282 Part IV: East Asian Civilization
groups. The wealth in land was held in a lineage trust, the Liugeng tang. By the
Republican period (1911–1949), the He lineage owned over 10,000 acres and
was one of the richest lineages in the delta with vast ancestral estates.
The first step in founding a great lineage was establishing local wealth. He
Renjian began the family fortune, but according to old lineage documents, it
was his great-grandsons who built the first ancestral hall to honor this ancestor
recent enough to be personally remembered by most people living. The family
quickly moved into the shenshi or gentry status, with degree holders and wealth.
Part of the family fortune was used to educate the sons, and this paid off in the
achievement of jinshi status by the second generation. Most famous was He
Zihai in the fifth generation. He Zihai wrote the first genealogy, going back only
five generations to He Renjian, the empirical founder of the local lineage. In cit-
ing the glories of the He lineage, he wrote: “several tens of descendants have
written poetry, practiced the rituals, and served as officials. Other lineages have
not been able to surpass this record” (Liu 1995:25). In the same passage he
scoffs at some lineages who were creating fictional ancestors by searching out
“reputable and virtuous people of past ages to serve as their ancestors” and
refrained from doing so himself. Later descendants during the Ming heard
rumors of people of the He surname elsewhere, most intriguingly at Nanxiong,
and as scholar-officials they traveled frequently enough to have visited there and
met some of them. However, nothing came of these discoveries immediately.
Besides genealogies, great lineages needed ancestral halls where collective
rites to the ancestors could be performed. The first ancestral hall, built in the
fourth generation, was destroyed by warfare at the end of the Yuan dynasty, so
it fell to the fifth generation in the early Ming—the same generation that pro-
duced the first genealogy—to build a new ancestral hall. The fifth generation
was the first to produce scholar-officials of high enough rank to be entitled by
law to worship their ancestors farther back than the third generation.
People who worshipped their ancestors beyond their station could be punished
and their temples destroyed, as the He lineage did to upstart servant lineages who
tried to build an ancestor hall in the nineteenth century. Common people generally
had no knowledge of their ancestral origins, no lineage organizations, no ancestral
halls, and could not name their ancestors four generations back (Liu 1995).
But a new interpretation of the Classics allowed an innovation for the gen-
try; this was the annual worship of the First Ancestor. This provided an institu-
tional basis for a much larger kinship group than previously allowable (Chow
1994). It was not immediately clear who the “First Ancestor” would be in spe-
cific cases, but it generally came to mean the first forebear to migrate to a locale:
for example, He Renjian in 1223. This meant that as generations came and went
and the number of He Renjian’s descendants multiplied, they continued to be
linked by common worship activities and by shared membership in the ancestral
estate. Any number of additional ancestor shrines to lower-order ancestors could
theoretically be built, but this was expensive and was only accomplished by very
wealthy lineages like the He, who had at least 87 ancestral halls. By the end of