280 Part IV: East Asian Civilization
great-grandmother’s tablets were taken out to the gravesite and burned or
deposited in the ancestral hall of the larger lineage, if there was one.Wealth, Power, and Morality in the Large Lineage
In a famous eleventh-century essay philosopher Ouyang Xiu (Ou-yang
Hsiu) urged that the hold of Buddhism should be loosened by local officials
promoting Confucian rituals, including weddings, funerals, and ancestral rites.
He blamed the decay of these rituals on allowing Buddhism to reach into the
hearts of the common people. Instructing people in Confucian rituals “not only
would prevent disorder but also would teach them to distinguish superior and
inferior, old and young, and the ethics of social relations” (Ebrey 1991:xix).
Buddhism’s efficient organization in monasteries, temples, charitable organiza-
tions, and schools came to be countered by a truly Confucian institution: the
large corporate lineage. This form of organization, though sanctioned by the
Classics, had not been cultivated intensively during the centuries of Buddhism’s
peak in China. The Confucian reforms of the Song dynasty, and later reforms
in the Ming and Qing, emphasized lineage organization and Confucian rituals.
Kinship had work to do, and a revival of the old large lineage took place.
According to the new kinship ideology, the lineage and the state were com-
plementary to each other, not competitive. When lineages diminished in
power, argued Gu Yanwu in 1652, so did the emperor’s control over the realm
(Chow 1994:84). Remember that emperors from Qin Shihuang on did all they
could to minimize the competing power of large regional aristocracies, which
were kinship based. Now, it was theorized, the Ming had collapsed because of
the failure of local resistance to the peasant rebellions and to the Manchus,
which might have been mounted by powerful local lineages had they existed.
Thus, unlikely as it seems, some gentry did in fact go about establishing lin-
eages in these centuries. These social units represented the values of the state to
the common folk, tutor them in Confucian ideals, and compete with Buddhist
institutions as the case study of the He lineage will demonstrate.
Local lineages were also found to be effective strategies for economic
enhancement. Between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries, powerful lin-
eages were established at local levels where they controlled land and resources.
These lineages were first studied by British anthropologist Maurice Freedman,
who seemed to have said the last word on them in a number of publications in
the 1950s (Freedman 1958). However, after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976,
access to archives was revived, and scholars have been able to enrich our under-
standing of these great families.
A team of historians and anthropologists including David Faure, Helen F.
Siu, Ye Xian’en, and Liu Zhiwei undertook a major research endeavor in the
Pearl River Delta area in southern China. This area lies in the heart of the vast
Hong Kong-Guangzhou development region. In presocialist times there were
huge corporate lineages each containing thousands of members and control-
ling enormous wealth in lineage trusts called tangs. These scholars have traced