Chapter 7 China 283the Ming dynasty the thirteenth generation had been reached, still keeping alive
their sense of common descent and still sharing in the growing profits of the
ancestral wealth; thus the lineage was “corporate” in a very real economic sense.
But the transition from Ming to Qing was devastating to the He lineage.
The peasant rebellions in the north that led to the Manchu takeover had paral-
lel movements in Guangdong Province; the He chronicler wrote of the “smell
of blood” on the Shawan sands:
The bondservants who had belonged to the various surnames turned upon
their masters.... Fierce young men in seven villages followed them, set up
camps and walled compounds, robbed, and could not be controlled....
Every family departed from the village to escape their wrath.... They
plundered our houses, slew our kin, burned our ancestral halls and turned
our pavilions into ashes. (Liu 1995:30)
Social upheaval was followed by natural disaster. Severe floods required
coastal evacuation that lasted from 1663 to 1669. Homes, villages, and ancestral
halls were left in ruins, followed by looting and destruction by soldiers and robbers.
As conditions stabilized after 1669, the He lineage had a great deal of
rebuilding to do. In 1700 they built a lavish new temple with entrance hall, rit-
ual gate, middle hall, back bedchamber, side halls, bell and drum tower,
kitchen, and servants’ quarters. They also began tinkering with the written
genealogy and produced a new apical ancestor. Fifteenth-generation He
Guangzhen uncovered old documents referring to a He branch in Nanxiong
and an even older “ancestor,” He Chang. He was identified as originally being
from Kaifeng and dying in the service of the emperor in Guangdong. He
Chang had everything needed in an ancestor: as an official at the court of the
emperor, one could not ask higher origins or credentials. His Han ethnicity was
certain, establishing that the He lineage folk were not non-Han parvenus from
the south trying to become Han. And He Chang was the first forebear to estab-
lish a line in Southern China, a true shizi. Finally, there were He living in
Nanxiong to fuse with, and there was already a famous temple built to him
because of the virtue (de) that allowed his corpse to flow upstream for 30 li at
his death. One could not ask for a better First Ancestor. The details between
He Chang and He Renjian were left to genealogists to fill in as best they could.
In this way great lineages were constructed in the Ming and Qing dynasties.
Several facts are noteworthy: (1) They were constructed post hoc, by descen-
dants who projected their line backward in time according to strategies allowed
by existing cultural rules. (2) Large lineages grew by fusion as well as by fission;
that is, they sought out distant branches to join with even in the absence of ver-
ifiable links, while also growing ever more complex as new generations and
new branches emerged. (3) They were subject to state-sponsored Confucian
rules about who was entitled to specific rights of worship and group formation.
Nongentry families were not allowed to form large lineages, even though a gen-
try lineage could have segments that included commoners. (4) Even if all the
class-based entitlements to play by these kinship rules were in place, it was the