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.