Social Structure and Dowry

Differences between T'ang and Sung social stratification are well known. The families that became established in the Northern Sung were rarely descendants of the leading T'ang families (even if some claimed such connections). Pedigree by itself was less of an asset in the Sung. The growing bureaucracy offered more opportunities for members of local elite families through the expanded examination system. The notion of an educated class of families whose members occasionally held office gained general recognition, displacing the T'ang notion of a super-elite of families whose members nearly all held office. Elite men were embedded in localized kinship groups, differing markedly from the dispersed kinship groups of the T'ang aristocratic families.^[17]

The size of the educated class grew rapidly in Sung times, probably in large part because as the economy expanded, it could support more local landlords and wealthy merchants. As a consequence, the numbers of those competing for elite positions seem to have steadily outstripped the supply of valued places, at both the national and local levels. Thus the culture of the elite in Sung times was if anything more competitive than in T'ang. The basic rules of civil service recruitment were changed several times, and there was a persistent tendency for those with good connections to devise ways to favor people of their own kind (through "protection" privileges, "sponsorship," "facilitated," or "avoidance" examinations, and so on) (see Chaffee 1985:101-5; Umehara 1985:423-500; Chang Pang-wei 1986). Sung sources are full of complaints about the nepotism of those in high office. For instance, in 1041 Sun Mien charged that high officials would recommend or sponsor their affinal relatives (ch'in-ch'i ) (CP 132:5a). In 1165 an official protested that the advantageous "avoidance" examinations were being taken not merely by agnatic relatives but by cousins through father's sister and mother's brother (both fifth-rank mourning relatives) (SHY hsuan-chü 16:13a-b). Even more common was the complaint that "cold, solitary" (han-ku ) scholars had a hard time getting ahead. Men with high-ranking close agnatic

relatives were not "cold" or "solitary," but neither were those with good affinal connections. At the same time, the dangers of nepotism were recognized and efforts made to contain them, especially by prohibiting specified relatives from serving under or examining each other (see Niida 1942:287-302 and Chang Pang-wei 1986). These efforts to curb nepotism also served to advertise the range and depth of kin who could be of use.

Does the inflation of dowries have anything to do with the political and social changes that led to this transformation of class structure in the Sung? Large betrothal gifts apparently disappeared with the social groups that practiced them. In the T'ang, there is no evidence that such girls were common outside the circle of aristocratic families. But there is no reason that the disappearance of excessive betrothal gifts would have to lead to exaggerated dowries.

The tendency for dowry to escalate in the late Five Dynasties and Sung appears to be related to the ecological situation of the emerging elite. Officials and aspirants to office who needed connections in order to facilitate promotions through sponsorship, to gain allies in factional disputes, and so on had to build up networks. This could be done through nonkinship means, such as through the ties of teachers and students or officials and their subordinates. But kinship ties have advantages, for they can be extended much further, to brothers, sons, grandsons, and so on. The dislocations of the tenth century seem to have resulted in many men finding themselves cut off from both patrilineal and affinal kin. For instance, Shih Chieh (1005-45), in describing the history of his family, noted that the first ancestor to move to their current location 150 years earlier had found himself with neither brothers nor affinal kin (TLSHS shih-wen :251; see also Matsui 1968). In such cases it was easier to build up networks of affinal kin through marriages with families long settled in that place than to wait several generations for the family to grow into a sizable patrilineal descent group. This use of marriage to establish networks occurred at both the national and local levels. Robert Hartwell found that of 210 marriages involving the thirty-five most eminent "families" of the Northern Sung (960-1126), just over half (115) were to others in these families originally from other parts of the country (1982:423). Robert Hymes (1986) found that until the end of the Northern Sung when official families migrated to Fu-chou (Kiangsi), they quickly arranged marriages to the leading local families.

In the T'ang those with wealth could not change the key element in their social status except by fraud: their home prefecture (choronym) and family name were fixed. A family hoping to convert wealth into social status could perhaps facilitate ties to these prestigious families by offering betrothal gifts or dowries verging on bribes. But the marriages contracted could only be expected to change the general evaluation of the family's status very slowly, after at least a couple of generations. In the Sung, starting with very little of

an established elite, family name per se meant little, so there was more to be gained by "buying" marriage connections.

Granting that there may have been more men eager to convert wealth into status in the early Sung, why did they use this wealth for dowries rather than betrothal gifts? Here I will argue that dowry offered three advantages over betrothal gifts: it made a better 'bribe"; it provided more flexibility for family strategies; and it made affinal ties stronger.

Dowry was a superior bait because betrothal gifts were supposed to be returned as dowry. By insisting on valuable betrothal gifts when marrying out a daughter, one may have guaranteed that she would have an adequate dowry, but one was not improving the financial health of one's own patriline. Dowry, by contrast, involved transfer from one patriline to another. Although the groom's father, who arranged the marriage, was not to have any control over the dowry, and even his son was supposed to gain his wife's consent on its use, it would eventually go to his son's sons and daughters (see CMC 5:140; MCC 33:31a-b, 33:34b-37a; Ebrey 1984b:101-20). Its final destination would not be trivial to a man worried about the eventual division of the family property among several sons. Mercantile families could use handsome dowries to marry their daughters into families of officials.^[18] Epitaphs for the early Sung also show rich official families marrying their daughters to promising young men, giving them large dowries.^[19] They did this in part to avoid marrying down or losing prestige, but also because even well-established families could benefit from connections to such men. And the groom also had much to gain. Ssu-ma Kuang criticized the practice of choosing brides on the basis of transient wealth and rank. "How could a man of spirit retain his pride if he got rich by using his wife's assets or gained high station by relying on her influence?" (SMSSI 3:29). Probably many young men would forgo some pride toward those ends.

My second argument is that dowry increased the options available in advancement strategies. Transmission of property along the patrilineal line through division among sons was inflexible: all brothers' shares were to be the same. Dowry allowed, to some extent at least, a differentiation among brothers inasmuch as dowries for each incoming bride were separately negotiated. Thus, a family with several sons and daughters could make different decisions for each one. Sometimes they could concentrate on affirming their prestige by arranging the best matches, ignoring how much dowry their sons' brides would bring and using up much of their disposable income for the daughters' dowries. Alternatively, they could worry about the future estates of their sons after division and try to soften the consequences by seeking sons-in-law who would take their daughters without large dowries or daughters-in-law for their sons who would come with good dowries. Another strategy might be to have one or more sons wait until he passed the examinations before arranging his marriage in the hope of securing a better dowry for

him. Of course, dowry would never be the sole consideration in marriage negotiations; a well-connected father-in-law could be worth more than an ample dowry. Moreover, a family might consider it wiser to invest more in education and less in marriages.^[20]

My third argument is that the obligations inherent in an affinal relationship could be strengthened by a large dowry. In an article published in 1981, I showed that the provision of dowry to daughters was associated with continuing obligations between the families of the bride and the groom (Ebrey 1981:124). The parents of the bride could expect more from their daughter, her husband, and her sons when they had married her out with a respectable dowry. The direct evidence I cited included Yuan Ts'ai's advice to families with ample property to give their daughters a share of it on the grounds that their sons might prove incapable and they might therefore have to depend on their daughters' families even for their funerals and ancestral sacrifices (Ebrey 1984b:224). I also pointed to strong ties between daughters and their natal families, ranging from daughters who took in their widowed mothers or arranged their parents' funerals or cared for their orphaned younger brothers, to parents or brothers who took responsibility for their widowed daughters or sisters.

One can easily posit (as Yuan Ts'ai did) that a woman who had received material assets from her parents had a greater obligation to aid them if they were ever in need than a woman who had not. One can also suppose that a widow with a dowry at her disposal (who either had no children or who was taking them with her) could more easily choose where she wished to live than one without much of a dowry. There is no obvious reason, however, for a family that had sent off a daughter with a substantial dowry to feel more obligated to take her back than one that had provided little if anything beyond recycling of the betrothal gifts. In these cases, the logic of unbalanced exchanges might be what kept these ties active. I also suspect that dowry strengthened affinal ties because it created lingering claims to common property. Just as brothers were bound to each other as coparceners of graveyards and ancestral halls even after division of the household, affinal relatives were linked through mutual interest in the disposition of the dowry and this kept their ties alive.^[21]

Another way to bring out the relationship between dowry and continuing reciprocal obligations is to consider either end of the spectrum of marriage finance. Families who sold their daughter as a concubine provided no dowry but received large "betrothal gifts" of cash. It was generally understood that they were losing kinship rights over her, that they might never meet their grandchildren, that these grandchildren need not come to their funeral, and so on (Ebrey 1986a and Watson, this volume). At the other extreme were uxorilocal arrangements whereby families took in husbands for their daughters, generally expecting little or nothing in the way of betrothal gifts but

providing their daughter with a dowry of much or all of their property. Such sons-in-law had many obligations to their wives' families—to support them, bury them, and see to it that their sacrifices continued.

Among the elite, strong affinal ties could be used not merely for kinship purposes (care of widows and orphans) but also for political ones. As anecdotes attest, families of officials seem to have often thought they could recruit sons-in-law with better career prospects by offering better dowries. The goal of such efforts does not seem so much to have been prestige but connections: sons-in-law make good clients and political allies. This line of thinking is clearly reflected in Sung rules on nepotism. Table 3.1 lists affinal and matrilateral relatives under whom a man could not serve according to the nepotism rules of 1070. It is organized according to the woman who served as the kinship link between the two men.

As can easily be seen, the gradation in the scope of relatives to be avoided does not correspond to mourning grades. In Chinese kinship reckoning, a man is considered closely related to his father's brother and he mourns this uncle's wife at grade two. Yet his ties of obligation to this woman's natal family were not considered strong enough to make avoidance necessary in a bureaucratic setting. The same is true of the families of the wives of a man's brothers and nephews. Even in the case of the family into which his sister had married, only her husband and son had to be avoided, not, for instance, her husband's father or brother. A man was considered most likely to feel obligations to men in his mother's and wife's families, and then to a lesser extent, to those in the families of his daughter's husband and son's wife.

The logic here, I contend, is that of dowry and not of consanguinity. It is true that a man is related by blood to his mother's family, but he is also tied by blood to his father's mother's family, to his father's sister's family, and so on. Moreover, he is not related by blood to anyone in his wife's family. A fairly large number of people in the family that sent a girl and a dowry had to be avoided by her husband and sons, but other members of the family into which she married are generally not involved. (That is, one had to avoid serving in the same office with a first cousin of one's wife, but not with the brother or father of one's brother's wife.) The difference would seem to be that one received nothing from the dowry a brother's wife brought, but brothers, grandparents, and uncles of one's wife could all have been coparceners of the family that sent her dowry. Moreover, one was the foremost contributor to the dowry of a daughter, somewhat less to that of a sister and son's daughter, and much less to that of a brother's daughter, and so on.

Let me reorganize my argument to sort out the causal chain that includes the shift toward large dowries. I see the growth of the economy, increasing availability of money, and freer transfer of land as general preconditions for both the growth of the educated class and the greater transfer of wealth through dowry. I see the political situation of the tenth century as bringing to the fore people who had no pedigree but who had been able to build armies or staff bureaucracies through various personal connections. Whenever such connections are useful, affinal ties will gain importance. Dowry, I argue, was an especially good way for those with wealth to try to secure preferred affinal relations (because it made a better bait, allowed flexible family strategies, and strengthened the ties once they were arranged). Given the competitiveness with which Sung men pursued positions in the elite, it became difficult for families to gain a useful connection through a daughter without providing a dowry. In time, through market forces, it became nearly impossible to find any sort of suitable family for her. The civil service recruitment system was, meanwhile, evolving. The usefulness of affinal connections was continually confirmed and reproduced in this arena, both through the extension of privileges of facilitated entry into office to a wide range of kin

and through provisions made to cut these privileges back. By the time nepotism rules were compiled in the mid-Sung, the transfer of dowry was clearly associated with the assumed flow of favors. There is no point in asking which came first: dowry as a means to transfer property; an elite that continually used affinal kinship to create and repair networks that would secure or advance one in local or national politics; or a civil service system that continuously struggled against and gave ground to the desire of those inside and outside the system to use personal connections for both entry and advancement. These three phenomena were systematically related to each other and each kept the others strong.