Organizer: Mark Elliott, University of California, Santa Barbara
Chair: Frederic Wakeman, Jr., University of California, Berkeley
Discussant: Evelyn S. Rawski, University of Pittsburgh
This panel consists of three papers on marriage and widowhood in the Eight Banners, the hybrid socio-military institution that formed the original core of Qing military power.
Lee's paper, "Nuptiality Among the Qing Nobility," is part of his ongoing work on marriage among the Manchu nobility. Relying on the impeccable information contained in the Aisin-Gioro clan genealogies, Lee describes the marriage market for the imperial lineage and analyzes marriage rates and ages. Among other things, he discusses the high rate of polygyny among sons, hypogamy among daughters, and patterns of intermarriage between lineages, showing that nuptiality here has more in common with Han nuptiality than might have been expected. Ding, "Banner-Commoner Intermarriage in the Qing," tackles the issue of intermarriage between Manchus and Han Chinese. She finds that intermarriage of banner men and Han women was in fact quite common, particularly in Beijing. Ding goes on to examine the role of intermarriage in the process of acculturation among Beijing's Manchus. In "Widows and Widow Chastity in the Eight Banners," Elliott investigates the treatment of widows within the banners (including their "repatriation" to Beijing following the husband's death) and the remarkable shift in attitudes toward widow chastity among the Manchus. He concludes that this shift is consistent with the general pattern of accelerated Manchu acculturation during the eighteenth century.
With their common focus on Manchu, Mongol, and Han wives and widows, these papers represent a novel turn in historical research on gender and ethnicity in early modern China.
Banner-Commoner Intermarriage
Yizhuang Ding, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
This paper takes up the question of intermarriage between individuals (Manchus primarily) in the Eight Banners and Han Chinese commoners. It is well known that three ethnically-based divisions existed within the banner system, the Manchu, Mongol, and Han-martial banners, and that important differences also existed between regular banner households and servile households, such as of bondservants (booi) and others. Intermarriage between these groups was both permitted and frequent, as the emperor's selection of numerous empresses and concubines from among Han-martial and booi women demonstrates. However, were banner men and women permitted to marry commoners? There was never any unambiguous empire-wide ban on such marriages, although partial restrictions can be found, such as those forbidding members of the imperial lineage to marry Han commoners and the 1736 prohibition of marriage between Manchu women and Han males.
Looking at both Beijing and the provincial garrison cities, the paper shows that marriage between males in the banners and Han women was nothing unusual and that in most instances the Qing government did not interfere with such matches; the marriage of banner women to Han males, however, was a punishable offense. Relying on cases culled from the archives, I examine the difficulty of enforcing restrictions. The paper also investigates polygamy in Eight Banner households, which was very common and which involved Han Chinese women in an overwhelming number of cases as secondary wives (concubines). I conclude by discussing the impact of intermarriage on the assimilation process among the Manchus.
Widows and Widow Chastity in the Eight Banners
Mark Elliott, University of California, Santa Barbara
Widow chastity and the cult of the "virtuous woman" in late imperial China has recently received a great deal of attention in the historical literature. The social, political, and economic pressures placed on women to remain faithful to their deceased husbands or to sacrifice their lives to avoid being shamed have been shown to vary significantly over time and among classes. The issue itself we now know to have been a controversial one even during the Qing, with some scholars deploring the practice even as the state was encouraging and promoting "chaste" behavior on an unprecedented scale.
This paper takes up a very interesting angle on this problem by examining the virtuous woman cult in the Eight Banners. As members of a dynastic elite banner women were subject to much closer supervision by the state than were commoner Han Chinese women, and their marital status was not simply a family matter, but a matter for the banner bureaucracy as well. Using Chinese- and Manchu-language archival materials, this paper explores the question of virtuous women, and particularly widows, in the banners. My research shows that attitudes changed dramatically between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries: where the cult of chastity was frowned upon early in the Qing period, by the middle Qing reports of chaste women had become quite common. The paper attempts to explain the reasons for this transition, addressing both the growth of the cult in the Qing generally as well as the larger problem of Manchu assimilation.
Nuptiality Among the Qing Nobility
James Lee, California Institute of Technology
Marriage in imperial China is widely reputed to be early and universal. Because of a preference for children, young people were supposed to marry early, and they could do so virtually regardless of economic circumstances-in contrast with Western Europe, where individuals had to inherit or establish independent means in order to marry, they could draw on the resources of the multiple-family household. Marriage in China is therefore also assumed to have been largely immune from social, economic, and demographic pressures. However, recent studies of nuptiality among historical Chinese populations depict a much more complex and fluid picture. Not only did a significant number of males never marry, but a variety of different marriage forms existed beneath the homogenous surface of early and universal female marriage.
This paper provides another set of evidence showing the historical complexity of marriage in late imperial China. It relies on a source of unusual completeness and accuracy, the genealogical archives of the Qing imperial lineage, to examine patterns of male and female nuptiality among the Manchu nobility. The typical view of marriage among this group is that alliances were limited to the Manchu, Mongol, and Han-martial banner elite, resulting in a political endogamy and a wide cleavage between rulers and commoners. In examining marriage patterns of the imperial lineage, the paper disputes the claim that these deviated significantly from the Chinese ideal, arguing instead that the Qing nobility represented this ideal in being free from mundane economic concerns and committed to producing heirs.