Work

Marriage, Mortality, and Identity on China’s Miao Frontier, 1750–1919

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Around 1745, Magistrate Xie Shenglun arrived in Tianzhu county in southeastern Guizhou, intent on transforming the kinship and marriage practices of the local Miao. Indeed, during the eighteenth century, local families adopted markers of formal lineage, including graveyards, genealogies, and ancestral halls, aligning themselves with Neo-Confucianism and the imperial state. However, other aspects of Neo-Confucianism were adapted or ignored. Records of wives and daughters in the Pan genealogy present evidence of practices such as widow remarriage, cross-cousin marriage, and delayed-transfer marriage. Attention to affinal relations reveals an alternate kinship system recorded alongside patrilineal descent. Families adopted formal lineage to protect their political and economic interests, but instead of reforming or replacing local kinship and marriage practices, they reinforced them. Even as the Pan genealogy confirmed the family’s status as imperial subjects, the marriage practices and networks it recorded helped maintain an ethnic identity separate from state categories and grounded in the local community.

Source: Modern China

DOI: 10.1177/00977004251398394

Author: Joel Wing-Lun

Institution: UNSW Sydney

Language: English

Topic: China's Ethnic Minorities and Relations

Subfield: Sociology and Political Science

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,650

Funders: University of New South Wales, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University