Chinese Empire

Society and Family in Imperial China

The family was the basic unit of imperial Chinese society. There was no concept of the individual as a self-standing being, independent of kin: identity was conferred by father and grandfather, status by the rank of the household, and even the afterlife depended on a male descendant to perform the sacrifices. Marriage, inheritance, residence, occupation, and political loyalty were all decided within the family, and the family in turn was held together by a complex web of rituals, hierarchies, and obligations. To understand imperial Chinese society is to understand the patrilineal household in all its forms: the joint family of the gentry, the nuclear family of the peasant, the marriage and divorce practices, the institution of concubinage, the painful history of footbinding, the treatment of widows, the rituals of childhood and old age, and the slow evolution of women’s status over two millennia.

This article offers a survey of society and family in imperial China, from the Qin unification of 221 BCE to the fall of the Qing in 1912. For a focused look at the family as a unit of government and economy, see our survey of the role of the family in imperial China. The family sat at the heart of the broader Chinese cultural tradition, and was shaped by the political structures described in the chronology of Chinese dynasties and the philosophy surveyed in Chinese philosophy and thought.

The Patrilineal Family

The dominant family form in imperial China was the patrilineal joint family (大家庭, dà jiātíng), an ideal in which three, four, or even five generations lived together under the authority of the senior male, sharing a common ancestor hall, a common property, and a common ancestor worship. The senior male — the jiāzhǎng (家長) or patriarch — had formal authority over all members of the household, including the right to arrange marriages, to approve or reject economic decisions, and to discipline younger members. The senior woman of the household — the tàitài (太太) or grandmother — often wielded real power in the inner quarters, managing the daughters-in-law, the children, and the household finances.

The Lineage and the Ancestor Hall

Beyond the household, the lineage (宗族, zōngzú) was a larger kin group tracing descent from a common ancestor, often several generations back. Wealthy lineages built an ancestor hall (祠堂, cítáng) where the lineage members met, where the tablets of deceased ancestors were kept, and where the lineage head presided over collective rituals. The lineage held common property — land, libraries, granaries, schools — and used it to support poor relatives, educate promising sons, and maintain the collective reputation. In some regions, especially the southeast, the lineage was the dominant social institution, more important than the village or the county.

The Household Economy

The household was also the basic economic unit. The peasant household worked its plot of land, raised its animals, processed its own grain, and sold its surplus at the market. The gentry household ran an estate, employed tenants, and used its surplus to educate sons for the examinations, to buy more land, and to support poorer relatives. The merchant household ran its business, often through several branches of the family, and used its profits to buy land, titles, and education for the next generation. In all cases, the household was both a consumption unit and a production unit, and the line between the family and the firm was not clear.

Marriage

Marriage in imperial China was not a private matter between two individuals. It was a family alliance, arranged by the parents (sometimes with the input of the prospective spouses, sometimes not), negotiated through a matchmaker, sealed by a bride price and a dowry, and validated by an elaborate wedding ceremony. The bride left her natal family and was absorbed into her husband’s family; she came under the authority of her mother-in-law and was expected to produce sons to continue the husband’s line. Marriage was monogamous in the strict sense — a man could have only one principal wife at a time — but the institution of concubinage (see below) complicated this rule.

The Marriage Ceremony

The wedding ceremony was a complex affair involving a series of rituals performed over days or even weeks. The bride’s hair was combed and bound in the style of a married woman; she was carried in a red sedan chair to the groom’s house; the couple bowed to Heaven and Earth, to the ancestors, and to each other; a feast was held for the guests; and the bride entered the bridal chamber to await the groom. The rituals were meant to ensure the harmony of the marriage, the fertility of the couple, and the continuation of the family line.

Bride Price, Dowry, and Marriage Transactions

Marriage involved substantial economic transfers. The bride price (聘禮, pìnlǐ) was paid by the groom’s family to the bride’s family, and the dowry (嫁妝, jiàzhuāng) was brought by the bride to her new household. The size of these transfers signalled the status of both families. In some periods and regions, the bride’s family gained financially; in others, the groom’s family did. The transfers were so significant that the state sometimes tried to regulate them, but with limited success.

Divorce and Remarriage

Divorce was possible but unusual, and was heavily regulated. The Seven Grounds for Divorce (七出, qī chū) listed in the Book of Rites gave a husband the right to repudiate a wife who was childless, licentious, unfilial, talkative, thievish, jealous, or diseased. The Three Grounds for Not Divorcing (三不去, sān bù qù) provided some protection: a wife could not be divorced if she had no family to return to, if she had shared her husband’s poverty, or if she had worn mourning for his parents. Women of the gentry class, especially in the Ming and Qing, faced increasing pressure not to remarry if widowed, and the cult of widow chastity became a powerful social force.

Concubinage

The institution of concubinage (納妾, nàqiè) sat alongside marriage. A man of sufficient means could take one or more secondary wives (妾, qiè) in addition to his principal wife (妻, qī). The principal wife was the legal mother of all children of the household, including those born to concubines; the concubine was legally and socially inferior. Concubines were sometimes taken from poorer families, sometimes from the entertainment districts, and sometimes given as gifts or as imperial rewards. The imperial court maintained a large establishment of concubines, organised in a strict hierarchy; only one of them could be Empress (皇后, huánghòu), but several might be Imperial Consorts (妃, fēi) of various ranks.

The institution had a complex effect on women’s status. On the one hand, it reinforced the patriarchal structure of the household and gave men considerable power. On the other hand, the existence of a clear hierarchy of wives and concubines stabilised the household, provided a clear legal status for children, and gave women a recognised role within the system. Imperial concubines, in particular, sometimes rose to great power: the Empress Lü of the early Han, the Empress Wu of the Tang, and the Empress Dowager Cixi of the late Qing are only the most famous examples.

The Status of Women

The status of women in imperial China varied dramatically by period, region, class, and the personality of individual women. The standard Western view that imperial Chinese women were uniformly oppressed is wrong; the standard view that they enjoyed high status is also wrong. Reality was far more varied.

The Doctrine: Three Obediences and Four Virtues

The Confucian doctrine of female subordination was summed up in the Three Obediences (三從, sān cóng): obey your father before marriage, your husband during marriage, and your son in widowhood. The Four Virtues (四德, sì dé) were morality, proper speech, modest bearing, and diligence. These were the ideals taught to girls in elite households, and they framed how a respectable woman was expected to behave. A woman who embodied them was honoured; a woman who violated them could be divorced, beaten, or even killed by her husband or his family without serious legal consequence in many periods.

The Practice: Variability Across Time and Place

In practice, the doctrine and the reality were often very different. In the Han dynasty, women of the elite had considerable freedom: they owned property, ran businesses, and sometimes participated in court politics. In the Tang dynasty, the high-status woman could ride horses, wear relatively revealing clothing, and was not as tightly secluded as her Song successors. The Tang is the period of the great Tang dynasty women: Wu Zetian, the only woman ever to rule China as emperor in her own right; the Yang Guifei, the famous consort of the Emperor Xuanzong; the poet Xue Tao; and many others.

The Song dynasty was paradoxical: it was both the high point of neo-Confucian doctrine (which stressed female chastity, widowhood, and the subordination of women) and a period of strong female literary culture, exemplified by the poet Li Qingzhao (1084–c.1155). The Song also saw the revival and spread of footbinding, which had begun in the late Tang or Five Dynasties and became near-universal in the elite and then the mass of the Han Chinese population over the next several centuries.

The Ming and Qing periods saw a tightening of seclusion, an emphasis on widow chastity so strong that some widows chose suicide rather than remarry, and the entrenchment of footbinding. Yet even in these periods, women ran households, managed property, and produced a significant body of literature. The late Ming and Qing saw a flourishing of women’s poetry societies, women’s autobiographical writing, and even women’s fiction.

Women in the Economy

Women were a major part of the imperial Chinese economy, although their work was often invisible in official records. In the countryside, women spun thread, wove cloth, raised silkworms, helped with the harvest, and managed the household economy. In the towns, women ran small shops, sold food in the markets, worked as midwives and healers, and operated the family business. In the cities, women worked in the silk workshops, in the porcelain kilns, in the textile factories, and in the entertainment districts. The economic role of women was, in many cases, decisive for the survival of the household, even when ideology denied them any formal status.

Footbinding

Footbinding (纏足, chánzú) was the practice of tightly wrapping a young girl’s feet from about age five to produce the small, arched “golden lotus” (金蓮, jīnlián) foot that was considered beautiful. The practice began in the tenth or eleventh century, perhaps among court dancers, and spread through the elite and then the mass of the Han Chinese population. By the Ming, it was near-universal among Han Chinese women of every class except the very poorest (who needed their feet to work in the fields), and it persisted into the twentieth century.

The Practice

The process was painful and long-lasting. A girl’s feet were soaked in hot water, the toenails trimmed short, and the four smaller toes broken and folded under the sole. The foot was then bound tightly with long strips of cloth, and the binding was reapplied regularly over several years as the foot grew. The ideal result was a foot about three inches long, with a deep arch and a “lotus” shape, that could fit into a specially embroidered “lotus shoe.” Women with bound feet moved with a distinctive swaying gait that was considered erotic and refined.

The Effects

Footbinding had serious medical and social consequences. It caused chronic pain, restricted mobility, made hard labour impossible, and left women dependent on male relatives for any movement outside the home. Foreign observers from the seventeenth century onwards condemned it as cruel and barbarous. Chinese reformers attacked it in the late Qing, and the new Republic formally banned it in 1912, but it lingered in some rural areas into the 1930s and even later. Footbinding is one of the clearest examples of how a cultural practice could be simultaneously aesthetic, erotic, social, and a form of control — and how difficult it was to abolish even when its harmful effects were widely recognised.

Childhood

Childhood in imperial China was a clearly marked life stage, with its own rituals, clothing, and expectations. The first month after birth, a child was given a name in a small ceremony. At about one month, the family held a “full month” (滿月, mǎnyuè) feast, and the child’s head was sometimes shaved for the first time. The first birthday (周歲, zhōusuì) was another major occasion, with the child placed before a tray of objects (a pen, a coin, a book, a seal, food) and the first object grasped taken as an omen of the future. A child who grabbed the book or the pen was thought destined for the examinations.

Children’s clothing was a special style: long, loose robes with animal-shaped hats, padded jackets, and embroidered shoes. Children were considered closer to the world of spirits than adults, and were dressed in bright colours and given toys, amulets, and protective charms. Education began early, with boys (and a smaller number of girls) learning to read and write from a private tutor, a small village school, or in the family library.

Old Age

Old age was respected in imperial China, at least in theory. The sixtieth birthday was a major milestone, marking the completion of a full sexagenary cycle in the Chinese calendar, and was the occasion for a great banquet. The eightieth, ninetieth, and hundredth birthdays were even more honoured. A long-lived person, especially one who had produced many sons and grandsons, was a sign of the family’s accumulated virtue. In practice, old age was often harsh: the lack of a pension system meant that an elderly person without a son to support them could fall into poverty, and the unequal distribution of food within the household sometimes put the elderly at risk in times of famine.

The Social Pyramid

The imperial Chinese social pyramid was, in official theory, a four-tiered structure: scholars, farmers, artisans, merchants (士農工商, shì nóng gōng shāng). The ranking, originally formulated in the Warring States period, placed scholars (broadly, the gentry and officials) at the top, peasants next, then artisans, with merchants at the bottom. The ranking was, in practice, more honoured in the breach than the observance: merchants were often richer than scholars, and the line between the four categories was often blurred. But the ranking reveals a great deal about official ideology: the productive labour of the peasant was valued, the manual skill of the artisan was respected, and the merchant, who was thought to profit from the labour of others without producing anything, was treated with suspicion.

Outcasts and Minorities

Below the four occupations were the outcasts (賤民, jiànmín): the “mean people” of the late Ming and Qing, the boat people of the south, the hereditary entertainers, the beggars, the prostitutes, and others. They were excluded from the civil service examinations, restricted in their marriages, and lived in segregated neighbourhoods. Ethnic minorities — the Mongols, the Manchus, the Tibetans, the Uyghurs, the Miao, the Yi, and many others — existed at the edges of the empire, sometimes absorbed, sometimes marginalised, sometimes autonomous.

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