^[27]

Nonetheless, the new wave of genealogy writing that Yang Shih-ch'i's many endorsements encouraged was not universally welcomed. Indeed, Hu Kuang (1370-1418), a colleague from Chi-shui County, about thirty miles north of T'ai-ho, is reported as having strongly disapproved of it:

Hu [Kuang] hated to preface genealogies for people, because most of them were clapped together and unreliable. But Yang [Shih-ch'i] prefaced genealogies for more than fifty families, more than any other literatus had ever done before. Hu Kuang's strictness edged toward righteousness, and Yang's generosity toward benevolence. But Yang's writing was appropriate to his high position. He lived to great old age, and he enjoyed an era of peace and prosperity, which was truly a happy juncture in world history. Those who chose a parsimonious view of things [in times such as that] are hardly worth taking seriously.^[28]

Thus Yang Shih-ch'i and his T'ai-ho colleagues, occupying some of the Ming dynasty's highest positions in the early and middle decades of the fifteenth century, made it their extraofficial duty to get to know people from their home county and to lend their prestige and authority to the formation, or reconstitution, of a society of certified common-descent groups, whose claims to ancestry were based as much as could be managed upon whatever facts could be ascertained from research into old documents and inscriptions and from interviews with elders. The outcome of these efforts was, as Yang Shih-ch'i noted, a hierarchy of such groups, and a group's place in the hierarchy depended upon whether it had a deep and well-founded genealogy featuring notable ancestors or only the shallowest of descent lines without notable ancestors. There was never any intention of making all common-descent groups equal.

The elite descent lines of T'ai-ho were tagged with a variety of special labels: "old families" (chiu chia ); "hereditary families" (shih-chia ); "robe-and-cap lineages" (i-kuan chih tsu ); "office holding lineages" (kuan-tsu ); "scholar-gentry lineages" (shih-tsu ); and the like. Ch'en Mo (Yang Shih-ch'i's uncle and tutor) noted that common people did not bother to keep genealogical records, so it was the shih-ta-fu (scholar-

official elite) who kept and updated such records "over a hundred or a thousand years, and [wrote down their descent lines] on sheets of paper."^[29]

Even so, very few such elite descent lines persisted intact over very many generations, as Yang Shih-ch'i explained:

What the world styles old families are those whose ancestors were noted in their time for their great merits, their virtuous righteousness, or their literary study. They are found in the dynastic histories, or in the written works of great men and literati. When posterity reads about them, it always wonders about the fate of their descendants. It turns out that scarcely ten of a hundred have any descendants left. Of those ten, only two or three have good descendants who haven't shamed their ancestors. Is this because the original legacy was poor? Or is it because the descendants themselves were unequal to the task of carrying on? In either case, it must be that Heaven didn't protect them.

In our county [of T'ai-ho], there once were easily several tens of surnames that were "old families" based upon merit, virtue, or letters achieved in good times. Then came troubled times, and their descendants died out, or they scattered, roiling like waves or curls of smoke, with the result that many people nowadays who are good and conscientious and do not shame their forebears don't realize that they are actually the descendants of an [illustrious] ancestor.

The P'eng surname of Yueh-ch'ih [Moon Pond Ward, township 56] is the only one known to have lived together more than ten generations, with old and young in rank-order day and night, and who do things together as a group, so that everyone acknowledges that they are the descendants of a certain definite ancestor.^[30]

The high-minded view of T'ai-ho's common-descent groups that Yang Shih-ch'i and his colleagues championed was often blind to the vulgar (liu-su ) thoughts and behavior of the real world. From the far-away aerie of Peking, local society's blemishes were sometimes hard to see, which favored a clearer perception of its better tendencies. Occasionally, however, there were rude surprises. One day, Wang Chih happened to mention to Yang that he had endorsed a genealogy submitted to him by Yang Meng-pien, a very rich man from township 43. In it, Meng-pien claimed descent from a line in Yang Shih-ch'i's genealogy that Yang Shih-ch'i knew to be extinct. Wang confessed that he had simply taken Yang Meng-pien at his word. Yang Shih-ch'i knew of those Yangs, and he knew that in fact they had lost track of their descent. He wrote a note to that effect for insertion in his own genealogy so as to discourage any future attempt on their part to interlope.^[31]

Lineage interloping was a problem in T'ai-ho. It was a problem because of the very prestige hierarchy that Yang Shih-ch'i and others favored. One learns about interloping mainly in those instances where it was foiled. For example, in 1420, two members of the Ch'ing-ch'i Ch'en descent group of T'ai-ho city passed their provincial exams and then decided for the first time to compile a genealogy. On the basis of surviving evidence, they could trace themselves back no further than a great-great-grandfather, a government medical teacher. However, they believed they were an offshoot of the Liu-ch'i (Willow Creek) Ch'en, a line with a long and distinguished pedigree, but they had no proof for that belief. Intimidated no doubt by the opinions of Yang Shih-ch'i and the others in questions like this, they contented themselves with the meager results of their research and a lowly place in T'ai-ho's prestige hierarchy of common-descent groups.^[32]

Similarly, the high-level climate of opinion that insisted upon concrete evidence persuaded Liu I (1361-1429) to start his genealogy four generations back instead of intruding upon the Chu-lin Liu, a very distinguished kin-group to whom he thought he was related. Yang Shih-ch'i commented:

Our area is noted for its generations of classics students who wear the cap and robe. As Liu I himself knows very well, many of them can record no more in the way of a pedigree than he, so he can have no regrets [about the shallowness of his own]. He has set his family in line with [the good customs] of the area, and from this promising start onwards, there will surely be no end to [the good things that] the minds of the benevolent people and gentlemen [of his family will focus upon].^[33]

It was often tempting for representatives of established elite lineages to admit into their genealogies interlopers of the same surname who were rich and wanted to buy social prestige. The temptation must often have been yielded to. Rebuffs may have been rare. It is clear that they were occasions to celebrate. Thus the Kuo of Kuan-ch'ao Ward (township 31) "refused to record [in their genealogy] unrelated people of the same Kuo surname, even if they happened to live in Kuan-ch'ao; and if a member without male heir adopted someone suspected of being non-kin, he was simply recorded as having died without issue. They rejected unrelated people, even if they were rich and noble. They admitted all relatives, even if they were humble and poor."^[34]

Chou Shih-hsiu recalled how his father once had angrily refused to sell an imperial patent issued to an ancestor to someone who bore the Chou surname but was unrelated.^[35] Chou Shih-hsiu's family lived in

Yang-kang Ward (township 55). The would-be interloper was a Chou of Ta-yuan Ward (township 33). The Ta-yuan Chou were rich but lacked a deep pedigree. They later decided they were related to the famous Neo-Confucian thinker Chou Tun-i (1017-73). They went so far as to add his biography to their genealogical file. Liu Sung wrote a colophon to their file in which he said he saw no proof of such a relationship and said he doubted truth of the claim.^[36]

It appears there was abroad in T'ai-ho a general attitude of skepticism about the assertions people made about their descent. "Vulgar people," wrote Yang Shih-ch'i, "cling to their prejudices and accuse others of lying if they boast a distinguished ancestor, or of being the descendant of bandits if they do not. Yet while spurious claims do exist, most are definitely genuine."^[37]

A descent group contaminant of a very different kind was the custom, common at least in the fourteenth century, of adopting children who were not kin. At least two of T'ai-ho's high literati personally experienced this problem.

When Yang Shih-ch'i was a baby, his father died, and his mother married Lo Tzu-li. At the age of five or so, Yang was excluded for no apparent reason from the Lo ancestral rites, and he burst into tears. Only then did his mother tell him that he was not a Lo at all, but a Yang. As a child of six, as he later recalled it, he fashioned his own little ancestral altar, where he secretly burned incense before the tablets representing his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather; eventually Lo Tzu-li, his stepfather, discovered what he was doing and was so moved by the child's devotions that he took the necessary legal steps to restore Yang Shih-ch'i to his original surname.^[38] The grandfather of Liang Ch'ien (1366-1418) had been adopted into the Chung family, and Liang Ch'ien was Chung Ch'ien until, as an adult, he himself got his original surname officially restored.^[39]

Surname restoration was not so easy. An adopted child certainly felt moral obligations toward the family who had borne the expense of raising him. Ch'en Ts'ung-lung, for example, was really Kuo Ts'ung-lung. But it was the Ch'en, an "alien" patriline, that had raised him, admitted him to its sacrifices, educated him, and given him his name and identity. Was it not ungrateful of him, then, to want to restore his surname to the original Kuo? Chou Shih-hsiu thought not. By restoring his original surname, he was removing himself as a source of disorder

(luan ) in his adopted descent group; he was really making the Ch'en line pure and uniform (ch'un-i ) once again.^[40]

Liu Sung's brother Liu Yeh (d. 1386) described an even more tangled case:

There were sixteen local [T'ai-ho] men whom the county magistrate recommended as refined talents [hsiu-ts'ai ] and sent to sit for the provincial exams in 1382. Liu Ssu-te was one. He and I shared the same surname, so I asked him his ancestry. "My surname is really Fu," he said in tears. "When I was a child, I lost my father. My stepfather Liu taught me and got me established, so I took his surname. I'm aware of my obligation to continue the ancestral rites, and I want to restore the Fu surname, but I'm afraid that would show ingratitude for my education. Yet by keeping the Liu name, I'm forgetting my origins. What am I to do? Moreover, my father was a live-in son-in-law to the Hsiao, and he inherited the Hsiao ancestral rites. Now that he's dead, I venture to think that there is no one to succeed him in continuing those rites. What am I to do about that?"^[41]

Liu Yeh urged him by all means to restore his original surname.

The adoption of nonkin is hard to account for as a strategy aimed at strengthening the descent group. Perhaps it was felt that the descent group was somehow better served by a capable outside adoptee than by a kinsman, but the available literature contains no explicit statement to that effect. Indeed, it may have been the case that when nonkin were adopted, it was for reasons having to do with the nuclear family and not the descent group as such.^[42]

At all events, the high literati of T'ai-ho invariably championed the purity of blood in the common-descent group, and they always urged adoptees to restore their surnames (fu hsing ) in the strongest possible terms.

As of the mid-fifteenth century, then, pushed from below by socio-psychological need and local social competition and given refined shape from on high by its great social arbiters, T'ai-ho evolved in the direction of a well-ordered society of patrilineal common-descent groups, their pure-blood identities established on the basis of honest research into known facts, and their place in the local hierarchy of common-de-scent groups assigned according to the depth of their genealogical roots and the good reputations of their ancestors.

The reconstituted common-descent groups of T'ai-ho regularly identified themselves with, and sometimes seem to have controlled outright,

a city sector or rural ward, which became for them what David Johnson has styled a "choronym." The choronym was regularly featured in the title of the genealogical book that was the descent group's constitutional charter (consisting of its body of rules, its history, and its membership roster). Thus we have the Ch'ing-ch'i (Clear Creek) Ch'en, the T'ao-yuan (Peach Spring) Hsiao, the Nan-ching (South Path) Hu, and on and on. Though the genealogical books were always compiled by kinsmen, it does appear that it was advisable for groups to obtain the recognition of at least one outsider who was not a kinsman, by way of a detailed written preface or other written token of acknowledgment, in order to be accepted into the larger family of T'ai-ho common-descent groups.

Thus constituted and recognized, the common-descent groups of T'ai-ho were expected to serve as bulwarks against social decay. A crucial weapon in the fight against social decay was the very information that the groups collected, stored, updated, and transmitted. Yin Ch'ang-lung (ca. 1369-ca. 1417) made that point clear. What happened when information about descent was lost or falsified? Two things. When people rose from low and obscure origins to wealth and status, they often felt shame for their real ancestors and found ways to go by some different surname. On the other side of the coin, hapless people of powerful and famous pedigree fell into bondage because their closest kin were ashamed to have them near. Sons began to divide their inherited property while their parents were still alive; people began looking upon their living kin as strangers; no announcements about marriages or funerals were circulated; and no aid was extended to the poor and distressed.^[43]

In other words, in the absence of accurate descent reckoning, what resulted was meanness, strife, rootlessness, and social isolation. What resulted was, generally, social decay. Thus the practice of conscientious fact gathering about one's own line of blood descent constituted the very gateway into the great arena of collective moral and social order for T'ai-ho, and for China as a whole. The inward looking exclusivity of cherishing pure blooded descent was understood to create, almost as though by magic, generalized social order. Genealogy was absolutely essential to the formation of the common-descent group, and it was precisely the common-descent group (rather than the nuclear family or the individual) that made possible the expression in the real world of Confucian social and moral values.

From Common-Descent Groups To Lineages

Sixteenth-century sources afford a quite different impression of the social landscape of kinship systems in T'ai-ho County. For one thing, the native sons of the sixteenth century whose collected works survive were never as highly placed as officials as their fifteenth-century counterparts had been, and their knowledge of T'ai-ho society was less comprehensive. Ou-yang To (1487-1544) admitted outright that he spent too much time in official duties to learn much about T'ai-ho society.^[44] The constant stream of T'ai-ho visitors—taxpayers, bureaucratic hopefuls, lower ranking colleagues and the like—that had come to Nanking or Peking and paid courtesy calls on the likes of Yang Shih-ch'i or Wang Chih and asked them to preface a genealogy or write a special message had pretty much dried up by the sixteenth century.

Yet the quantity of information, though diminished, is still substantial; and the information conveys a picture of a society where the common-descent groups have gone beyond data collecting and recognition seeking to develop a truly corporate existence, with collective assets in land and rice and silver, and disciplinary powers over their memberships. There are twenty-four known examples of this transformation.

Some prefacing of genealogical books still went on in the sixteenth century. Some prefaces were new, but many were for updated versions of genealogies whose main texts had been assembled a century before. Thus the rate of admission of new common-descent groups into the elite society of T'ai-ho had clearly slowed; of the 141 groups known, only 22 are mentioned for the first time in the sixteenth century or later.

Patricia Ebrey and James Watson draw a useful definitional distinction between "descent groups," which have few corporate activities, and corporate "lineages," which have many. In T'ai-ho, the groups represented by these designations are clearly consecutive stages in an evolutionary development. The fifteenth century featured the formation of descent groups, by way of evidentiary research undertaken by members and endorsement supplied by outsiders. In the sixteenth century, some of these descent groups evolved into lineages. Lineage creation entailed at least four new phenomena: (1) a downgrading of the importance of indisputable evidence for establishing distant kinship connections; (2) the construction of elaborate temples in honor of original founding

ancestors; (3) the creation of new means of finance for intensified ritual and other activities; and (4) the elaboration of regulatory and judicial mechanisms within and among the corporate kinship groups.

Interesting examples exist to show that the rules of evidence insisted upon in the fifteenth century were no longer strictly followed in the sixteenth. This dispensation opened the way to the formation of some new and very large kinship conglomerates.

Two K'ang descent groups of T'ai-ho were the Chueh-yü K'ang of township 52 and the Lei-kang (Thunder Hill) K'ang of township 62. The founder of the Chueh-yü K'ang group had originally emigrated from Nanking to T'ai-ho in the Sung period. Sometime after that a branch had moved to Thunder Hill, following which, supposedly sometime in the twelfth century, one K'ang Chung-yen moved from Thunder Hill to Chueh-yü Ward as a live-in son-in-law to the Chueh-yü Chou. K'ang Chung-yen's descendants kept their original surname and stayed and multiplied in Chueh-yü.

Hu Chih (1517-85) knew these K'angs. Several of their junior members helped him organize a community compact (hsiang-yueh ) in their part of T'ai-ho, "where the land is flat, and the great surnames live dispersed about like chesspieces." One day Hu Chih made a personal visit to the K'ang home in Chueh-yü. "Their old, high-roofed residences sit [as densely crowded together] as the scales of a fish or the teeth of a comb," he wrote. "In the crowd of greeters you could spot the elders by their thick eyebrows, white hair, tasseled caps, laced shoes, and attentively reverential air. The excellence of the younger men you could tell by the way they invited me to sit, and brought a basin, moving neither too fast nor too slow."^[45]

The K'ang genealogies had all been destroyed in the late Yuan wars, and proof that the Chueh-yü and Lei-kang K'ang were kin had disappeared. Earnest research efforts by men of both groups early in the Ming had failed to find any evidence for the presumed connection. Accordingly, Lo Ch'in-shun's (1465-1547) preface to the Thunder Hill genealogy relates a wholly different founding legend from that of the Chueh-yü and makes no mention of any possible link at all.^[46] Yet in this same sixteenth century, while some K'ang fed Lo Ch'in-shun one story, some other K'ang fed Yin T'ai (1506-79, of Yung-hsin County, west of T'ai-ho) another story altogether. In this latter story, the Thunder Hill and the Chueh-yü groups merge and become the T'ai-ho K'ang. Yin T'ai

explained: "people [nowadays] hold ancient study in high regard, and excellent students from both K'ang groups, who had been doing well [as sheng-yuan ] at school, felt badly that because their genealogy was not in order, it was impossible for them to teach and inspire the various family heads. So they consulted with all the elders and compiled a joint and expanded genealogy, with the first T'ai-ho ancestor as [founder] of one permanent great descent line [ta tsung ]."^[47] Thus when missing evidence threatened to frustrate a wave of enthusiasm in favor of lineage merger, the difficulty was simply swept aside. This particular merger joined two groups of approximately equal prestige and strength.

Likewise, the sixteenth century saw the coming together of the many scattered Teng people of T'ai-ho. They lived in at least three different localities there. Earlier on, Teng Ting (d. 1504) contributed from his own official salary to try to organize his kinsmen into a commune, a project that, "due to exhaustion," he eventually had to give up. Nor was he able, though he tried, to revise and update an earlier Teng genealogy. Later, his third son failed at the same task. Perhaps the problem was lost data. Finally in 1533, three Teng juniors who were sheng-yuan (county students) completed the genealogical revision with the advice and financial support of some of the Teng elders. This was the first complete genealogy ever done for the Teng, who had already been living some twenty generations in T'ai-ho. The genealogy was printed, and one of the juniors asked Lo Hung-hsien (1504-64) for a preface. Lo was a renowned official and Confucian thinker, but he lived in Chi-shui, two counties to the north; and he made no attempt to verify the accuracy of the research that he endorsed.^[48]

Similarly with the Ch'ens. In the fifteenth century, there were at least four distinct common-descent groups of the Ch'en surname in T'ai-ho, each with a founding story completely different from that of any of the others. Of these, the Willow Creek Ch'en were the largest and most distinguished. Grand Secretary Ch'en Hsun was a Nan-liao Ch'en; and as he explained in a message to a friend of his who was a Willow Creek Ch'en, the two common-descent groups were unrelated. The Willow Creek founder had immigrated in the tenth century, whereas the Nan-liao founder had come in the early Yuan, three centuries later; and the two groups had no common ancestors.^[49] Nothing could be more clear-cut than that. Or could it? Around 1570, Ch'en Ch'ang-chi, a Willow Creek Ch'en, offered an extended argument (which, strangely, he placed in an obituary for a grandmother, née Lung) that in fact the Nan-liao and Willow Creek Ch'en were the same, if one went far enough back in

history. He asserted that Ch'en Hsun had been very reluctant to declare the two Ch'en as separate groups. "Many of the old families and great houses of our county trace themselves to ancestors who lived in the Chou or Han," he insisted, "and surely they're not the only ones who descend from an historically verifiable original ancestor."^[50] So, another merger.

The Kuo case shows how kin-group unions might involve more than two parties and thus grow to enormous size. In the fourteenth century, Liu Sung found the descent record of the Kuo of Kuan-ch'ao (township 31) a confused jumble of fragments, full of gaps and copying errors.^[51] Early in the fifteenth century, Liang Ch'ien reviewed the corrected record and noted that it had been improved in the light of new evidence.^[52] A few decades later, Ch'en Hsun (whose second wife was a Kuan-ch'ao Kuo) wrote a detailed preface to a newly revised genealogy in which, miraculously, all the evidence fit without gap or doubtful link. (Here the acknowledged problem was that certain outsiders of the Kuo surname were trying to insinuate themselves into the Kuan-ch'ao pedigree.) The founding story, related for the first time publicly by Ch'en Hsun, now had it that the Kuan-ch'ao Kuo were all descended from an official who had made his home there in 878, in the time of the Huang Ch'ao rebellion. His four sons had all moved south to Wan-an County. Then a great-grandson of the second of them had migrated back to T'ai-ho for good, thus becoming the first Kuan-ch'ao ancestor.^[53]

The greatest scion of the Kuan-ch'ao Kuo was Kuo Tzu-chang (1543-1618), an important Ming provincial official and writer. By his own testimony, he had a leading hand in establishing linkages among several large Kuo lineage branches (descendants of the settler of 878), by way of making exchanges of genealogical information. Kuo stated that, altogether, the original founder had produced some eight thousand male descendants as of the year 1600.^[54] In a letter addressed to the heads of the "five" Kuo lineages, Kuo Tzu-chang said that they currently numbered some "several myriad" people altogether.^[55] The number five somehow stuck. Despite the number five, Kuo never enumerates any more than four, two in Wan-an County and two in T'ai-ho. He never mentions the Kuo of nearby Ta-kang (township 29 in T'ai-ho), who had in Ch'en Hsun's time laid a vague claim to descent from one of the four ancient Kuo brothers but were no longer making that claim in the sixteenth century.^[56] Nor does he mention the Kuo of Kao-p'ing (township 61 in T'ai-ho), who had made an equally vague claim to the same descent in the fifteenth century and were still making it in the sixteenth.^[57]

(The Ta-kang Kuo, themselves a huge group in the fifteenth century with some eight local branches and three thousand undistinguished descendants, boasted that they were the oldest and largest of all the Kuo in T'ai-ho.)

The Kuo case shows (1) that acts of recognition of kinship connections among already large lineages could create huge aggregations, "several myriad" in the Kuo case and (2) that there was some picking and choosing as to just which lineages of the same surname were to be admitted into the aggregation. There are at least three other T'ai-ho examples of Kuo-style lineage conglomerates. The purposes behind their formation is not entirely clear. At the very least, these unions absorbed educated talents and created wider opportunities for social interaction.^[58]

Besides mergers and unions, another kinship enterprise of the sixteenth century was the construction of elaborate temples to original founding ancestors. This was new. The orthodox cult of ancestral piety that T'ai-ho people observed in the fifteenth century restricted itself to modest shrines to immediate forbears rather than lavish temples to distant founders of unknown or doubtful identity.

However, there was a time in T'ai-ho, in the poorly known era of the Sung and Yuan, when it apparently was not rare for the richer lineages or common-descent groups to consign the guardianship of their ancestral cults to Buddhist or Taoist temples. As Liu Sung pointed out, people had once felt churches to be safer and more stable than lay families as protective institutions. The Yueh of Ho-ch'i Ward (township 65) had once entrusted its ancestral cult to a nearby Buddhist temple.^[59] In the late thirteenth century, the Tseng of Mei-shan (township 3) delegated the management of their cult to a local Taoist temple; they also had cast and installed there a bronze image of the Jade Emperor, the Taoist god coeval with Heaven and Earth, as their lord and family guardian.^[60] Yang Shih-ch'i's genealogy, lost in the late Yuan wars, had once been cut into stone and kept in a Taoist temple as well.^[61] Thus in a way, the sixteenth-century construction of ancestral temples, though under lay rather than religious auspices, represents a revival of a lavish tradition of much earlier times.

At least a dozen examples of sixteenth-century temples built in honor of original founding ancestors can be found in the literature. The Ch'en of Willow Creek built one of them:

In 1541, Ch'en Te-ming, who had been assistant surveillance commissioner [of Shantung Province, 5A], and Ch'en Te-wen, [vice director, 5B, in the] Ministry of Works, conferred and said: "In antiquity, high officials used to have hereditary temples, and the completion of families used to require their producing hereditary officials. So far, we have not been able to gather the lineage together for seasonal rites in honor of our founding ancestor. That is a dereliction of propriety, and is tantamount to neglecting all our ancestors."

In 1557, a tract of land in T'ai-ho near White Crane Mountain was bought, and on it the kinsmen built a main hall, covered walkways, a shrine, and a repository for archives. It was all very impressive looking.^[62]

Ch'en Te-ming, who had died by the time the temple was built, is reported as having been uneasy over the prospect that the enlarged ancestral cult would attract interlopers. He wrote: "Our founding ancestor held no higher an office than that of case reviewer. His family's income was less than middle-rank, and he settled in T'ai-ho in order to escape the upheavals [of the tenth century]. He was loyal and filial. His descendants have continued the sacrifices ever since. Unfortunately, more and more people who are not his descendants have insinuated their way into those rites."^[63]

Lung Tsung-wu (1542-1609), an official exiled to Kwangtung, directed that miscellaneous income from his personal property in T'ai-ho be saved up to buy land and materials to enlarge the temple in honor of the original Lung founder, who had migrated to Kan-chu Ward (township 54) sometime in the Sung. Management of the temple and its fund was to rotate annually among the five branches (p'ai ) of the Lung lineage. All the many Lung celebrants could now be accommodated. After Lung Tsung-wu died, his son asked Tsou Yuan-piao to write the dedicatory inscription.^[64]

Tsou Yuan-piao (1551-1624), a native of Chi-shui County, thirty miles north of T'ai-ho, was a latter-day adherent of the Wang Yang-ming school of Confucian thought and one of the most noted imperial officials of his day, which is why he was asked to write commemorative inscriptions for the Ch'en and Lung lineage temples. Orthodox Neo-Confucianism did not countenance such temples, but now there was a new dispensation, as Tsou explained:

Chu Hsi [1130-1200] . . . stated that sacrifices should be made only to the last four generations. It isn't that he didn't want [to go further; he understood that] there was a restriction, and he didn't dare. Nowadays, everyone has been thinking about those whom their ancestors descend from, and ev-

eryone has begun sacrificing to those distant ancestors. It is quite all right to do that, provided one does not neglect one's near kin in the process.^[65]

Tsou Yuan-piao made a personal visit to the Hsiao lineage at South Creek Ward (township 59). There the Hsiao settlements were spread out over several miles, and until recently, the Hsiao had maintained separate ancestral cults. A retired minor official, Hsiao Yuan-kang (1531-1610+), had built a big new temple in honor of the original local ancestor and created a common cult for all the Hsiao kinsmen. Tsou Yuan-piao appeared before the first grand congregation of Hsiao and delivered them two remarkable short speeches, first before the elders, then before the juniors:

Do you all realize how righteous your original ancestor was? You Hsiao descendants are numerous and important, and that original ancestor is the one who gave rise to you all. Today, after the passing of many generations, you've gathered the lineage in order to reflect upon your origins.

I've heard it said that if there is a root, then there is a time before that root emerged. There is an origin to the root, a beginning before the beginning. That's how we should think about beginnings.

How should we conceive the situation before the beginning? There was somebody who existed naturally of himself, who accomplished things without action or intention. Things done by action always decay in time. Things done intentionally always dissolve. Those are the conditions under which you now celebrate your founding ancestor. And surely the same principle applies to this very assembly. Hsiao [Yuan-kang] leads you in this because he cannot contain his sincerity within himself. You, the lineage, respond to him for the very same reason. Only a breath of air lies between your founder and you here now. (Here the elders said: "So it is!" Then I went before the juniors, and I said):

When people are physically strong, their pneuma circulates freely and their pulse is vigorous. But when there is any blockage, these stop. The same applies to men who harmonize their lineages. Thanks to [Hsiao Yuan-kang], your descent group has a freely circulating pneuma and a strong pulse. He went away [as an official], and he made an excellent reputation wherever he went, and when he retired home, he devoted all his thoughts to his ancestors. You see how a benevolent man cleaves to his learning!

It is the responsibility of you all to continue in his footsteps. When you enter this hall, you must lead the congregation of kin by means of filial intentions so keen that you make it look as though [the ancestors] were actually present. If you don't make [Hsiao Yuan-kang's] mind your mind; if you don't reflect upon where your bodies come from; if you don't firm up the roots and nourish the branches—then you will come to a standstill, and you won't even be able to regulate a three-family market, let alone the realm and the state, and no one will acclaim you. So you must strive. Benevolence in the realm and in the state begin in the family.

(The elders leapt up and said: "What you've said is exactly right. We'd like you to write it up for engraving on the back of the stela [commemorating the building of the new temple]." So afterwards I wrote it up as they asked. The contributors and dates of construction are recorded elsewhere).^[66]

The construction and upkeep of large lineage temples entailed high costs. Lung Tsung-wu's contribution included, aside from income from his own fields, a donation of a thousand taels of silver. The Willow Creek Ch'en financed the building of their temple by laying periodic assessments in silver upon each constituent family (fang ), the amount varying according to the number of able adult males (ting ) in each. Several "honest men" from the Hou-chieh (Back Street) branch were put in charge of the fund, which was lent out at interest and, after a few years, yielded earnings of "over a thousand [taels of] silver." It was interest earnings on silver loans that paid construction costs for the temple.

The Kuan-ch'ao Kuo lineage (in the sixteenth century, before Kuo Tzu-chang's time) collected money from their kinsmen and bought new "constant harvest" fields. Income from these collectively owned fields allowed them to raise the frequency of their ancestral rites from once to three times a year. (Unspent funds, controlled by the officers of the ancestral hall, may have been loaned at interest.)^[67]

The Tseng of Yueh-Kang (Moon Hill Ward, township 32) built a temple at a former homesite on Sandalwood Lane in T'ai-ho city, as well as another in Moon Hill itself, in honor of the recent founder of that subsettlement. Rental income from collectively owned sacrificial fields funded annual birthday celebrations for the Moon Hill founder and his four wives.^[68] The distantly related Tseng of Shang-mo (township 28) found their ancestral temple in disrepair and the rents from their sacrificial fields undependable, and so they levied contributions on thirty-one kinsmen. The temple was then repaired and enlarged, and more fields were purchased. A list (not preserved) was made of the donors, the fields, and the rental income amounts.^[69]

One subbranch of the huge Wang lineage of Nan-fu (township 61) funded their joint ceremonies by imposing graded assessments in silver upon each of their 221 adult males, with further amounts to be paid on any of several special occasions, such as reaching age fifty sui , or upon the birth or marriage of an eldest son. Sixteen junior kinsmen controlled the fund and made interest-bearing loans from the surplus.

In addition, the subbranch received yearly 26 piculs from rents on sacrificial fields nearby, and a further 123 piculs from sacrificial fields they owned a hundred miles south, in Hsin-feng County, in southern Kiangsi.^[70]

One could go on and list further examples of this kind, each differing in its details, but the main point in each such case is clear: that in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, T'ai-ho's common-descent groups were acquiring a self-sustaining economic base that was controlled by a joint board of managers. Lineage property was in most cases taxable, but it was removed from the reach of individual ownership and inheritance. In some instances at least, joint lineage income served social welfare needs. The ancestral temple built by Chang Ssu (1465-1542, of Hou-tung Ward, township 5) had attached to it fields whose yield supported, in addition to sacrifices, a grain fund of a thousand piculs that was lent interest-free to poor kinsfolk. Those too poor to repay even the principal were placed on permanent dole, which was funded from the rent income on forty mou of fields especially set aside for that purpose.^[71]

Thus the resource base of some T'ai-ho lineages, like the Kuan-ch'ao Kuo and the Nan-fu Wang, extended well beyond the borders of T'ai-ho itself, forming sort of a low-level colonial order, with its home base in T'ai-ho. However, it was also true that certain other T'ai-ho lineages were but constituent units in giant lineage conglomerates based outside the county. For example, from 1636 to 1638, toward the very end of the Ming era, Li Pang-hua (1574-1644) of Chi-shui County, a high official, built a great temple in the prefectural capital of Chi-an for all the Li everywhere who considered themselves descendants of a certain prince of the T'ang imperial house. T'ai-ho Lis were included. Li Pang-hua left instructions that the management of this temple and its funding should rotate among all the component Li lineage branches. He said that he chose Chi-an city because it would be easiest for large numbers of scattered relatives to gather together there.^[72]

Finally, it needs to be pointed out that the corporate lineages that were being established in sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in T'ai-ho took on judicial and penal functions that were not within the competence of the descent groups typical of the earlier part of the Ming.

For example, the Lung of Kan-chu Ward made their new ancestral

temple not just a ritual center but also a venue for lectures on ethics and law, and a court of first instance for the adjudication of disputes among the kin.

When the Chou of Ch'i-t'ien (Lacquer Field Ward, township 51) enlarged their ancestral temple in 1570 in order to accommodate their growing population, they also instituted regulations threatening punishment for those who were lax in their ritual obligations and for those who oppressed and mistreated their poorer and weaker kin.^[73] The Hu of I-ho (also in township 51) organized a "family compact" (chia-yueh ) with an elder in charge of enforcing discipline through it.^[74]

In order to suppress a wave of unruliness among his relatives, Tseng Hsin (1445-1530, of Shang-mo Ward, township 28) drew up a set of "family rules" (chia-fan ) and had "two or three good juniors" help him admonish those who broke the rules and penalize them for misbehavior. These rules he submitted to the provincial censorial authorities, who reviewed and endorsed them and directed the prefectural and county officials to enforce them in case of appeal.^[75]

About a century later, Kuo Tzu-chang (1543-1618) compiled a list of "family instructions" (chia-hsun ) for the Kuan-ch'ao Kuo lineage. These were aimed at correcting certain disorders that he believed arose from invidious income differences among the component Kuo families. According to Kuo Tzu-chang, the lineage was suffering discord because "the rich and noble use their status to act arrogantly toward the poor and humble, while the poor and humble rely on their greater numbers to abuse the rich and noble." Affluent Kuo were dissipating themselves in drunken socializing with male and female opera performers; poor Kuo were drifting into gambling and thievery. Scheming kinsmen were cheating dissolute heirs out of their rightful inheritances. To remedy these disorders, Kuo Tzu-chang directed the lineage head (tsu-chang ) to conduct bimonthly meetings with all the family heads (fang-chang ) in the ancestral temple. Warnings and beatings were to be administered. If all else failed, malefactors were to be disowned and handed over to the county authorities for imprisonment.^[76]

Interlineage Organization: The Community Compact

In the sixteenth century, and with the encouragement of imperial government, T'ai-ho's lineage leaders undertook to organize regional federations—the higher-order interlineage alliances known as "commu-

nity compacts" (hsiang-yueh ). In T'ai-ho, the first term in this expression (hsiang ) was the same as the word for "canton," the mostly functionless territorial units into which the townships were grouped. The formation of community compacts in T'ai-ho was in fact based upon the cantons and breathed new life into at least some of them.

The earliest major example was a compact created in and for the canton of Yun-t'ing. In 1531, Lo Ch'in-shun, who had resigned from office and was living at home in Hsi-kang (West Hill Ward, township 28), joined together with Tseng Hsien of Moon Hill and several others and drew up a compact that appears to have comprised the entire area. Since a total of seventeen "elites" (shih-ta-fu ) attended the organization meeting, held at a Buddhist temple, it looks as though all but one of Yun-t'ing's eighteen townships were represented. The conferees agreed upon a set of regulations. The regulations were later printed up into a pamphlet, together with Tseng Hsien's address to the session and poems by all. The regulations, now lost, are known to have included a reform of burial customs, a perennial source of litigation. What prompted the meeting and the compact was a sense that the old social order, which had worked well in the fifteenth century, had begun to unravel sometime during the Hung-chih era (1488-1505)—as evidenced by rising rates of idleness, luxury, and crime—and that measures had to be taken to reverse the disastrous course that society seemed to be taking.^[77]

As the old tax-and-service system came to be replaced by the silver-based Single Whip regime in the latter part of the sixteenth century, the Chi-an prefectural officials sought to co-opt the lineages and the community compacts and make them part of the new tax mechanism. In 1577, the prefecture urged all nine counties (T'ai-ho was one) to organize community compacts as a means toward comprehensive social reform.

New compacts were formed in at least three of T'ai-ho's six cantons. In Yun-t'ing Canton, the compact of 1531 had in the meantime dissolved. Tseng Yü-hung (1521-88), retired from office and living at home in Moon Hill, issued a circular which succeeded in getting it revived. The circular read:

Our canton consists of eighteen townships and nearly fifty wards. Here, earlier generations plowed and studied, valuing hard work and frugality, and observing decorum and righteousness. People despised laziness and profligacy. Thieves and traitors did not exist. This you—fathers, sons, and brothers—have all heard.

But starting in the Hung-chih era [1488-1505], customs decayed from that

standard. That's why in the Cheng-te and Chia-ching periods [1506-66], two of my kinsmen who were retired officials took the lead, and Lo Ch'in-shun presided, and they met in the Nan-t'ai [temple], and what they came up with was called "Improving the Canton." This you fathers, sons, and brothers all know.

Alas, since then, the old and experienced men have died. Then in 1561 came roving bandits, and they inflicted grave damage. In the aftermath of the killing and destruction, there was no time for decorum and righteousness, with the result that our customs have been declining, litigation has been mounting, and more bandits keep appearing. This you are all painfully aware of, and angered about.

Since leaving office, I too have seen and been distressed by these things, but fortunately the authorities have called for the formation of community compacts throughout the nine counties. We must heed these wise instructions and urge each other to take action. May you fathers of the canton take note!^[78]

At the same time that Tseng Yü-hung tried (and, apparently, succeeded) in reviving the community compact in Yun-t'ing in southern T'ai-ho, another official, Hu Chih, temporarily retired and living at home, helped organize a first-time compact for the cantons of Hsin-shih and Kao-hsing, in western T'ai-ho.

Hu Chih's home was in I-ho Ward (township 51) in Hsin-shih Canton. The new compact, taking in the two cantons, was called the Ch'iu-jen (Search for Benevolence) Compact. Organizers and participants are known to have included, besides the Hu of I-ho, the unrelated Hu of She-pei Ward (township 51); the Chou of Ch'i-t'ien (Lacquer Field Ward, also township 51); the K'ang of Chueh-yü (township 52); and probably also the Yueh of Ho-ch'i (Grain Creek Ward, township 65).

The Ch'iu-jen compact was elaborately organized, and it acquired something of a permanent institutional base. The Chou of Lacquer Field funded the building of a special meetinghouse in a scenic location. A Confucian study society was formed there; community sacrifices to the soil and grain gods were held; and a community militia (t'uan-chieh ) was assembled for defense against wintertime bandit raids. The aim of the community compact proper was to encourage reform of degenerate customs and bad behavior among the young men—in particular, the "several hundred" on stipend as boarders (kuan-ku ) in the schools operated by the great lineages of western T'ai-ho.^[79]

There is no particular reason to suppose that T'ai-ho's community compacts survived the upheavals of the Ming-Ch'ing interregnum of the middle and late seventeenth century. At least, there is no evidence that they did. For one thing, there were no more native sons successful

enough in office, and zealous enough as Confucian thinkers, to give ex-tralineage organization at the cantonal level the spark and the push and the literary celebration that it seemed to require for its success. No T'ai-ho native in Ch'ing times ever achieved the national eminence that men such as Lo Ch'in-shun, Hu Chih, Tseng Yü-hung, or Kuo Tzu-chang did in the Ming; and the presence of such high elites as organizers and participants seems to have been required to ensure that the compacts fulfilled both the needs of the state for security and revenue, and of local society for moral reinforcement.

But patrilineal systems survived, at least in some form. As late as the 1840s, many of the old T'ai-ho patrilineages, already well known in Ming times, were still very much alive and active—cheating on their taxes, oppressing their poor relatives, encroaching upon each other's grave sites, and selling their genealogical credentials to interlopers.^[80]

One is curious about how the story of patrilineages in Ming T'ai-ho compares with that of other parts of south China. Is the T'ai-ho story recapitulated elsewhere? Did what Timothy Brook has aptly called an "aristogenic" order—a corporate, kin-based upper class—also characterize other local societies in south China in late imperial times? It appears that the answer to both questions is, generally, yes.

The compiling and prefacing of genealogies were activities well under way in parts of south China, Chekiang Province especially, in Yuan times, if not before, so T'ai-ho got into this game a bit late. Other counties, such as T'ung-ch'eng in Anhwei and Han-yang in Hupei, were newly settled in the early Ming era, so genealogy compiling started later than it did in T'ai-ho, in the sixteenth century in the case of T'ung-ch'eng. Once created, however, local societies of aristogenic common-descent groups became extraordinarily stable and durable. As in T'ai-ho, these groups often evolved further into corporate, endowed, rule-bound "lineages"—in the seventeenth century in T'ung-ch'eng and in the late eighteenth in Wu-hsi in Kiangsu.^[81] In short, the developmental cycle discernible in T'ai-ho in the Ming seems also to have been spun out, at one time or another, in other south China counties.

Wherever an aristogenic society was founded in the counties of south China, it was part of what Robert Hymes has called the creation of a "localist strategy," a major historical change that dates from the twelfth century, wherein a previously national elite decided to distance itself from the uncertainties of too close a tie to the capital, and develop new

sources of security, identity, and livelihood for itself at home in the south China countryside.^[82] There, survival and continuance were no longer so closely dependent upon success in bureaucracy. Key to the long-term survivability of the south China patrilines as local elites was what William Rowe has described as their "constant flexibility and innovation."^[83] And the T'ai-ho record confirms that. Not only did the T'ai-ho aristogeny as a whole evolve in terms of its corporate organization but also members individually contributed to its continuation by constantly adapting themselves to new opportunities and constraints—to commerce, moneylending, landowning, land managing, tutoring, or degree winning and officeholding—and by pledging some good part of their income, energies, or prestige and influence to the welfare of their own kinship groups, certainly, and at times to the welfare of the larger society of such kinship groups as well.

Chapter 5
Pathways to Ming Government

For the young men from the city and countryside of T'ai-ho seeking employment, and every one of them sought employment of some kind, government was, without question, the firm of choice.

Not that government necessarily paid well. For the lowest civil service grade, wei ju liu , or "not yet in the current," the annual salary was thirty-six shih , about enough to feed a family of ten or twelve when paid in full. However, other living expenses besides food had to be met as well. A son or younger brother successful in the quest for office could sometimes find himself in serious debt. Yet while it was possible to earn much more in estate management or commerce, no other career could offer what Ming bureaucracy could offer: status; honor; extrastatutory income from gifts and other emoluments; literary fame; the opportunity to meet the best minds and talents of China; certain service exemptions; authorization to wear the caps, robes, sashes, and silk badges of a select elite; and a chance to immortalize oneself and honor one's ancestors, to right wrongs and create benefits for the great masses of China, and to leave one's mark in the annals of civilization. Many young men from T'ai-ho, and from all over Ming China, devoted their lives to the goal of one day becoming civil officials.

The aspirants were many, but the available positions few. Regular civil service officials held one of eighteen ranked positions, from 1A at the top down to 9B, plus the rank wei ju liu (actually the nineteenth grade) at the bottom. Exactly how many such positions were open, or

filled, at any one time is impossible to say, but some total figures exist, supplied by grand secretaries who were probably privy to reliable information. Wang Ao, grand secretary from 1506 to 1509, counted 20,400 civil positions; Chu Kuo-chen, who held the same position from 1623 to 1625, reported 24,683 (1,146 in Peking, 558 in Nanking, and 22,709 in the rest of the realm).^[1] The mandarin segment of civil government (that is, excluding some 55,000 clerks) thus had about the population size of a small city.

T'ai-ho produced at least 1,668 men who qualified themselves for official position during the 276 years of the Ming era. An explanation is in order as to exactly what that figure means. It means that on the basis of the earliest extant county gazetteer, that of 1579, and later gazetteers of the Ch'ing period, it is possible to identify, by address and by the year or reign-period of their qualification, 1,668 men. The true total must be somewhere around 2,000 because (1) 229 men are listed in the gazetteers without date, or by name only, and cannot be further identified; (2) data for the years 1580-1644 is incomplete; and (3) easily dozens of men identified as men from T'ai-ho County, Kiangsi, appear as local officials in gazetteers from other parts of China but are otherwise unknown. A national roster of officials dating to the 1630s lists eighteen men from T'ai-ho, but only four of them are listed in the T'ai-ho gazetteers; and since this particular roster omits all government teachers and princely officials, perhaps twice as many T'ai-ho men actually were in office at that time.^[2] Although 1,668 is unquestionably an undercount, they are men whose identities (and, in many cases, lives) are known for certain, and it is with them that I wish to deal here.

T'ai-ho was but one of over a thousand counties (hsien ) in Ming China, and it was a matter of great local pride that it succeeded as well as it did, especially in the fifteenth century, in placing so many of its men in imperial government. As many as 1,668 men are known because the magistrates and their assistants at county headquarters kept a perpetual list of all the locals who qualified themselves for office. It must also be emphasized that the common-descent groups and lineages endeavored to do the same thing for their members. The channel through which a man qualified himself for office and the highest post to which he rose in his official career became integral parts of his personal identity, and a proud entry in the genealogical records, where ancestors' offices, real or honorary, were invariably mentioned. If a dead person had ever held an office, the headline on his engraved tombstone inscription always stated it.

Besides gravestones (especially the mu-piao , whose whole text was in view for anyone to read), small monuments to deceased native sons who had been officials could be found all over T'ai-ho city and the countryside, more than two hundred of them by late Ming times, singly or in various family or other groups. In addition there were two great temples built and maintained at imperial government expense, one in memory of Grand Secretary Yang Shih-ch'i (1365-1444) and the other in honor of Ou-yang Te (1496-1554), who had been a minister of rites and a renowned exponent of the thought of Wang Yang-ming. All this shows that Ming bureaucracy made a strong and shaping imprint upon local society. Participation in that bureaucracy helped to define the local elite and contributed to the formation of a local hierarchy of prestige, not solely because of the downward force exerted upon those who were not in the bureaucracy but also because of the inducements participation offered to encourage men to rise up.

The 1,668+ officials T'ai-ho County produced in the Ming provide an opportunity to explore the larger world of Ming bureaucracy, particularly with respect to such issues such as the significance of the different channels through which it recruited its manpower; how the experience of having come up through a particular channel affected one's career prospects; and how these things changed over the course of the Ming.

The channels of recruitment were several, the differences among them wide; and which path one took had certain consequences for one's personal status and identity, in life and afterwards.

Around the year 1600, Kuo Tzu-chang (himself an eminent official) wrote a preface to the genealogy of the Hsiao lineage of Huang-kang (Phoenix Hill Ward, township 25), who were not a particularly distinguished bunch. In it, he listed by name and by path of entry all Hsiao who had by that time become Ming officials: two men who had won the highest degree, the "metropolitan" degree (chin-shih ); fourteen men who held the "provincial" degree (chü-jen ); seven men who had achieved office by way of "recommendation" (chien-chü, cheng-pi ); twelve men who had taken one or another "tribute" (kung ) route through one of the two imperial colleges; three more who had taken other routes through the college; and four men who had been promoted to officialdom from the ranks of the national clerical service (yuan, li-yuan ).^[3] That makes forty-two in all (fifteen of them are missing in the county lists). The Huang-kang (Phoenix Hill) Hsiao men were scarcely

visible in the great aggregate of Ming bureaucracy; yet it was men like them who constituted the great mass of Ming bureaucrats and made the greatest contribution to establishing the whole presence of the bureaucracy in the life of the nation.

But just what did having entered through these different channels mean to the individuals who followed them? What larger strategic purposes did the Ming state have in mind when it established this and that track for its new recruits? Why so many tracks? (The Phoenix Hill Hsiao genealogy shows five broad categories.) These are complex questions. It seems most convenient to discuss these tracks, and to give some account of the men who entered upon them, principally in order of the kinds of pools of eligibles that each track drew upon and secondarily with respect to each track's relative prestige. Through a given track one was said to "graduate" (ch'u-shen ), and each path created its own special "credential" (tzu-ko )—to use the official jargon of the time. The pool of potential recruits through the recommendation channel was for a while the largest of all, and I would like to discuss it and its place in the scheme of things first.

Recommendation (Chien-Chü)

The recommendation route into Ming government was an important channel of opportunity for roughly the first century of Ming rule; its prestige value was extremely variable, and it drew men up directly into government from the population at large. Recruitment by recommendation was a favorite tool of the dynasty's founder, Ming T'ai-tsu (the Hung-wu emperor, r. 1368-98). Local officials everywhere were required actively to hunt out the best and most promising men from the population at large and nominate them for employment. Typical categories under which searches and recommendations were made included "those worthy and good, square and upright"; "those possessing talent and virtue"; "those versed in the classics and refined in behavior"; and so on. After having been screened by the personnel authorities in the capital, the nominees were then assigned either to administrative positions or to government teaching positions. Not everyone passed the screening, as T'ai-ho man Tseng Ts'un-shan found out; recommended for talent at the age of forty-nine, perhaps sometime in the 1430s, he came to the capital, got nothing, and so went back to T'ai-ho empty-handed.^[4] (Overall rejection rates are unknown.)

The recommendation route was an important channel of opportu-

nity for roughly the first century of Ming rule. Some 416 known T'ai-ho men were selected for service through this channel from the inception of the Ming down to the closure of the channel early in 1459.

During Ming T'ai-tsu's reign, recommendation was mainly a means for recruiting new administrative officials (of 123 T'ai-ho men so recruited during his reign, 70 percent entered administration). From the Yung-lo era (1403-24) onward, however, priorities changed, so that nearly 75 percent of the recommendation men (212 of 287) were taken into government teaching service. (After recommendation was shut down in 1459, the task of supplying teachers was shifted to the chü-jen and the sui-kung , or county students sent as "tribute" to the imperial colleges.)

As administrators, T'ai-ho's recommendation men ended their careers in posts with the median rank of 8A; that is, half achieved posts ranked 8A or higher, and half 8A or lower. A typical 8A post was that of county vice magistrate. Thus while a handful of recommendation men did well, it is evident that the dynasty used that channel principally as a means of recruiting manpower for the very lowest levels of civil bureaucracy.

There was a time very early in the Ming when even those recommended for government teaching posts could hope to advance into the higher levels of civil bureaucracy. Early in the Ming, promotion chances were not as fixed and predictable as they later became. A good example of what was possible early but not later is provided by T'ai-ho's most famous native son, Yang Shih-ch'i, originally recommended and appointed a lowly county-level assistant instructor of wei ju liu rank, who eventually ended up at the very top of the civil service as grand secretary and became one of the great statesmen of the early Ming dynasty.

Though recommendation led only to the lowest administrative posts, or to the backwaters of the government teaching service, its abolition constituted a serious setback for many young men of T'ai-ho. The cumulative figures make that clear. From 1400 to 1464, an average of ten T'ai-ho men entered government through all channels every year. From 1465 to the end of the dynasty, however, the annual average dropped by half, to five men per year. Thus when recommendation ended, the other channels did not expand commensurately.

From a national standpoint, the diminution of official opportunity in T'ai-ho was surely justifiable, given the fairly constant size of Ming government and the competition of men from some 1,145 county-level units like T'ai-ho all across China. In the Hung-wu era (1368-98),

when far more T'ai-ho men entered office by the recommendation path than by any other, the total annual average of new recruits through all channels was only around six per year. Thus over the years 1400-64, T'ai-ho's rate of ten per year was excessive, and what happened after 1464 was something on the order of an equitable downward readjustment.

It is no accident that so many T'ai-ho men entered government in the first half of the fifteenth century. Several T'ai-ho men occupying the very highest central posts in Ming government saw fit to extend patronage and protection to their county compatriots. The greatest patron was Yang Shih-ch'i. When Yang died in office in 1444, his place as grand secretary was assumed by a T'ai-ho protégé of his, Ch'en Hsun (1385-1462). In 1451, Ch'en was joined as grand secretary by yet another T'ai-ho man, Hsiao Tzu (d. 1464). T'ai-ho man Wang Chih (1379-1462), earlier a grand secretary, and long influential, in 1443 became minister of personnel. The grip of a handful of men from one county in China on the controlling levers of Ming government was quite extraordinary.

It could not last; and indeed, it did not survive the great palace coup of 1457, a critical event that has been well described in Philip de Heer's The Care-Taker Emperor .^[5] Grand Secretaries Ch'en Hsun and Hsiao Tzu and Minister of Personnel Wang Chih were all dismissed in the aftermath of that coup, which restored Ying-tsung to the throne and inaugurated the T'ien-shun reign-period (1457-1464).

In fact, the presence of too many T'ai-ho men in government, and the recommendation channel through which so many of them came into government, came under political attack not long after the death of Grand Secretary Yang Shih-ch'i. In 1451, for example, the emperor was prompted by the censorate to order more stringent screening procedures at the provincial level for new government teachers coming up through a too wide recommendation route.^[6]

In 1453, censors broadened the attack on the route by making a case of Grand Secretary Ch'en Hsun's distant cousin, T'ai-ho man Ch'en Yung (1400-56). The allegation was that cousin Ch'en Yung had attended the T'ai-ho County school as a registered student, or sheng-yuan , but had been expelled for poor performance. After he was expelled, he took up tutoring for a living. In 1430, an assistant instructorship opened up in Ch'ang-chou Prefecture, in what is now Kiangsu Province. From Ch'ang-chou an emissary was sent to T'ai-ho with a gift and an invitation for Ch'en Yung to assume the position. Not by coincidence,

surely, the chief instructor (rank 9B) in Ch'ang-chou was none other than Ch'en Yung's brother-in-law, Yü Hsueh-shih.

Ch'en Yung first proceeded to Peking, where the recommendation was viewed favorably by the Ministry of Personnel, and then he was duly appointed. A friend got Wang Chih to write Ch'en a personal message, a kind of testimonial and letter of introduction.

After completing his nine-year term, Assistant Instructor Ch'en went again to Peking, this time for the required review and evaluation of his performance. A pleasant surprise! The Ministry of Personnel took him out of educational service and placed him in administration, as first a probationary, then a regular, investigating censor (7A).

In 1446, Ch'en's work as censor was favorably reviewed, and he was promoted to assistant surveillance commissioner (5A) of Chekiang Province. His work there involved overseeing tax shipments and directing antibandit militia, and for effectively discharging those tasks, his salary was raised.

On April 2, 1453, he was promoted to administration commissioner (2B) of Fukien Province, surely for him the capstone of an unexpectedly successful career as a recommendation man. But it was not to be. On April 9, the roof fell in on him. Lin Ts'ung, chief supervising secretary of the Office of Scrutiny for Personnel, an alert watchdog in such matters, blocked the appointment on the grounds that Ch'en Yung was an expelled sheng-yuan who had become an assistant instructor through special connections; that as a government teacher he should never have been brought into administration; and that he was too shallow a personality to manage successfully the new task assigned him. Grand Secretary Ch'en Hsun was unable to help him; he was forced from government, and he died three years later.^[7]

It was one thing to try to confine recommendation men to low teaching posts; but there was in addition a desire on the part of some Ming officials to get rid of the recommendation channel altogether. In 1456, in a long brief he composed for the emperor, Grand Secretary Ch'en Hsun tried to hold together the crumbling status quo on behalf of his fellow locals. He explained to the emperor that T'ai-ho County was heavily populated and that it lacked enough commerce, crafts production, or farmland to occupy all its young men. Consequently, as many as 20 or 30 percent of its men made their living as primary tutors in the classics in family schools all over China. Given the tight quota restrictions on the provincial examinations, only a handful could ever hope to pass, which was why so many sought recommendations to become gov-

ernment assistant instructors. It was most unfair, argued Ch'en, that so many in government hated these men and considered them "filth" (fen-t'u ), when no less a man than Yang Shih-ch'i had risen precisely through that route. Actually, confided Ch'en, the issue was not just a supposed surfeit of recommended assistant instructors from T'ai-ho; the real issue was that all the other officials out there hated everyone from T'ai-ho, himself included.^[8]

The specific issue that prompted Ch'en Hsun's brief was the question whether newly recommended assistant instructors should go directly to the Ministry of Personnel (where Wang Chih was then minister) for evaluation and assignment, or whether they should be tested first at the Han-lin Academy, where, presumably, a large number would be weeded out. Ch'en demanded that they go directly to the ministry. The emperor had already ruled in Ch'en's favor on this issue a year earlier.^[9] This time he responded to Ch'en's plea with a wave of the hand. He told Ch'en it was just too minor a matter to be so suspicious about.

But Ch'en Hsun's suspicions were on target; and when recommendation was abolished in 1459, the official justification was that the recommendees were ambitious men of inferior quality.^[10] It may have indeed been the case that the pool of good young free-lances suitable for recommendation as teachers had dried up as more and more youth sought to enroll in the county Confucian schools (ju-hsueh ) under the liberalized quotas that were in place by the mid-fifteenth century.

Clerical Promotion (Li-Yuan)

Recommendation, while it lasted, was used to recruit men from the population at large, not from the special pool of county students (sheng-yuan ). The only other channel into regular bureaucracy for which the sheng-yuan did not serve as the recruitment base was the li-yuan channel, which drew from the body of government clerks. In the early sixteenth century, a total of some fifty-five thousand clerks were reported to have been employed at every level of government; their jobs are specified in detail in chapter 7 of the Ta Ming hui-tien (Collected ordinances of the Ming) of 1587.^[11] The rule was that after nine or so years of satisfactory service, clerks were promotable to the lower (7B or below) grades of regular bureaucracy, just where depending upon the rank of the office they had served their clerkships in.

The T'ai-ho gazetteers list 109 men who were li-yuan , which is an undercount (missing, for example, are the four li-yuan produced by the

Hsiao lineage of Phoenix Hill). The civil service ranks that T'ai-ho's 109 listed li-yuan achieved range from 5B to wei ju liu . The median position they achieved ranked 9B, which is the worst for any of the recruitment channels.

The li-yuan credential was not held in respect. The Yung-lo emperor placed the entire category under official discrimination in 1411 by refusing to appoint a li-yuan nominated for the 7A post of censor because, he insisted, all li-yuan were simply after personal advantage and knew nothing of moral right or of the "big picture" (ta-t'i ).^[12] In 1428, the Hsuan-te emperor ordered a selective purge of officials holding the li-yuan credential and denied promotions to the rest. He also ordered a partial purge of li-yuan "with cap and belt on half salary awaiting official appointments." The li-yuan struck him and the upper echelons of the bureaucracy as often "crude" (pi-wei ) in appearance, corrupt, or insufficiently literate.^[13]

Waiting lists of clerks qualified for official appointments could grow long. Occasionally, government showed such men a bit of compassion. An official of the Ministry of Personnel indicated in 1495 that there existed a backlog of 33,900 and that the usual wait for all these men was thirteen or fourteen years, by which time many were no longer employable. His suggestion was to grant all of them retirements "with cap and belt," that is, with the status of retired officials.^[14] In 1571, the Lung-ch'ing emperor lifted the native-place avoidance rule for the very lowest civil service posts (including that of granary commissioner, 9B, a typical li-yuan slot) because many men that low in the hierarchy simply could not afford the out-of-province travel and relocation costs.^[15]

But the stigma remained. In 1576, the young Wan-li emperor, or someone acting in his behalf, denied a request from the Ministry of Personnel to promote a li-yuan from assistant magistrate (9A) to magistrate (7A), on the grounds that no exclerk was qualified enough.^[16] Before 1469, it had been the rule to punish government students who failed or misbehaved by expelling them and forcing them to take government clerkships (though, somehow, Ch'en Yung escaped that rule). This was reckoned an effectively humiliating punishment because of the "status difference" (ti-wei hsuan-ko ) separating students from clerks. Yet certain students, who were seen as evil, considered such demotion an opportunity. Some young and bright students reportedly flunked deliberately in order to get jobs as clerks. That had to stop, and so the emperor ruled that thenceforth the students would simply be expelled rather than be made clerks.^[17]

Thus the li-yuan constituted something of a despised subcaste in the bureaucracy, morally and intellectually tainted by their training and their experience as clerks, consigned to the lowest positions, and liable to have their individual merits overriden by their caste stigma in promotion cases.

Some T'ai-ho people clearly shared these official attitudes. Yang Shih-ch'i's mother was one. In the 1380s, Yang Shih-ch'i was a poor boy, and as he remembered it all many years later, a neighbor who was doing very well as a clerk had liked and pitied young Yang and had sent a servant to ask his mother if he could take him on as an apprentice. Yang's mother had resolutely refused and insisted that her son continue his Confucian studies.^[18] Young Wang Ching-hsien (1365-1420, from Yung-chiang Ward, township 49) was asked to fill a vacant clerkship by the T'ai-ho County magistrate. His mother, too, refused to let him accept, poor as the Wangs were at the time. The magistrate was impressed and appointed Wang a government student.^[19] Obviously, status anxieties preyed upon these exemplary mothers of T'ai-ho. It seems that the decision to direct a boy into a clerical job was made early in his life, the price of that decision being his having to give up further Confucian education.

T'ai-ho's li-yuan list provides home addresses, which show that the 109 li-yuan came from fifty-seven different families, with none producing more than six. Even the most prominent and successful of T'ai-ho's lineages produced a few. But twenty-six came from obscure families, many with city addresses, whose only "output" during the Ming was that one single li-yuan .

One of the very few li-yuan mentioned individually in the literature is Hsiao Ssu-ching of Yen-chuang Ward (township 64). He was a prefectural clerk sometime during the Yung-lo era (1403-24). When his term expired, he went to Peking for reassignment and was made a document handler for General Chang Fu, earlier a top Ming commander in Vietnam. Following that, he was sent to the Ministry of Justice to learn its document system, and after a year at that, the Ministry of Personnel finally appointed him a vice magistrate (8A) in Hunan. Wang Chih, at the time a Han-lin official, knew Hsiao and had once visited his home in Yen-chuang Ward. When Hsiao's brother was about to return home from a visit to Peking, there was a going away party. The guests wrote a collection of poems, for which Wang wrote a preface. Hsiao Ssu-ching seems to have lacked a Confucian education, but Wang said in his preface that although Hsiao knew law well, he was not legalistic.^[20] It ap-

pears that despite all the official prejudice, Hsiao Ssu-ching socialized well with his official betters. If as a category the li-yuan were despised, as individuals they might be treated quite differently.

Hsiao Lung-yu (no relation to Hsiao Ssu-ching) is also listed as a li-yuan . In the Chia-ching era (1522-66), he ended up somewhere as a county vice magistrate. His immediate ancestors were wealthy city people. He became a clerk because his father died young, and he thought studying law would be the best way to establish himself. (He is mentioned in the literature because he later regretted that decision, preferring to involve himself in local philosophical circles.) His career was not distinguished. After a term of service as a government clerk, he paid a sum of money to the Ministry of Works, received a cap and belt indicative of official status, was put on a waiting list for an official vacancy, and went back home to T'ai-ho. There a kinsman of his stepmother's interested him in Wang Yang-ming's philosophy, and he became a member of a study circle that Hu Chih organized in 1549. Then for ten years or so he served as a personal aide to Lo Hung-hsien of Chi-shui County (north of T'ai-ho), who was one of the leading Confucian thinkers of his time. When the Ministry of Personnel finally informed him of a vacant vice magistracy, he was reluctant to take it: "All I'll be doing is running around, getting abused and humiliated for the sake of some tiny salary," complained Hsiao. "I know for sure [the higher officials] won't accept me, and I won't do what I'll have to do for them. Rather than cringe, I'd rather stay as one of your disciples, following in your footsteps, walking through the woods and valleys, discussing things, internalizing them, and getting something for oneself from that, as a way of repaying you." Urging Hsiao to go, Lo Hung-hsien advised him that a vice magistrate's job did not lie outside the Confucian Way and that Hsiao should accept the challenge, despite the hardships.^[21]

County Students (Sheng-Yuan)

All the other recruitment channels drew in one way or another upon the sheng-yuan . Young men in T'ai-ho had available to them both the county school and the larger prefectural school in Chi-an. I have found no information about how the choice was made as to which school a young man should attend and no indication that the county school was in any way inferior to the prefectural school.

T'ai-ho's county school was established in 1370 with a teaching cadre

consisting of an instructor and two assistant instructors. All the instructors were local appointees until 1404, and the all the assistants were local until 1438.

The original sheng-yuan quota was twenty. All twenty sheng-yuan received stipends. The annual stipend was not ungenerous: ten shih of rice annually, about enough to feed three people, plus certain service exemptions for the student's family. (Starting in 1610, the stipend was paid in silver, at a rate of 6 ounces per shih. )

T'ai-ho's first sheng-yuan class was selected by the local officials on the basis of the recommendations made by the new teaching cadre, made up of local men. According to Yang Shih-ch'i (never himself a sheng-yuan ), the first class of boys, aged fifteen or older, varied widely in character: half of them got into trouble and came to a bad end, and of the rest, only a few eventually became officials.^[22]

By 1401, the original quota was doubled by the addition of a category called added students, who received service exemptions but no stipends. Ch'en Hsun later remembered that there had been forty sheng-yuan in the T'ai-ho County school in the years he attended it, 1401-14. He also recalled a further ten or so men who, though not sheng-yuan , regularly had taken the provincial exams anyway.^[23] To accommodate an evidently growing population of exam takers without school affiliation, a final ring of supplementary students was authorized in 1447, with no quota restrictions. School rosters from the Ming have not survived, and so the creation of an unrestricted student category makes it impossible to know exactly how many sheng-yuan there were in all at any given time; but indications are that the numbers swelled. By 1470, the T'ai-ho County school was cramped, moldy, and falling apart, and a major rebuilding effort ended in the enlargement of the main hall, lecture halls, library, student housing, and kitchen.^[24]

In the early years of the Ming, and as late as 1404, new sheng-yuan seem to have been recruited by recommendation of the instructors and assistant instructors.^[25] Even the students themselves could make recommendations. In 1401, an investigating censor came to T'ai-ho, and, upon discovering that there were only sixteen added students instead of twenty, ordered each of the stipend students to recommend one candidate. Stipend Student T'ang Liu (1367-1406) made an effective representation on behalf of his nephew Lung Ts'an (1384-1447), whom he wanted to take on in an informal master-disciple relationship.^[26] Ch'en Hsun was recommended by Stipend Students Hsiao Hsing-shen (1380-

1429) and Yü Hsueh-k'uei (1372-1444), the son-in-law and the son, respectively, of the older sister of Ch'en I-ching (d. 1410), a minor official who was in turn Ch'en Hsun's father's first cousin. They were all fond of the talented Ch'en Hsun (who would become top-ranked chin-shih in 1415 and later a grand secretary). Their recommendation was accepted, and Ch'en Hsun became an added student.^[27]

Though sometimes called the bachelor's degree, sheng-yuan status was not strictly speaking a degree at all, as were the chü-jen or chin-shih degree, but an appointment. Teaching cadres and stipend students, early on, made recommendations, but they could not appoint new sheng-yuan . Appointments could only be made by administrative officials: the magistrate, the prefect, and, after 1436, the regional education intendants.

Ch'en Hsun spent four years as an added student, without stipend. His family was fairly well off under his older brother's management, and the expense was affordable. In 1403 there was an opening, and the teaching cadre wanted Ch'en to take the vacated position, which carried a stipend. "However," noted Ch'en's biographer, "the private regulation of the school was that all who filled such openings had to pay a large amount to recompense the man who vacated the slot; but Ch'en was ashamed to buy the stipend, and so he declined, on the excuse that he hadn't yet tried the provincial examinations, and dared not accept the offer just yet." After failing his first try at the exams in 1405, however, Ch'en did become a stipend student. He may have avoided the fee; at least, when he vacated his slot upon passing the provincial exams in 1414, he declined payment from any of the several men vying to assume the vacated stipend.^[28]

How large were these unauthorized fees paid in order for an added student to become a stipend student? To whom were they paid? The answers to these questions are not clear, but the problem was national in scope. In 1456, it was noted at court that most provincial degree winners were added students, not stipend students, for the reason that stipends were awarded by bribe, not by merit.^[29] In 1468, Supervising Secretary Ch'en Hao (a Willow Creek Ch'en, no relation to Ch'en Hsun) proposed that, since the charge was often made that youths who entered the county schools of China did so mainly in order to escape service obligations, it would be best to terminate all such exemptions. The Ministry of Rites considered Ch'en Hao's proposal but refused to recommend it, on the grounds that it would "violate the old system" to

do so. The emperor agreed and endorsed the ministry's position.^[30] Until the end of the Ming, hints of corruption continued to hover about the national Confucian student body.

Yet, early in the Ming at least, there were occasional expulsions of sheng-yuan . The case of Ch'en Yung has already been noted. The early rule that expelled sheng-yuan must become clerks was sometimes enforced. For some reason not stated, the censorial authorities expelled Tseng Shih-jung from the T'ai-ho school. "Everyone who knew Tseng" felt the expulsion to have been unjust. Yang Shih-ch'i consoled poor Tseng with the thought that becoming a clerk was perhaps not such a bad fate after all.^[31] It was indeed a bad fate for Ch'en Meng-hsing (1356-90), a grandson of Yang's maternal uncle and tutor, Ch'en Mo. Young Ch'en was devoted to his grandfather and was a good student, but his classmates thought him unsocial and arrogant; and they hated him enough to engineer his expulsion. Owing to the recent death of his beloved grandfather, Ch'en Meng-hsing went into mourning and refused to take the provincial exams. His classmates argued that the death of a grandparent was not a valid reason not to show for the exams; their argument carried, and in 1389 Ch'en was expelled. He then went to Nanking to receive his obligatory clerical assignment, but a year later he died, of severe depression.^[32]

As the sheng-yuan population expanded all over China in the fifteenth century and later, some court officials proposed to conduct wholesale purges of their numbers. There was a proposal in 1468 to abolish the unrestricted supplementary student category altogether. Ch'en Hao successfully argued against it. His point was that some localities (including, presumably, his own home county, T'ai-ho) had many more talents than forty, and it would be disastrous simply to cut them off. They should be tested rigorously, however, to make sure they were indeed qualified.^[33]

That was not quite the end of the matter. In 1494, and again in 1504, the Hung-chih emperor demanded a national purge of aged, sick, and unqualified sheng-yuan . On the earlier occasion, some officials interpreted the imperial order to mean the categorical abolition of all supplementary students. Certainly T'ai-ho was in an uproar. T'ai-ho County student Chou Shang-hua (1476-1520) wrote his friend Hu Hsing-kung (1469-1527) asking him what he thought of the impending purge. Hu Hsing-kung (who was Hu Chih's grandfather) was not a sheng-yuan ; he could not afford it because he had to support his mother,

wife, and four children on his income as a private tutor. Hu replied that the edict could not mean an all-out purge because in large counties (like T'ai-ho), with upwards of a thousand students, 90 percent of the students would be forced out, and many of the best of the victims would have to emigrate to smaller counties where they might successfully compete for the available quota slots. It was an abuse that so many of the sheng-yuan were sons of officials, and that their aim in life was simply to avoid service duties and raise themselves up from the common masses, but, according to Hu Hsing-kung, the fault for that lay with the education intendants who let them enroll. Hu urged the revival of the recommendation system, which had, after all, been aimed at commoners just like himself.^[34]

One source of the problem of sheng-yuan inflation was that more than one official authority had the power to make appointments. Ch'en Hao raised this problem in 1468, but he could not get the court to agree that all appointment powers should be placed in the hands of the provincial education intendants (the counterargument was that the provincial administration and surveillance commissions had to help out because there were too many local schools for the intendants to manage unaided).

Ch'en Feng-wu (1475-1541, from T'ai-ho; no relation to Ch'en Hao or Ch'en Hsun) was intensely involved in just this issue, as education intendant in Hukuang and then Shansi, in the years 1504-10. Strict and conscientious, Ch'en reportedly expelled all irregularly appointed sheng-yuan from their schools. In a memorial of 1510, which the emperor approved, he acquired full control over the Shansi sheng-yuan ; no other provincial-level official was allowed to interfere in appointments and evaluations.^[35]

That seems to have been an exceptional arrangement. Nothing like that happened in Kiangsi Province, where T'ai-ho was located. Around the very time Ch'en Feng-wu secured his powers in Shansi, Kiangsi Education Intendant Li Meng-yang, owing to his great popularity among the Kiangsi sheng-yuan and his defiance of the attempts of other provincial officials to interfere with him or with the sheng-yuan , was put on trial and forced to retire in 1514.^[36]

In the sixteenth century and later, it appears that a boy wishing to become a sheng-yuan had to qualify for appointment either by taking a test or by having someone influential nominate him. It appears that the teaching cadre no longer had a role to play in this respect. A case

in point is Ch'en Ts'an (d. 1546), who declined an offer by his uncle (Ch'en Ch'ang-chi, who had just won his chin-shih degree in 1538) to recommend his appointment. "I have to make my own way," he insisted, "otherwise I won't have done it as you did it." Indeed, he soon got the sheng-yuan appointment on the basis of the high quality of his writing.^[37]

Yang Tsai-ming competed in a boys' exam (t'ung-tzu shih ) in 1528, when he was fourteen years old. The magistrate and education intendant both agreed on giving him the highest grade, and they appointed him a sheng-yuan then and there.^[38] In 1483, when he was eighteen years old, Lo Ch'in-shun found himself one of "seven or eight hundred" T'ai-ho aspirants to sheng-yuan status; an exam was given, and Lo was one of the 25 percent who passed.^[39] Kuo Tzu-chang's (1543-1618) father took him to take the sheng-yuan test when he was only twelve years old. The county magistrate, though impressed, advised his father to take him home and have him study some more. At age fourteen, Kuo took the test again, and, after passing further tests with the prefecture and with the education intendant, was accepted as a county sheng-yuan . Other T'ai-ho boys, Kuo's friends and later his official colleagues, passed those same exams: Yang Yin-ch'iu (1547-1601) at age ten; Lung Tsung-wu (1542-1609) at age fifteen.^[40] Yet even exams were not free of a perception of corruption. Tseng Ch'iu-t'an (of Moon Hill Ward, township 32) took one such exam in the sixteenth century, and "when he saw that people were passed on the basis of bribes, he quit in indignation, and never came forth again. He studied in his family's library, never regretting having given up [an official career]."^[41]

It should be noted that Kuo Tzu-chang was first appointed a supplementary student. He spent seven years in that category and graduated to added student upon passing an exam given by the education intendant. Two years later, he passed another exam and in the following year, 1567, was finally made a stipend student. Kuo was talented and energetic, but for lack of data, it cannot be said whether his progress through the sheng-yuan hierarchy was fast. Lo Ch'in-shun spent only nine years altogether as a sheng-yuan , but Lo was, when he started, four years older than Kuo had been.

Glimpses of student life in T'ai-ho are few and far between. The sheng-yuan of the 1390s are pictured working very hard at their studies. Yin Ch'ang-lung (ca. 1369-ca. 1417) "was very serious-minded and exceptionally intelligent, having benefited from the Ch'eng brothers' regi-

men of self-cultivation through seriousness. By day he studied for tests, and at night he stayed in the Tz'u-en Buddhist temple in [T'ai-ho's] City East, intoning texts by lamplight until midnight, then rising at the first bell at dawn."^[42] Wang Chih recalled studying with junior members of the Tseng family of T'ai-ho's North Gate. He remembered how the boys' mother assigned them an empty room to study in and had a bondsman supply them with tea and lamps.^[43]

There was periodic impromptu testing. Ch'en Hsun's is the only case known in detail. In 1402, the T'ai-ho magistrate set a poetry theme for the sheng-yuan , asking them to expound upon the lines "clouds follow the morning sun; the moon rises over the library." In 1403, a prose test was given in Chi-an Prefecture, on the theme "ending in seriousness." In 1404, Ch'en and three other students went again to Chi-an, where the assistant surveillance commissioner held a mock provincial exam. Another such official held an impromptu test in T'ai-ho in 1408. In 1409 and 1410, an administration vice commissioner came to the county and held tests for the students. In 1413, an assistant administration commissioner came and presided over an oral exam.^[44]

Thus it seems the officials who tested the junior sheng-yuan were of lower rank than the officials who tested the senior sheng-yuan . Hierarchy among the sheng-yuan can also be seen in the fact that in 1408, by which time Ch'en Hsun had gained a reputation for the brilliance of his exams, he was appointed "school guest" (shu-pin ) by the county instructor, with the responsibility of helping to teach the twenty added students.

There is no information available about student life during the period from the early 1440s to the sixteenth century, by which time the size of the T'ai-ho student population had ballooned from around one hundred (counting all three levels of students) to some many hundreds, perhaps a thousand. Some of the students led intense and complex intellectual lives which took them far from their original moorings in the strict need to meet examination requirements. So much can be seen from what Hu Chih tells of himself and his classmates during the years 1533-43, when he was a T'ai-ho county sheng-yuan . Some students actively engaged themselves in local issues; others conducted raging arguments over literary models and literary criticism; yet others formed philosophical groups for the purpose of exploring the new Confucian ideas of Wang Yang-ming. All of this activity seems distant indeed from student life a century and a half before.^[45]

Provincial Degree Holders (Chü-Jen)

The hope of all sheng-yuan —and it did not matter whether they were stipend, added, or supplementary students, all were equally eligible—was to pass the triennial provincial examinations for the chü-jen degree. Winners of that degree then proceeded in the following year to the national capital (Nanking until 1421, Peking thereafter) to attempt the metropolitan and palace examinations for the chin-shih degree, which was, by far, the best credential of all. But first, the provincial hurdle had to be cleared.

Over the course of the Ming, altogether eighty-nine examinations were given in the Kiangsi provincial capital, Nan-ch'ang. During the first century of Ming rule, T'ai-ho candidates did exceptionally well. After that, they did worse and worse.

It makes an interesting exercise to compare the performance of the T'ai-ho men to that of the average candidate, as far as the latter can be determined.

Over the course of the 276 years of the Ming dynasty, 555 T'ai-ho men, sometimes after several tries, passed the Kiangsi provincial exams (89 others achieved the chü-jen degree under other provincial quotas).

The triennial chü-jen quota for Kiangsi was set at forty in 1370 and was raised to fifty in 1425, sixty-five in 1440, and ninety-five in 1453, where it stayed for most of the rest of the Ming.

There were ninety-one government schools in Kiangsi: seventy-seven county schools, thirteen prefectural schools, and one subprefectural school. It was the main purpose of all of them to prepare sheng-yuan for the provincial examinations.

If everything had been equal, then no more than one or two candidates from any one school would have passed in any given year. At least at the outset, however, things were unequal, because under the forty quota, 30 percent of all the Kiangsi chü-jen were T'ai-ho men. Under the fifty quota, 12 percent were. Under the sixty-five quota, 10 percent were T'ai-ho men. But under the ninety-five quota, as the years wore on, T'ai-ho's advantage grew less and less; by around the middle of the sixteenth century, less than 1 percent of the Kiangsi chü-jen were from T'ai-ho, a figure that is right about where a pure law of equal opportunity would put it.

When the quota was raised to ninety-five in 1453, the unrestricted supplementary student category had already been six years in existence, and after that time, the supplementary students gradually in-

creased T'ai-ho's sheng-yuan population to several hundred, perhaps a thousand. What chance, then, under these circumstances, did any one sheng-yuan from T'ai-ho have of ever achieving his goal of passing the provincial examinations?

It is possible to frame a crude answer to that question. Let us assume a population of one thousand T'ai-ho sheng-yuan of equal ability. Let us assume that an average sheng-yuan had a tenure of ten years, an assumption that gives him three chances at the provincial exams. There were ninety-one Kiangsi schools whose sheng-yuan were in the competition. The majority consisted of schools in counties smaller than T'ai-ho, so let us assume that the average body of Kiangsi sheng-yuan was five hundred, which gives a provincial total of 45,500. It is known that not all were certified to go to Nan-ch'ang in any given year. In fact, in 1456, more than 2,000 were. In 1534, more than 3,000 were. In 1558, there were more than 4,300 candidates, and in 1627, more than 5,300.^[46] Thus, every three years, something like 10 percent of the provincial student body underwent the exams. Something on the order of ten T'ai-ho students, then, would have gone to Nan-ch'ang in any given examination year, or three hundred in a ten-year period. Thus the probability of a given T'ai-ho sheng-yuan even taking the exam was less than one in three (because some students took the exam more than once). The probability that any of the three hundred who took the exams might pass one of them, given a quota of ninety-five and a turnout of, say, thirty-five hundred each time, was something like one in thirty-six. Thus, the chance that any T'ai-ho student might take and pass the chü-jen exam was very small indeed, perhaps less than one chance in a hundred, assuming all had equal abilities and none was given special consideration. (Parameters and assumptions such as these, are, of course, always fair game for further experimentation.)

There is no doubt but that competitive pressures were intense. An official report of 1571 related news of a riot in the Kiangsi provincial capital of Nan-ch'ang by 40,000 (surely an error for 4,000) sheng-yuan who had just failed the exams. A rumor that one of the examining officials had played favorites fueled their outrage, and some sixty students were trampled to death in the melee.^[47]

Of T'ai-ho's 653 chü-jen (counting those who took their exams outside their home province), 201 (or about 30 percent) went on to pass the metropolitan and palace exams and become chin-shih . That left a resi-

due of 452 men who failed one or more times at the national level but ended up on the so-called B-list as fu-pang chü-jen , men with a kind of second-class credential for office holding.

Chü-jen management was something of a continuing problem for central government. The Hsuan-te emperor (r. 1426-35) tried to push them all into government teaching. The Cheng-t'ung emperor (r. 1436-49) was at first willing to let those who did not want teaching posts to enroll in one of the imperial colleges, but later, in an effort to improve teaching quality, he forced all but the youngest (aged twenty-four or below) to take teaching positions.^[48]

The T'ai-ho data show that, indeed, from early in the Ming down to the Ch'eng-hua era (1465-87), 70 percent of the chü-jen began and ended their careers as government teachers. But assignment policy changed, and from the Ch'eng-hua era on, 80 percent of T'ai-ho's provincial graduates ended their careers in administration rather than in teaching. This shift was effected in two ways: more of the men were sent to the imperial colleges for administrative training (where they were treated as a class apart from and above the regular tribute students); and chü-jen were regularly promoted from government teaching into regular administration. At least fifty-three T'ai-ho chü-jen benefited from the latter policy.

T'ai-ho men who qualified as chü-jen had much better careers than those who qualified as chien-chü or li-yuan , categories discussed earlier. As administrators, the highest bureaucratic ranks the chü-jen achieved range from 3A to 9B, with 6B being the median. (An example of a 6B post would be a subprefectural Vice magistrate.) That compares very favorably to the medians of 8A and 9B, respectively, for officials holding the chien-chü and li-yuan credentials.

The Chin-Shin

Fifty-six percent of the 201 men from T'ai-ho who achieved the chin-shih degree during the Ming dynasty did so after more than one try. This phenomenon is evident from a comparison of the median age at which men won the chin-shih degree with the median age of those who won only the chü-jen degree. The ages of thirty-two T'ai-ho chü-jen degree winners are known: they range from eighteen to forty-five, with a median age of twenty-seven. The known ages of ninety-one T'ai-ho chin-shih range from nineteen to fifty-three, with a median age of thirty-one.

The competition for the chin-shih degree was quite stiff, though only half as stiff as the competition for the chü-jen degree. Government set the triennial national quotas at between one hundred and four hundred, usually around three hundred, depending upon then current estimates of manpower needs at the elite levels of government. Usually, slightly less than 10 percent of the examinees passed each time the exam was given.^[49] That compares to the z percent to 4 percent of Kiangsi chü-jen candidates who passed the provincial exams, and chü-jen pass rates elsewhere were comparable, or lower.

Within the general national chin-shih quota, government established regional subquotas in an effort to prevent any one region of the country from becoming too dominant. In 1436, for example, within an overall quota of one hundred, the ratio of southerners to northerners to people from central China was 60:30:10. In 1508, for a quota of three hundred, north and south absorbed the center and were then equalized at I50:150, a move which further diminished the chances of well-prepared candidates from a comparatively rich and populous southern province like Kiangsi.^[50] There were yet further limits on how many men offering any one text as his classic of choice might pass. Thus T'ai-ho man Hsiao Luan (1399-1458, from South Creek Ward, township 59) failed the chin-shih exam of 1436 not because he wrote a bad exam but because he was one of too many offering the Book of Documents as his classic of choice to be tested on. As a B-list chü-jen , then, Hsiao was compelled to take a teaching post.^[51]

Men from T'ai-ho fared extraordinary well at the national exams over roughly the first half of the fifteenth century. From 1404 to 1451, seventy-two T'ai-ho men passed the seventeen exams given. From 1454 to 1499, forty-five passed the sixteen exams given. But as the years rolled on, things got worse and worse for T'ai-ho, as of course they did also at the provincial exam level. From 1502 to 1550, thirty-four passed the seventeen chin-shih exams given. From 1553 to 1598, twenty-one passed the sixteen exams given. And from 1601 to 1642, sixteen passed the fifteen exams given. The fading visibility of T'ai-ho men on the national scene mirrors the declining fortunes of Chi-an Prefecture and of Kiangsi Province as a whole in the national competition, as men from the southeastern coastal regions gradually assumed complete dominance over them.^[52]

But in the early fifteenth century, things were good indeed. In the examination of 1421, Yang Shih-ch'i was chief examiner. There were three thousand candidates, and the chin-shih quota was two hundred.

Seven T'ai-ho men made it. The B-list quota was three hundred, and nine T'ai-ho men made that. There were twenty-five hundred outright failures; of them, only four were from T'ai-ho.^[53] In 1427, two thousand candidates, fifty (!) of them from T'ai-ho, gathered in Peking, hoping to make the one hundred quota set for that year. Six T'ai-ho men succeeded in achieving their chin-shih degrees. That year there was a B-list quota of 470, but how many T'ai-ho men made it is not stated.^[54] These were, obviously, inordinate success rates for a single county, and there is; no reason to suppose that they could have been sustained forever.

The bureaucratic careers of men holding the chin-shih degree were better by far than the careers of those who entered government service through other channels. The highest official positions obtained by chin-shih degree winners from T'ai-ho ran the gamut from grade 2A to 9B (one man demanded a prefectural instructorship, 9B, for personal reasons), with 5A as the median rank attained. (Vice prefect, assistant surveillance commissioner in the provinces, and bureau director in one of the six ministries in the capital were typical 5A posts.)

Tribute (Kung)

What happened to those who failed the examinations? It was the destiny of all but a tiny minority of sheng-yuan to fail repeatedly at the provincial exams. After repeated failures, many sheng-yuan just quit, but it was possible for some, through testing or through seniority or perhaps through bribery and special connections, to advance to the rank of stipend student. For county-level units of government like T'ai-ho, the number of stipend students was restricted to twenty. Stipend students were placed on a waiting list for the annual tribute (sui-kung ) through which they were sent up one or two at a time either to the northern imperial college in Peking or to the southern one in Nanking. After 1441, the usual rule was for counties to send up one tribute student every two years; subprefectures two every three years; and prefectures one every year (Nationally, all schools sent up some 855 annual tribute students every year.)^[55]

The plan, not always followed consistently, was for those sent up through the tribute channel to spend ten years as imperial college students (chien-sheng ), then three years in job training (li-shih ), usually as document drafters and checkers. At that point, the imperial college students were considered qualified for appointment to a range of low-level positions in administration, or as teachers in the national Confu-

cian educational service. Actually, residency requirements for chien-sheng were often waived; and job-training stints were shortened or lengthened, depending on the size of the chien-sheng backlog and the current level of the government's need for the clerical work that the students performed.

Over the course of the Ming, T'ai-ho produced over 404 men who qualified themselves for office through annual tribute to either of the imperial colleges as sui-kung chien-sheng . What was their fate? Thirteen of them died before ever receiving an appointment. Eight retired unappointed, but with the cap and belt of official status. What happened to ninety-three of them, mostly of the Wan-li period (1573-1620) and later, is unknown owing to missing records. Of the remaining 290 men, 172 (60 percent) entered and remained in government teaching service, mostly at ranks lower than those of the chü-jen . Over half the chien-sheng who were appointed teachers were never promoted beyond the lowest rank of assistant instructor. Those 118 chien-sheng appointed to administrative posts eventually achieved offices whose ranks ranged from 4A down to wei ju liu . The median rank was 7A, clearly above the median ranks of the li-yuan (9B) and the recommendation men (8A), and just as clearly below those of the chü-jen (6A) and the chin-shih (5A).

I would like to take a moment to say something about government teaching because so many of T'ai-ho's chü-jen and chien-sheng were appointed to teaching positions, rather than to administrative ones. In fact, a total of 514 T'ai-ho men, recruited from virtually every pool except the li-yuan , spent their entire careers as government teachers. That constitutes 30 percent of all the T'ai-ho men who qualified themselves for office during the Ming, which is a substantial number and an important component of the collective experience of T'ai-ho society with the larger world of Ming governance.

Confucian schools were established in each of some fifteen hundred prefectures, subprefectures, and counties in China, as well as in a further number of military guards communities and regional princely establishments scattered about the realm. Just counting the regular civil units of government, there were, until the sixteenth century, some 5,244 teaching posts available: 1,564 instructorships and 3,680 assistant instructorships. (During the sixteenth century, some 612 assistant instructorships were abolished).^[56]

The educational function of government was treated quite separately from administrative function, and the former lay distinctly beneath the latter in prestige. The highest local teaching post, that of prefectural school instructor, was ranked 9B, the same as the lowest regular rank in the administrative hierarchy. All other local teachers were ranked wei ju liu (effectively grade 19). The capstone of the teaching service was the imperial college staff, in Peking and Nanking, where there were altogether sixty-five positions, ranging from wei ju liu to 6A, for directors of studies. The college staffs were recruited mainly from chü-jen with good records as local teachers, but the deans (or rectors, 4B) were typically chin-shih appointees from regular administration, not former teaching officials at all. Rectors aside, government teachers were seldom promoted into administration. They were also issued insignia that displayed their inferiority to administrative officials at the same grade.^[57]

Teaching may have been a respected function in Ming China, but that respect was clearly not shown in pay or prestige for the official teaching hierarchy. Out in the localities, government teachers were required to produce a given number of chü-jen per year and were penalized in various ways if they failed to do that.^[58] Even early in the Ming, when education was not quite yet the dead-end service it eventually became, Yang Shih-ch'i noted that educational posts were considered "cold jobs" (leng chih ), i.e., out of the bureaucratic mainstream, and were definitely not the first choice of the majority of T'ai-ho's ambitious young men.^[59]

As much as 25 percent of the manpower of Ming civil bureaucracy was destined in fact to prepare sheng-yuan to become teachers of other sheng-yuan , who in turn prepared sheng-yuan yet elsewhere to become teachers to yet other sheng-yuan , and so on and on, in endless loops that, over time, snaked their way this way and that through the whole country.

To return to the chien-sheng , many of them were eventually appointed government teachers—to prepare sheng-yuan to pass the very provincial exams that they had, by definition, failed at themselves. It is little wonder their prestige was low.

Ming records are replete with expressions of concern about how to clear the huge backlogs of sui-kung chien-sheng awaiting their first official appointments. Little could be done about the matter. The T'ai-ho data, though thin, support the assertions of Ming government itself

that the tribute students were old men by the time they at last became officials.^[60]

There was, for example, Tseng Jen (1459-1543), from a prominent and successful lineage, the Tseng of Yueh-kang (Moon Hill Ward, township 32). Ou-yang Te remembered him well and wrote his epitaph. When Ou-yang Te became a sheng-yuan , at the age of fourteen (ca. 1510), Tseng was already fifty-one and well known locally as an authority on the Book of Changes in the orthodox Ch'eng-Chu interpretation, and he had already been a stipend student for some years. Though he always did well on the school tests conducted by the education intendants, he kept failing the provincial exams. Ou-yang Te shot right by him, achieving his chü-jen degree in 1516 (at the age of twenty) and his chin-shih in 1523. In 1523, poor old Tseng was sixty-four years old and still a county stipend student. Then in 1525, recalled Ou-yang,

Tseng was placed first on the county sui-kung list, and [his classmate] Lung Chin was placed second. The tribute rule was to test two men from each county, with the better of the two getting the selection. The education intendant tested them, and decided that Tseng's writing was the better, and that therefore he should be selected for tribute. But Tseng declined, on the grounds that Lung Chin's writing was not necessarily worse than his own, and, besides, Lung was the older. [So grateful was Lung, of Kan-chu Ward] that he called Heaven's blessings down on Tseng in the presence of everyone, and that made Tseng famous: as "Master Tseng of T'ai-ho, who yielded his slot as sui-kung ."^[61]

Three years later, Tseng himself finally got his reward and became a chien-sheng , at the age of sixty-nine. At some later date, he was made assistant instructor at a Confucian school in an educationally backward part of Kwangtung Province and was said to have done well there. He retired with enough vigor left to help enlarge his ancestral temple and lend grain.^[62] He died at eighty-four. Lung Chin, old as he must have been, also lived long enough to be appointed an assistant instructor.

These appear to be extreme cases, but clearly the waiting time for those on the list of expectant sui-kung could at times be measured in decades. But there were ways to circumvent the bottleneck of the student tribute system; of these, purchase was by far the most common.

Purchase of chien-sheng status was known, euphemistically, as "regulation tribute" (li-kung ). Central government openly established this purchase system for the first time soon after the security crisis of 1449, when the Mongols captured the emperor and held him hostage. It was reinstituted intermittently after that, at times when government found

itself short of revenues. At least eighty-one T'ai-ho sheng-yuan took advantage of Ming fiscal crises to buy their way around the formidable logjam of the annual tribute system.

In 1517, a silver payment schedule was issued for those who wished to become li-kung . Stipend students were asked to pay zoo taels, added students 280, and supplementary students 340.^[63] In 1537 these schedules were reissued and eligibility was extended to include failed sheng-yuan (price not noted). A price list of 1550 made official positions available to all chien-sheng who wanted to leap to the front of the waiting queue (a grade 7 post in the capital went for fifty taels, and one in the provinces for thirty).^[64]

Sales of chien-sheng status were, to be sure, susceptible to terrible abuse; but sales offers seem to have been made mainly to men who were probably qualified anyway. Nevertheless, from the official documents and discussions recorded in the Veritable Records , it is clear that the li-kung were resented by their sui-kung classmates and heavily discriminated against by the upper classes of officialdom, and thus they constituted yet one more despised bureaucratic sub-caste, rather than a den of moneyed privilege.

The T'ai-ho evidence shows that, indeed, the li-kung were treated worse than the sui-kung were. Virtually all li-kung were appointed to low-ranking administrative positions. The median rank at which they ended their careers was 8A, marginally below the 7A median for sui-kung .

Who were the li-kung ? It goes without saying that they came from wealthy T'ai-ho families. Interestingly, almost all of them came from academically successful families. Thirty-three li-kung were the sons or grandsons of prominent officials. It appears safe to say that, at least in T'ai-ho, the opportunities provided by the Ming state to buy preferment attracted not crass parvenus but the luckless or restless sons of the socially respected upper crust.

The lives of some half dozen T'ai-ho li-kung are known in some detail. One was Yang Ch'un-sheng of T'ai-ho city. These Yang were eminent and successful indeed, being descendants of Grand Secretary Yang Shih-ch'i. Yang Ch'un-sheng was the fourth of five sons of Yang Tso, who had won his provincial degree in 1525 and had ended his career a subprefectural magistrate (5B) in the 1540s.

Ch'un-sheng was bright, and his kin confidently expected him to succeed at least as well as his father had done. But as an added student in

the T'ai-ho County school, he failed four times at the provincial exams, and so he paid a required sum and became a li-kung .

At the imperial college in Nanking, he proved an excellent student, and so was permitted to take the provincial exams for the southern metropolitan area that were held in Nanking. Three times he failed at those. At the age of forty-two, Yang had failed seven times in twenty-one years, and on the basis of examples he had read about in the Han dynastic history, he decided he could still achieve something worthwhile as a li-kung . How else could he even begin to satisfy the expectations his family had placed upon him? So he took "a substantial sum of money" and proceeded to Peking to buy a post from the Ministry of Personnel. His wife, Mme Tseng, a wholesaler in rice and salt back in T'ai-ho, provided the money. Alas, Yang died en route of a fever that same year.^[65]

Wang I-chueh (1532-83, of Nan-fu Ward township 61) also had intellectual credentials in addition to money. His relatives included uncles who were chü-jen ; officials; scholars; and devoted followers of the thought of Wang Yang-ming and Chan Jo-shui. Wang seems to have been a bit impatient. He became a sheng-yuan at age twenty-three, and three years later he bought into the Peking imperial college as a li-kung . At twenty-nine, he made a payment to the Ministry of Personnel and was then assigned the post of assistant office manager (8A) in the Directorate of Imperial Parks. After his nine-year term expired, he went home to manage lineage affairs and, from time to time, to attend Hu Chih's lectures on Confucianism.^[66] His example shows how money could oil the frozen gears of official selection and placement.

For a favored few sheng-yuan , a special route into the imperial colleges was available: this was the yin (protection privilege) route, which one could take if one's father or grandfather had risen high enough in Ming bureaucracy. Upon promotion to a position ranked 3 or better, officials were permitted to nominate a son, sometimes also a grandson, for admittance into one or the other of the imperial colleges (in a few cases early in the Ming, the yin privilege led to a direct official appointment, bypassing the colleges).

Of thirty-four T'ai-ho sons and grandsons granted the protection privilege in the Ming, twenty-three eventually got official positions, all but one in administration. The median final position reached by these men was 7A, the same as that for the sui-kung chien-sheng .

In the colleges, the yin men were designated as kuan-sheng , or "offi-

cial students." It is apparent that, like the sui-kung , they could expect to spend many years actually or nominally present in the colleges before a post was assigned them. College matriculation dates are often known from entries to that effect in the Veritable Records . The dates of first appointments are sometimes known from other sources, mainly gazetteers. In the case of four men, both years are known, and these show that these particular men spent from fourteen to twenty-nine years languishing as kuan-sheng .

On November 11, 1496, the emperor endorsed the petition of Chang Ta (1432-1505, from Hsiu-ch'i, at T'ai-ho City West), at the time chief minister (3B) in the Court of Imperial Entertainments in Nanking, to have his son Chang Yin admitted into the imperial college under the yin rules. So Chang Yin enrolled, and there he stayed, until 1525, when at last he was appointed vice magistrate (8A) of little T'ai-p'ing County in Chekiang Province, whose gazetteer notes, laconically, that "because his salary came by inheritance, he tended to be insubordinate, and for that reason he was [soon] dismissed."^[67] (Other T'ai-ho yin men seem to have bent better to bureaucratic discipline.)

This chapter has tried to sketch out the story of the experience of T'ai-ho men with the world of Ming government, and the moment has now come to offer some broader perspectives on issues that the discussion has raised. One issue is the nature of Ming bureaucracy. Another issue is regional and local competition for office. A third issue is the larger implications for local society of the results of that competition.

The local T'ai-ho data reveal certain things about the nature of Ming bureaucracy that might not be so easily found out by studying that bureaucracy from a purely national perspective. For one thing, the data show the crucial importance of credentialing in recruitment and in promotion.

It is possible to see how credentialing—getting recommended, winning a degree, entering the imperial colleges, etc.—was not so much an arbitrary creation as a cultural and institutional adaptation to the mathematical laws of hierarchy.

To demonstrate that idea, one needs only to know the total size of Ming civil bureaucracy (twenty to twenty-five thousand) and then to estimate the number of hierarchical levels that it contained. A case can be made for some five to nine levels; the choice is not crucial to the essence of the matter. If five, then we place the emperor on level one; 12

grand secretaries and chief ministers, say, on level two; 144 other important central officials on level three; 1,728 provincial and prefectural officials on level four; and 20,736 local, educational, etc. functionaries on level five. (This configuration results from the choice of twelve as the average number of direct subordinates controlled by any immediately higher official.) The total number of men in this theoretical hierarchy comes to 22,611—very close to the actual size of Ming bureaucracy.

All things being equal, what are any one man's chances of promotion into a vacant higher-level position from a lower level in this theoretical bureaucracy? Exactly one chance in 20,736 for those on level five, one chance in 1,728 for those on level four, and so on up the ladder. There are some further features to be noted. There ten times as many men on the lowest level (20,736) than there are on all the other levels added together (1,885). The higher a person stands in the hierarchy already, the better his chances for (further) promotion are. If one assumes seniority to be the only qualification for promotion and an average career to be twenty years long, then a man on level five in this hierarchy will spend about 92 percent of his career there and 8 percent of it (or less than two years) on level four. (If level one, the emperor's position, were open to everyone for promotion on the same basis, then everyone would serve as emperor for about half an hour!)^[68]

In this light, one can understand credentialing as an adaptation to the intractable realities of promotion in hierarchical systems. The Ming established a complex series of fast and slow tracks, and we have seen just what these were and have identified them as fast or slow on the basis of the median rank of the final post the men who entered them achieved. Demeaning as it may have been, slow-tracking was the method seized upon by a highly competitive society for justifying the lowering of the expectations of the vast majority of its officials and for reducing competition for scarce positions in the upper bureaucratic echelons. (It may also be noted that the chin-shih credential, which opened the fastest track, was itself differentiated into fast and slow tracks, depending largely upon one's final ranking [1-100, 1-300, etc.] in the palace examinations.)

Also at issue is the question of the places of Kiangsi Province, Chi-an Prefecture, and T'ai-ho County in the national competition for office. Ho Ping-ti's The Ladder of Success in Imperial China pointed out long ago how, with respect to the output of chin-shih , Kiangsi Province led the nation in the fifteenth century, only to lose out to Chekiang in the sixteenth, and to fall even further behind in the seventeenth. Ho's study,

now a classic, also noted that during Kiangsi Province's fifteenth-century heyday, Chi-an Prefecture played an absolutely dominant role, both among Kiangsi prefectures and among all other prefectures in the realm; and that as Kiangsi's place among the provinces of China fell lower and lower, Chi-an Prefecture's place among the prefectures of Kiangsi did exactly the same.^[69]

Ho professed himself unable adequately to account for the extraordinary socioacademic success of Chi-an Prefecture in the fifteenth century. It cannot be adequately accounted for here either, because (1) the question demands further research from a national perspective and (2) there were no prefecture-wide institutions through which common efforts toward turning young men into chin-shih might have been exerted. In addition, there was little sense among the prefectural elites that they were prefectural compatriots above and beyond all other possible modes of self-identification. The sense of county citizenship was stronger by far than any sense of being from the same prefecture or from the same province.

However, to continue Ho's paradigm of rise and decline in the output of chin-shih , it can be shown that as Kiangsi declined relative to the rest of China, and Chi-an declined relative to the rest of Kiangsi, T'ai-ho County also declined relative to the other eight counties that constituted Chi-an. Chin-shih degree winners from T'ai-ho were some 25 percent of the prefectural total from the time of the Ming founding down to the mid-fifteenth century; then their place declined slowly relative to that of competitors from the other Chi-an counties through the sixteenth century; finally it plunged to the 10-15 percent range in the first half of the seventeenth century—about where the principle of equal opportunity dictates it should have been all along.

Kiangsi men and Chi-an men of the sixteenth century were themselves aware of their declining place in the national scene, and Kiangsi man Lo Ch'i (1447-1519) thought he could explain it. He noted that when Szechwan Province bloomed in the Northern Sung, Kiangsi was obscure and far behind. Then later in the Sung, Kiangsi in turn burst forth all of a sudden. In the early Ming, Kiangsi was the cultural center (the Tsou-Lu ) of China, but in later years it "lost sixty to seventy percent of its former fame," being regularly outperformed by other provinces. Lo's explanation was that the unpredictable motions of the cosmic process, the "spiritual energy [exuded by the] mountains and rivers" (shan-ch'uan chih ch'i ), were responsible for these shifting for-

tunes. But he thought Kiangsi would some day rise again; one must just keep working hard, and wait.^[70]

Finally, what does the competition for office in Ming civil bureaucracy reveal about the society of T'ai-ho, its common-descent groups and lineages in particular?

It is possible to identify T'ai-ho's more than 1,668 Ming officials with some 328 different common-descent groups and lineages.^[71] If one considers each such lineage as a unit of production, competing against all the other units for the sale of its products to the Ming state, then one can see that success was by no means evenly distributed among the units.

The 328 units sort down into three or four giant firms, a hundred or so firms of middle to small size, and a huge number (204) of tiny operations, producing only one or two officials each over the whole course of the Ming. The biggest producer of all, by far, was the Ou-yang group, of Shu-chiang Ward (township 61), with 125 officials, including fourteen chin-shih . Next biggest was the Wang of Nan-fu Ward (also township 61), with fifty-eight officials, including four chin-shih . The three largest firms produced almost as many officials (236) as did the smallest two hundred and four (259).

When all 328 units are taken as members of a competitive elite, it is evident that T'ai-ho's elite was dominated by an oligarchy of unusually successful common-descent groups and lineages. And it bears keeping in mind that beneath this entire "oligopolized" elite lay a "gray" area of unknown size whose families produced no officials, though they tried; and a "white" area, again of unknown size, whose families never entered the competition at all.^[72]